Dr Eleonora Natale

Eleonora Natale is lecturer in International History at the Department of War Studies. She is an experienced ethnographer and political scientist working on military issues in Argentina and Brazil.

Her doctoral research focuses on former officers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83) and their experiences of political violence, transitional justice and conventional war. Before joining King’s College, she taught International Relations at Durham and Keele University, where she also obtained her PhD in 2019. Moreover, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Universidad Nacional De San Martín in Buenos Aires, where she researched the Argentine involvement in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War.

Dr Natale was awarded research grants by Santander, the Argentine Ministry of Education and the Society for Latin American Studies, which allowed her to build a durable partnership in South America with social scientists working on military issues. She is part of King’s Brazil Institute where she is co-investigator on the project ‘Military in Politics in Brazil’. She is also member of the European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS), particularly active in the working group ‘Military Families’.

https://kcl.academia.edu/EleonoraNatale

 

Research Interests

• Political violence and transitional justice in Latin America
• Falklands/Malvinas War
• Military families and civil-military relations

Dr Natale is especially interested in exploring the ‘everyday dimension’ of military life, particularly the social and family spheres. Within her studies she spent 18 months doing fieldwork in Buenos Aires, interviewing former officers of the Argentine dictatorship – including those now in prison for crimes against humanity – their wives and adult children. She also works on the Argentine Army’s experiences of combat against the British within the 1982 conflict in the South Atlantic, and she is now extending her expertise to the evolution of civil-military relations in Brazil.  Finally, she is interested in the ethnographic method, the production and use of oral sources, and the challenges of conducting empirical research on conflict and the military.

 

Publications

• Natale, E. (2021). Researching Violence and Everyday Life in the 1970s: An Ethnographic Approach to the Argentine Military Family. Bulletin of Latin American Research

   

• Natale, E. (2021). Military families and political violence in 1970s Argentina. International Affairs Blog

• Natale, E. (2019). Dealing with condemnation: military families and transitional justice in Argentina. In M. Andres, R. Moelker, and N. Rones eds., The Politics of Military Families, Tensions between State, Work Organizations and the rise of the Negotiation Household, Routledge, pp.33-44.
• Natale, E. (2017). Torturare per redimere: il caso argentino. In M. Di Giovanni, C. R. Gaza and G. Silvestrini eds., Le nuove giustificazioni della tortura nell'età dei diritti. Morlacchi Editore University Press, pp.207-216.

 

Teaching

• BA3 Security and International Relations in Latin America: from Independence to the Present Day 

   

• MA Diplomacy and Foreign Policy