The Transitional Justice Peace Agreements Database.
About the Peace Agreement database
Content
This database contains information relation to over 640 documents addressing
approximately 102 conflict dyads spanning 85 jurisdictions. The
collection uses a working definition of peace agreements as: documents
addressing militarily violent conflict with a view to ending it. The
threshold used for militarily violent conflict is 25 conflict-related
deaths in one calendar year (this threshold is drawn from the Uppsala
Conflict Database Programme). No
temporal limit has been applied between the date of a given conflict
meeting the threshold and the signing of a peace agreement. The collection
therefore includes agreements aimed at averting nascent conflicts that
subsequently met the threshold, and further implementation agreements
signed beyond the duration of the violent conflict. The date of 1990
is used as a starting point because it broadly marks the end of the Cold
War and the beginning of the peace agreement era. Like any date,
it results in some arbitrary exclusions. In particular,
agreement trails in Central America more properly start in 1989 and arguably
even earlier in the Esquipulas process of the early 1980s.
The collection includes: proposed agreements not accepted by all relevant
parties (but setting a framework); agreements between some but not all
parties to conflicts; agreements essentially imposed after a military
victory; joint declarations largely rhetorical in nature; agreed accounts
of meetings between parties even where these do not create substantive
obligations. In cases where a series of partial agreements were later
incorporated into a single framework agreement, all of the constituent
agreements are listed separately. Where specific pieces of legislation,
constitutions, interim constitutions, constitutional amendments, or UN
Security Council resolutions were the outcomes of peace negotiations,
these are included in the database; however, where these were viewed
as far removed from the peace agreement they were not included.
Sources
No official system for registering peace agreements currently exists.
Consequently, diverse electronic and documentary sources were used so
as to compile the most comprehensive dataset of peace agreements. A number
of web-based peace agreement collections exist which overlap but are
not coterminous. The most notable among these are the collections hosted
by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) (www.usip.org/library/pa.html),
INCORE’s current collection (www.incore.ulster.ac.uk), the Accord
collection hosted by the think-tank Conciliation Resources (www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/index.php),
and more recently, the United Nations Department of Political Affairs
(http://peacemaker.unlb.org). The database logged all of these
peace agreements. In addition peace agreements were sourced from
websites that are dedicated to monitoring specific peace processes, such
as the Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program (http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/)
and Tamilnation.org. In many cases, state and non-state parties
to conflicts have primary documents available online, such as the African
National Congress in South Africa (http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/). Similarly,
the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/peace%20process/reference%20documents/)
provides a comprehensive collection of treaties and agreements related
to conflict in the Middle East, and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs
makes all of the bilateral agreements between the UK and Ireland concerning
the Northern Irish conflict publicly-available on its website (http://www.dfa.ie/home/index.aspx?id=334).
More recently, the BBC website has posted the full text of agreements,
where the agreements were the subject of news reports, for example, the
Iraqi Constitution or the St Andrews Agreement concerning Northern Ireland.
These websites were all checked for additional sources of primary documents.
In isolated cases, specifically Bosnia, Colombia, and India, the text
of agreements were taken from dedicated publications. In certain
instances, where framework agreements referred in their text to earlier
peace agreements that could not be sourced, we nevertheless accepted
those references as sufficient evidence of the existence of the peace
agreement.
Research drawing on civil and interstate datasets provided ongoing information
on where conflicts as been resolved by negotiated settlement, so that
the text of the settlements could be followed up. In addition, new peace
agreements have been tracked by using peace negotiation monitoring services,
in particular, the weekly electronic newsletter Peace Negotiations
Watch published by US-based Public International Law and Policy
Group (http://www.pilpg.org), and the monthly bulletin CrisisWatch of
Brussels-based International Crisis Group (http://www.icg.org). The texts
of agreements reported in these bulletins were subsequently sourced through
the varied print and web-based resources discussed above, and by writing
to the relevant governments, non state groups, and mediators.
In the database some agreements are listed for which a full text could
not be traced. This is indicated by an asterisk preceding the agreement
title. The agreements were included if they were listed in reputable
sources (chiefly the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Accord, Centre for
Humanitarian Dialogue, Monty Marshall’s online list of African
Agreements, reports of the UN Secretary General, or other subsequent
peace agreements whose text we did have).
Verification
The text of peace agreements have been taken from sources that have
a reputation-based authority, but no further steps to verify each text
has been taken. It is difficult to suggest what might constitute
an authoritative source, or adequate verification of a text signed by
state and non-state actors. The web-based sources used have been
established for some time, and are widely used, meaning that they have
garnered an authority. Of the general web-based collections listed
above, USIP is the only one with a clear verification mechanism, requiring
at least one party to the agreement to verify the text before posting
it to the collection. The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD)
and Conciliation Resources’ partial web collection of peace agreements
includes agreements only from jurisdictions in which the organization
performed a non-governmental / mediation role, and these are therefore
verified in the sense of having been accessed contemporaneously from
local actors. In addition, CHD recently concluded a project reviewing
amnesty provisions in all peace agreements (narrowly defined) signed
between 1980 and 2006; this research appears to count agreements as ‘verified’ when
taken from an authoritative source such as the web-based collections
of USIP, INCORE and Conciliation Resources. UN Peacemaker notes its source
for all peace agreements, and in processes in which the UN was involved
these are often official UN documents. In other instances agreements
appear to be either sourced to one of the databases listed, or are marked ‘unverified’. Accordingly,
there appears to be no independent mechanism of verification. Another
authoritative source of peace agreements is the publication of the text
of peace agreements within International Legal Materials.
Accuracy
While every possible effort has been taken to be accurate, the database
remains a work in progress. Any suggestions or other agreements
should be forwarded to c.bell@ulster.ac.uk.
For the development of the database and definitional issues
see further
- Bell, C On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria (Oxford
University Press 2008) http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199226849,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Law-Peace-Agreements-Lex-Pacificatoria/dp/0199226849/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231327819&sr=8-3
- Bell C ‘Peace Agreements: Their Nature and Legal Status’ (2006) American
Journal of International Law 373-412
- Bell C ‘Peace Agreements and Human Rights (Oxford
University Press 2000), http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829889-7 (hardback), http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-927096-1 (paperback),
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peace-Agreements-Human-Rights-Christine/dp/0199270961/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231327952&sr=8-
