is an anthropologist with an interest in the study of initiatives of environmental care for transboundary river basins, citizen uses of law, post-conflict violence, and democracy-making practices. Her research takes in anthropological analysis of the environment, the law, and of democracy. Much of her research has been carried out in El Salvador. Currently, she works in borderlands of river basins in the Americas and Southern Europe.

She is currently based at the Anthropology Department of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow, on leave from her position as Reader in Latin American Studies and Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has been a Visiting Fellow at CIESAS-DF (Mexico), the University of Melbourne (Australia), Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (El Salvador), and The New Institute (Germany).

Her research has been funded by such institutions as the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Spanish National Research Council, the Spanish Research Agency, and the Basque Agency of Cooperation and Solidarity.

A revised and updated edition of her monograph The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Postwar El Salvador (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and its translation into Spanish, will be published in 2027.

She has also devoted time to critically thinking about the research cultures of which she is part, collaboratively addressing aspects such as open science, academic precarity, and academic writing and publishing.

From 2019 to 2024, Ainhoa was co-editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR), the journal of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), and from 2021 to 2024 she co-edited the Latin American Studies book series published by University of London Press.