PeaceTech Futures

Abstract

This chapter assesses ‘where PeaceTech’ is, in terms of hype, disillusionment and a plateau of steady-state use. In conclusion a small manifesto for PeaceTech’s future is offered.

1 A PeaceTech Hype-Cycle Audit

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity lifecycle of new technologies and innovations divided into five phases, which I adapt to PeaceTech (see box).

Gartner Hype Cycle

• 1. Innovation Trigger. Interest in a PeaceTech possibility is sparked by seeing an application of a new digital innovation.

• 2. Peak of Inflated Expectations. People’s excitement and expectations for the innovation exceed the reality of its current capacity to deliver. This excitement can generate considerable financial speculative support.

• 3. Trough of Disillusionment. Peacebuilder and funder excitement dissipates and is offset by disillusionment, due to poor performance, length of time to deliver, or lack of sustainability in cost-outcome terms.

• 4. Slope of Enlightenment. Early PeaceTech adopters overcome the initial hurdles and begin to realise the innovation’s benefits. Other organisations benefit from the experience and gain better knowledge regarding where and how the innovation will deliver significant value (and where it will not).

• 5. Plateau of Productivity. The PeaceTech innovation demonstrates real-world benefits, and more organizations feel comfortable with the greatly reduced level of risk. Others adopt the PeaceTech innovation until the innovation (modified or not) becomes mainstream.

Where would be plot the PeaceTech innovation to end wars on this cycle? I offer a speculative graph below (Fig. 14.1). What follows is my assessment of ‘where PeaceTech is at’. I offer it for deliberation rather than as a final judgment.

Fig. 14.1

‘PeaceTech’ Gartner Hype Cycle

PeaceTech as Hack. The innovation trigger for PeaceTech as a disaggregated set of ad hoc responses, and ‘one good thing’ approaches, means that the Gartner Hype Cycle is in a sense repeated in mini-ways, with different technologies. Many of the ‘once-off’s’ have not been sustained, or have not fully delivered. I place it in the Plateau, however, because across the peacebuilding field there is a sustained turn to technology and methodological innovation. Even discrete initiatives have opened minds as to positive new applications of tech in the peacebuilding field, and generated a new ecosystem that enables new forms of collaboration across actor-type, and across skills.

Ad hoc digital peacebuilding is therefore ‘mainstreamed’, but characterised by ongoing experimentation, rather than attempt a wholesale digital transformation of practice, including the practice of peace processes and mediation. Once-off experimentation is in part due to the ad hoc nature of peacebuilding itself, which was always not very ‘joined up’, across interventions, actions and actors. Peace processes seldom, if never, are able to mobilise strong cross-organisation strategisation and coordination, but often see vast amounts of replication, competition and supply-led practice. PeaceTech as ‘hack’ at worst replicates this pattern, but at least retro-fits some new techniques onto it.

Yet organisations now know and use the ‘easy-to-use’ technology that is low-cost, and are open to responding to other innovations on a ‘trial-and-error’ basis. Over time, some PeaceTech providers have found ways to build business models based on ‘reusability’ across a range of peacebuilding needs, expanding the possible capacity for organisations to draw on—as Ushahidi illustrates. There are of course vast gaps in who does PeaceTech, and where it can be done, but these do not challenge the broad idea that digital methods are now in the frame as a new ‘go to’ in the peacebuilder toolkit.

Conflict Early Warning Systems. These remain a central focus of international attention, and governments, and are likely to remain so, not least because they are also big tech business. Today they are a normal part of security intelligence systems. As regard their use in peacebuilding and PeaceTech World, I divide them into the ‘nowcasting’ CEWS and the more Future-scanning EWS, and put these in slightly different places on the Hype Cycle graph.

