Peace agreements: General understanding

There is considerable work on peace agreement with respect to individual conflicts. General treatments are rarer. However, the Peace Accord Matrix at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame is a particular resource for the implementation of such agreements. It can be reached on https://peaceaccords.nd.edu. For an overview as well as definitions of peace agreements, see L. Harbom, S. Högbladh and P. Wallensteen 2006. ‘Armed Conflict and Peace Agreements’, Journal of Peace Research, 43 (5): 617–31.

Christine Bell 2008. On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and Lex Pacificatoria. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, presents the legal aspects of peace agreements, which often are absent in the more political treatments of such arrangements. From this work has also emerged the special database on peace agreements, called PA-X and available on https://www.peaceagreements.org/search. It is introduced in Christine Bell and Sanja Badanjak 2019. ‘Introducing PA-X: A New Peace Agreement Database and Dataset’, Journal of Peace Research, 56(3): 452–66.

In the volume by Stephen J. Stedman, D. Rothchild and E.M. Cousens (eds.) 2002. Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner and a number of other researchers study peace agreements in political terms and in particular conflicts.

Many of the peace agreements mentioned in Understanding Conflict Resolution, for instance, in Table 4.2, have drawn interest among researchers, writers, journalists and the parties themselves. Thus, there are a host of monographs, biographies and memoirs of those involved and their accomplishments. Of interest for Understanding Conflict Resolution are those authors attempting to draw general lessons from these experiences. This normally requires a theoretical framework, a comparative approach or the use of a database.