Peace and Transition Process Data

What is PA-X Tracker?

The PA-X Tracker is a suite of tools that enable tracking peace and transition processes through data from the PA-X Peace Agreement Database and Dataset, and external data from a wide range of sources. The purpose of the tracker is to allow users to understand how these processes are unfolding, and what impact peace processes have had on a range of institutional, political, economic, and security indicators. In the tracker, users can compare data in different contexts by selecting 'All' and viewing data for all countries or can select a country of interest to view country-specific data on a timeline, through interactive dashboards, interactive network graphs and other data driven applications.

Some key definitions from PA-X include:

• Peace Agreement: formal, publicly-available documents, produced after discussion with conflict protagonists and mutually agreed to by some or all of them, addressing conflict with a view to ending it
• Conflict’s protagonists: state actors and non-state actors who are involved in violent conflict, or their associated political representatives
• Conflict: armed violence, causing more than 25 conflict-related deaths in one year
• Peace or Transition Process: a formal attempt to bring political and/or military protagonists of conflict, to some sort of mutual agreement as to how to end the conflict

We invite feedback, comments, suggestions, and ideas that would help us improve this tracker.

• Fill out the feedback form and help us improve.
• Get in touch at PeaceRep@ed.ac.uk.

View the PA-X Tracker Methodology for more information on the tracker and all secondary data used in the tracker.

For guidance on how to use the PA-X Tracker, see step-by-step guides linked below each Tracker component/dashboard. Alternatively, view the videos on our YouTube Playlist - 'How to use PA-X Tracker', or access a full PDF of all the User Guides.

How do I cite PA-X Tracker?

Cite PA-X Tracker:

Please cite/attribute any re-use of the Tracker visualizations or tools with the following:

PA-X Tracker: the Peace and Transition Process Tracker, PeaceRep, Accessible from: https://pax.peaceagreements.org/tracker/

Cite PA-X Version 8:

• Bell, Christine, Sanja Badanjak, John Allyson, Shivangi Bansal, Juline Beaujouan, Jacob Dobson, Robert Forster, Tim Epple, Adam Farquhar, Roy Gardner, Niamh Henry, Jennifer Hodge, Moosa Izzat, Astrid Jamar, Kelsey Kestenbaum, Kevin McNicholl, Sean Molloy, Tom MorKathryn Nash, Tom Morley, Saketh Srinivas Pittala, Jan Pospisil, Robert Wilson, Laura Wise , Surya Kiran Yadav (2024). PA-X Peace Agreements Database and Dataset, Version 8. 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/

For further citation information click here.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: What countries, conflicts and processes are covered in the tracker?

Any formal, publicly signed and written agreements, and peace and transition processes that are recorded in PA-X Peace Agreements database are included in the PA-X Tracker (2055 agreements across 170 peace and transition processes since 1990 are recorded in v8 of PA-X). Therefore, there are some limitations to what is recorded in both PA-X and PA-X Tracker that may be important in the processes, such as verbal agreements or documents that are not publicly available. Additionally, there are some conflicts that do not reach the threshold for inclusion.

Q: I want to track a country that has had a peace agreement but it does not have its own profile – can I do this?

Country profiles are curated collections of interactive data tools relevant to the country. These are available for the following countries, which are relevant case studies of where we work in PeaceRep: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. This is a living and growing platform, and new country profiles will be iteratively added over time.

If you are interested in a country/conflict/process that has not been listed, and does not have its own ‘country profile’ yet, but they are included in PA-X, you can use the ‘All’ tile to explore and compare Process Overviews of any Country/entity that is in PA-X, using the dropdown on the top left of the dashboard. Additionally, you can view and compare Implementation Data across indicators of security, politics and the economy for any country that is in PA-X and is on Gleditsch and Ward’s List of Independent States.

Please note that some states may not have data availability across all data sources, and some of the charts may show as blank for some countries. If that country has its own curated profile, access the implementation data via their country portal rather than ‘All’ as it will contain relevant replacement data.

Q: Where is the data from?

On the PA-X Tracker, we aim to contextualise the data collected across the PeaceRep consortium amongst a range of widely used data sources in the peace and conflict resolution field.

Data we collect at PeaceRep includes the PA-X Peace Agreements Database (including PA-X Local, PA-X Gender and the APCA [Amnesties, Conflict and Peace Agreement (ACPA) dataset]), in addition to local data collections in South Sudan regarding Perceptions of Peace, and Perceptions of Legitimacy and Authority in Syria.

Other external data we have used are listed below in the section ‘External Data Sources and Providers’.

On any component of the tracker where there is an information button ⓘ, hover the button to see the data citation, or click the button to navigate to the original data source website.

Q: How can I use the PA-X Tracker?

User guides which provide some tips on how to use the tracker, are provided under each tracker component. They are available as PDF step-by-step guides, or videos that illustrate a walkthrough of each component. View the videos on our YouTube Playlist - 'How to use PA-X Tracker', or access a PDF of all the User Guides.

Q: How often is the data updated?

Where possible, the data on the tracker updates on a monthly basis including updates from ACLED, UCDP GED Candidate, ACAPS INFORM Severity Index and Crisis Figures from ReliefWeb. Other data providers release data on an annual or ad-hoc basis, therefore the data is updated as and when a new version is released.

PA-X data is updated on an annual basis. The current version (7) records agreements until early-2023. The next version (8) is set to be released late Spring 2024, which is when the updates to the PA-X Tracker will also take place.

Q: Why do some processes/countries have more options to view than others?

