PA-X: Peace Agreements Database

About

What is PA-X?

The PA-X Peace Agreement Database (www.peaceagreements.org) is a database and repository of peace agreements from 1990 to date, current up until January 2003. PA-X provides a comprehensive dataset of peace agreements, capable of underpinning both quantitative and qualitative research.

PA-X has been designed to provide easy access to peace agreement texts and to allow users to explore patterns of agreements over time, both within processes and across processes. PA-X is primarily produced by a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh, with additional collaborators - see more about the team in Acknowledgements.

It aims to be accessible to:

• mediators and parties in conflict seeking to understand how compromise can be crafted

• civic actors seeking to influence on-going peace talks and proposals

• social science researchers interested in understanding peace agreements quantitatively and qualitatively.

For peace agreement definitions see here. Download PA-X Codebook here.

What does PA-X include?

PA-X contains:

over 2003 agreements in over 140 peace processes
coding of provisions for 225+ substantive categories such as power-sharing, women, and transitional justice .

It enables search permutations which can disaggregate the data by country, entity, region, conflict type, and stage of agreement; and allows examination of different combinations of issues addressed. See more here.

What is PA-X Gender?

PA-X is accompanied by PA-X Gender, which contains more detailed analysis of the over all agreements in the main PA-X collection that mention women, girls, or gender. This database breaks down the relevant provisions into 53 categories, again with detailed search mechanisms and quantitative data fully available.

The search mechanisms and pages on PA-X Gender work the same way as PAX, although they involve different sub-coding of gender provisions. PA-X Gender was launched in 2015 and has been central to research by institutions including UN Women and the Council of Foreign Relations.

Where do the agreements in the PA-X database come from?

Agreements were sourced using: existing collections; country-specific websites and literature; websites of other civic groups; official documentation of international organisations; and writing to or meeting with and requesting documentation from governments and actors who have signed peace agreements, or mediators involved in conflicts.

See more on sources here.
Download an spreadsheet export of all sources by peace agreement here. Please note that, in some cases, the original websites that hosted the agreement documents are no longer available. In each case, a hard copy of the agreement document is kept on file. Whenever possible the sources were recorded on Wayback Machine.
For Notice and Takedown Policy see here.

How do I use PA-X? See more here.

See video demonstrating PA-X search capabilities here.

How do I cite PA-X?

Version 7:

Bell, Christine, Sanja Badanjak, Juline Beaujouan Robert Forster, Tim Epple, Astrid Jamar, Kevin McNicholl, Sean Molloy, Kathryn Nash, Jan Pospisil, Robert Wilson, Laura Wise (2023). PA-X Codebook, Version 7. Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.

Bell, C., & Badanjak, S. (2019). Introducing PA-X: A new peace agreement database and dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 56(3), 452-466. Available at https://www.peaceagreements.org/

Version 6:

Bell, Christine, Sanja Badanjak, Juline Beaujouan, Robert Forster, Tim Epple, Astrid Jamar, Kevin McNicholl, Sean Molloy, Kathryn Nash, Jan Pospisil, Robert Wilson, Laura Wise (2022). PA-X Codebook, Version 6. Political Settlements Research Programme, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. www.peaceagreements.org