Keywords

1.1 PeaceTech in Action

1.1.1 Seán

Seán sits in his air-conditioned office in the capital city of a very hot country with a ‘peace process’. He works for the United Nations (UN). His job involves deciding how to spend funds pooled by countries who cooperate to support the peace process. The money is used to support local peacebuilding projects in-country. There is one problem. There is not much of a peace process in evidence. There was a peace agreement many years ago. Then a revised one when the first did not work. Then more revisions. Each agreement tried to make the preceding ones work—amending them, adding new ‘implementation matrixes’ and new timelines. Despite these efforts, the ‘peace process’ barely exists.

Seán works and lives in the country. Except for the one week in six that he gets off which he uses to go home or recuperate in tourist spots in neighbouring countries. As an ‘international’ he works in a building in a ‘compound’—a gated community where lots of the diplomatic embassies and international offices are behind the same perimeter fence. Seán’s credentials as an international mean he cannot leave the compound easily: it is considered too unsafe. He does not just work in the compound but lives there too—in a different building in a more residential section. His world exists between these two buildings, and in the cafes and coffee shops around them. Except for a few days every two months, when the team visits projects ‘out there’ in the countryside. His home life is through his screen. He does not like that things are the way they are.

Seán’s job involves monitoring and reporting on how all the funded projects are going, so he has to put together a lot of project reports, and data relating to the country. He spends huge amounts of time gathering data, and cutting and pasting it into his reports. It is much more boring than what his family thinks he does. He tries to use this information to present to the donors how their money is spent, and what it is achieving. It takes forever, so he and his colleagues are working on an automated system to try to capture the data, and decrease the manual work.

1.1.2 Paul

Sitting in Geneva, Paul works on this same country, and sort of for the UN. He works to deliver food aid to places where people are going hungry. Many of those places are in countries experiencing armed conflict. Today he gathers international experts online. The organization he works for has just won a major award for peace. In fact, this organization does not ‘do peace’: it does food aid. Now his boss has questioned, if people think that food and peace are connected and have given us a prize for peace, should the organization try to measure the ‘peace impacts’ of its food aid? Sometimes they have been aware that programmes such as enabling people to get cattle are co-opted by armed groups for income, or trigger cattle rustling between warring communities.

When does food aid build peace and when might it have a negative peace impact? His boss has asked Paul to help to design a dashboard to help measure peace impacts, or warn of war impacts. This dashboard could then help the organization to think more systematically about how their proposed delivery of food aid might affect the conflict or help encourage peace.

When we say that Paul ‘sort of’ works for the UN, what does that mean? He works for an agency within the United Nations that operates almost as an independent organization within the UN’s broad umbrella (see Foley, 2023, p. 4). While in some deep sense Seán and Paul work for the same organization, in another sense they do not. Their different sub-organizations will not ask them to work together, and in a sense do not trust each other. Trust cannot exist within departments, even less so across them, as much of the data is sensitive to the particular job each agency does. Sometimes the information is sensitive because it could be helpful to ‘war tech’. Information on networks of civic groups, for example, can be used to target activists. Sometimes, however, there is no trust between agencies for much duller bureaucratic reasons. It is sensitive that the organization views things a certain way. Views of particular armed groups, or state armies, for example, need to be discussed within organizations, but can cause a diplomatic incident if they are seen as the formal or even informal position of the organization.

Seán and Paul may never learn of each other, and their projects will be locked down to those ‘who need to know’ within their own agency or department. If they do meet in ‘shows and tells’, they will never be asked to collaborate, and will not be allowed access the other’s finished data system. Could it not be a different way, they wonder?

1.1.3 Atem

Out beyond the capital city, Atem who is from the country works as part of a Churches project trying to support local agreements to end conflict arising from cattle theft and kidnapping. He gets money from Seán’s fund. The conflict Atem is engaged with is between local communities and armed groups. But it has curious links to the ‘national conflict’. For example, there is overlap between local organizations and the main armed groups that operate country-wide. Conflict in his area can trigger conflict in other places, and vice versa. Atem’s childhood friend Samuel—also with activist commitments—is doing a PhD on local agreements and peacebuilding initiatives ‘from the bottom up’ at a University in Norway. Samuel is studying there on a scholarship targeted at people from his country. But he spends most of the time ‘in the field’, or in other words ‘back at home’. Atem and Samuel figure that—if they created a simple App, they could support information sharing between social activists and create a crowd-sourced way to monitor the implementation of agreements and perhaps even help support new ones being reached.

