Farzaneh Hall
Email: rachel.schwartz@ou.edu
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Website: https://rachel-schwartz.weebly.com/
Rachel A. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies. Her research focuses on the legacies of armed conflict, statebuilding, corruption, and human rights in Central America. Her book, Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book received the 2023 Donna Lee Van Cott Award for the best book on political institutions from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Her dissertation, on which the book is based, was awarded the 2020 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Dr. Schwartz’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), and her work has been published in scholarly journals like the Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, Latin American Politics & Society, Journal of Democracy, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Military in Politics, Revista de Ciencia Política, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Studies in Comparative International Development. She has also published op-eds and policy analysis for outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, World Politics Review, and Americas Quarterly. Dr. Schwartz is also an affiliated researcher with the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.
During the Spring 2025, Dr. Schwartz will be a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she will be working on her next book project tentatively titled, When Impunity Fights Back: International Anti-Corruption Commission, Elite Manipulation and Democratic Backsliding in Central America. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019.
Prior to her graduate studies, Dr. Schwartz worked as a program associate at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank based in Washington, DC that specializes in Western Hemisphere affairs. While at the Dialogue, she coordinated programs on migration and citizen security in Central America and Mexico and Congressional outreach. Beyond academia, she routinely serves as a country conditions expert on behalf of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan asylum seekers fleeing violence and political persecution in their home countries.
Recent scholarly publications:
Book
2023. Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009219907
Articles
2024. “Guatemala 2023: From Authoritarian Deepening to Democratic Resilience.” Revista de Ciencia Política 44(2): 323-345 [open access]. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-090x2024005000105.
2024. “Embracing the Crisis of Research Design: How the Collapse of Case Selection in the Field Can Uncover New Discoveries.” Perspectives on Politics 22(3): 836-847 [open access]. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000586.
2024. “When Counterinsurgent Institutions Persist: Unpacking Local Wartime Legacies” (with Reo Matsuzaki). Studies in Comparative International Development 59: 379-408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-024-09427-1.
2024. “Leveraging Country Expertise: How Scholars in International Studies Can Support the Asylum Process” (with Hannah S. Chapman). International Studies Perspectives [open access]. https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/ekae002.
2023. “How Guatemala Defied the Odds” (with Anita Isaacs). Journal of Democracy 34(4): 21-35. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.a907685.
