Manuela Mahecha Alzate is a PhD candidate in Political Economy and a teaching assistant at the Department of History, Economics, and the Society (DEHES), at the University of Geneva. She works under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bruno Amable since August 2021.

In her thesis, she seeks to characterize the Dominant Social Bloc behind the accumulation regime taking place in Colombia between 2002 and 2020. The Dominant Social Bloc is defined by the neorealist approach of Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini as an alliance between social groups benefiting from an accumulation regime, and providing political support to the latter. The objective is to analyze how these accumulation dynamics generated a rupture in this Dominant Social Bloc, which would end up unleashing a social uprising that started to occur in November 21, 2019, and gained momentum on April 28, 2021.

She is a graduate of the EPOG (Economic Policies in the age of Globalization) master's program, from which she obtained a degree in Economic Analysis and Policy from the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, and a degree in International Economics from the Berlin School of Economics and Law. She also holds a degree in Business Administration from the Muenster University of Applied Sciences, and a degree in Economics from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín.