PeaceTech: What Is It?

Abstract

This chapter examines definitions of PeaceTech and associated terms such as digital innovation and peacebuilding. It explains that the book is focused on digital innovation to end wars through mediated processes, and illustrates how this focus connects to wider understandings of peacebuilding and PeaceTech.

1 Legacies

In the year after the Belfast/Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 was signed in Northern Ireland, a brilliant two-minute radio programme called ‘Legacy’ was broadcast as the Agreement was implemented, including its provisions releasing those convicted and imprisoned. Each Legacy programme provided a short audio testimony of an anonymous person whose relative had been killed in the conflict, talking about how the killing. If you wish, you can listen to these heartbreaking testimonies at Legacy Series.

Over 1999, daily stories came from people such as: the policeman’s widow; the ‘totally innocent’ child killed because they were in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’; the pro-state armed actor killed by his own side for informing; or the IRA member shot dead by security forces.

The series played an innovative peacebuilding role. It exposed people to the common loss and grief of relatives of those killed, across divisions, and regardless of perceptions of the person’s ‘victim status’ in terms of perceived complicity in the conflict. The stories focusing on the experience of those left behind, created a powerful public conversation regarding the bottom common denominator of grief and loss. It was a daily reminder of the costs of the conflict that quietly bore witness to what was at stake in maintaining the peace.

The Legacy Series contributed to peacebuilding, it used technology, and it was innovative. So was it PeaceTech? PeaceTech sounds new, but the technology—radio—was very old. In an interesting aside, some of the first attempted cross-Atlantic wireless signals by Guglielmo Marconi were transmitted from Rathlin Island and Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, across the Atlantic in 1898. You can still see the ‘Marconi cottage’ where he worked from—now a fancy coastal house. Marconi was to return to Italy during the Second World War where he was a Mussolini supporter—not what we would think of as pro-peace, or associated with the Nobel Physics prize that he had won. Marconi PLC, the company which emerged from his work, still exists as a major player in communications including mobile technology, with a central role in digital innovation (see its history here).

2 Defining PeaceTech

The ‘Legacy’ radio programme poses the question—what exactly is PeaceTech? As we will see PeaceTech is experimental in nature and there are many diverse examples that we could label as PeaceTech. This experimentalism makes it difficult to define or to draw good boundaries as to what is PeaceTech and what is something else.

The following definition is a useful starting point:

PeaceTech is the use of digital innovation to support peacebuilding practices to improve and extend.

There are other possible definitions that have overlaps and are set out in the Box below. Our definition, however, needs more definitions to make better sense.

PeaceTech Definitions

PeaceTech is….

… an umbrella term for technologies (software and hardware) that are being developed and used in efforts to prevent or end cycles of violence in society, building and sustaining peace. (Carl, 2023).

…the movement to use technology to end violent conflict and extremism. (Heidebrecht, 2022, p. 101).

…

– Products and services that help foster relationships between groups, protect people from the effects of violent conflict, disrupt the tactics of violence, or respond to the root causes of conflict.

– Tools that foster positive outcomes like enhanced social well-being, sustainable economies, stable governance, rule of law, and safe and secure environments.

– And so much more. (Peacetechlab)

…. The field of technology for peacebuilding. (Peace Direct, 2020)

3 What Is Digital Innovation?

PeaceTech involves digital innovation, what then is ‘digital innovation’? Is it the use of a new technology, such as the use of satellite imagery such as Nick was using in Chap. 1? Or is it the innovative application of an existing technology to a new peacebuilding application—say the use of SMS text messaging to survey a population with little internet connectivity, on their desires for particular outcomes for the peace process (see e.g., Firchow & Mac Ginty, 2020)? Is use of SMS texting really ‘digital innovation’? People have been texting for decades. It is not a terribly innovative technology. But then come to think about it, the first satellite was Sputnik 1, launched in 1957, so satellite technology is in fact older than SMS texting (which seems to have arrived only in 1992).

