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, will be published by Cambridge University Press in Spring 2023. 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, Journal of Global Security Studies, Latin American Politics & Society, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Military in Politics, Revista de Ciencia Política, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Studies in Comparative International Development. 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.
Select peer-reviewed publications:
2022. "Guatemala 2021: Reconsolidating Impunity and Reversing Democracy." Revista de Ciencia Política 42(2): 309-322.
2022. “Rewriting the Rules of Land Reform: The Institutional Legacies of War in Nicaragua.” Small Wars & Insurgencies. First View.
2022. "'To Make Men Believe Their Rebellion Just': Thomas Hobbes and the Study of Civil War" (with Dan Kapust). Polity 54(2): 359-384.
2021. "How Predatory Informal Rules Outlast State Reform: Evidence from Post-Authoritarian Guatemala." Latin American Politics and Society 63(1): 49-71.
2020. "Guatemala: The Military in Politics" (with Anita Isaacs). Oxford Encyclopedia of the Military in Politics.
2020. "Conjuring the Criminal State: Rethinking the 'State-Idea' in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and International State-Building." Journal of Global Security Studies. 6(2).
2020. "Civil War, Institutional Change, and the Criminalization of the State: Evidence from Guatemala." Studies in Comparative International Development 55(3): 381-401.
2018. "What Drives Violence Against Civilians in Civil War: Evidence from Guatemala's Conflict Archives" (with Scott Straus). Journal of Peace Research 55(2): 222-235.
