Liana Eustacia Reyes

International Relations

Comparative Politics
Civil Wars
Law
Conflict Resolution

Dr. Reyes brings her expertise in the scientific study of law and conflict to understand the determinants and consequences of conflict resolution. To this end, Dr. Reyes engages in theoretically driven data collection efforts and multi-method analyses. Her main research project theorizes the implications of group-level legal preferences for conflict resolution and provides an in-depth and systematic analysis of them: how these preferences vary across groups and how their degree of congruence facilitates/obstructs conflict resolution. Empirically, she focuses on rebel and incumbent groups. To date, this research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, Rice University's Social Sciences Research Institute, the University of Pennsylvania's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Purdue University, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.  

 

Dr. Reyes's co-authored work examines law, conflict, and governance, with particular emphasis on negotiations, arbitration, constitution-making, justice mechanisms, property rights, and rebel governance, and has been published in journals such as the International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, ​and ​Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 

 

Additionally, Dr. Reyes directs the Law and Conflict (LAC) research lab. With LAC, she mentors undergraduate and graduate students interested in the scientific study of law and conflict. Dr. Reyes trains these students on various research processes: how to ask research questions, examine plausible answers with several methodological tools, engage in scientific data collection, and manage projects at different phases. 

 

During the 2024-2025 AY, Dr. Reyes was a Rosenwald Fellow with the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.  Prior to Purdue, she was a University of Pennsylvania's Provost Postdoctoral Fellow and affiliated with the Department of Political Science and PDRI-Dev Lab. During 2021-2022, she was the Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona's School of Government and Public Policy. Additionally, she was a 2017-2018 APSA Minority Fellow and a former Visiting Research Fellow at National Defense University.

 

Dr. Reyes holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University, Master of Arts in Politics from New York University, and Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Juris Doctor from Florida International University. ​She also holds a certificate in Global Arbitration from the School of International Arbitration, Queen Mary University of London, and Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Finally, Dr. Reyes has unique professional experiences that expand across industries: national security, intelligence and investigations, and law. She draws on the expertise she developed throughout these experiences, which include fieldwork in Latin America, when examining political phenomena.