Peace Duration Analysis
Also known as: Duration of Peace Analysis, Post-Conflict Peace Survival Analysis, Peace Spell Analysis, Time-to-Conflict-Recurrence Analysis
Peace duration analysis applies survival (time-to-event) methods to study how long peace lasts after a conflict ends and what makes it endure or collapse. The unit is the post-conflict peace spell, observed from a settlement or cessation until conflict recurs or the observation is censored. Modeling the hazard that peace fails as a function of how the conflict ended and the structural conditions — as in Hartzell and Hoddie's (2003) study of power-sharing after civil war — reveals which arrangements, such as institutionalized power sharing or peacekeeping, lengthen the survival of peace.
Key highlights
- Correctly handles right-censored peace spells that have not yet ended.
- Models the timing of peace failure, not just whether it recurs.
- Reveals how the hazard of collapse changes over the life of a peace.
- Quantifies how settlement terms and conditions raise or lower the risk of renewed conflict.
Intuition
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
How it works
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
When to use it
Use peace duration analysis when the question is how long peace lasts and what prolongs or shortens it, and when your data include censored spells (peace that has not yet failed) — which they almost always do. It is the appropriate framework for evaluating settlement designs, peacekeeping, and power-sharing on the durability of peace. It is less suited when timing is irrelevant and a simple recurrence indicator suffices, when peace spells are too few for stable estimation, or when the proportional-hazards assumption is badly violated without remedy.
Strengths & limitations
- Correctly handles right-censored peace spells that have not yet ended.
- Models the timing of peace failure, not just whether it recurs.
- Reveals how the hazard of collapse changes over the life of a peace.
- Quantifies how settlement terms and conditions raise or lower the risk of renewed conflict.
- Defining the start of peace and the threshold for recurrence is consequential and contestable.
- The proportional-hazards assumption may fail, requiring stratification or time-varying effects.
- Few post-conflict cases limit power and the complexity of estimable models.
- Selection into how conflicts end (e.g., which wars get negotiated settlements) can confound effects.
Common pitfalls
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Applications
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Frequently asked
Why use survival analysis instead of a simple recurrence regression?
Because peace duration data are censored: at the end of observation, many peaces have not yet failed, so we know only that they have lasted at least so long. A simple logit of whether conflict recurred discards the timing information and mishandles censoring, biasing estimates. Survival models use both the durations and the censoring correctly, and they reveal how the risk of failure changes over time — for example, whether peace is most fragile in the first few years.
What does a hazard ratio mean in peace duration analysis?
It is the multiplicative effect of a covariate on the instantaneous risk that peace ends. A hazard ratio of 0.7 for, say, a power-sharing provision means that provision is associated with a 30% lower risk of peace failing at any given moment, implying longer expected peace. A ratio above one means higher risk and shorter peace. Hazard ratios come from exponentiating the model coefficients.
How does peace duration analysis relate to conflict recurrence analysis?
They are two sides of the same coin. Peace duration analysis models how long peace survives (time until conflict returns); conflict recurrence analysis focuses on whether and why conflict comes back, often using the same survival framework and data. In practice both study the post-conflict period with duration models; the framing differs — survival of peace versus failure into renewed conflict — and recurrence analysis often emphasizes repeated-events structure.
Sources
- 1.Hartzell, C., & Hoddie, M. (2003). Institutionalizing peace: Power sharing and post-civil war conflict management. American Journal of Political Science, 47(2), 318–332.
You have read it. What now?
Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Peace Duration Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/international-relations/peace-duration-analysis