Rachel Blair

Rachel is an intern in SIPRI’s Food, Peace and Security Programme, supporting research on how development and peacebuilding efforts strengthen resilience in the Sahel.

She recently earned an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, focusing on conflict and peacebuilding. Her dissertation analyzed Mali’s expulsion of French forces through the lenses of insurgency, military governance, anti-neocolonialism, and foreign intervention.

Rachel previously studied at the University of Washington, where she was a research fellow investigating human rights abuses in Central America’s civil wars. Alongside coursework on human rights and transitional justice, she wrote a thesis on how dictatorial legacies shape Chile’s judicial system.

The throughlines in Rachel’s work are the intersecting dynamics of human rights, conflict, and peacebuilding as they unfold across institutions and everyday lives. Between her studies, she traveled extensively, documenting remote landscapes and communities as a photographer and, most recently, as a freelance journalist.