How Peace Agreements Address Displaced Persons: Key Trends and Challenges

Authors: Robert Wilson, Niamh Henry, Tim Epple

This report presents global trends on how peace agreements have substantively addressed displaced persons from 1990 to 2024. The analysis draws on a sub-collection of peace agreements from the PA-X Peace Agreement Database, bringing together and visualising examples of peace agreements that attempt to address displaced persons by adopting differing technical mechanisms or modalities.

Based on publicly available data from PA-X, the report examines trends of existing peace agreement practices. The report offers reflections on the challenges to effective or comprehensive safe return and reintegration of displaced persons, when set against the backdrop of fragmented conflict contexts and messy peace and transition processes. It highlights short country case studies and the contextual details that are important in relation to the peace agreement data, while also considering how the issue is addressed in local agreements. The report concludes with discussion and reflections, particularly in relation to what the observed shifts in contemporary mediation and peacemaking practices could mean for including and addressing displacement in peace processes.