Current Projects
Assessing the Success and Failure of Peace Agreements
Christine Bell
Catherine O’Rourke
The project, funded by the British Academy, aims to produce a ‘human definition’ of success and failure of peace agreements, and to illustrate how that definition relates to other possible ways measuring success or failure.
Background to the Project
Post Cold War years have witnessed the proliferation of peace agreements addressing violent social conflict. Since 1990 646 such documents, spanning 85 jurisdictions have been negotiated (Bell ‘On the Law of Peace’ 2008). Peace agreements constitute the prevalent international approach to ending conflicts occurring primarily within state borders. Literature on peace agreement success and failure is only beginning to emerge, with some of the following conclusions:
- There is high degree of policy and scholarly disagreement over how to measure the ‘success’ of ‘failure’ of peace agreements.
- There is considerable dispute over whether a peace agreement should be measured for its capacity to deliver short-term goals such as an end to deaths in conflict, or longer-term goals such as a level of democracy or good governance, the geographic spread of ‘peace’ benefits, increased democratic dialogue, and increased capacity to resolve disputes without international involvement.
- Within each conception of peace there are further internal disputes: how to count the agreement’s ability to stop deaths in conflict for more than five years; how to measure and understand what factors might have been determining with regard to the sustenance or collapse of the ceasefire.
- As regards measuring a conception of peace as constitutionalism, the question is whether this peace can be measured quantitatively at all.
The current project aims to work as a pilot project to examine a ‘human definition’ of success and failure which will be compared with quantitative and qualitative indicators for assessing the success or failure of peace agreements.
The Project Methodology
The project involves comparative analysis of the peace accord implementation in Northern Ireland and Colombia. There are important parallels between the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Colombia. Both countries have experienced long periods of protracted violent social conflict, and several failed peace initiatives. In particular, the resolution of conflict in each context has hinged on the successful disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of paramilitary actors. In Northern Ireland the peaceful resolution to conflict has largely been achieved (the Good Friday Agreement, 1998). In Colombia cyclical and multi-dyadic peace processes have taken place with partial success since the early 1990s.
The project will examine a series of possible indicators for success and failure for each of these peace processes. To these indicators will be added civil society views, based on semi-structured interviews with key actors from at least eight civil society organizations in each jurisdiction to develop indicators of subjective perceptions of peace at the grassroots level to see what ‘human’ definitions emerge for a concept of peace agreement success or failure. These interviews will not attempt to test social attitudes, but to see if components of an ‘experiential’ definition can be suggested, drawing from the interview material.
Project Events
The following events will be held during Semester I: 2009/10.
Symposium: Implementing Peace Agreements : An Interdisciplinary Conversation on How to Measure Success and Failure. 8 October 2009, Transitional Justice Institute, Magee Campus
Symposium: Belfast Agreement: Success and Failure. November (Date to be confirmed), Transitional Justice Institute, Belfast Campus