Keywords

1 War and Peace

Then… In 1502 Leonardo Da Vinci was working as a military engineer, a job he took aged 30 and was to hold for 17 years. While we remember him as an artist-scientist, he considered himself skilled in the art of war and contributed multiple technical drawings of weapons. In the middle of a period of Italian Wars between 1499 and 1504, evolving around city-states, Da Vinci found himself in the Italian town of Imola with his boss at that time—Cesare Borgia a nobleman, cardinal and, after retirement, a soldier for hire. Borgia had ‘taken’ Imola in a war campaign of 1499 along with the city of Forlí.

While in Imola, Da Vinci was tasked with helping Borgia learn more about the town’s layout. He created his ‘Plan of Imola’—a kind of bird’s-eye map of the town, using cutting-edge of surveying techniques, and artistic imagination (all maps are ‘representations’). It looks remarkably like a satellite photo, with a 3D effect, and compared with early aerial photos, is highly accurate. The map was significant, as it moved cartography forwards, and led to maps being viewed not just imaginative art, but as information. The plan of Imola can be viewed online, along with the many other birds eye view maps he was to go onto create, both because he was asked to and because he had ingenious engineering projects he wanted to explore. Videos also help explain the Imola Plan’s genesis. Da Vinci’s plan was an early example of ‘WarTech’.

Now… Today, Planet Labs offer Dove ‘satellites for peace’. Their name is interesting, as their website explains:

In the aerospace industry, satellites are typically referred to as “birds”. From the ground, it looks like they are flying across the sky as they travel along their orbits. There’s also a tendency in the aerospace industry to think of these satellites as birds of prey; satellite missions like FalconSat and Kestrel Eye bring to mind a circling hunter ready to swoop down and strike. Not so fun.

Dove’s mission is,

to utilize space to help life on Earth, and that attitude permeates everything we do. These are peace-bringing satellites, enabling commercial, humanitarian, and environmental applications at a scale that has never been attempted before. We call our satellites “Doves” so that the message is loud and clear. Do good, foster peace, and take better care of our planet. We’re focusing on applications such as deforestation monitoring, disaster response, improvements in agriculture, the list goes on. (Emphasis in original)

This is a PeaceTech mission in the broadest sense, overlapping with development tech, humanitarian-tech and climatetech. Planet Labs’ ‘unique selling point’ is that they launch millions of tiny satellites in groups they call ‘flocks’ into space. When I say tiny, the satellites measure around 10 x 10 by 30 centimetres—not much more than two volumes of the print version of this book put together. I first encountered this company in the PeaceTech world, because Alex Lee, has created Vigil Monitor Ltd, which uses these satellites to address conflict atrocities (a form of ‘early warning’) has worked for a sister research project to ours, XCEPT, that focuses on cross-border conflict.

2 New Capacities

Images such as Da Vinci produced are now produced by satellite. Dove satellites indicate the ways in which satellite technology that was once hugely expensive and the preserve of militaries, governments and big business, is increasingly available to ordinary users (see further Card et al., 2015). A wide variety of open source platforms for earth data, and an active community of innovators who collaborate on its use for research purposes, now enable PeaceTech satellite use. Strata, for example, who we met last chapter, have built their platform using Google Earth images that are open source. The Strata partnership that includes a small dynamic Edinburgh-based company called Earth Bloxs provides a no-code way for educationalists and others to customise google spatial technology and build it into their interfaces. Incidentally, this is modularization in practice. Earth Blox’ business model is one of engineering-as-assembling: it helps people to add satellite imagery to their practice as a module, by reducing the level of expertise needed to ‘bolt it on’.

3 Embracing Failure: To Boldly Go

At the end of the last chapter, we explored Chandler’s view of ‘hactivism’, as a marriage of experimental digital approaches to development tasks, and ‘embracing failure’ as regards larger-scale structural development interventions. Interestingly, Planet Labs came up with the idea for Dove satellites by an embracing failure approach to experimental design.

Satellites are normally fairly large and cost a lot of send up into space, and therefore developing and launching them is a high-risk venture financially. Planet Labs founders asked themselves—what if we sent up hundreds of tiny satellites? Then the failure of some would not affect the success of the overall coverage of the network as a whole. The company model is therefore to launch dozens of simple satellites into low orbit, in the knowledge that a percentage of failure can be weathered, with the network remains intact.

