Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legal Preferences and Civil War Outcomes

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Civil wars are notoriously difficult to resolve and often times likely to recur. This project will study how legal preferences shape peace negotiations, the termination of civil wars, the outcome of civil wars, and the duration of peace. More particularly, this project will focus on the divergence of insurgent and government legal systems over salient issues and how this discrepancy in legal preferences might affect conflict resolution and structuring the post-conflict society. Incorporating a mixed method approach with a case study using archival data of the warring parties’ legal preferences during the conflict and peace negotiations, as well as quantitative analyses of dyads of warring parties across a time period of nearly 70 years, this project will present a novel theory of peace and conflict in civil wars while implicating numerous disciplines. The study will produce a dataset of incumbent and rebel legal systems disaggregated across several theoretically-driven issues, including property rights, justice, societal relations, membership/citizenship, and source of law. These dyadic data on intrastate conflict will detail specific legal regimes of the warring parties, as well as the compatibility of their legal preferences, de jure power-sharing, and the termination/recurrence of conflict. This study will inform theoretical, empirical, and public understandings of civil wars across time and space. Moreover, data and findings will be publicly disseminated to allow policymakers, scholars, and the public to better determine how popular approaches to conflict management and termination of civil war can have a long-term impact on peace. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.