Rachel Schwartz

Rachel A. Schwartz is assistant professor of international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines the legacies of armed conflict, corruption, statebuilding, and peacebuilding, with a regional focus on Central America. 

While at the Kellogg Institute, Schwartz will work on a new book project, “International Anti-Corruption Commissions, Elite Manipulation, and Democratic Backsliding in Central America.” She is analyzing the development and trajectories of international anti-corruption commissions in Central America and examining why these institutional innovations have given way to democratic backsliding.

Schwartz is the author of Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Her dissertation on which this book is based was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics in 2020. 

Her research has been published in journals such as Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Peace Research, and Polity. She has also contributed public-facing articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NACLA Report on the Americas, Americas Quarterly, and World Politics Review.

Previously, Schwartz was a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University’s Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR). She is a past recipient of the Fulbright US Student Award and the United States Institute of Peace’s Jennings Randolph Peace Scholarship. She is currently the secretary of the Central America Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and is co-organizer of the Central American Politics Consortium (CAPC). She also uses her expertise on Central America to serve as a country conditions expert on behalf of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan asylum seekers.

Schwartz holds a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.