This ‘low tech’ approach to satellite aims to ‘disrupt’ traditional satellite provision, by providing an amended technology at a different scale of cost. As with other PeaceTech companies, Planet Labs has yet to make a profit, although its growth continues (see Planet Lab News). In a quirky aside, some of the Dove satellites are adorned with Star Trek artwork, in a partnership with the Roddenberry Foundation (of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry).

4 Geographical Information Systems, Geocoding, and Remote-Sensing

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), geocode and remote-Sensing, are a second key digital innovation that offers systematic-scale transformation of both conflict and peace efforts. Satellites are one form of ‘remote-sensing’ (remember the fitness watch GPS?), and the images they produce comprises geo-spatial data, that can be part of a ‘Geographic Information System’ or GIS.

A Geographical Information System is “a computer system that analyses and displays geographically referenced information. It uses data that is attached to a unique location.” United States Geological Survey.

Data to do with place can be recorded as geocoded points or areas, so that they can be located with reference to each other, for example, on a map. Geocoding is assigning geographic coordinates to location data, and is not the same as mapping. A map is one of a number of visualizations of spatial data, albeit a common one. Geocoding can also combe data using AI. Google maps, for example, shows all addresses using both a map and a ‘street view’ obtained by photographing streets and locations. Its street view is produced not by satellite but by ‘google street cars’ and sometimes walkers with backpacks (!), that have special mobile cameras on the roofs and packs, that take 360 degree images. AI then helps overlay the photographs on top of each other, and blurs out car licence plate numbers and faces to create the street view image (on terminology see further, Farquhar, 2023). Although, as I view my house and car, I wonder when we consented?

As our opening story about Leonardo Da Vinci illustrated, the connection between war and geo-spatial data is strong and historical. Contemporary conflict event-data is all geocode. We have already seen multiple uses of GIS in Early Warning Systems that often use maps to analyse where conflict is and point to conflict patterns. Is there a further capacity for GIS to support peace and transition processes, beyond alerting to conflict-renewal?

5 Space, Conflict and Peace

Let us digress a little. Conflict happens in real places. It seldom sprawls out evenly across countries and communities, but centres on areas that have people or important infrastructures or both. Like many forms of violence, wars map onto other social realities. They take place more in particular places: in borderland spaces between different communities; in poorer parts of the country; in areas in which minorities are present. These places reflect conditions of ‘structural violence’, that also have a spatial dimension. The Turing Institute initiative described last chapter, revolves around the idea of a link between war and ‘big roads’.

The spaces of actual conflict sit alongside a more conceptual less ‘plotable’ space. For example, I lived in North Belfast in an area that was majority Nationalist or Catholic on half mile triangle of three roads that had seen over 25% of all the killings during the conflict. Kids played on the streets and did not leave their area because of an invisible ‘sectarian geography’ that meant they felt at risk if they entered a Protestant neighbourhood just a block away. Anderson has evocatively called identity groupings as ‘imagined communities’ because they involve communities of the mind, where differences between people are often created as much as real (Anderson, 1983). These imagined communities inhabit imagined spaces that create a physical geography that those who live in them are acutely aware of and must navigate.

Researchers, including ourselves, have argued that space requires more consideration in peace and conflict research. The ideas are useful for understanding the relevance to peace processes, pointing to the following ways in which ‘space matters’ to both war and attempts to produce civicness (Björkdahl & Buckley-Zistel, 2022).

People are involved in ‘spatial practices’ through which ‘spaces are created, transformed, or dissolved in relation to peace and conflict’. In Colombia, for example, persistently across the conflict communities have tried to create ‘zones of peace’. These are specific ‘territories in which local communities have attempted to persuade armed actors to abide by certain rules to mitigate the effects of the armed conflict locally’ (Idler et al., 2015, p. 1).

Spatial dynamics constitute particular spaces as significant. Peace processes and agreements often reconstitute what comprises ‘the nation state’, new international borders, new administrative districts, or federal regions, of even ‘entities’ (Bosnia Herzegovina!), with new interfaces and technologies. Conceptually, the disruption of peacebuilding sees the global, the local, the national and the transnational all blur; and space such as North-South, centre-periphery, also become important.

Stopping armed conflict involves combining logistics with maps. Ceasefires, for example, involve lines of control, buffer zones between armies, no-fly zones, areas from which withdrawal must happen. In Syria and Yemen, as already noted, often ‘micro-confliction’ local agreements attempt to create peace between communities, or to let humanitarian access through, navigating and creating realities such as check-points, that people must pass through. They can set up new ways of managing relationships in particular areas—check-points, airports, or borders.