Personally I am sceptical about prevention capacity to ‘predict’ the imminent onset of violent conflict through purely quantitative data-driven methods, and mobilise effective pre-emptive responses. I am reinforced in this by writing at time when the conflict in Khartoum is unfolding. No-one really predicted this specific armed conflict would erupt when it did on the basis of data, even though politically the peace process was widely known to be shaky and likely to fall apart somehow at any moment.

In my view, our understanding of conflict drivers and how they interact show a mix of structural cause and human agency, and the former are so difficult to predict, and the latter so inherently unpredictable, that the idea that probabilistic statistical modelling would somehow prove usefully predictive is misplaced. Even if I am wrong, I suspect this feeling is shared in peacebuilder circles, meaning that warnings will not generate sufficient confidence to provoke coherent political reaction that might prove useful. I suspect that good context-specific political analysis, based on simple observation of data, supported by digital innovation perhaps, will continue to be the main driver of response. But of course, I could be proved wrong, and may have leapt too early into the trough of despondency. However, because I am there myself, I place CEWS as data-driven automated warning in the trough of despondency.

However, when we turn to the peace process ‘peace agreement implementation’ area of work, in my view, CEWS have a value. Here the challenges often are in the platform design, and how not to introduce so much data that it remains unable to be deliberated on, or impose massive logistical data-collection jobs on staff who already risk spend more time filling in reports than peacebuilding in any meaningful sense.

CEWS, in my view, can usefully support ‘future scenario planning’. That is, as a longer-term tool to support strategic analysis of the range of people involved in supporting peace processes, as to how best to do so. CEWS for future-scanning avoids some of the CEWS warning-response gap problems, because rather than give a predictive analysis of what will happen next, it suggests emergent risks and creates a conversation as to whether a mission or country-team or set of local actors should ‘adapt’ what they are doing to address that risk. CPAS attempts to do this, and our PA-X Tracker platform aims to support this type of deliberation. I can see this travelling round to the plateau of productivity if the right choices are made.

GIS and Remote Sensing Technologies. Technologies, such as satellite are offering a new capacity to peacebuilding in the form of access to technologies that were once beyond their capacities and budgets. They are also offering things like drones that we might think of as WarTech now reinvented as a module to be added to peace technology. This type of GIS PeaceTech has had the innovation trigger pulled and is hurtling up the curve of inflated expectations. As a PeaceTech tool in the making it seems to offer peacebuilders, and other peace process implementers such as peacekeeping forces, amazing new possibilities. UN Peacekeeping appears to have seized on the potential for new capacities for ‘intelligence’ to support peace implementation with gusto.

Whether GIS develops to support peace processes will depend on delivery of low cost provision of new satellite capacity, and peacebuilders having sufficient resources and expertise to use it. Connectors such as Earth Blox type projects that offer ‘low- or no-code’ ways of accessing and using images may play a part. However, my jury is out on how mainstream this type of work will become for peacebuilders. Some other forms of remote sensing such as sensors in the ground are remarkably cheap, but aside from warning of bombs, it is difficult to see the wider peace process function they would provide.

Perhaps the bigger PeaceTech limitation for aerial observation lies in the ethical civilian protection issues encountered by HHI, of ‘switching modules’ from war to peace. Can remote sensing technology be used as a module that can be unscrewed from war ends, and re-attached to peace ones? Peacebuilders may find it is simply impossible to build organisational firewalls to stop ‘intelligence for peace’ becoming ‘intelligence for war’. Capacity to move beyond a trough of despondency to steady-state use will involve adequately addressing these challenges.

Geocoding. Beyond new remote sensing technologies, Geocode/geocoding of conflict and peace data, has reached—in my opinion—a plateau of productivity due in no small part to the good practices of ACLED and UCDP and the wide usage of both data sources. Further standardisation of things like administrative sub-unit geocoding, and methodologies of plotting—boring as they may be—would be very useful for peace process monitoring, and could help visualize local peace perception surveys, such as we have been conducting (Deng et al., 2022), with other information such as local agreements or peacebuilding projects.

