Research Spotlight: PeaceRep’s PA-X Peace Agreements Database
Thu 15 May 2025
At Edinburgh Law School we’re proud to be home to innovative and world-leading research that contributes to scholarship and the wider society. As part of our Research Spotlight series, we’re showcasing some of the extraordinary work taking place at the School, like the creation of the PA-X Database.
About the PA-X Database
The PA-X Peace Agreements Database was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh Law School, led by Professor Christine Bell. The team’s work on updating the Database is currently part of PeaceRep, a consortium of research institutions, non-governmental organisations, and local research teams led by the University of Edinburgh Law School and funded by UK International Development from the UK government. PeaceRep’s research examines the major trends and shifts in the post-1990 peace and transition process landscape, supporting peace and transition processes to innovate and adapt with data-driven research and tools.
The team have recently announced the release of PA-X Version 9, the latest update to the PA-X Peace Agreements Database. The dataset includes 2,144 agreements from over 170 peace processes from 1990 to 2024, reinforcing PA-X as the most comprehensive global resource on peace agreements. PA-X has a searchable interface, and supports the work of qualitative and quantitative researchers in law and social sciences, country specialists, and mediation professionals.
The database is accompanied by subdatabases including PA-X Gender which contains peace agreements with references to women, girls, gender, or sexual violence, and PA-X Local, which contains agreements that deal in some way with local issues, involve local actors, and deal with forms of local/communal violent conflict.
PA-X data underpins a range of digital tools, visualisations, and datasets to support research, policy and practice, including the PA-X Tracker, a new, innovative digital tool offering data-driven insights to support peace and transition processes. The PA-X data are also used in the PeaceFem app, which was developed to support women in peace talks, and provides a compendium of peace agreement provisions that relate to women’s rights and a matching set of case studies of negotiations and implementation.
A public resource
Not only is PA-X currently the largest peace agreements database and dataset in the world, it is free and open to everyone, including mediators and parties in conflict, civic actors, and social science researchers.
The collection of peace agreements started as a personal collection by Principal Investigator, Professor Christine Bell as a resource for the peace talks taking place in Northern Ireland. As the collection grew, Professor Bell felt that it was important to turn the collection into a public repository with a quantitative and qualitative research capacity.
Speaking to the British Academy, Professor Bell said: “PA-X has taught us that peace takes time, happens by degrees, and requires hope, persistence, and ongoing ingenuity and invention. We hope that PA-X is more than a research tool: we hope it is a resource for political imagination in seemingly intractable conflicts.”
Agreements on the database are sourced from existing collections; country-specific websites and literature; websites of other civic groups; official documentation of international organisations; and writing to or meeting with and requesting documentation from governments and actors who have signed peace agreements, or mediators involved in conflicts.
The impact
PeaceRep and the PA-X Peace Agreements Database has been cited in the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on women, peace and security for the last seven years, which informs the Security Council’s annual open debate on women, peace and security. In 2024, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) used data from PA-X Gender versions 7 and 8 in their new General Recommendation No. 40 on equal and inclusive representation of women in decision-making systems.
PA-X has also been hailed by the UK government, when the team showcased the database, key research findings from the Middle East and South Asia, and PeaceRep’s work on supporting women and girls.
Talking to PeaceRep during a visit, Lord Ahmad, the UK’s Former Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the United Nations said: “PeaceRep is producing world-leading research and playing an extraordinary role in delivering peace and security across the world. The UK Government is proud to be supporting the team based at the University of Edinburgh.”
The database and the team have won awards including the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Mary Somerville Medal, which recognised PeaceRep for its outstanding collaborative work, pivotal role in networking peace and conflict organisations, and digital innovation in peacebuilding research. PA-X has been recognised within the University and has been awarded the best dataset prize in the Centre for Data Culture and Society’s Digital Research Prizes in 2023.
What’s next?
The PA-X team is already working on the database’s tenth release, which will cover all new agreements signed in 2025. Alongside this update, the team is testing the use of large language models to integrate into the data production process, which would enable faster data collection and open up more space in the team’s schedule for data dissemination and new research on peace agreements and peace processes.
Explore the database
PA-X Analytics | Peace and Transition Process Data
Learn more about research at Edinburgh Law School