Dr. Ely Orrego Torres is an Ansari Institute Global Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher at Lund University. Her research brings together international relations and political theory to explore the intersections of religion and politics in the global arena. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2025. She is currently working on her first book, which examines the politics of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas between 2017 and 2023, with a focus on transnational and regional networks and the religio-spiritual actors participating in the Organization of American States (OAS). Her work has been published in journals including Social Compass and Philosophy and Global Affairs. Outside of academia, she is a passionate foodie who enjoys exploring new restaurants, experimenting with recipes, and trying street food from around the world.
Tell me a little bit about your research, and how you landed on your research topic.
In my dissertation, I studied the politics of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas between 2017 and 2023. I focus particularly on transnational and regional networks that I call “Transnational Religio-spiritual Networks (TRSNs)”. In particular, I research these networks in one venue, which is an international organization, the Organization of American States, the OAS.
For those who don't know, the OAS is the main hemispheric organization of the Americas that gathers most of the sovereign states from the Americas, including North, Central, and the Caribbean, and South America. The OAS is based on multilateralism, dialogue and creating a common agenda. I analyzed these networks in three interconnected dimensions of the OAS. First, I studied them as part of the international organization– why and how they access and participate here. Secondly, the Inter-American Human Rights System as an international tribunal, considering, for example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Then, third, I focus on the participation of civil society through an open and democratic dialogue called the “Dialogue with Civil Society,” which is their main venue of advocacy.
Over the last years, there has been an important rise of these networks, especially religious networks in international venues, and the use of the language of religious freedom in the Latin Americas. So basically I'm trying to see and to respond to questions, like, “what does religious freedom do in the context of the OAS? Why do they use the language of religious freedom? How is this discourse and practice of religious freedom produced, mobilized, or contested within these transnational and international arenas?”
In that sense, one of my main contributions is that this is the first study of its kind to focus exclusively on the OAS. While similar forms of mobilization are taking place in other contexts—such as the European Union, the United Nations, or before the European Court of Human Rights—my research shifts the lens to the Americas, examining how these dynamics are happening within the OAS specifically.
And how did I get into this topic? I usually tell two stories. The first one is quite personal. Before starting my PhD in the United States, I had barely encountered the concept of “religious freedom” as a distinct legal or political issue in conversations. In Latin America—at least from my perspective growing up in Chile—it simply wasn’t a central topic of discussion. When I arrived in the US, however, religious freedom seemed to be everywhere: in discussions of the First Amendment, constitutional law, and public debates more broadly. That contrast really intrigued me, and it led me to ask why religious freedom occupies such a prominent place in the US context in particular, but also in the Americas. The second story is connected to my previous involvement with an NGO. In 2019, just before starting my PhD, I attended the General Assembly in Medellín, Colombia. I participated as part of the “Coalition of Religions, Beliefs, and Spiritualities”, a coalition that brought together different religions, beliefs, and spiritualities from the Latin Americas. That experience ended up becoming one of the two core cases in my research. The other case I examine is the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family.
Something that also got me into this topic was a desire to better understand the plurality of religious networks in Latin America. These networks are often treated as if they speak with a single or singular perspective. Yet, something that I really wanted to explain in my dissertation is that even the politics of religious freedom –which is fairly widespread across the region– is understood and mobilized in very different ways by different actors. They organize differently, they use the language of human rights differently, but it is still a powerful political language across these diverse contexts.
What have been your findings? And, as a political scientist, has your research been more qualitative or quantitative?
My project is grounded in ethnography. So, that is also one of my contributions. Conducting ethnography as a political scientist is something relatively new in the field, especially in international relations. Political science is not very broadly understood as a field of ethnography, but I’m particularly interested in what ethnography can reveal when applied to international organizations like the OAS. I used a multi-sited ethnographic approach that combined in-person and virtual fieldwork. During my research period, COVID disrupted many planned meetings, which meant that some of my fieldwork shifted online. I participated in many events and gatherings, including official OAS meetings such as the General Assembly and the Dialogue with Civil Society, public demonstrations, rallies, and informal gatherings. Then, I also participated in regional meetings with the particular actors that I was researching in countries like Mexico, United States, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Across these sites, I relied on participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis—particularly because the Dialogue with Civil Society changes each year, with different participants and dynamics, making it a key space for observing how these issues are articulated and contested.
I would say my work makes three main contributions. The first is that it examines how transnational religious and spiritual networks—particularly those with a Protestant Evangelical background—mobilize at the international level. Most existing scholarship has focused either on Catholic and Orthodox alliances or on Evangelical actors operating primarily at the domestic level, in cases such as Brazil, Guatemala, or, more recently, Argentina. What I’m especially interested in is the growing presence of Protestant Evangelical networks in international venues and how they participate in these spaces while articulating a Protestant Evangelical identity.
