International Conference on Peace Agreements and Conflict Resolution (ICPACR)

Modern conflict resolution as a structured international practice emerged from the devastation of the two World Wars and the creation of the United Nations in 1945, whose Charter (notably Chapter VI) obliges states to settle disputes by peaceful means including negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and judicial settlement. During the Cold War, superpower rivalry constrained UN-led peacemaking, but the period still produced landmark instruments such as the 1949 Armistice Agreements, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which established norms for territorial integrity and human rights as components of peace. The end of the Cold War expanded the field dramatically, with the 1992 Agenda for Peace introducing the concepts of preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding. The core dispute in contemporary conflict resolution concerns how to design agreements that hold. Studies by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and others show that roughly half of negotiated settlements collapse within five years, often because they address battlefield outcomes without resolving underlying grievances over power-sharing, resource distribution, identity, or transitional justice. Cases such as the 1995 Dayton Accords, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, and the 2016 Colombian peace accord with the FARC illustrate both the possibilities and the limits of negotiated settlements, particularly when implementation lags or spoilers remain armed. Today the field faces new pressures: a documented decline in successfully negotiated endings to civil wars since 2010, the proliferation of non-state armed groups, great-power competition that complicates Security Council mediation, and active conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, and the Sahel where ceasefire and political-process tracks have repeatedly stalled. Debates now center on inclusive mediation (notably women's participation under UNSCR 1325), the sequencing of justice and peace, the role of regional organizations such as the AU and ASEAN, and whether traditional Westphalian mediation models remain fit for hybrid and internationalized conflicts.

While the signing of a peace agreement is often treated as the resolution of a conflict, scholarship and practice since the 1990s have shown that implementation is where most settlements succeed or fail. The Peace Accords Matrix at the University of Notre Dame, which tracks comprehensive agreements since 1989, finds that fewer than half of agreed provisions are fully implemented within a decade, and that incomplete implementation correlates strongly with relapse into violence. Key recurring challenges include disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of combatants (DDR); security-sector reform; transitional justice; constitutional reform; and the management of natural-resource and territorial disputes. The issue's evolution can be traced through cases such as Angola's failed Bicesse Accords (1991) and Lusaka Protocol (1994), the partial success of the Dayton framework in Bosnia, the breakdown of Sudan's 2005 CPA leading to South Sudan's independence and subsequent civil war, and the contested implementation of Colombia's 2016 accord, where rural reform and substitution of illicit crops have lagged. International guarantors, monitoring missions, and verification mechanisms—ranging from UN peacekeeping operations to hybrid bodies like the Kosovo Verification Mission or the Tripartite Mechanism in Sudan—have produced mixed results, and the credibility of third-party guarantees has eroded with high-profile failures. Current debates focus on how to strengthen implementation: through better-sequenced provisions, more robust monitoring with clear benchmarks, sustained donor financing for peacebuilding (an area where the UN Peacebuilding Fund remains underfunded), and inclusive mechanisms that bind civil society, women, and minority groups into the agreement's afterlife. The collapse of the 2020 Tigray Pretoria Agreement's implementation timeline, the fragility of the Yemen truce, and the unraveling of the Minsk II framework prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine have intensified scrutiny of how the international community designs and backstops the post-signature phase.