# Visualizing Peace Transitions: Interactive Visualizations to Support Innovation and Adaptive Management in Peace Processes

Tomas Vancisin, Jinrui Wang, Niamh Henry, Sarah Schöttler, Lucy Havens, Tobias Kauer, Sanja Badanjak, Christine Bell, Benjamin Bach

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Tomas Vancisin, Jinrui Wang, Niamh Henry, Sarah Schöttler, Lucy Havens, et al.. Visualizing Peace Transitions: Interactive Visualizations to Support Innovation and Adaptive Management in Peace Processes. VIS 2025 - IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics, Nov 2025, Vienna, Austria. 2025. [hal-05407000](https://hal.science/hal-05407000v1)

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Visualizing Peace Transitions: Interactive Visualizations to Support
Innovation and Adaptive Management in Peace Processes

Tomas Vancisin*

University of Edinburgh

Jinrui Wang

University of Edinburgh

Niamh Henry

University of Edinburgh

Sarah Schöttler

University of Edinburgh

Lucy Havens

University of Edinburgh

Tobias Kauer

University of Edinburgh

Sanja Badanjak

University of Edinburgh

Christine Bell

University of Edinburgh

Benjamin Bach

Inria Bordeaux

University of Edinburgh

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Examples of PeaceRep Visualizations.</figcaption></figure>

ABSTRACT

This poster presents nine visualization projects that were devel-
oped through an 8-year interdisciplinary collaboration between vi-
sualization and peace studies researchers to help practitioners and
policymakers in their complex workflows. Our work demonstrates
how different visualization purposes - analysis for domain experts,
tracking for decision-makers, and conveyance for broader audi-
ences - require distinct design considerations when handling the
subjective, incomplete, and disputed nature of peace agreement
data. The visualizations have proven effective in supporting real-
world peace mediation and policy analysis, demonstrating visual-
ization's potential for addressing critical humanitarian and societal
challenges. https://peacerep.org/peacetech-tools/

Index Terms: Visualization, PeaceTech, Peace.

# 1 INTRODUCTION

Data provides reliable evidence in armed conflict resolution, a field otherwise dominated by emotions and politics [1]. Visualization can play a pivotal role in analyzing, tracking, and conveying such evidence, particularly given the qualitative, incomplete, and disputed nature of peace data. However, existing peace and conflict visualizations typically use generic and/or static design approaches, rather than focusing on iterative, human-centered solutions developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration.

This poster presents nine interactive visualization projects from
an 8-year collaboration between visualization researchers and the
Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep) at
the University of Edinburgh¹. Built on the PA-X Peace Agree-
ments Database [3] - the largest collection of its kind, with over
2,000 formal peace agreements since 1990 - our visualizations en-
able analysis, tracking, and conveyance of peace process related
data for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the area.
Through human-centered design, these tools have proven effective
in supporting real-world peace mediation by revealing complexities
and patterns that are inaccessible using traditional approaches.

2 PROJECTS

Our nine visualization projects serve three core purposes with distinct design considerations:

ANALYSIS for domain experts emphasizes exploratory interac-
tion to reveal data complexity. The **Messy Timeline** [2]² shows the
back and forth trajectory of peace processes over time. The visu-
alization challenges assumptions about the linear progress of peace
negotiations and demonstrates that 'successful' processes follow di-
verse paths, providing reassurance that progress manifests differ-
ently across contexts. It has helped to emphasize that peace agree-
ments are not signed in isolation and are not sufficient on their own
to resolve conflict - they are always part of a wider unique process
and there is not a single 'successful' trajectory. The **Matrix**³ illus-
trates the coding structure of the concepts/themes found in peace
agreement documents. This can allow users to identify patterns

* tomas.vancisin@ed.ac.uk, jinrui.wang@ed.ac.uk, niamh.henry@ed.ac.uk, sarah.schoettler@ed.ac.uk, lucy.havens@ed.ac.uk, tobias.kauer@ed.ac.uk, sanja.badanjak@ed.ac.uk, christine.bell@ed.ac.uk, bbach@ed.ac.uk

¹https://peacerep.org/

²https://www.peaceagreements.org/visualizations/
messy-peace-processes/

³https://www.peaceagreements.org/visualizations/
data-overview-visualization/
in when and where specific issues are addressed throughout peace processes, track persistent issues over time, and understand the evolution of issues across negotiations.

**PaxVis** [5]<fnref n="4" /> reveals geographic patterns in peace agreements and shows issues addressed (e.g., power-sharing, human rights frameworks) as colored flower petals. This highly exploratory tool enables users to identify key conflict issues in specific areas and processes, and how issues addressed in processes may shift over time.

