One of the most common features found within peace agreements are provisions that call for post-civil war elections. Unfortunately, recent research on post-civil war stability has consistently demonstrated that the initial elections held after civil wars significantly increases the risk for renewed fighting. While this research does highlight a danger posed by post-war elections, it focuses only on one element associated with post-civil war democracy. I argue that by implementing electoral reforms that are called for in peace agreements, post-war countries reduce the risk of renewed civil war. Implementing these peace agreement provisions increases the durability of post-war peace in two ways. First, by implementing costly electoral reforms called for in the peace agreement, the government signals a credible commitment to the peace process which reduces security dilemmas faced by opposition groups. Second, electoral reforms generate new avenues for political participation for disaffected citizens, which reduces the ability of hardliners to mobilize future armed opposition. I examine how implementing post-war electoral reforms impact the risk of renewed conflict from 1989 through 2010. Using duration models, I demonstrate that implementing these electoral reforms substantially reduces the risk of renewed conflict.

The creation of durable peace following armed conflicts has been widely researched from a variety of perspectives. There is much less research, however, concerning when and why mediation can produce durable peace because most mediation research focuses on achieving a short-term success as indicated by the creation of a new peace agreement. This is an exploratory study which examines several factors considered to be important for the creation of durable peace. This study finds that the two most important factors are the power dynamics between the parties and the management of spoilers. Moreover, this study finds that these two factors are interlinked inasmuch that changes to the parties' levels of power can facilitate the emergence of spoilers. These findings are based on the systematic examination of mediation in four cases of armed conflict by utilizing a modified contingency model of mediation which is tested against the mediations conducted in the 1973 Egyptian-Israeli war, the Bosnian war, the third Angolan war, and the first Chechen war. This study argues that a well-designed agreement can shift the power dynamics between the parties so that their struggle for power will not take violent forms, and it can help prevent the emergence of new spoilers because it does not favor one party more than the other. Well designed agreements can be created even when the balance of power between the parties is unequal, and efforts to further weaken the already weaker party should be avoided because it can contribute to the emergence of spoilers from within the disputing parties. An original model for durable peace which accounts for these new findings is then developed. This model argues that to create durable peace mediators must produce good agreements that are balanced and channel the struggle for power into nonviolent mechanisms and processes, and manage the spoilers who threaten the peace.

As civil conflicts continue to be the most prevalent form of war, women and children are disproportionately affected by intrastate violence. In response to such findings, the United Nations, at the behest of a transitional activist network, passed United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which outlined how to include more women in formal security practices.Because of the normative qualities of the Resolution, I employ a norms framework to explore the properties and evolution of when and how women are part of peace agreements. Before exploring the norm of engendered security, I present a review of feminist security studies and how engendered security is understood using a gender lens. To first establish what a norm is, I developed a three-level approach which illuminates the principles, properties and policies that constitute a norm; I then apply this model to the norm of engendered security. I then use this norm to study peace agreements, and develop graphs and tables illustrating the varied levels of engendered security in different peace processes.Then, to address the ways in which this norm has evolved, I employ a norm lifecycle model which includes four stages: innovation, emergence, enactment and routinization. Subsequent chapters explore the first three phases of engendered security's development into a norm. This includes a discussion of Guatemala as a norm innovator, in which a strong domestic women's movement and feminist leaders promoted a high level of engendered security in their peace process. Norm emergence focuses on the agenda-setting of a Peacewomen's Network who promoted Resolution 1325; it includes an analysis of the developing discourses of security and women, culminating in global recognition of women's insecurity in conflict. The final chapter explores norm enactment and the ways in which norms become common practices and policies in various security-related institutions. This chapter concludes with a study of Sudan's two peace processes and the role the international community played in producing very different levels of engendered security.Ultimately, the views of leaders during peace processes, the presence of an organized women's movement and agenda and gender-conscious mediators seem to account for higher levels of engendered security.

With a focus on legitimacy, accountability, and protection equality, this thesis aims to investigate the impact of domestic institutions on the likelihood that peace succeeds in the aftermath of armed conflict. The argument is that the presence of such domestic institutions should facilitate the construction of a peaceful post-conflict environment by reducing commitment problems in the peacemaking process. A quantitative analysis is conducted on 82 peace agreements signed between governments and rebel groups during the time period 1989 to 2004. The findings suggest that the extent to which social groups within the state are protected equally by the government most significantly impacts the likelihood that peace prevails.

Peace agreements are important tools towards gender equality, and how they are written in terms of language is of particular importance. In October 2000 the United Nations Security Council acknowledged among other things the need for gender inclusive peace agreements with their Resolution 1325. This study is a qualitative textual analysis that with the use of a content analysis and a critical discourse analysis analyzes two peace agreements, one from before the implementation of Resolution 1325 and one from after. The findings of the study suggest that references towards women and gender have increased since the implementation of Resolution 1325, and that the way women are portrayed in terms of agency and stereotypes have changed for the better. However, the latter agreement was still missing gender provisions that sufficiently addressed issues that fundamentally structure gender relations.

