Research Areas
Feminist International Relations
How gender shapes war, security and political order, and what feminist theory adds to the study of international politics.
Gender, Security and Insurgency
Women fighters and armed movements, and how revolutionary organizations shape gender equality.
Latin America and Comparative Politics
Comparative work on Colombia, Mexico and Kurdistan, connecting Latin American and Middle Eastern cases.
Current Project: Insurgent Feminism
Vierelina’s book manuscript, Insurgent Feminism in Global Revolution: Lessons from Colombian and Kurdish Guerrilla Fighters, grows out of her doctoral dissertation. It examines the feminist contributions, ideologies and politics of women fighters in revolutionary movements in the Global South. A complete first draft was workshopped by four senior faculty members at Rutgers University in October 2025, and revisions are underway.
The project develops a framework she calls “war as generative process,” which argues that war and conflict can have positive effects on gender equality. To study this, she compares legislative speeches and official party communiqués from the political wings of the Colombian and Kurdish movements.
Original Datasets
Two original mixed-methods datasets built from her dissertation research. The first draws on survey and interview data collected with 153 former FARC combatants. The second is a content analysis of 193 official documents of Turkish, Kurdish and Colombian political party material. Both are archived with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, and an interactive dashboard accompanies them.
Methods and Fieldwork
Her work uses comparative and mixed-methods approaches. Her dissertation fieldwork took place in Colombia (May–October 2021) and in Turkey, France and Germany (January–June 2022).