Puzzle Peaceing challenges the idea that you must be a shark to navigate global conflict. As a researcher and student of international law, I examine how societies fracture and rebuild, through neuroscience, international law, and lived experience. We look at the language of crisis, the psychology of inaction, and why peace efforts, even ones built on good intentions, collapse as often as they succeed, sometimes because even protective missions get the relationship with the community wrong. Empathy here isn't sentiment. It's the discipline of reading what a community actually needs.
Your brain treats an old wound the same way it treats present danger, running the same stress response for something that happened years ago. A psychologist named Pauline Boss spent decades studying exactly that kind of unresolved grief and called it ambiguous loss. Now scale that up to an entire country deciding whether to move on from a dictatorship while the people who did the harm are still walking around free.
This episode looks at transitional justice through Nuremberg and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then goes back further to Athens in 403 BC, the earliest recorded political amnesty in Western history, and what happened within a year when it didn't hold. It uses Harvard's Martha Minow on how forgiveness already lives inside law more than we admit, and pulls real outcome data from the Transitional Justice Database to compare Argentina's Nunca Mas report and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo against Bolivia's stalled reparations process. It closes with Gladys Trujillo Oroza, whose fight through the Inter-American Court of Human Rights changed how an entire region prosecutes state violence, without ever giving her back what she actually wanted.
18 Jul 2026
Prepare for Peace, Not War: A Week at the Hague Academy of International Law
There's an old idea that peace only holds if you're ready for war. This week, while attending the Hague Academy of International Law, I sat in on a separate gathering marking an anniversary of the ICJ's advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, where two experts couldn't agree on why the world hasn't reached catastrophe yet, and heard an argument that flips that old idea entirely, that if we want peace, we have to prepare for peace itself, not just avoid war. This episode connects that argument to a linguistics class from my time at the Academy, an old immigration case about the limits of a state's right to defend its borders, and what it actually takes to build peace on purpose. If you're curious about international law, diplomacy, or what a summer at a place like this is really like, start here.
8 Jul 2026
A Note From the Host
This was filmed on August 5, 2025. There wasn't a firm launch date yet, there was still so much to work through. But this is the most honest take on what this podcast means to me. It's raw, it's honest, and it's the central part of me as a thinker, a host, and a person. Cheers to it almost being a year since I filmed this.
4 Jul 2026
Inside the Peace Palace: Changing the Narrative on International Law
As we close out Season 1, we are laying the groundwork for a massive operational shift. In just 48 hours, I am boarding a flight to the Netherlands to study public and private international law directly at the Peace Palace in The Hague.
In this finale, I pull back the curtain on why this podcast is evolving from theoretical deep-dives into an active, on-the-ground blueprint. Speaking as a legal professional currently working in U.S. immigration law—outside the traditional law school pipeline—I break down what it actually means to intentionally build your own path into elite global institutions before ever stepping foot in a law school classroom.
Whether you are a legal professional navigating your own milestones, an ambitious student looking to uncover hidden opportunities, an educator watching from the sidelines, or simply curious about how the world functions behind closed doors, this upcoming season is your front row seat to the human side of international institutions.
The bags are mostly packed, the transition is underway, and the next time we speak, we will be on the ground in the legal capital of the world. Welcome to Season 2.
Connect on the journey:
Updates & real time post-class debriefs: Find me on TikTok [@puzzlepeaceing]
Deep-dives & personal reflections: Subscribe to my Substack [substack.com/puzzlepeaceing]
17 Jun 2026
Immigration Enforcement has a Strait of Hormuz Problem
The medical and psychological research on immigration detention uses a phrase that sits flat on the page: chronic uncertainty.
In a clinical paper, it sounds like a neutral variable. But in your body, if you have ever lived with long-term anxiety, or waited weeks for a phone call that would decide your future, it is a texture you already know intimately.
This episode is a direct reading of my latest Substack piece from The Sort by Puzzle Peaceing. It looks past the standard political talking points to answer a deeper, systemic question: What does sustained instability actually do to a child’s developing brain, and why will the consequences of that rewiring travel with them regardless of which side of a border they end up on?
We are sorting the invisible variables that the headlines miss—from strategic chokepoints in the Persian Gulf to the relational fabric of our local communities.