The second contribution speaks to broader debates in international relations on activism within international organizations. Much of the existing literature looks at well-known transnational organizations such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace, usually in the context of promoting democratic values or advancing human rights. What my research highlights is a different dynamic: forms of activism that seek to reshape the liberal order itself, often pushing back against advances in gender and sexual rights within international organizations like the OAS. The cases I study—the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family and the Coalition for Religion, Beliefs, and Spiritualities—are not well-known names or big transnational actors. They are not Amnesty or Greenpeace. Yet, despite their relatively small size, they are influential within the OAS. In that sense, my work shows how less visible actors can still shape democratic participation and influence civil society dynamics in the regional, diplomatic and deliberative spaces.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier regarding the plurality of actors in the Americas, my work pushes for a more nuanced understanding of religious actors in the international arena. Especially with the rise of Protestant Evangelical groups, there is often an assumption that they are all uniformly conservative or aligned with the far right. And this is not right, and sometimes an oversimplification. Especially at the OAS, you can see a wide range of actors who share a Protestant Evangelical background but differ significantly in their theologies, discourses, strategies, and motivations. What I ultimately aim to propose is a framework that takes this diversity seriously—one that resists treating these actors as a single bloc. We really need to contextualize them when analyzing their political engagement at the international level.
How have you found the Global Fellowship to be helpful in your scholarship and moving forward converting your dissertation into a book?
Amazing! It has been a great experience learning more about the different scholarship of my colleagues, the Global Fellows. I think that it's very important to speak to our different audiences. That, to me, is one of the fellowship’s main contributions: we all come from diverse disciplinary and personal backgrounds, and that diversity pushes us to think more carefully about how we communicate our research.
Our books should reach out to different audiences so that someone outside our specific field can read them and say, “yeah, I understand why this matters.” That can be challenging, especially after years of writing primarily for a dissertation committee. Now, we have to write for a larger audience. In that regard, I received valuable feedback on the presentation I gave this quarter. It has really shaped how I’m thinking about the project going forward.
I also think that having an academic community like this really matters, because academic work can be quite lonely. During my academic journey, I’ve come to see academia as a deeply collaborative space. Writing our first book requires a lot of feedback—especially because, while we’re trained to write dissertations, we’re not necessarily trained to write books. In that sense, the mentors and faculty involved in the fellowship have been incredibly helpful, both in offering substantive feedback and in helping us navigate the broader process of turning a dissertation into a book.
I’m especially excited because I’ve met some of the Global Fellows before at other events—Dina at a summer school in Rome, Andrew at a conference, and Jethro at a summer program in Belgium. I’m really looking forward to seeing them again in person in June for the symposium and to sharing this space with such inspiring colleagues. I’m also very grateful for this fellowship because it allows us to complement our main work without having to relocate to Notre Dame, which is particularly meaningful given the current global situation.
Next semester you move to Sweden for a two-year postdoc. Can you share more about that?
Sure. I feel very fortunate to be starting a new position as a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Scripture and Secularism” led by Professor Hannah Strømmen, who recently wrote a book called The Bibles of the Far Right. I’ll also be working closely with Professor Valentin Jeutner from the Faculty of Law. I'm going to be working on their project that is mostly dedicated to the reception of the Bible in political contexts, which aligns perfectly with my research interests.
It's an interdisciplinary postdoc, and I will be at the Center for Theology and Religious Studies and the Faculty of Law. I am probably going to be one of the few political scientists there. But I'm super excited, because the Ansari Fellowship helped me realize how much I want to engage with interdisciplinary questions, especially at the intersection of religious studies, theology, and politics. So I think that I will be in the right place to continue working on that.
I’m also looking forward to learning more about the political situation in the Nordic countries. My work has given me some insight into continental Europe –especially Spain, due to its connections with transnational networks and France, during my time as a visiting scholar at Sciences Po. This postdoc will give me the opportunity to expand my understanding in a new regional context.
In my project, I’ll be working on two new chapters for my book. The first will focus on domestic legislation in selected countries in the Americas—probably Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. I plan to examine how the actors I’ve studied at the international level are operating within their own national contexts. It’s a bit like comparative politics in reverse: after studying these networks at the OAS, I’m now looking at what they’re doing domestically. This is something I often hear feedback on at conferences—people are interested in my OAS research but ask, “What’s happening in individual countries?,” “Are they really influential in their countries?” I didn’t have the time to explore that in depth during my PhD, so over the next two years I’ll focus on these case studies, looking at how politicians and members engage in national politics. I’m particularly interested in the Union of Christian Parliamentarians, associated with the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family. They form a fascinating network of elected officials across countries who influence legislation and even invoke Biblical resources in their advocacy.
The second chapter will broaden my research by exploring Trans-Atlantic connections between the Americas and Europe, looking at how religious and political networks operate across these regions and influence one another. I’m particularly interested in tracing the ways actors in Europe engage with similar networks in the Americas, and how ideas, strategies, and political frameworks circulate across these contexts. Because at the end, there is a global aspect of these networks.
I’m very grateful for the opportunity to conduct research in Sweden, which will allow me to immerse myself in the European side. This experience will help me develop a more comparative and international perspective in my work, and it’s an exciting opportunity to strengthen the global relevance of my research as I continue advancing my academic career.