Paulina Ochoa Espejo is a political theorist who works at the intersection of democratic theory and the history of political thought. She focuses on popular sovereignty and borders. She has written about populism, migration and the right to exclude, the relation between democracy and territorial rights, and borders' moral relevance. She also works on Latin American political thought. She is the author of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011); co-author of Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017). At present, she is working on a monograph provisionally entitled Rights of Place: Territory, Property, and Jurisdiction in the Americas.