What specific criteria does PRIO use to classify a conflict as terminated versus ongoing?
Executive summary
PRIO (through the UCDP/PRIO collaborative datasets) treats a conflict as “terminated” when researchers can assign a precise end_date to an episode of continuous armed violence and identify a concrete termination mechanism—victory, peace agreement, ceasefire (or other outcomes)—as recorded in the Conflict Termination dataset and the Armed Conflict codebooks [1] [2] [3]. Episodes are the analytic unit (years of continuous use of armed force), and recurrence is defined by a clear temporal gap of at least one calendar year between episodes [3] [4].
1. What PRIO/UCDP actually codes as an end: end_date and episodes
PRIO’s practice is to code an end_date for conflict episodes “as precisely as possible,” sometimes down to a single day when a discrete terminating event can be identified; those end_dates close an episode of continuous conflict activity as defined in the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict codebooks [1] [2] [5]. The underlying analytic unit is the episode—years of continuous armed force use—so termination is operationalized as the cessation of that episode rather than a subjective “peace” moment [3] [5].
2. The catalogue of termination mechanisms PRIO records
The Conflict Termination dataset explicitly records a broad range of termination outcomes—victory for a party, peace agreements, ceasefires and “other” outcomes—so classification as terminated depends on establishing which of these mechanisms best explains the observed cessation of violence in that episode [3] [6]. Where multiple arrangements occur, PRIO treats the most definitive arrangement (for example, a subsequent peace agreement that follows a ceasefire) as the cause of termination, per the ETH/PRIO ceasefire work that maps ceasefires onto UCDP/PRIO conflict records [7].
3. How PRIO treats ceasefires and “definitive” suspension of hostilities
PRIO (and allied ETH/PRIO projects) use a broad, operational definition of ceasefire to capture truces, armistices or cessations of hostilities, but they distinguish types by purpose, scope and whether the arrangement seeks definitive termination rather than a temporary pause; definitive ceasefires are rare but when present are often coded as part of or appended to a peace agreement and may count as the terminating cause [7] [8]. The Civil Conflict Ceasefire dataset specifically classifies ceasefires by identifiable characteristics and notes that if a peace agreement immediately follows a ceasefire, the peace agreement is recorded as the terminating event [7].
4. Temporal rules for declaring recurrence versus termination
PRIO’s Conflict Recurrence Database applies an explicit temporal rule for distinguishing termination versus recurrence: a conflict is treated as recurring when there is at least one calendar year gap between the last violent event in one episode and the first violent event in the next—meaning termination for the first episode is coded only when that gap exists or another termination mechanism is recorded [4]. This explicit temporal criterion is important because many conflicts produce multiple ceasefires and short lulls that the datasets do not count as termination unless they satisfy the episode/end_date logic [3] [9].
5. What the sources do not (fully) specify and why it matters
The available codebooks and associated papers emphasize coding precision, episode definitions and multiple termination outcomes, but the supplied excerpts do not lay out every operational threshold or decision rule (for example, any additional numeric thresholds beyond the episode concept or the complete decision hierarchy used in ambiguous cases) in the snippets provided, so full replication of every classificatory judgment requires consulting the full codebook and termination dataset documentation on the UCDP/PRIO download pages [10] [1] [3]. Researchers should also be aware that related projects (ETH/PRIO Ceasefire dataset, PRIO recurrence work) apply compatible but sometimes finer-grained typologies and purposes that can influence which arrangement is recorded as the decisive terminating mechanism [7] [4].