This report is part of the Varieties of Peace Research Program, an ambitious initiative undertaken at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Sweden. The program attempts to push our contemporary understanding of peace far beyond the absence of war, and to provide nuance, or rather variation, to a long-running debate. The current report contributes to the program by characterizing and comparing civil-war peace processes that were initiated during the 1990s. In addition, the report offers a long-term analysis of the peace that has (or has not) ensued after these civil wars. The report is descriptive and comparative in its effort and is mainly intended to serve as a basis for further exploration and analysis. Nonetheless, the findings raise some interesting questions.
In practice, the report views peace agreements as expressions of peace processes. Data on peace agreements have been collected from the Peace Agreements Database (PA-X), and data on civil wars have been collected from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The agreements have been characterized on a general level and on a conflict-specific level. Several trends and patterns in the general picture, as well as differences and similarities between the specific processes, have been found. The report’s long-term analysis of peace offers a cautiously optimistic picture. On average, the investigated indicators point to improvements in peace. However, in several cases conditions have deteriorated. Such conclusions are, of course, based on the assumption that the examined data and the measured indicators are relevant to peace. However, it is not obvious that this is the case. Thus, when reading the report, it is worth keeping an open mind regarding the question: What is peace?