Everyone ‘knows’ when kidnappings or killing of cattle that signifies an agreement’s breakdown is going to happen. If they had a safe and secure and fast way to communicate with each other, perhaps attacks could be prevented, by simply moving people and animals out of harm’s way. Could Atem and Samuel provide this? A ‘data-driven initiative’ in Samuel’s Norwegian university offers funding, and the Informatics Department offers to help. Samuel and eager young computing academics design and deliver a prototype App for communication. Atem works with Samuel to develop the App and trial it in the field. It proves quite simple and effective, where there is connectivity, or at least for some reason agreement violations subside. The difficulty is that when the App does not work quite right or needs improved, the Norwegian Informatics Department staff cannot always spare the time and resources to develop it.

1.1.4 Aker

Aker is Atem’s sister. She listens to her brother talk, and wonders if a similar App could help with her work. She works in an organization supporting victims of sexual violence. Sexual violence existed before the conflict, during it as part of armed violence, and has continued even in moments when peace has been celebrated. Could they have a similar App to assist in prevention and reporting of sexual violence? She wonders about whether this would really work for the issues and people she serves. Have Atem and Samuel thought about whether women will be able to participate in their initiatives? Most of the people with information about imminent attacks will be women: they hear and swap information from across communities as they go to collect fire wood to cook, or to get water. This is also often when attacks against women occur as they stray farther from safe areas when climate change makes both water and wood scarce. But women often don’t own phones, and when technically they do, they often don’t control when they are used, or get to take them outside the home.

Is sexual violence not also something that should be reported on and taken seriously as violence ‘to do’ with the conflict? What is peace, she wonders, if resolving conflict is does not resolve this violence? Peace processes and wars come and go, and the reasons given for violence against women change, but their experience of violence does not.

1.1.5 Nick

Nick is sitting in an office in an Ivy League University in North America. He and his team are looking down on the same country from above. They have developed a capacity to use open-source satellite technology and images to monitor agricultural development. They have worked collaboratively across social science and geospatial technology and can now use the many publicly available satellite images to try to understand drought and where crops are doing well and where they are failing. This work sheds light on how the lives of people are affected by climate change and helps inform development organizations to support local communities to be ‘resilient’. Nick’s team also monitors what happens when crop failure becomes a driver of displacement as people move in search of food. Until recently Nick’s research would not have existed, but has been made possible because publicly accessible geospatial imagery is now free or very cheap.

Today, as they monitor crops they notice something strange. In the area they are zoning in on, all the roofs have disappeared from the houses. This triggers alarm: people take the roofs off houses when they are moving. The houses contain metal that has a value. But the crops are still in the ground, so why are people on the move? Nick and his colleagues get other satellite imagery, and look more closely down the road. They see villages burning just a short distance away. The villagers seem to know that an armed group is moving through with violence, and are fleeing. Nick and his team triangulate their satellite data with local evidence by WhatsApp-ing some contacts in the area—yes, this is what is happening. There are other villages further down the road who do not seem to know they are in the pathway of a marauding armed group. Nick and his team agonise—there is a prospect of huge violence and civilian death, if villagers down the road do not move. The team faces a dilemma. Will they go public with what they know and warn villages down the road? Or is this something they should not interfere in? After all, they were only trying to look at crops. Nick makes a decision and goes public, warning people locally of what is coming.

Something he did not expect happens. Another armed group further down the road mounts an ambush, and kills many of the first armed group. In the North American University, Nick and his team feel uneasy. This is not what they meant to happen. But was it their fault? What do they think should have happened? Are they playing God?

1.2 Introducing PeaceTech

These PeaceTech stories are all drawn from real life, amended a little: the country and their coincidence in it are mostly fictional, as are some of the details. The key elements, however, are drawn from practices I have encountered across a number of violent conflicts going on in the world, and often do all co-exist in some form within a single country. The stories illustrate real-world efforts concerning the business of peace, the business of development, and the business of war, all of which rely on digital technology to achieve their goals. As you go through this book, you may recognise some real-life examples that resemble those above, and we will see yet other examples of digital innovation and peace-focused applications.

These are stories of what we are calling ‘PeaceTech’—that is—innovation in the use of digital technologies to support peacebuilding. This book maps out ‘PeaceTech’ as an emerging set of peacebuilding activities that connect to a wider digital revolution that affects all aspects of all our lives. The book assesses how PeaceTech aims to end violent conflict in deeply divided societies.

PeaceTech World, however, operates alongside ‘WarTech World’, where the same technologies also carry significant risk for escalating conflict, targeting civilians, or undermining the political institutions that offer an alternative to violence. Can tech really be used for good and to end conflict? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits? Or are PeaceTech and WarTech inevitably part of the same picture—each attempting to outwit the other, in a mutually building dynamic?

1.3 About This Book

This book aims to set out PeaceTech as used to support peace and transition processes, and introduce some of its potential and some of its challenges. I hope the book will support those who aspire to ‘do PeaceTech’ in some form or other. I draw on my own experience in incubating PeaceTech projects as part of a dynamic research group in PeaceRep, www.peacerep.org which has innovated to produce what I term in Chap. 11—‘Peace Analytics’. Through this work I have been part of what is being termed the ‘PeaceTech Ecosystem’ that I talk about in Chap. 6—that is, a set of practitioners, researchers, funders, tech entrepreneurs, and people living in conflict, that are seeking to support use of technology in peacebuilding, and who have a sense of being in a network with each other.