While a space and peace research agenda is largely a future one, GIS, geocoding and visualizing that data is well developed with particular reference to conflict-events, and provides a basis for pursuing it using digital methods.

6 Geocoding

6.1 Conflict Data

Conflict patters and datasets are tracked spatially, and geocoding plays an important role in literally ‘mapping’ conflict patterns. ACLED and UCDP conflict event data is all geo-located in ways that mean it can be connected across datasets—we explore how we have connected this to peace agreements in the next Chap. 11.

However, while conflict events such as killing happen in actual point locations, conflict as a system is perhaps better thought of in terms of ‘zones’—that is geographic areas. This involves a different type of mapping. In Ukraine, for example, multiple attempts have tried to ‘map’ in an ongoing way, zones of control as battle fronts advance and retract (see, PA-X Tracker Ukraine Interactive Map, for an example).

6.2 Reporting

Conflict and peace data, also can involve geo-located news, Twitter/X and other social media, or other forms of crowd-sourced reporting. Google has a source called GDELT, that geo-locates news stories—both the source of the story, and the location reported on, with coding relating to conflict and peace events, and sentiment (whether positive or negative) (see further, Gardner & Bell, 2022). Other forms of social media, and crowd-sourcing have techniques of geolocation although there are also ways of evading it.

6.3 Geocoding Spatial Imagery

Satellites and other remote-sensors geocode data, and are important to early warning mechanisms and ‘post-hoc accountability’ mechanisms, as we have seen. With the increase of climate change and increased concern to be able to track its conflict-impacts, satellite imagery can often map both, as our story of Nick at the start of the book, and Strata earlier illustrated.

However, satellites are not the only things that capture images from ‘space’. Drones can also be involved, or even tethered balloons with arrays of cameras. We tend to think of these as WarTech, but they can be attached to peacebuilding—modular-style. In 2017, for example, UNICEF launched an initial drone corridor for what it and UN Peacekeeping prefer to call ‘Unarmed Arial Vehicles’ or UAVs—to distinguish what modularizing for war turns the drone into! The corridor was to test their humanitarian and developmental use, with a particular focus on their ability to deliver vaccines in Africa’s Malawi (UNICEF, 2017). The UN humanitarian agencies and international organisations are searching for more ways to mount ‘good’ drones, and along with tethered balloons with cameras, they now play a role in giving Peacekeeping forces a new form of surveillance and with it a new ‘intelligence’ capacity. Drones or UAVs, have been used by peacekeeping operations in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mali and Central African Republic—all situations of hugely fragmented national conflict (UNICEF, Office of Innovation).

6.4 Geo-coding Peace?

Much less explored is how we might geo-code ‘peace’. This is something we have been thinking about, and tried. In a sense, the geo-coding of Covid 19 ceasefires described in our Tracker, was an attempt to geo-code peace.

We have also produced a map of our peace agreement data, which shows what peace agreements are in particular countries, and also reveals regional patterns in their content (Visualising Peace: Time and Space). The map lets you also explore the relationship between space and time—a concertina button enables the viewing of peace agreement and issue geography over time.

A second example, where we have ‘mapped’ peace, involves Ukraine. Here we produced a ‘map of maps’ that would layer different type of conflict event data, but also data about location of say—nuclear or other power plants, that seemed particularly to be targeted by Russian attacks, or were the location of fighting that posed substantial risk of catastrophe.

On this map we also mapped types of dialogue or mediation. We collaborated again with the EHT Zurich to use data they had collected in the first few months of the war, on attempts to negotiate ‘humanitarian corridors’. We represented the corridor mediations as arrows between beginning and end points on the map. It was more difficult technically, to plot and represent the actual route of the corridor. The exercise also made us realise that it would also have been useful to collect more information about the ‘type of route’ involved in the corridor—whether a road or a railway route, or other.

However, this mapping, arising as it did at a point where no mediated peace process seemed desirable or possible, visually illustrates just how much micro mediation was in fact ongoing. It provides a surprisingly ‘alternative’ story to the ‘no negotiations’ story that is told about the interstate conflict as a whole. We have produced new analytical research, that explores whether ‘islands of peace’, might be a strategy for unwinding aspects of the conflict, in an ongoing context in which immediate resolution seems unlikely, including an assessment of risks (Wittke, 2023).