Due to lack of data availability for some countries, in addition to data collections and case studies across the PeaceRep consortium, we have different amounts of data available depending on the context. This is a living and growing platform that is a work in progress, and more components will be added for relevant countries when they are developed. Additionally, some of our tools are experimental/proof of concept and we have not yet extended them to new countries but wanted to make them publicly available for exploration.

Q: I expected to see relevant events to the conflict on the timelines, but they are not included, why?

On the timelines of institutional change, we include the following event types from the relevant data providers – if an event has not been recorded in these datasets, they are therefore not included on the timelines. If you have any suggestions for data that provides relevant events that would be valuable on the timelines, or specific events relevant to the formal change process in a country, please reach out to: peacerep@ed.ac.uk.

External Data Sources and Providers

Data used in the Tracker are provided by the following organisations and individuals. We list these sources and providers to the best of our ability to identify original data owners.

Where data from these providers are used in data visualisations, an ‘ⓘ’/’information’ button provides the correct attribution/citation in line with their terms of use, with these buttons providing navigation to the relevant source's websites, or their full citations are on the website under the relevant content.

All reuse of Tracker components must attribute the visualisation to the Tracker owners and to the original data owners. All external sources have been used in accordance with Terms of Use and where necessary these have been checked with data users. However, if you are one of the data providers and have any concerns regarding this, please raise it through our 'Notice and Takedown policy' on PA-X Website.

External data providers:

• acaps INFORM Humanitarian Severity Index, Available from: https://www.acaps.org/en/thematics/all-topics/inform-severity-index
• Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset (ACLED): Raleigh, C., Linke, A., Hegre, H., & Karlsen, J. (2010). “Introducing ACLED: An armed conflict location and event dataset: Special data feature”. Journal of Peace Research, 47(5), 651-660. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343310378914. D. View here: https://acleddata.com/
• Chin, J. J., Carter, D. B., & Wright, J. G. (2021). The Varieties of Coups D’état: Introducing the Colpus Dataset. International Studies Quarterly, 65(4), 1040-1051.
• Clayton, Govinda, Ceasefires Project , ETH Zurich, https://css.ethz.ch/en/research/research-projects/ceasefires-mediation.html
• Consumer Price Index (CPI). Data taken from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Consumer Price Index (CPI) Dataset. Accessible from: https://data.world/imf/consumer-price-index-cpi
• Corruption Perceptions Index: Corruption Perception Index (CPI) [2022] by Transparency International is licensed under CC-BYND 4.0. View here: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
• Data on Global Aid Workers KIDA (Killed, Injured, Kidnapped or Arrested) from Insecurity Insight, Available on Humanitarian Data Exchange: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/sind-aid-worker-kka-dataset
• Election data from National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA): Hyde, S. D., & Marinov, N. (2012). Which Elections Can Be Lost? Political Analysis, 20(2), 191–210. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23260172 View here: https://nelda.co/#
• Elkins, Zachary and Tom Ginsburg. 2022 “Characteristics of National Constitutions, Version 4.0.” Comparative Constitutions Project. Last modified: October 24, 2022. Available at https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org
• Global Peace Index: Institute for Economics & Peace. Global Peace Index 2022: Measuring Peace in a Complex World, Sydney, June 2022. Available from: http://visionofhumanity.org/resources (accessed Feb 2023)
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). View here: https://www.ictd.ac/dataset/grd/ UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset’. Version 2022. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/GRD-2022
• Military Expenditure (as a share of GDP) data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Military Expenditure Database: https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex
• Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office Gateway (United Nations): Data accessible from: https://mptf.undp.org/analyze-all-contributions
• National Democratic Institute – Global Election Calendar. View here: https://www.ndi.org/elections-calendar
• OECD States of Fragility (2022), States of Fragility 2022, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/c7fedf5e-en View 2022: http://www3.compareyourcountry.org/states-of-fragility/overview/0/
• ReliefWeb Crisis Figures Data latest figures available from Humanitarian Data Exchange: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/reliefweb-crisis-figures
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Data: Intentional Homicide. Accessible here: https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
• Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) GED: Davies, Shawn, Therese Pettersson & Magnus Öberg (2023). Organized violence 1989-2022 and the return of conflicts between states?. Journal of Peace Research 60(4). View here: https://ucdp.uu.se/
• Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). View here: https://v-dem.net/ - Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryd´en, Johannes von Romer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundstrom, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. ”V-Dem Country–Year Dataset v12” Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds22. Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Romer. 2022. “The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data”. V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 7th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute
• World Bank Data, Personal remittances, received (current US$), BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT. Available from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT

Additional Resources

See the PA-X Tracker Methodology.

Acknowledgements

The Peace Agreements Database (PA-X) and the PA-X Tracker: the Peace & Transition Process Tracker is an output of PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, from a project funded by UK Aid from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) for the benefit of developing countries. However, the views expressed and information contained in it are not necessarily those endorsed by FCDO, which can accept no responsibility for such views or information or for any reliance placed on them.

This platform was developed in a collaboration with IS Applications Development Services in the University of Edinburgh, with special thanks to Callum Fenna-Roberts, Jacob Dobson, Diana Smoliar and John Allison for development of the platform.

This data infrastructure supporting this platform was developed in collaboration with the EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre), with special thanks extended to Jonny Hay, Malcolm Illingworth and Charaka Palansuriya.

The contents of this platform were conceptualised, designed and developed by the University of Edinburgh PeaceRep team, with special thanks to Christine Bell, Sanja Badanjak, Jinrui Wang, Roy Gardner, Sarah Schöttler, Benjamin Bach and Niamh Henry for their contributions.

The country-outline images used in the tracker interface are royalty-free, sourced from pixabay, with credits going to user GDJ.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh.