Elena Butti is an urban anthropologist, humanitarian practitioner and participatory film-maker interested in youth, organized crime, activism, informal housing, and migration in Latin America. She holds a PhD and a Post-Doc from the University of Oxford, and is currently a SNSF Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. 

Elena’s doctoral research explored the dynamics of entanglement of adolescents in Colombia’s criminal economies. The results of this work, based on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, are contained in her forthcoming book ‘We Are the Nobodies: Youth, gangs, and precarity in neoliberal Colombia’ (NYU Press). Her current project looks at the new wave of Venezuelan migration in the country, seeking to understand how Venezuelan migrants in Medellín’s urban peripheries relate to the organized criminal structures which are active in these areas, and how this migration wave intersects with the city’s housing crisis. 

Before joining the Graduate Institute, Elena has worked for several years in the humanitarian sector, collaborating with organizations such as the UN, UNICEF, the ICRC, and War Child on matters related to the Youth, Peace and Security agenda. She is also the author of several participatory films co-created with young people. Elena also serves as the Secretary General of the Société Suisse des Américanistes (SSA). She is a co-founder of the Colectivo Juvenicidio y Resistencias Sociales (JUVIR), dedicated to the study of youth assassinations in the Latin America region.

Biographical details correct as of 09.07.25