Yet, both the examples above involve forms of innovation. If you read Firchow and Mac Ginty’s work, you will find out about an interesting project called ‘Everyday Peace Indicators’, involving a creative attempt to measure the success or failure of peace processes ‘from the bottom up’ (see also Everyday Peace Indicators). They used SMS texting to generate bottom up peace indicators and measure perceptions of peace in hard-to-access populations. No-one engaged in implementing the peace process had ever really bothered to ask people what they thought peace should look like, or what they wanted from it—what would have to change for them to experience peace? Yet, why should international supporters of peace processes define what ‘peace’ looks like from a perspective of ‘when can we leave’? Is it not important that peace is felt in people’s everyday lives, far from the capital cities that international actors reside in? Everyday Peace Indicators are now taken seriously by international organization as a way of benchmarking positive change, these include organizations like the World Bank that we think of as disconnected from local communities. 

What was new in Mac Ginty and Firchow’s use of SMS was the design of a localized participative process of defining peace by ordinary people in hard-to-reach communities. Using SMS contributed to a transformation of how we define and monitor peace, and whose experience ‘counts’, although it raised its own challenges in terms of who has access to mobile phones in terms of inclusion (for discussion of these challenges and how to navigate them, see Firchow et al., 2017; Demombynes et al., 2013). Legacy and radio broadcasting are even more ‘analogue’ than SMS. But in societies with low connectivity, radio may be a very effective way to reach large sections of the population. Is new always good when it comes to technology?

Similarly, what is new about use of satellites for peacebuilding is not satellite imagery per se, but the new capacities for producing images, and producing them cheaply enough and open source enough that researchers, citizens, and non-governmental organizations can now sometimes gain capacity to use them for new purposes such as peace monitoring. We will look at satellite technology more in Chap. 10.

4 What Is Peacebuilding?

The second definition that our starting PeaceTech definition would need to clarify is: what is peacebuilding?

Civicness is a useful word to capture the focus and spirit of ‘peacebuilding’. It was coined by Mary Kaldor and colleagues who work as members of our PeaceRep team, and the term is at the heart of our PeaceRep programme as a way of working that seeks to counter-act logics of war. They describe civicness as:

(i) as a logic of public authority, that speaks to ideas of rights-based, inclusive rather than exclusive political orders; (ii) as a form of behaviour, acting ‘as if’ such a logic existed; and (iii) as a political position, articulated against un-civic politics, in particular the combination of endemic corruption, ethnic or religious sectarianism and economic and social injustice. (Kaldor & Radice, 2022, p. 125)

Is peacebuilding everything that has some sort of ‘peace impact’ or that attempts to create civicness? Well my goodness, this could be literally everything. PayPal and Airbnb for example, work in interesting ways to generate ‘trust between strangers’. Is ‘creating trust between strangers’ a form of peacebuilding? To use PayPal as an example, complete strangers enter into transactions with each other at a distance without even knowing if their identity is real. In 2022, PayPal had 392 million active users who conducted 15.4 billion transactions that generated $21.4 billion revenue (Galov 2023). Four hundred and twenty six million users transacted at least once in that year. Fraud rates were only 0.12%—less they claim than most competitors. So PayPal generates and depends on a lot of trust and its success in getting people to use it, depends on this trust.

PayPal see their system as rooted in four core commitments, three of which appear to be more connected to a morality of ‘civicness’ than what we might think of as money-making commitments. These are:

• transparency—that we might think of as a public good

• data protection—that we might view as rooted in individual rights

• a commitment to fighting fraud—that we might view as a commitment to civicness by tackling uncivic behaviour of corruption.

Their fourth core commitment is ‘using payment methods that are popular with customers’ which appears more business-oriented. But in fact we could also see this commitment as having something to do with civicness if we put it a different way, for example: being ‘responsive to people’, or delivering maximum ‘digital financial inclusion’. By using technologies that people already use, PayPal aims to include more people by meeting them where they are at, rather than assuming they will become more ‘tech-savvy’.

While I have suggested that PayPal’s values encapsulate a form of civicness, PayPal likely committed to these values because they generate the trust that is central to their business model. They need people to trust the service to use it.

