Ending civil wars : The implementation of peace agreements

Between 1997 and 2001, Stanford University's Center of International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the International Peace Academy (IPA)conducted research to better understand the determinants of successful peace implementation in civil wars. The CISAC-IPA project on peace implementation focused on three primary issues: 1)An evaluation of international actors and their strategies of peace implementations. 2)An evaluation of various tasks of peace implementation (for example, demobilization, disarmament, refugee repatriation, human rights, and reconciliation) and their relationship to overall implementation success. 3)A search for low-cost, possible high-payoff opportunities for linking short-term implementation success to longer term peacebuilding. To Strengthen the policy relevant of the research, practitioners and policymakers participated in every stage of the project. The project began with two conferences, one held at Stanford in November 1997 and the other held at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund conference centre at Pcantico New York, in March 1998. We asked experts in various aspects of civil war termination (for example, medication, strategic coordination, transitional authority, human rights, elections, and refugee repatriation) to write short memos framing what they considered to be the key issues in ending civil wars.