Rachel Van Nostrand

Rachel Van Nostrand is a PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona. Her research interests lie at at the intersection of human rights, repression, post-conflict environments, and geographies of violence. She is broadly interested in understanding why states target vulnerable populations, and how large-scale atrocities can be prevented. Her dissertation focuses on the cross national study of concentration camps, which examines the strategic motivations underlying concentration camp use within states' repertoires of repression. Her dissertation employs a mixed methods approach, relying on an original dataset of concentration camp systems from 1946-2018.  Her work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.