Rebel Law and Conflict Resolution (UNDER REVIEW)
WWhy do nearly half of all peace agreements ending civil wars collapse within five years, even when they include power-sharing, comprehensive settlements, and third-party monitoring? And why does a single agreement so often succeed on some provisions and fail on others?Rebel Law and Conflict Resolutionargues that the answer lies less in the terms negotiated at the table than in what each side brings to it: its own legal order. Rebel organizations are not blank institutional slates. Over years of wartime governance, many build legal orders of their own, with courts, property regimes, standards of justice, and rules of membership. States arrive with legal systems that are just as deeply entrenched. Peace agreements, as incomplete contracts, cannot anticipate the disputes that implementation generates for years afterward: who adjudicates a contested land title, what standard applies to an accused war criminal, which communities have legal standing in new institutions. How those disputes are resolved depends on legal congruence, the degree to which the former rivals’ legal orders agree on four dimensions: the source of law and authority, property rights, social diversity and collective rights, and justice. Where common legal ground exists, shared governance is seen as legitimate and disputes are settled through procedures both sides accept. Where it does not, routine decisions escalate into crises that external monitoring alone cannot contain. Congruence is not fixed: settlement designs that bridge rival legal orders can build common ground over time, while designs that impose one side’s law deepen division.
The book develops this argument through two matched comparisons, built on fieldwork and archival research. El Salvador and Guatemala show how legal congruence shapes implementation after negotiated settlements. In Guatemala, the accord on Indigenous identity and rights became the least implemented of the peace accords, because the state’s legal order lacked the categories, such as collective Indigenous legal personhood, that its provisions required. Brčko in Bosnia and Abyei on the Sudan–South Sudan border were both submitted to binding international arbitration, with strikingly different results. Together they show that arbitration cannot manufacture legitimacy on its own: it succeeds when paired with institutional designs that build legal common ground, and falters when it papers over deeper incompatibilities. An original dataset, Rebel and Incumbent Laws (RAIL), shows the broader patterns behind these cases. RAIL codes the legal regimes of rebels and states dimension by dimension across 111 armed conflicts followed by power-sharing agreements (1989–2006), measured at the start of formal negotiations. Its four dimensions are derived from jurisprudence before any coding begins, so the data capture the concepts the theory specifies rather than whatever proxies happen to be available.
By showing that legal congruence can be identified before an agreement is signed, the book gives negotiators and mediators a diagnostic tool: a way to anticipate where post-conflict governance is likely to fracture and to design provisions, including arbitration mechanisms, that build institutional common ground rather than impose one side’s legal order on the other. In doing so, it reframes post-conflict state-building as a problem not only 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.