This paper introduces the dataset of Political Agreements in Internal Conflict (PAIC), produced at the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security of the University of Birmingham (UK) by the authors.
PAIC aims to provide a snapshot of the institutional provisions in political agreements aiming to manage intra-state conflict and instances of diffused violence between 1989 and 2008. It focuses on power-sharing, transitional justice, cultural institutions, territorial self-governance and third-party intervention. It is unique in its fine-grained coding of each provision, grounded in the qualitative expertise of the authors.
The paper presents the data collection procedures, the construction of the coding scheme, and the definition of the coding procedures. These all aimed to maximise inter-coder reliability and to exploit the individual subject expertise of each coder. The PAIC dataset encourages further theoretically grounded, empirically substantiated comparative engagement with the contents and contexts of contemporary war-to-peace transitions. This paper thus presents some of the possible applications of the dataset to current debates in the field of conflict management (such as on the relationship between power-sharing and criminal prosecution in the aftermath of violent conflicts).
