I am Agustín Lira Montes, a political scientist of Chilean origin currently based in Milan, Italy. I am interested in political theory, international political theory, the relationship between culture and politics, and sports. As a political scientist, I aim to show that it is possible to elaborate a normative conception of politics that cannot be criticized for being too idealistic or lacking realism.

I was born and raised in Rancagua, a small city 90 km south of Santiago. Like many people from small towns, I went to university in the nearest big city. In my case, it was Santiago. There, I studied political science at Universidad Diego Portales, and my interests changed unexpectedly. I started my studies interested in the more quantitative part of political science, but halfway through, I became interested in political theory and normative issues.

This shift meant I was no longer as interested in questions such as what factors explain institutional change, voting behavior, or political attitudes. Instead, I became interested in questions about what the limits of the state should be, what it means for our institutions to be just, and what the goal of politics is. It was a course on transitional justice and conflict resolution and another, not part of my curriculum, on literature, cinema, and the city that triggered this change. The political circumstances in Chile also played a role. For example, with the massive student mobilizations of the last decade, it was impossible not to engage in debates about rights and the relationship between equality and freedom.

Finally, my undergraduate thesis was a theoretical-political approach to the problem of the compatibility of human rights and state sovereignty. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do an internship at the then Human Rights Department of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was useful not only to learn what is being done at the international level in the field of human rights and to complement my theoretical knowledge on the subject but also to know what to expect from international human rights politics.

Shortly after, I did another internship at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C., one of my favorite cities in the world. My work consisted mainly of analyzing public human rights policy in Latin America. Between these two internships and after the United States, I was a teaching assistant for two professors of political economy. Although each had a different idea of what political economy is, both approaches are equally necessary. The preference for one or the other depends on the phenomenon being studied.

My internship in Washington, D.C., motivated me to continue my search for experiences around the world. My reasoning for choosing my next destination was this: I did a human rights-related activity in the United States, so now I needed to do something similar, but in the opposite place. So, I chose Russia. I applied for a master's degree in public policy and political analysis with a track in human rights and democratic governance at the Higher School of Economics and went to Moscow.

Soon after, the war started, so I had to abandon the program because it became very difficult to study there: my family was worried, it became more and more difficult to get money from Chile because of the economic sanctions, and many of my professors left the university and even left Russia. This experience changed my perspective on international relations. In Chile, I had never experienced how an international conflict could affect your normal life, how war, something so alien to me as a Chilean, was so familiar to others, and how hard it is for the West to face this situation (I don't know if it's an excess of optimism or stubbornness to accept an inexorable reality).

After Moscow, I went to Milan to do a master's degree in politics, philosophy, and public affairs. I graduated in October 2024, and I am still here. At the University of Milan, I mainly took courses in philosophy and political theory. I wrote my thesis on Judith Shklar's political theory and Cold War liberalism, and part of it I wrote at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, thanks to a scholarship from the University of Milan.

I have also worked for other organizations, companies, and individuals, but I preferred to dedicate this space to those experiences that marked my way of understanding the world. I hope this will be reflected in my publications.

Finally, I am also very passionate about sports, especially boxing. I have been boxing for several years and have trained in Chile, Germany, and Italy. I am convinced that we are currently at a historic moment for boxing, and I am committed to convincing people that the image of boxing as a sport in which two tough people beat each other in a ring until they get a knockout is completely wrong. I hope in the future to write a book about boxing and politics, or to be more precise, a book about how political issues have been reflected in Olympic and professional boxing.