On 14 September 2019, our dear colleague Ralph Sprenkels passed away after he had suffered a cardiac arrest. Ralph was a historian and an anthropologist, a scholar who sought to understand armed conflicts and their aftermath.
Ralph Sprenkels was a historian and anthropologist working on understanding armed conflicts and their aftermath. He studied Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam before pursuing History at the University of Guadalajara in México. He obtained an MA degree (cum laude) in Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam (in 2004) and a PhD degree in Social Science at the University of Utrecht (in 2014). Co-founder of Salvadoran human rights group Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos, Ralph Sprenkels held extensive work experience in the field of human rights activism and international cooperation. His publications included books and articles about El Salvador’s civil war, the legacies of human rights abuses, social movements, memory politics and post-insurgency.
For an overview of his publications, check out Ralph's profile page on academia.edu. Most of his publications can be downloaded in pdf format from there. Alternatively, some can be downloaded from his publication list in this portal.
Research profile
Ralph's research focused on the imprint of war and protracted conflict on political orders in non-western societies. It addressed both how wartime institutions transpose into post-war political orders and how ongoing struggles on the imputed legacies and debts of war form a constitutive element of post-war politics. Ralph furthered this agenda through three interconnected research themes: a) reconversion of armed groups (into political parties and other institutions); b) former armed actors, memory politics and transitional justice; and c) political mobilization of war veterans. His work combined a broad range of qualitative methods, including political ethnography, visual ethnography, life course methods, prosopography, and oral history. It relied on extensive cooperation with researchers in the Global North and Global South.