I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, and Founder and Director of the Law and Armed Conflict (LAC) research lab. My research sits at the intersection of law, conflict, and governance. States are not the only actors that make and enforce law; rebels, criminal organizations, and self-governing communities, including Indigenous groups, do as well. I study how these interacting legal orders shape violence and peace, with a focus on rebel and criminal governance, peace agreements, post-war constitutions, and property rights, including Indigenous land. My work combines theory-driven empirics, drawing on original cross-national data and fieldwork across Latin America.
My book manuscript, Rebel Law and Conflict Resolution (under review), explains why roughly half of all peace agreements collapse within five years, and why some provisions hold while others fail. Rebels who govern build legal orders of their own, with courts, property regimes, and standards of justice, and those orders don’t disappear when the fighting stops. I argue that peace holds where rebel and state legal orders agree on the source of authority, property, collective rights, and justice, and breaks down on the dimensions where they clash. Settlement design matters too: arrangements that bridge rival legal orders can build common ground over time, while those that impose one side’s law deepen division. I examine the argument primarily through comparative case studies, drawing on fieldwork and archival research in El Salvador and Guatemala and on the internationally arbitrated disputes over Brčko and Abyei, and use an original dataset covering 111 armed conflicts to show descriptive patterns and the argument’s broader reach.
At LAC, undergraduate and graduate students work with me to build new, theory-driven data, often as coauthors. We code the legal systems of rebels and states, including their courts, property rules, and standards of justice, and are extending that work to gangs and other armed non-state actors. We are hand-coding the constitutions adopted after civil wars from 1946 to 2019 to see how they write rights, the basis of a planned second book. We study how communities and states govern land and resources, including whether legal recognition helps Indigenous territories withstand global commodity booms. And we use satellite imagery, including sensors that see beyond the visible spectrum, to measure what war destroys beyond lives, from homes and farmland to forests and water.
My articles appear in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Conflict Management and Peace Science, and my research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth’s Dickey Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets. Before academia, I worked in law, investigations, and policy research, including projects on Colombia’s peace process for National Defense University and on gang governance in Central America for CSIS, experience that still shapes how I approach my research.
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