I relate the book to a wider context of digital transformation, to understand how PeaceTech sits as part of this broader ‘fourth industrial revolution’ moment. Digital transformation technologies are often central to business development discussions because they re-shape how businesses make money. Business consideration of digital transformation understands new technologies to have complicated ‘disruptive’ effects on normal ways of doing business, that have a wider set of consequences for which business becomes dominant in an area, which one thrives, and which one fails. I am interested to explore when and how use of technology shapes the peacebuilding field. Peacebuilding is not a set of market transactions, but an attempt to engage in a complex political practice. So what happens when new technologies are used?

I also try to focus on PeaceTech from a ‘how to do it’ point of view, rather than just analysing it. There are many good reports trying to map out PeaceTech, but few that engage with the practical struggles involved in doing PeaceTech and how these shape what emerges. Yet, academics are beginning to consider the ‘politics’ of PeaceTech, as what they call a ‘socio-technical’ system that produces a ‘socio-material’ reality. This means: that the way of doing something through a particular technology, can shape the ends of what is produced, to produce perhaps something different from what was intended (see e.g., Hirblinger et al., 2022). In our work, we have experienced a lot of trial and error, that has given us both confidence and doubts about what PeaceTech can and should do. The book is partly an attempt to share our learning and deliberations.

The book is written with the flavour of a ‘business practice / self-help’ book for would-be PeaceTech enthusiasts who want to engage. Apologies if you are a person for whom that style or project grates. I hope I also reflect the self-critical reflection that I think should be carried alongside any PeaceTech practice, and help shape its ambition and design. I add questions at the end of each chapter to support reflection.

I also want the book to join up four groups of people who might be interested to know more.

The first group are people involved with and engaged in peacebuilding as researchers, students or practitioners, or even just because they live in a conflict, who are curious to understand digital innovation in their field better. They might be curious about the potential of a digital innovation to address a very specific problem; or they may need to understand tech jargon for their job; or are just the sort of people who are attracted to new ways of working.

The second group are those from a business background who are interested in digital innovation and how it works more generally. These people may find something interesting about when and how digital innovation is impacting on the unfamiliar world of brokering peace, and learn more about how business interests are increasingly involved.

The third group, are those who are from a more technical digital background such as data engineers, software developers, who perhaps seek more meaning and value in their life and work, and want to understand what their type of work could bring to something that has a wider global significance such as peacebuilding.

Finally, I want the book to influence the development of those already involved in building the PeaceTech world—hence my concluding ‘Futuring Peace—Manifesto’. As I will sketch out in Chap. 6, an already-present ecosystem of humanitarian, development, peace and conflict, human rights and business actors are engaged in PeaceTech. In the last years, governments in Norway, Finland, and Switzerland have articulated ambitions to drive PeaceTech in some sense. PeaceTech innovation is at the heart of the UN’s attempts to transform its work in a digital transformation strategy. Yet while offering new potential, all this activity and rapid proliferation risks spinning into duplication, competition and incoherent development. Moreover, PeaceTech innovation can have complicated consequences, as Nick’s story indicates. I therefore use the book’s conclusion to offer thoughts as to how PeaceTech should proceed.

1.4 Book Structure

The structure of the book is as follows.

Part I: What Is PeaceTech? sketches the basic questions regarding what PeaceTech is, where it sits with reference to the broader ‘digital transformation moment’. I set out the main digital technologies shaping the field.

Part II: Doing PeaceTech describes who is involved in PeaceTech and some of their incentives. I illustrate the use of the main PeaceTech technologies through what I suggest are the four main pockets of activity: Ad Hoc peacebuilding support (PeaceTech as ‘hack’); Conflict Early Warning Systems; Geographic Information Systems, and remote-sensing including satellite data; and data-driven support to peace processes that I term—Peace Analytics.

Part III: PeaceTech Challenges draws together the ‘how to’ elements of early chapters to set out particular key challenges in thinking about, designing and using PeaceTech applications. I also point to the new legal and ethical dilemmas and the ways our existing frameworks do not address them, and point to new emerging frameworks. In conclusion, I assess the future directions of PeaceTech and contribute a short ‘manifesto’ to shape it if it is to do good rather than harm.

Throughout I draw on the PeaceTech work that I and the team I am part of have engaged in and learnt from.

Questions

  1. 1.

    What is your reaction to the stories?

  2. 2.

    What examples of PeaceTech can you think of?

  3. 3.

    Is PeaceTech a good term, or can you think of other terms to use for digital technology and peacebuilding?