**TRACKING**—Tracking actor involvement and process outcomes in conflict resolution is an important task for practitioners and policymakers. They need to be able to compare temporal patterns across multiple dimensions, identify network relationships between signatories, and correlate spatial-temporal events. Traditional text-based analysis of reports makes these multi-dimensional analytical tasks difficult at scale, particularly for these users as they are often under strict time constraints. To address this, the following visualizations provide quick access to data that can be filtered, linked, and compared, allowing to track progress across a variety of datasets and indicators, which can then support policy analysis and practitioner decision-making. The **Actors across Processes** tool<fnref n="5" /> uses coordinated views, combining a beeswarm timeline and multiple network representations. Users can select actors and peace processes to reveal signing patterns over time, which enables the identification of potential mediation entry points based on historical collaboration patterns. The **Ukraine Conflict Map**<fnref n="6" /> employs layered geographic visualization with temporal filtering and multi-source data integration. Users can toggle between conflict event layers and filter by time/event type. The visualization triangulates various conflict and humanitarian datasets on a single canvas, revealing data gaps and complementary coverage that individual sources cannot provide. The **PA-X Tracker**<fnref n="7" /> uses coordinated dashboard views that contain network diagrams, timelines, and indicator trend charts that contextualize peace agreements within broader institutional and conflict events. Users can track levels of conflict intensity before and after an agreement has been signed, examine how political/security/economic/humanitarian indicators change over time in the context of the peace process, and compare processes in different contexts historically and geographically. PA-X Tracker supports adaptive management, comparative analysis, and on-boarding of practitioners who can quickly familiarize themselves with these processes.

**CONVEYANCE**—Due to the complex nature of peace and conflict resolution that is understandably present in the PA-X dataset, some of our visualizations use ‘scrolly-telling’ techniques in order to convey these complexities to the user gradually, through the combination of explanatory text, images, and visual data representations. This approach allows us to communicate expert analyses from researchers on the team in a digestible manner for a variety of users. The **Yemen Timeline**<fnref n="8" /> provides an overview of the Yemeni conflict evolution. The visualization shows a timeline of peace and transition documents, through which the user can scroll and contextualize these agreements within other relevant political/conflict events in Yemen, to highlight that these agreements are not signed in isolation. In the **PA-X Gender**<fnref n="9" /> visualization, our aim was to compare peace agreements that contain references to women, girls, gender, and/or sexual violence with agreements that do not address these issues. In particular, we wanted to emphasize that out of 2,055 peace agreements in PA-X, only 464 (23%) contain such references

despite being a key conflict-related issue. Lastly, the **Russia-China as Third-Party Actors**<fnref n="10" /> visualization allows the user to scroll through expert analyses of Russia and China as third party signatories to peace agreements, and explore trends in these two actors’ activities over time.

## 3 DISCUSSION

Our work demonstrates how human-centered design can address unique challenges in peace visualization, revealing insights for the visualization community alongside future research directions.

**Design Insights for Visualization**—Working with peace data reveals distinct requirements: handling disputed and subjective information, serving diverse stakeholders with conflicting needs, and balancing analytical depth with accessible communication. Our analysis/tracking/conveyance taxonomy provides a framework for similar applications where single-purpose tools are insufficient.

**Ethical Considerations**—Visualizing conflict data raises ethical issues that are often overlooked in visualization research. We follow the Do No Harm principle [4], considering unintended consequences of representing lived experiences as data. Additionally, Global North/South power dynamics in data collection and the need for multilingual accessibility present ongoing challenges. Visualizations have a tendency to present data as the ground truth, with little transparency in data pipeline decisions and the underlying human contributions [6]. To address this, we are developing a provenance visualization that explicitly reveals the gap between real-life events and the data driving our outputs, suggesting a model for trust and transparency in the data and subsequent tools that use it.

**Future Directions**—Visualization atlases [7] offer potential for consolidating individual projects into coherent platforms that serve diverse audiences. However, this requires balancing global perspectives with context-sensitive analysis - a key challenge for humanitarian visualization platforms. Future work should therefore interrogate how a more flexible structure for peace transition atlases might support meaningful integration while balancing flexibility and depth.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the entire Edinburgh Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep) team, particularly those working on PA-X<fnref n="11" />, Roy Gardner, and UoE Information Services (in particular John Allison) for their role in the project. This research is supported by PeaceRep, funded by UK International Development from the UK government. However, the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the UK government's official policies. Any use of this work should acknowledge the authors and PeaceRep.

## REFERENCES

[1] C. Bell. *PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars*. Springer Nature, 2024. 1

[2] C. Bell, B. Bach, and T. Kauer. Ways of seeing: Peace process data-viz as a research practice. *Convergence*, 2022. 1

[3] C. Bell and S. Badanjak. Introducing pa-x: A new peace agreement database and dataset. *Journal of Peace Research*, 2019. 1

[4] CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. Do No Harm: A Brief Introduction from CDA. Online; Available from: https://www.cdacollaborative.org/, 2018. 2

[5] L. Havens, M. Bao, L. Pschetz, B. Bach, and C. Bell. Paxvis: visualizing peace agreements. In *CHI EA '19*, 2019. 2

[6] T. Vancisin, M. M. Orr, L. Clarke, and U. Hinrichs. Provenance visualization as an entry point to the history and curation of information collections. *Journal of Visualization and Interaction*, 2025. 2

[7] J. Wang, X. Shu, B. Bach, and U. Hinrichs. Visualization atlases: Explaining and exploring complex topics through data, visualization, and narration. *IEEE TVCG*, 2024. 2

<footnote n="4">⁴https://www.peaceagreements.org/visualizations/agreements-process-map/</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵https://www.peaceagreements.org/visualizations/actor-networks/</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶https://www.peaceagreements.org/tracker/ukraine/map/</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷https://www.peaceagreements.org/tracker/</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸https://peacerep.github.io/yemen-timeline</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹https://tvancisin.github.io/pax gender</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰https://www.peaceagreements.org/visualizations/third-party-scroll/</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹https://peacerep.org/about/people/</footnote>