Conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East persist in part because once-promising peace deals have unravelled. The war in Ukraine has endured despite successive Minsk agreements, just as the Israeli-Palestinian strife persisted even after the Oslo Accords. Renewed tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions followed the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran-US nuclear deal). Yet not all treaties founder: the Good Friday Agreement has largely silenced decades of violence in Northern Ireland, and the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty
Peace accords and conflict mortality
A peace agreement is a legally binding accord between former adversaries that sets out ceasefire terms, disarmament procedures and frameworks for political power-sharing, human rights guarantees or regional security cooperation. An analysis of the PA-X Peace Agreement Database maintained by the University of Edinburgh shows that from 1990 to 2024, the vast majority—around three-quarters—address intra-state conflicts, reflecting that most contemporary wars pit governments against non-state armed groups driven by ethnic, ideological or resource disputes. In the post-Cold War surge, accords ranged from short-term bilateral ceasefires in the Balkans to comprehensive multi-party power-sharing deals across Africa’s civil wars, alongside regional confidence-building treaties. As the annual tally of new agreements climbed from about 40 in the late 1980s to over 90 by 1993–94, battle-related deaths fell from roughly 80,000 to a post-Cold War low of 12,000 by 2005—except for the brief rise in 1999–2000 driven by overlapping major wars such as the Second Congo War, the Eritrean–Ethiopian border conflict, NATO’s Kosovo intervention and Russia’s Second Chechen War. Since then, signings have slowed to fewer than 50 per year even as fatalities have rebounded towards 280,000—driven by renewed insurgencies in the Middle East and relapses in long-running conflicts. This pattern underscores both the immediate human dividend of robust peace accords and the grave consequences when diplomatic momentum stalls.
The human cost of failed pacts
As the primary intent of peace agreements is to curb conflict between two parties, HT investigated the success or failure of peace agreements by checking whether the conflicts they were addressing recorded fatalities in the following year by cross-linking PA-X Peace Agreement Database with Battle-related deaths database. Analysing death counts for the year following signature shows that since 1990, an estimated 2,59,574 fatalities have been cumulatively recorded in conflicts a year after signing peace agreements. Accords that are part of peace processes which have stalled at the ceasefire or pre-negotiation stages generally register the highest death tolls as a result of their failure in curbing violence. The failure of the 2023 Jeddah Talks in facilitating any meaningful ceasefire or peace agreement between Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces is a good example of this. UCPD estimates around 4,684 deaths from this conflict in 2024, however, some researchers estimate that as many as 61,000 people died in Khartoum state alone between April 2023 and June 2024. Similarly, the early-2025 ceasefire declarations between Israel and Hamas and the November 2024 truce with Hezbollah all proved ineffectual: the Gaza ceasefires have repeatedly unravelled after only brief pauses, and sporadic clashes along the Lebanon border have continued unabated.
This just shows the inherently messy nature of peace processes
Peace processes seldom advance in a straight line. Data from the PA-X Peace Agreement Database shows that out of 175 processes analysed, only 39% reached the implementation phase. Several implementation-phase pacts required additional renewals before substantive provisions could resume. For example, Darfur’s 2006 ceasefire was signed and renewed twice and it still collapsed into fresh fighting. Yemen’s 2015 framework deal similarly reverted to ceasefire and renewal talks amid renewed hostilities. These reversals illustrate how, without sustained enforcement, inclusive buy-in and trust-building, even high-level pacts can unmake earlier gains, prolonging negotiations and perpetuating violence. For future peacemakers, success will depend on treating agreements not as endpoints but as the opening steps in a marathon of reconciliation, one diligent action at a time.
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