Gabriel is a postdoctoral researcher for the “Land Use, Sustainability, and Democratic backsliding” LUDEMO project at the Earth and Life Institute, UCLouvain. He holds a PhD in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of Georgia (2025), where he also completed Graduate Certificate in GIScience, he also holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the University of Brasilia (2020). His research lies at the intersection of political economy, environmental politics, and bureaucratic politics. How do agrarian elites shape the fate of democracy in unequal societies? This is the puzzle that motivates the core of my research. In my work, I approach this question by combining multiple methods and sources of evidence, using big administrative datasets, GIS, quasi-experimental designs, and extensive qualitative fieldwork.