I use empirical methods—surveys and experiments in conflict-affected settings, archival and historical records, and original cross-national datasets—to study three sets of questions about how states form, change, and wage war.

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Published articles are available for download from the Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

Protesters carrying a banner reading "No to the coup" in Cairo, July 2013

Governance and Accountability

Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Regime Transitions

Protesters carrying a banner reading “No to the coup” (لا للانقلاب), Cairo, July 2013 (Revkin 2013)

This line of research asks how regimes change, how governing institutions build or lose legitimacy in the eyes of the governed, and how societies hold power to account for past abuses. It covers transitional justice — the processes through which states pursue accountability, truth, and reparation after atrocity or authoritarian rule — and how law is used to manage, and sometimes manipulate, public memory of the past. A related strand examines how the institutions that distinguish democracies, including judicial independence, free and fair elections, and the separation between military and police, respond to pressures including polarization, war and other national emergencies, and autocratization.

Methods Original cross-national datasets · survey experiments and focus groups · archival and historical records

Police car in Bartella, Iraq

State-Building

Origins, Development, and Reconstruction

Police car in Bartella, Iraq (Revkin 2018)

A long tradition in social science holds that war makes states, but that literature has focused on armies, taxation, and bureaucracies. My work examines the legal institutions—courts, codes, and police—through which wartime authorities govern, in two settings rarely studied together: a twenty-first-century insurgency in the Middle East and the nineteenth-century American capital. A second strand traces what happens after the fighting stops: how divided communities decide whether to punish or reintegrate those accused of collaboration, and how humanitarian assistance shapes reconstruction in fragile settings.

Methods Archival research · conjoint and survey experiments · household surveys in conflict-affected settings

A child's drawing of the battle for Mosul, Iraq

The Costs of War

Civilian Harm, Redress, and Prevention

A child’s drawing of the battle for Mosul, Iraq (Revkin 2017)

This work concerns the conduct of war: how civilians judge the armed forces fighting around them, how international humanitarian law regulates—and fails to regulate—the use of military force, and what is owed to those harmed, whether symbolic, in the form of apologies and memorialization, or material, in the form of compensation and investment in reconstruction.

Methods Original datasets built from military strike reports · satellite imagery · conjoint experiments, interviews, and focus groups

For a complete list of papers and publications, please see my C.V. or visit my Google Scholar page.