Read the essay and view the source research on Substack: substack.com/@puzzlepeaceing
11 May 2026
Can Peace Be Practiced? (Not the Way You Think)
Last week we asked why disagreement is so hard. This week we ask what to do about it.
In Part 2 of this conversation, I sit with John Paul Lederach's The Moral Imagination, John Brewer's writing on Northern Ireland after thirty-plus years of the Troubles, and a small moment in my own life when I almost built a barrier with a stranger I had never spoken to.
If you came up in last week's episode about Jonathan Haidt and you have been wondering what we are supposed to do with the diagnosis, this is the practice. Not a checklist but a way of paying attention, especially in the small moments where the gut moves before the mind has caught up.
By the end of this episode, you will have three observations you can carry into your next disagreement. A clearer sense of why most peacebuilding work happens in private, long before any conversation begins. Maybe, if it lands, a small new muscle for catching the barriers you might otherwise build without noticing.
29 Apr 2026
The Argument Before the Argument
We think we reason our way to moral conclusions. Jonathan Haidt says we don't. The gut decides first. The brain catches up after, building a case for a verdict that's already been reached.
In this episode, I walk through The Righteous Mind, the book quietly reshaping how I think about peace work, public discourse, and how international law actually holds up under pressure.
This is Part 1: the diagnosis. Part 2, out next week, where we sit with what to do about it.
8 Apr 2026
The World Saw It Happen: The Bystander Effect in International Law
Why do people who know something is wrong still not move?
This episode traces that question across three decades and three continents, from a UN peacekeeping compound to the Security Council floor to a 2026 legislative vote that may reshape how an entire country defines childhood. The psychology behind inaction doesn't just explain history. It explains you.
**Please take care of yourself while listening. This episode discusses violence, genocide, and the sentencing of children.
Ep. 3 Reading List:
-"Bystander Non-Intervention and the Somalia Incident" by Lt. Commander George Shorey, Canadian Military Journal
-"The Responsibility to Protect" by Ivan Šimonović, UN Chronicle
-"UN Urges El Salvador to Review Life Sentences for Minors," Tico Times, April 1, 2026
-Joint Statement on Life Imprisonment for Children and Adolescents in El Salvador, UNICEF & Committee on the Rights of the Child, March 27, 2026
-General Comment No. 24, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child
-The Moral Imagination by John Paul Lederach
22 Mar 2026
The Liability of Empathy
What does a word cost and who pays when the wrong one is chosen?
In this Sort, host and legal researcher Camila maps the gap between what the law says and what the body carries. From the staggering liability a single word can trigger in international law, to a prosecutor describing the abduction of thousands of children as "sustenance," to indigenous Peruvian women who, when asked what healing looks like, asked to understand the men who hurt them.
Drawing on John Paul Lederach's framework of moral imagination and somatic research on embodied oppression, Camila asks whether the failure of imagination belongs only to the accused, or also to the system built to hold them accountable.
Ep. 2 Reading List:
-The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace by John Paul Lederach
-Oppression Embodied by Dr. Rae Johnson
-Superando la teta asustada by Damarys Espinoza
-The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
-International Criminal Court proceedings: The Prosecutor v. Joseph Kony
8 Mar 2026
Why Your Brain Wants Violence (And How to Pause)
Why are we biologically wired to click on the violence?
In the inaugural episode of Puzzle Peaceing, host and legal researcher Camila breaks down the "biological glitch" that makes our brains mistake shock for high-value information. From a dark neurological study at the University of Amsterdam to the archival violence of the 18th century Caribbean, we explore how the human craving for friction is weaponized by modern algorithms, media headlines, and geopolitical lawmakers.
Drawing on her master's research regarding the constitutional codification of migrant children in South America, Camila reveals how the state uses the language of crisis (words like "surge" and "liability") to trigger our reward systems and strip away human context at the border.
Reaction is easy, it's just biology but peace is rigorous.
Ep. 1 Reading List:
-The Brain's Reward System & Words: Writing for Impact by Bill Birchard (Referencing the University of Amsterdam study on neurological responses to negative/violent descriptions).
-Archival Violence: Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Professor Marisa J. Fuentes.Independent Research:
-Camila’s master's research on the constitutional codification and legal framing of child migrants across the Americas.
(Released on March 8, in honor of International Women's Day).
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