Other deals, have a less easy way of pointing to the ‘to’ and the ‘from’. For example, a grain deal in Ukraine focused on how the 10% of the world’s grain that comes from Ukraine might get out through ports, to the countries that depend on it. What is the geolocation of this agreement? It is in a sense from Ukraine to the rest of the world. In practice, however, it had to transit through Ukraine’s neighbours. The deal soon was opposed by Poland and Hungary as countries who found that transit regime set up by the grain deal led to large amounts of grain arriving in their countries and stayed there, to the determinant of their farmers. These objections have required further ‘deals’ to address, not least because they threated the EU consensus on support to Ukraine (Greenall, 2023).

In a move from ‘geolocation’, we are now attempting to map dialogues in both Ukraine and in Myanmar, using actor-network mapping. In both places ‘grand bargain’ negotiations with militaries seem undesirable and impossible for civilians, but multiple forms of dialogue between different permutations of armed and civic actors exist. This initiative responds to a view of peacebuilding that tries to work with the ‘double disruption’ dynamics, and views conflict as a system that needs to be unwound piece-by-piece, by understanding the ‘peace systems’ that focus on particular pieces of the conflict.

Our peace agreement data, as we will see next chapter, also includes a collection of ‘local agreements’. These also pose challenges for map representation because the agreements do not exist in a ‘point’, but establish peace in an area. Our analytical research has identified three different types of areas that different local agreements deal with and also ‘create’:

  • borderlands between communities

  • ‘peace roads’ that enable security for those who are travelling through, and

  • forms of ‘peace zone’, such as cities, towns or villages, where armed actors and civilians come to a local political settlement

How should these areas be represented on a map? Some of the edges say of a peace zone or borderland may be as much conceptual as much as actual, and deciding on the relevant zone may also mean deciding what the agreement was ‘about’ in ways that impose an a-contextual meaning on it. So when does mapping create and reinforce zones, rather than just reflect them? As Thrift writes,

space formations such as borders, territories, battlefields, or buffer zones are produced by the practices of agents with particular agendas in mind. They are the outcome of a series of highly problematic temporary settlements that divide and connect things up into different kinds of collectives which are slowly provided with the means which render them durable and sustainable. (2003, p. 95)

All mapping involves choices of this complicated sort. Some choices are born of the difficulty of mapping a three dimensional world on a two dimensional page. The choices also have political import (for example, historically maps of the world have shown colonial countries as many times bigger than the countries they colonised when they were much smaller). The problems of geo-locating peace have possible solutions. We have researched the types of tools and standardised codes that can be used to map countries, administrative regions within them, and even polygons in which local agreements might operate (see Farquhar, 2023). However, which one is ‘best’ might depend on the end-user and their purpose in mapping. Ideally, the choice would be locally elaborated.

7 Risks of GIS

As Nick’s story illustrated, GIS have distinctive risks, which are again due to the way they can be understood as modules that can be added not just to peacebuilding practices, or climate monitoring, but to practices of war.

Geo-locating people, or ceasefire zones, by mapping them, or mapping the movement of people, and even matters such as location of the Internet Service Providers that people use for PeaceTech, can all be used for war. We consider these risks and what to do with them in Chap. 13.

8 Conclusion

We began this chapter with the story of Da Vinci in 1502, and Dove satellites over five centuries later. One is a story of WarTech, and one a story of PeaceTech. But which is which?

We still revere Da Vinci as the epitome of the renaissance—a period associated with a civilising shift to art, culture and knowledge. We do not much see his drawings of complex killing machines, or think of the renaissance as also the age of the invention of gun powder. However, some suggest that Da Vinci perhaps travelled with Borgia merely to have a job and be able to produce art; they point out that the multiple drawings he did for weapons show uncharacteristic dysfunctionalities and could not have worked. They muse that perhaps these were the deliberate act of a secret pacifist.

As regards, Dove, we discussed earlier Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme, and Starlink satellites (which have the Falcon and Kestrel names Planet Lab counterposes ‘Dove’ to). SpaceX, are now involved in a five year partnership with Planet Labs, to launch the miniature Dove satellites into space (Bradshaw, 2020). This has efficiencies for Dove, but sits uneasily with SpaceX’s larger ambition being commercial flights to space—something that has huge negative environmental impacts. Relationships of philanthropy, business, war and peace, increasingly entangle in ways that make it difficult assess and predict their consequences.

Questions

  1. 1.

    What peace and conflict spaces can we map, and what ones can we not map?

  2. 2.

    What are the dangers of mapping?

  3. 3.

    Are you excited by the potential of satellite and other forms of aerial imagery for peace? If so, why? If not why not?