The Law and Armed Conflict (LAC) Research Lab at Purdue University studies how law shapes armed conflict, governance, and peace, both within states and between them. Our work starts from a premise: states are not the only actors that govern through rules. Rebels, criminal organizations, and self-governing communities do too, and the fit or clash between their legal orders helps explain why conflicts erupt, how they are fought, and whether peace endures. LAC builds new, theory-driven data to answer these questions. We begin with the argument and its observable implications, define concepts and coding rules accordingly, and only then collect data.
Our projects include:
Rebel and Incumbent Laws (RAIL): coding the legal systems of rebels and states, from courts and property rules to standards of justice, across 111 armed conflicts, now being extended to gangs and other armed non-state actors.
Post-war constitutions: hand-coding the constitutions adopted after civil wars from 1946 to 2019 to see how they write rights, and what those choices mean for democracy and renewed conflict.
Property rights: examining how communities and states govern land and resources, including whether legal recognition helps Indigenous territories withstand global commodity booms.
Satellite data and armed conflict: using 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.
We pair these data with fieldwork, archival research, and case studies, drawing on political science, law, and economics. Students are research partners in all of this. Undergraduate and graduate students from political science and beyond take part in every stage of the research process: formulating questions, designing studies, collecting and coding data, and analyzing results, often as coauthors. Along the way, they learn to manage projects, work with tools such as remote sensing and text analysis, and communicate findings to both scholarly and policy audiences.
PROJECTS
1) Armed Non-State Actor Governance and Law How rebels and other armed non-state actors build legal orders, and how those orders shape violence and peace.
Rebel Law and Conflict Resolution, book manuscript (under review)
“Legal Congruence and the Implementation of Peace: Why Former Enemies Comply with Some Provisions and Not Others”
“Law and the Legacies of Rebel Governance,” with Sherry Zaks
“Do Narco Rebels Engage in More Indiscriminate Violence?” with Benjamin Torres (Purdue, PhD Candidate)
Undergraduate research assistants: Timothy Brandon Irwin (Political Science, Professional Writing, and Pre-Economics); Barakah Abdo-Baari (Political Science)
2) Post-War Constitutions How constitutions adopted after civil war write rights, and what those choices mean for democracy and renewed conflict. With Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Dmitrii Kofanov, and Charles Crabtree.
“How Rights Bind After War: Enforceable, Aspirational, and Qualified Rights in Post-Conflict Constitutions”
“International Mediation and Post-Civil War Constitution Making” [confirm title]
An original corpus of post-civil war constitutions, 1946–2019
Undergraduate research assistant: Elizabeth Shelby Payne (Natural Resources & Environmental Science and Global Studies)
3)Property Rights How communities and states govern land and resources, and how property rights shape conflict and its resolution.
“Paths of Property Rights Formalization: Organizational Governance and Legal Authority,” with Colin Harris, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili (under review)
“Booms and Borders: Global Commodity Shocks and Contested Authority over Indigenous Land”
“The Sovereignty Paradox: Border-Zone Bans and Contested Authority at the Amazonian Frontier”
“Interstate Territorial Disputes, Property Rights, and Conflict Resolution,” with Stephen C. Nemeth and Andi Zhou
4) Satellite Data and Armed Conflict Measuring what war destroys beyond lives, from homes and farmland to forests and water, using multiple remote sensing sources.
“Beyond the Visible Spectrum: Disaggregating Conflict Events through Multi-Source Remote Sensing,” with Jiashu Hu (Purdue, PhD Student)
PEOPLE
Current Affiliates Graduate Research Fellow Jiashu Hu, PhD in Construction Management Technology Benjamin Torres, PhD Student Undergraduate Student Researchers Timothy Brandon Irwin, Political Science, Professional Writing, and Pre-Economics Elizabeth Shelby Payne, Natural Resources & Environmental Science and Global Studies Simran Singhal, Mechanical Engineering, Political Science (Minor) Hazel Stephens, Political Science and Psychology, Business Management (Minor) Barakah | Abdo-Baari, Political Science Former Affiliates Mitushi Mukherjee, PhD Candidate in Political Science, Graduate Research Fellow Sky Kunkel, PhD in Political Science Lauren Miranda Riina, Political Science and Global Studies Magdalaine Isabella Davis, Political Science and Italian Studies Leah Kerkhoff, Political Science and Spanish Caleb Mills, Political Science and International Relations Muhammad Faisal Azizi (Dartmouth College)