Mara Revkin

Mara Redlich Revkin joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a fellow at the Center on National Security and the Law. Her primary research and teaching interests are in armed conflict, peace-building, transitional justice, migration, policing, and property with a regional focus on the Middle East and Africa. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science.

Professor Revkin holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (2016) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2019) where her dissertation examined the Islamic State's governance of civilians in Iraq and Syria. She uses qualitative and quantitative empirical methods including surveys, experiments, interviews, and archival research, and has conducted field research in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan. In addition to her academic research, she has worked with and advised United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations on the design of evidence-based programs and policies that aim to strengthen rule of law and the protection of human rights, support peaceful reconciliation after conflict, and mitigate the root causes of political violence and extremism.

Professor Revkin's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, The American Journal of Political Science, The Yale Law Journal, The American Journal of Comparative Law, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Global Security Studies, World Development, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Harvard National Security Journal, The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Innovations for Poverty Action, the National Science Foundation, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, among others.

Before entering academia, she was the Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Middle East Program), a Critical Language Scholar in Jordan (Arabic), and a Fulbright Fellow in Oman. She holds a B.A. in Political Science with minors in Arabic and Anthropology from Swarthmore College.