So is PayPal ‘peacebuilding’? Let us review: it creates peaceful interactions between people, and promotes trust based on commitments which have a moral dimension rooted in civicness—something I have suggested is at the heart of peacebuilding. PayPal also improves the world in a lot of peaceful ways by enabling commerce, charity payments and gifts to friends and family. But we would probably hesitate to call it an exercise in ‘peacebuilding’ as the ‘peace’ element is indirect, unintentional and really an accidental side-product of trying to enable on-line commerce.

But perhaps we should not be so hesitant. One of the greatest threats to peace of our times, is currently disinformation. People fighting against social media circulation of disinformation as a threat to peace, are doing all sorts of innovative thinking on how to address this threat. These people find themselves thinking a lot about the ways in which systems themselves work to generate trust or distrust.

Some of those concerned with peace and human rights, lobby social media companies to engage in ‘content moderation’, that would remove illegal content, or disinformation (see Barrett & Hendrix, 2022; Barrett 2022). While the stated intent for Twitter/X was that it should merely be a platform for views, there is now greater awareness that its real-world power to shape views, and its use for vile purposes, have brought pressure to moderate what is put on the platform.

A second focus of people concerned with peace, however, has concerned the more invisible ways that social media constructs interchanges between even civically minded people to be ‘uncivic’. These people seek to understand the algorithms (essentially maths formula that try to predict what you will most click on), that control what pops up on your social media feeds on Twitter/X, or Facebook (see Fournier, 2021).

Peacebuilders have noted that social media uses algorithms to promote ‘engagement’ to keep people scrolling and expose them to more advertising (also chosen by algorithms). These algorithms promote emotionally provocative feed more than factually correct feed, because the former has been found to better promote ‘engagement’ (see Lanier, 2018). Social media platforms defend the neutrality of algorithms on the grounds that they merely reflect user preferences and interactions that increase engagement. For those concerned about peace, accentuating dispute is a choice that leads to social polarization and is particularly invidious, because it happens without users fully realising how they are being drawn in. If you are pro-peace, this is not neutral.

The ways in which social media controls what you see happens invisibly under a cloak of ‘neutral algorithms’. However, there are now peace counter-responses, that look to the trust-creating mechanisms of online commerce such as Airbnb or PayPal to understand how a platform creates trust rather than polarization. For example, a new Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) was set up in 2020, as ‘a multi-stakeholder initiative bringing together leading experts from science, industry, civil society, international organizations and government that share values to foster international cooperation’. It subscribes to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Principles for Artificial Intelligence (AI) focused on ‘how governments and other actors can shape a human-centric approach to trustworthy AI’. Experts involved in groups like this consider how trust is built or destroyed using AI, such as social media algorithms, to drive platforms, based on issues such as the ‘transparency’ of how the AI does its job. Broadly speaking this move to responsible AI, is in some deep sense ‘about peacebuilding’.

5 The Problem With Definitions

Returning to our definitions: discussion illustrates the difficulties of deciding how ‘new’ and how ‘innovative’ digital innovation, and how peace-focused an activity has to be to be PeaceTech. There is no exact way to draw a circle around PeaceTech. It depends what we want to give the label to.

The good news is that we do not need to get too agitated about the exact boundaries of PeaceTech: labels are merely useful ways to create a bounded conversation to help us talk to each other about the same thing. If we understand peacebuilding to be broad and ‘everything that is to do with peaceful co-existence’, then we will have a broad definition and conversation about PeaceTech involving all the ways in which technology is being used by those who have an agenda of peace, and even those who work on values such as ‘trust’ that we associate with peace. This approach can see PeaceTech applications in countries such as the US or UK where there is no violent conflict with armed actors (even though some forms of organised crime and state violence come close to creating similar conditions in some areas).

However, the term peacebuilding sometimes has a narrower meaning amongst communities of practice and scholars as:

Activities taken in response to violent conflict within societies, that aim to address the conflict around them directly or indirectly, to produce more peaceful outcomes.

Again there are different definitions of peacebuilding or similar concepts, some of which are set out in the box below and are useful to read to see how peacebuilding is talked about. But the definition above captures things well enough for our purposes.

