Verifying the Implementation of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement: A New Methodology and Dataset

Strong and impartial verification mechanisms are indispensable for the success of civil war peace agreements. Verification establishes standards for evaluating compliance, prevents destabilization, and reduces the risk of renewed conflict. However, the lack of a shared understanding of implementation progress often leads to disagreements, requiring impartial and mutually accepted information to adjudicate disputes. Ambiguous language and diverse interpretations among stakeholders further complicate verification efforts. Unfortunately, robust and impartial verification has been rare in practice, and global verification efforts have lacked systematic, replicable methodologies, resulting in low external validity. This article introduces a novel, generalizable, and empirically rigorous verification approach developed through the 2016 Colombian Final Peace Agreement. We provide coding rules for different commitment types and implementation scores at various levels of aggregation. Our dataset includes monthly coding of 578 commitments. In a research application, we demonstrate a micro-level relationship between international accompaniment and the implementation levels of specific stipulations. This approach not only fulfills an official verification mandate but also sets a new benchmark for monitoring and evaluating peace agreements worldwide.