Why do nearly half of all peace agreements ending civil wars collapse within five years, even when they include power-sharing mechanisms, comprehensive settlements, and third-party monitoring? Rebel Law and Conflict Resolution argues that scholars and policymakers have been asking the wrong question. The durability of peace, it contends, does not hinge primarily on the terms negotiated at the table, but on the legal orders each side brings with it into peace.
Rebel organizations, the book shows, are not blank institutional slates. Over years of wartime governance, they build genuine legal orders of their own: courts, property frameworks, standards of justice, and rules of membership. States, meanwhile, arrive with their own deeply entrenched legal systems. Because peace agreements are inherently incomplete contracts, they cannot anticipate the thousands of micro-level disputes that implementation generates for years afterward — who adjudicates a contested land title, what standard applies to an accused war criminal, which communities hold legal standing in new institutions. How these disputes are resolved depends on legal congruence: the degree of institutional compatibility between the two rivals' legal orders. Where that common ground exists, joint governance is seen as legitimate and disputes are resolved peacefully. Where it does not, routine decisions escalate into existential crises that no amount of external monitoring can substitute for.
Drawing on paired case studies of El Salvador, Guatemala, Sudan/South Sudan, and Bosnia, alongside an original cross-national dataset spanning 111 armed conflicts (1989–2006), the book offers a mixed-method account of not just whether peace agreements hold, but which of their provisions hold, and why. A close comparison of Brčko and Abyei, two cases submitted to binding international arbitration with strikingly different outcomes, further shows that arbitration alone cannot manufacture legitimacy: it succeeds only when paired with institutional design that builds legal common ground, and fails when it papers over deeper incompatibilities between rival legal orders.
By identifying legal congruence as a measurable, generalizable predictor of peace agreement durability, the book equips negotiators and international mediators with a diagnostic tool for anticipating where post-conflict governance is likely to fracture, and for designing provisions, including arbitration mechanisms, that build institutional common ground rather than simply imposing one side's legal order on the other. In doing so, it reframes post-conflict state-building as a problem not of enforcement, but of institutional compatibility.
*A book workshop was completed Feb 2026. The manuscript is in its final draft version, available upon request, and pending submission for review. This research has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation (Award #2017173), The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, Purdue University, the University of Pennsylvania's Office of the Vice-Provost for Research, Rice University Social Sciences Research Institute, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.
The above photo includes pamphlets made by the FMLN and other rebel groups during the Salvadoran Civil War. It was taken during my Jan 2019 archival visit to the UCA, San Salvador, El Salvador.