Success Factors for Peace Treaties: A Review of Theory and Evidence

Wars impose tremendous costs on societies and the question of how to end them is of foremost importance. Several hundred books and scientific articles have been written on mediation and peace agreements. In this policy paper I shall provide a critical literature survey on the effects of peace agreements, with a special emphasis on mediation. One of the major conclusions of this review of existing work is that many findings in the literature need to be interpreted with much care, as they are merely correlations that could well be driven by selection bias or confounding factors, and that interpreting them as causal evidence would be dangerous. This survey does however not limit itself to discussing the potential fragility of various findings, but also highlights some results that are supported by a substantial body of suggestive evidence, focusing in particular on the sharing of political and military power, on security guarantees, on trust-building measures and on the role of economic opportunities.