My research sits at the intersection of law, conflict, and governance. I study how competing legal orders, those of states, rebels, criminal organizations, and self-governing communities, including indigenous groups, shape violence, governance, and peace. Whether authority is contested within a country or negotiated across borders, the same question recurs: when rival authorities claim to govern, how do their institutions interact, and when does the resulting order hold? Trained in both law and political science, I draw on jurisprudence to conceptualize and measure legal orders on their own terms, and on political economy to explain how they shape why groups fight, how settlements are designed, and whether peace endures. I am a mixed-methods scholar: my data collection is theory-driven, and I pair original cross-national datasets with fieldwork and archival research, much of it in Latin America.
At the center of this agenda is my book manuscript, Rebel Law and Conflict Resolution, now under review in Cambridge University Press's Economics, Choice, and Society series. The book asks why roughly half of all peace agreements fail within five years, and why provisions within the same agreement succeed or fail. Rebels who govern, I argue, carry their legal orders to the peace table, and the congruence between those orders and the state's shapes whether former adversaries can settle their disputes peacefully. Settlement design matters too: arrangements that bridge rival legal orders, including through arbitration, can build the shared legal framework that peace requires. My coauthored research extends these questions to rebel governance, wartime justice, negotiation, and property rights, and appears in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth's Dickey Center, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among others.
Much of my current research takes shape in the Law and Armed Conflict (LAC) Research Lab, which builds new, theory-driven data on property rights, the political economy of post-war constitutions, criminal governance, and the physical and environmental toll of war measured from satellite imagery. Undergraduate and graduate students are research partners at every stage, especially collecting, coding, and analyzing data. The same commitment carries into my teaching at Purdue, where I teach a graduate seminar on conflict processes alongside courses on civil wars, law and armed conflict, and law, justice, and governance.
Before joining Purdue, I was a Rosenwald Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University, an M.A. in Politics from New York University, an M.A. in Global Affairs and a J.D. from Florida International University, and a certificate in Global Arbitration from Queen Mary University of London. My earlier career in law, investigations, and policy research on governance and security continues to inform both my fieldwork and my study of legal institutions.
TWITTER @LIANAEUSTACIA
BLUESKY @LIANAEUSTACIA.BSKY.SOCIAL
BLUESKY @LIANAEUSTACIA.BSKY.SOCIAL
LER01@PURDUE.EDU
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
100 NORHT UNIVERSITY STREET
WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA 47907