Peacebuilding Definitions

Sustaining peace ‘should be broadly understood as both a goal and a process … which encompasses activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties to conflict to end hostilities, ensuring national reconciliation, and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development…’. (UN GA Resolution 70/262 (2016) and UN SC Resolution 2282 (2016))

Peacebuilding is the development of constructive personal, group, and political relationships across ethnic, religious, class, national, and racial boundaries. It aims to resolve injustice in nonviolent ways and to transform the structural conditions that generate deadly conflict. (Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame)

Peacebuilding refers to efforts to assist countries and regions in their transitions from war to peace and to reduce a country’s risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities for conflict management, and laying the foundations for sustainable peace and development. (United Nations)

Conflict prevention ‘is about creating incentives for actors to choose actions that resolve conflict without violence. Effective prevention requires acting before grievances harden and the threat of violence narrows the choices available for leaders and elites, understood as groups who hold power or influence in a society’. (World Bank, 2018, p. xxi)

6 Peacebuilding Ripples

To understand the examination of PeaceTech in this book, and the possible scope of the PeaceTech field in general, it can be useful to think about types of peacebuilding activities as nested within each other from and connecting in and out like ripples. Fig. 2.1 illustrates.

Fig. 2.1

Peacebuilding Ripples

In the inner circle are peace and transition processes to end conflict as an active practice of trying to stop people from fighting by creating a process to mediate its end.

In the second circle, a broader range of activities take place in war zones with or without a clear conflict resolution process, whereby individuals and organisations address aspects of violent behaviour or things like distrust that create violence; or try to counter violence by creating spaces of dialogue or civicness as an alternative; or work to support those who are affected by violence. These activities could be things like women’s groups, meeting across divides to try to address common problems of poverty. They could be victims groups supporting those hurt by the conflict regardless of where they come from. They could be an inter-schools reconciliation group that attempts to create understanding across social divisions. All of these activities try to build civicness in the face of uncivic violent behaviour that seeks to destroy people and their relationships and communities.

In the widest circle are all peace-focused activities that operate even in societies that we do not think of as having violent conflicts (albeit that most societies have violent practices and spaces). These could be an anti-racist group seeking to combat racial polarization, injustice and violence against minorities; they could be people seeking to address inter-gang rivalries and knife crime; or groups trying to address ‘polarization’. The International Catalan Institute for Peace, located in Barcelona, for example, has recently been committed to conducting surveys on polarization in an attempt to understand the nature of polarization and what it means for ‘a culture of peace’ in Catalonia and more widely (International Catalan Institute of Peace, 2020). The survey produces interesting results on what types of polarised views people can hold without it affecting their emotional relationship to people different to them, and what types of polarized views translate into treating others badly.

7 PeaceTech and Ending Wars

What will this book discuss as PeaceTech? Which circle is it focusing on? The book will focus on the innermost circle of peace processes to end conflict, and the use of technology to support attempts to create and sustain ceasefires and agreements to that end. The book therefore mainly focuses on the narrowest circle, but throughout I will give a flavour of PeaceTech as an activity that inhabits all of the circles. The activities in all the circles are important to understanding what goes on in the central circle, because different circles pull in different actors that have different relationships to peacebuilding, and different capacities for digital innovation that over time connect.

My choice of a narrow circle of PeaceTech—as digital innovation to end wars—is partly personal. Quite simply, that is what most interests me. I grew up until my early 20s in a conflict (in Northern Ireland), without realising what was happening around me was not normal. The weirdest part of life, as I look back, was the curious way that normal life and completely abnormal life were all mixed together until you couldn’t really tell what normal was. As a young child, I never really understood that the conflict was not normal, what it was about, or how I and my family were positioned as regards its various ‘sides’. Over time, I learnt of course, and experienced directly the violence.

Jumping forward to when I was an adult and the peace process arrived I realised that without some sort of agreement with those involved in the fighting, the fighting would not stop. Since that time, I have been interested and involved in how conflicts are brought to an end, not by victory or defeat, but by agreement. I am therefore interested in how and when PeaceTech supports attempts to end conflict through mediation and the peace processes that unfold.

Questions

• 1. Do you agree with the definitions of PeaceTech?

• 2. Is it new? Does that matter?

• 3. Is the PeaceTech label a helpful one, or does it lump too many things together?

• 4. What do you view as peacebuilding? Which of the three circles are you most interested in?