The remaining issues for geocoded data is the existence of data gaps, and whether and how people trust deaths in conflict data as providing a ‘real’ picture. Here, paradoxically, different datasets at least enable questions to be asked of ‘whether this is real or an artefact of the data collection model’. Some interesting in-country projects, provide further more locally-collected data, to compare with the larger global datasets. There is a lesson for funders here- sometimes more is more, and replication has a value.

The other key gap, is a methodological and data gap in understanding how to measure peace, usefully contributed to by Caplan (2021) who points to the need to measure ‘peace impacts’, and then the difficulty of matching peace impacts onto data that is often ‘slow data’, and has country and quality gaps, as well as gaps in disaggregation of data. In the peace process context, there is a need to better think through what types of change are relevant to measure, and what should be the expected timescales of change, before jumpin into monitoring.

2 Peace Analytics

There is, in my view, a clear capacity and need to bring together the very considerable data collection efforts relating to conflict and peace into better articulation in peace analytics. Peace analytics will not change the world, but at present, as the stories right at the start indicated, multiple organisations repeat the same tasks to write similar reports, using the same data, in ways that they cannot share, to try to support peace processes. They face the same silly obstacles. How can I disaggregate the data by the local administrative districts we have projects in? How can I easily visualise information in a way that supports strategic decision-making, and adaptive management? How can I communicate levels of confidence about what it tells us and what it does not? How can I connect the quantitative data to our own organisational assessments? These are all issues that if solved could support peace process implementation tasks, and create massive efficiencies across organisations in-country (see e.g., Brusset et al., 2022, for an excellent report, that bears similarity to Paul’s story). If done in an open source way, as we are trying to do, the enterprise might also enable collaborative conversations between people whose own platforms cannot be shared for diplomatic reasons.

I am biased, of course, as this is what we are doing. I also would not like to try to shoot us up the ‘inflated expectations’ curve, but rather jump over it and the associated trough of despondency, to land in a place of productivity. So I would want to emphasise that our peace analytics ‘is what it is’—an attempt (still ambitious we feel), to create new ways of seeing, new ways of sharing information and analysis, and new ways of making comparative process information available. Whatever its ambition, it is what happens next in the real world that will change that world or not.

However, I believe these types of platform, and the methodologies we are working with, have potential to increase the opportunity for local actors and priorities to be more easily incorporated into peace process development, and seen and heard. Projects like Everyday Peace Indicators are good examples that giving voice to local definitions of peace can have power even in high places like the World Bank. Giving voice to local priorities is perhaps even more important in a context of double disruption where international actors no longer know ‘what to do’ and are floundering, and often displaced overnight from the country altogether, as Sudan and Afghanistan illustrate.

3 PeaceTech Manifesto

This book has given a short and—I hope—somewhat enticing introduction to PeaceTech efforts focused on ending wars. There is clearly much more that could have been said.

However, as part of encouraging that discussion, I leave with a short ‘PeaceTech Manifesto’. The word ‘manifesto’ is deliberate. To quote Wikipedia (let’s not be academically snobby in a PeaceTech book—it is a wonderful crowd-sourced tool, and we all use it):

A manifesto is a published declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer…. [It] usually accepts a previously published proposition or public consensus or promotes a new idea accompanied by prescriptions the author believes should be made. It often is political, social or artistic in nature, sometimes revolutionary, but may present an individual’s life stance.

Yes to all of that. Here goes.

• 1. Digital transformation in all aspects of life is here to stay, it has a lot to offer peace processes, but also raise new ethical, technomoral and practical challenges that we must rise to meet. As a rule of thumb, if a PeaceTech innovation feels creative and collaborative, and responds to a problem in the field, it is worth exploring. Inaction also has risks.

• 2. Conflict patterns are changing and a range of intersecting threats mean that the last decade has become much more dangerous to the point of our extinction. New models on how to mediate ends to conflict and reinvent responsive peace processes, need to be fashioned, and combined with innovative thinking about technology for war and technology for peace.

