From non-settlement to political settlement: The types of urban conflict agreement

This article examines urban conflict agreements, which are agreements between ordering actors addressing specifically urban areas affected by armed conflict. Drawing on and contributing to the literature on the urbanisation of conflict, it makes two contributions, first offering a new conceptualisation of urban conflict agreements, and second offering a theorisation of them through developing a typology. The article argues that urban conflict agreements which incorporate a greater number of participants in their processes and contain more comprehensive governance provisions are expected to demonstrate greater durability in their order-making processes than those agreements which do not incorporate all relevant actors in their processes, or which do not include comprehensive governance provisions. The article builds on a deductive and inductive methodology to identify four types of urban conflict agreements – non-settlements, political unsettlements, partial settlements and political settlements – and offers illustrative cases to indicate their unique characteristics.