Laura is an intern on the Transnational Crime and Technology team at the RSO. She holds a NOHA Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Humanitarian Action, specialising in Peace, Conflict and Religion at Uppsala University with a regional focus on Southeast Asia at Chiang Mai University, and a Master’s in Gender and Peacebuilding from the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Her Bachelor’s thesis examined the psychological consequences of family separation at the US–Mexico border, and her Chiang Mai research traced how structural adjustment programmes drive forced displacement and gendered vulnerability to trafficking in Southeast Asia. She interned with USAID’s Counter Trafficking in Persons programme in Bangkok and worked in Jordan on protection from sexual exploitation and abuse.

Her interest sits at the intersection of protection, counter trafficking, and humanitarian action with a particular focus on migration, and displacement seen through an intersectional lens. She is interested on how field level responses connect to the policy and coordination work of international offices and programmes. At the RSO she brings this lens to the team’s work on tech-facilitated trafficking and people smuggling.

Recommended documentary: El Silencio de Otros/The Silence of Others (2018) directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, follows survivors of the Franco dictatorship in Spain pursuing justice through Argentina’s courts, using universal jurisdiction after decades of impunity at home. Laura’s Master’s thesis examined memory and resistance with a feminist perspective during the Spanish Civil War, and the film reflects what she finds essential in this field: that justice and reconciliation often depend on cross-border cooperation.

Email: laura.munar@rso.baliprocess.net