Do ceasefires during peace negotiations facilitate reaching a peace agreement in internal armed conflicts? Existing case studies offer diverging arguments and mixed empirical evidence for whether ceasefires should precede or come after the more political settlements. In this regard, I argue that ceasefires facilitate that the combatant parties will reach a political deal by increasing mutual trust, alleviating the impact of two critical uncertainties in the negotiation stage: the uncertainty on whether the other party is willing to reach a negotiated settlement, and the uncertainty on whether the other party has the capacity to control their respective armed forces. Using new data on negotiation processes in internal armed conflicts in Africa, between 1989 and 2013, I examine the effect of having a ceasefire during negotiations on the probability of reaching a negotiated accord, while controlling for the levels of violence during the talks as a crucial conditioning factor, as well as for the presence of peacekeepers, and the intervention of a mediator. The results show that early ceasefires have a significant effect on the conclusion of political agreements at the talks, and that this effect is stronger when the talks are surrounded by decreased or null levels of violence.

The study focuses on the north and south Sudan conflict and seeks to investigate the continuing threats to a return to war between the two parties since the 2005 Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and after the independence of South Sudan. The study critically analyses the CPA and investigates the dilemmas faced by the two Sudans and examines the conflict resolution/transformation process. This thesis relies on data generated from key informant interviews and archival data as primary sources; complemented by secondary sources of data obtained from books, journals, research documents and relevant literature on the area. The study analyses the background of the north-south Sudan conflict, analysis of the CPA, implications of the negotiation, mediation and the implementation processes of the CPA and the referendum, post-referendum, the post-independence issues and the conflict resolution efforts. These are discussed in order to find the reasons as to why the CPA emerged as it did and its effectiveness. The study uses the concept of the conflict resolution/transformation approaches and their methods (mediation, negotiation and peacebuilding), the Galtung ABC theory and the Liberal peace theory as tools to guide the study in order to measure the data collected from the field. The results of the analysis suggest that history, the mediation and the negotiation process viewed to have been narrow and non-inclusive, the content of the CPA itself, the problems of the previous processes before the referendum, the referendum of Southern Sudan and the Abyei referendum failure provided the basis of the origins of the post-referendum and the post-independence issues. These issues are responsible for the dilemmas faced by the two states and eventually the tensions and the threats to a return to war which exist up to the present. All these issues lie at the heart of the difficulties of the conflict resolution process and the relationship problem of North and South Sudan. However, the 2005 CPA had partial success in that it achieved partial negative peace which in turn led to the separation of north and south Sudan.

With the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325 the role women play for peace and security was affirmed. Since the implementation of the resolution, almost two decades ago, more than 400 peace agreements has been signed. Since then one can assume much has happened regarding women and their role in the peace process. It can thus be valuable to explore if the implementation of the resolution has created a larger acknowledgement of women in the peace agreements and to see if women are limited to and by the roles they are assigned to in the peace agreements in their peace work. The focus of this study is a comparative case study that examines five cases where women’s role in peacebuilding were mentioned more extensively. This will be done in two sections. First, the roles women are assigned in peace agreements and second, what the women actually work with. This will create a basis for the thesis to investigate the presumed supposition that women are victims of conflict rather than agents of change and also look into if women are engaged in work that follow societal roles or if they act outside of these gender norms. The findings of the study showed that women engage in all types of peacebuilding work and even though women suffer and are victims of war they are also agents of change and when they are limited by the gender roles that exist, they use what agency they have within the frame of their roles as women to implement change.

This thesis contributes to the debate on what makes peace durable by developing an analytical tool that, based on the current research status on what makes peace agreements last, intends to evaluate peace agreements on their capacity to maintain peace. The research was done through a qualitative desk study, using the Colombian peace agreement which was signed in 2016. The agreement, as it is finally negotiated, is according to the analytical framework estimated to have a reasonably good chance to being durable.

Creative ambiguity as a negotiation strategy is used often in peace agreements and refers to when ambiguities are used in agreements to serve as a positive motivation to get over obstacles. While it has many positive impacts, the use of creative ambiguity also often times shifts the burden of the negotiation phase to the implementations phase, and thus can result into agreements that are not implemented as well as plummeting the relations between the parties affected. This thesis aims to understand how the use of creative ambiguity in the Brussels Agreement between Kosovo and Serbia had an impact on the heightened conflict between the countries. This thesis is a single instrumental case study that illustrates the issue of creative ambiguity through the case of the Brussels Agreement. Through analysing interferences from material mainly collected from both countries’ government websites, this study conducted that the use of creative ambiguity had a harmful impact not only on the relations between Kosovo and Serbia, but also on the implementation of the agreement.