Thirty-two of the fifty-three African states experienced some form of violent conflict between 1991 and 2005. From 2002 to date, more than half of these countries have been implementing, or have attempted to implement, negotiated peace agreements. What are these peace agreements? Peace agreements are formal commitments between parties in a conflict whose intent and purpose is to end a violent conflict, or transform a conflict in a significant way into one that is approached constructively.

In Africa, however, peace agreements have failed as often as they succeeded. This mixed outcome has presented conflict transformers with a challenge. The Peace Agreements in Africa Initiative therefore seeks to respond to this challenge. One key task of this multilevel response is evaluation of the status of the existing peace agreements, in order to draw generic lessons and best practices from processes that have produced these agreements, and to use these best practices to generate new intervention strategies and approaches. ACCORD’s Peace Agreements Initiative therefore aims to:

• Analyse existing peace agreements (the design, the text and the response to issues in conflict) in Africa with a view to explaining why some peace agreements have been successful while others have failed.
• Interrogate the peace processes (negotiation dynamics, mediation/ facilitation, packaging of key issues et al) that have been employed to produce the existing peace agreements, and from this interrogation generate best practices.
• Engage in comparative analysis of the existing peace agreements in Africa with a view to mapping key policy, intervention and theoretical issues in peace agreements in Africa as well as informing new intervention strategies.

What are peace agreements?

Peace processes have become the most preferred way in which seemingly intractable conflicts are resolved. Peace agreements are, however, not a panacea to ending violent conflicts. Peace agreements fail as often as they succeed. Peace agreements therefore can be defined as formal commitment between parties in a conflict to end a conflict or transform a conflict in a significant way into one that can be approached constructively. There are three forms of peace agreements.

Pre-negotiation agreements

Pre-negotiation agreements are about how peace is to be negotiated. Such agreements determine who would sit at the negotiation table, where the table will be, what issues will be considered, who would mediate, or facilitate and other preliminary matters. Pre-negotiation agreements include ceasefire agreements.

Substantive agreements

Substantive agreements detail the issues in a conflict. They set the framework for resolving these conflict issues, commit parties to resolution of conflict issues through negotiation and non-violent methods, acknowledge the status of all the parties to the negotiation, address the consequences of the conflict e.g. prisoners, refugees, human rights violations et al, provide interim agreements with respect to power sharing – if the conflict is about power – and set an agenda and timeframe for reaching a more permanent resolution of substantive issues. These could include self-determination, democratisation, security sector reform, human rights protection and reconstruction.

Implementation agreements

Implementation agreements break down the details of the substantive agreement for implementation purposes. The implementation agreements often require a new round of negotiations with the parties involved in the substantive agreements. Often, the issues in the substantive agreements are re-negotiated in the process of working out the details.

Activities

The Peace Agreements Initiative has implemented several activities that include desktop and field peace agreements research, establishing a network of experts and analysts from different parts of Africa, published a special edition of Conflict Trends Magazine (CT 3/2007), produced a compendium of peace agreements in Africa, compiled a data base of experts and other relevant stakeholders and organised two experts workshops with financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Overview of key peace agreements

For an overview of key peace agreements in Africa, please see the following documents:

• Analytical overview of key peace agreements in Africa 1997-2007
• Summary of peace agreements in Africa 1997-2007