Luis L. Schenoni is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in international relations. His research focuses on state formation, foreign policy analysis, and IR theory and has been published in Security Studies and Foreign Policy Analysis, among other journals, and also featured in The Washington Post and the New York Times. In his dissertation he challenges the conventional wisdom in the state formation literature proposing that victory in nineteenth century wars was the main determinant of state capacity levels in Latin America, explaining the ranking of development in the region to our days.