Ligia Mori Madeira is the Rio Branco Chair at the King's Brazil Institute, King's College London, and Full Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, where she has taught since 2010. She holds a PhD in Sociology (2008, awarded with distinction) and an MA in Sociology from UFRGS, as well as undergraduate degrees in Social Sciences (UFRGS) and Law (PUCRS). She has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2015) and a Visiting Fellow at Queensland University of Technology (2019).

Her work brings together political science, public policy and socio-legal studies, with a focus on criminal justice, judicial institutions and public security policy in Brazil. She has published more than 40 journal articles, two monographs, four edited volumes and over 25 book chapters. Recent work includes a book on the spread of specialised anti-corruption courts in Brazil (2024) and articles on electoral support for law-and-order candidates (Brazilian Political Science Review, 2025) and on the Supreme Court's role in criminal justice policy (2026). She leads funded projects on environmental and organised crime (CAPES), intimate partner violence (SobreVida, CNPq) and conservative backlash against women's rights (CAPES).

Research

• Gender-based violence and femicide
• Criminal justice and public security policy
• Judicial policy and comparative judicial institutions
• Organised crime and anti-corruption institutions
• Research methods: process tracing, QCA and agent-based modelling

Ligia's research examines how justice and security institutions in Brazil shape, and are shaped by, public policy. At King's, her work focuses on gender-based violence, including femicide and intimate partner violence, using agent-based modelling to simulate the mechanisms behind violence and test policy responses. Other current projects investigate the convergence of environmental crime and organised crime, mapping how federal environmental offences reach the courts and assessing the capacity of security and justice institutions to respond. She also studies prosecutorial discretion and selectivity in the Federal Prosecution Service's use of non-prosecution agreements, and institutional change in specialised anti-corruption courts. Her work combines qualitative methods such as process tracing with quantitative, spatial and computational approaches, aiming to produce evidence that can inform policy. 

Teaching

PhD Supervision 

Ligia is happy to supervise doctoral research on:

• Judicial politics and judicial policy in Brazil and Latin America
• Courts and democratic erosion
• Gender-based violence, femicide and justice-system responses
• Criminal justice, prosecution and prison policy
• Public security, organised crime and environmental crime
• Anti-corruption institutions
• Policy process theories (Advocacy Coalition Framework, policy diffusion, punctuated equilibrium) and qualitative causal methods (process tracing, QCA)

At UFRGS she has supervised 11 doctoral theses and 18 master's dissertations to completion, and has supervised seven postdoctoral researchers.

Expertise and Public Engagement 

• Expert commentator in Brazilian media and public debates on the judiciary, the Supreme Court, anti-corruption policy and public security
• Coordinator of the UFRGS Observatory of Gender-Based Violence, producing data on femicide, domestic violence and political violence in the Porto Alegre metropolitan region with civil society and public agencies
• Training for justice-system professionals, including a course on data and statistics for the Federal Prosecution Service (2023)