• 3. Ending conflict through practices of mediation and compromise is worth saving. We have few safe alternatives. Compromise between armed actors has moral costs, but these are nearly always less than the moral costs of continuing conflicts, particularly ones that it is clear neither side can ‘win’. All conflicts have legitimate and illegitimate interests on all sides, even where there appear to be clear transgressors on one side and warriors for social justice on the other. Good practice matters as to whether an honourable and sustainable compromise is reached or not, and useful digital support to that end, is a good thing.

• 4. Peace and transition processes, while not transformative of all social relations, have made important contributions to reducing deaths in conflict, without which other transformation is not possible. The practice is in decline, and the world is more dangerous. Criticism of how good they have been should not lead to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The iterative nature of peace and transition processes shown by PA-X, indicates that we should be more open to understanding peace processes as the complex ongoing business of politics and innovate to support.

• 5. To this end, digital capacities can help us to understand and map, and provide comparative information as to how people in conflict assemble and disassemble for peace and for war, with a view to supporting pockets of civicness where they emerge.

• 6. Beyond that, digital innovation has a vital role to play in addressing past peace process critiques by:

  • (a) Enabling creative communities committed to peace to come together across different skill sets

  • (b) Helping local priorities to be more visible, heard, and accepted by international peace process supporters.

  • (c) Support monitoring and implementation of peace promises by armed actors.

• 7. To be effective PeaceTech will have to continue to develop two things:

  • (a) Better composite agreed frameworks to assess ethics, data protection and harm to people and processes

  • (b) Technomoral virtues for the field that connect understanding of PeaceTech innovation, to understanding of the wider impacts of digital transformation on our world (for this reason I have focused on drawing the connections).

• 8. People seldom shift positions and begin to trust each other by simply getting better information about ‘the other’. They do so, through relationships and encountering the other. Supporting face-to-face encounter remains important.

• 9. PeaceTech promises inclusion, but risks exclusion. The rush to innovate should not bypass considering digital exclusion in design.

• 10. PeaceTech promises better collaboration but risks the same patterns that have emerged in the peacebuilding field itself. Funding models often reflect funder needs to show value, and so both project and funder in need to claim ownership of shiny new things. These incentives run counter to a field needing better sharing, reusability and interoperable data, which might require demonstrating an effort to build on what came before, rather than touting small modifications of existing data as ‘new datasets’. More consideration of how the PeaceTech field as a coherent field should be built into innovative funding models that incentivise cooperation, open acces, and where appropriate, mutual ownership, and things like ‘reusability’.

• 11. No-one wants to pay for ongoing data development. Everyone wants to fund ‘shiny’ new data even when it is unproved and overlaps with the old, but without any capacity for data continuity. Funders need to flip to support data sustainability and reuse better. Servitization is not the answer. Plus someone needs to support projects that have capacity to develop good models of ‘standardisation’ and ‘interoperability’. Not sexy, hard to claim the result as a major thing leading to the outbreak of peace, but none of the sexy stuff happens without it. Good data is a major thing.

• 12. Finally, finally. There is a real opportunity to think through much better how PeaceTech could be systematically part of peace process design, rather than left to moments of experimental incubation. Not all things would need done in all circumstances, but having some form of open-source blueprint, to provide a systematic starting point would be useful. We have been involved in projects to design in-country digital peace processes. In my view, further considering what the ‘digital peace process’ might look like could usefully come together to support thinking about what peace processes should be in the age of double disruption. Perhaps a new way forward could be found for a peacebuilding field that has in a sense been always characterised by fragmentation and lack of strategy across varied organisations and actors. Whoops, there, I’ve said it!

  Thank you for reading.

  The End.

Questions

• 1. How would you place PeaceTech developments on the PeaceTech Hype Cycle graph?

• 2. What is your manifest, are there bits of mine you particularly agree or disagree with?