Keywords

1 Running Hard to Stand Still

The fastest runners in the world are Ethiopian and Kenyan (Douglas, 2022). Theories of their speed have included: analysis of genetics; expanded lung capacity from training at the high altitudes in each country; cultural and historic attitudes to running; team training methods; and nature of training schedules.

Both these countries have had complex conflicts and peace processes that have continued many years. These are seldom discussed in running magazines, although, for example, in 2023 unexpected London marathon winner Sifan Hassan, had fled Ethiopia aged 15 as a refugee from war.

Ethiopia reached a peace and transition agreement in 1991 as a result of a victory by a range of groups from different areas and ethnicities, against a vicious dictatorship known as ‘the Derg’ (Transitional Period Charter of Ethiopia, 1991). In 1994, a creative Constitution built a federal country, but conflicts have remained in different areas, as have peace processes.

I worked on and off for several years with people of Somali identity in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, who built over time what is presently a successful peace process reaching a peace agreement, which interestingly was mediated by a Kenyan government facilitation team (Joint Declaration, 2018). Other conflicts continue and emerge—this last year a conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia has been brutal and involved allegations of war crimes, with an estimated 600,000 killed. In Kenya, post electoral violence in 2007–2008 saw over 1000 people killed, and led to transition agreements and a transition that in a sense remains perpetually ongoing (see further, Paffenholz, 2021).

Back to running. For those of us who are not so swift, in countries that are predominantly located in the western or developed world, the search for improvement in running has involved Fitbits, Garmins, Apple i-watches, and a range of wrist ‘fitness trackers’, which track steps, speed, route, and when and how you did the activity.

2 What Are the Key New PeaceTech Technologies?

We often talk about PeaceTech without really talking about the Tech. It is important to understand the key technologies, their distinctive terminologies, and how they interact to create new ways of working, if one is seeking to understand their use in peacebuilding. Fitness watches are a good, if trivial, example of how a range of technologies work. If you came to hear about peacebuilding, bear with me here.

Fitness watches are fitness trackers that look like watches. However, they are really little computers that log data from your wrist. They work as part of a system of interrelated computing devices that include phones and computers and satellites. Each wrist tracker has a unique identifier—like a name that only they have, that mark them out as a distinct ‘thing’. When you sign up to their systems, they will give you a unique identifier—you too will be a ‘thing’. These computers have ability to transfer information over a network without any human being involved. They are part of what we call ‘the internet of things’ or IoT for short (see Box 3.2).

Internet of things: the network of physical objects—‘things’—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of ongoing connecting and exchanging data over the internet in automated ways, with other devices and systems. Oracle, India.

To illustrate: for you to analyse your performance and compare it with others, your watch will count the steps, and measure your elevation with reference to already coded data on maps and sensors within the watch, and satellites in the sky. This will be recorded on the watch’s mini-computer which will then transmit this data to the Cloud. ‘The cloud, as its metaphorical name suggests, is like a big computer and storage system in the sky (see Box). Cloud computing is available on-demand and offers both computing power and ways of storing data without your active management.

The Cloud: a network of global servers, with software that enables remote storage and computing accessible widely through the internet. Cloud computing is computing happening on those servers, rather than the user’s own computer.

Sometimes you get access to the cloud for free (like your free email such as Gmail, or file storage, such as Dropbox or SharePoint, both of which are on ‘the cloud’). Except that free is not really free—you ‘pay’ for it, by permitting your personal data to be connected to a range of other products and services. Sometimes you get access as part of your deal with the watchmakers. Sometimes you get access by paying for it with money—like when Gmail or Dropbox charge because you have ‘run out of free storage’.

Use of the cloud storage is not bought permanently as if it were a warehouse, but in-effect rented for a periodic fee. There is a word for this: Servitization that connotes the shift from buying to in a sense renting—by subscribing to a ‘service’ (sometimes referred to ‘software as a service’ or SaaS).

We will come more to servitization in Chap. 12, but let’s explain it a little here. Sell a thing and the person pays for it once. Change it to a ‘service’ and it is paid for on an ongoing and even indefinite basis. Servitization goes hand-in-hand with digital innovation as it is a way for businesses to create revenue streams to support ongoing development of their product and continue to make profit.

Servitization is not just a cunning new capitalist tool to keep charging you (although it’s that too): it makes some sort of sense in the field of digital provision because digital innovation is fast-paced. Email systems such as Gmail, for example, are constantly being improved and integrated into other products. The storage service fee enables system maintenance and improvement, including ever-improved security.

The Cloud of course is not a magical storage container in the sky, but is a complex set of machines and software that has a physical existence ‘on-the-ground’ somewhere. Amazon, for example, which started as a bookseller, expanded to selling more and more things until it has become the world’s biggest marketplace. Part of its success lies in how Amazon can provide data about its customers and their purchases to create sophisticated user data models that inform predictions about item sales that can enable targeted advertising, and predictive storage and shipping. Over time this led to collection of more and more data, so that Amazon dominates online selling because it can quite simply do more of it more efficiently than others. Amazon has had to build the data facilities needed to sustain all this data-crunching. These data facilities, are now themselves a major thing that Amazon markets. One can buy storage on amazon and use its ‘data facilities’ (see details here).

This short digression shows us that behind digital innovation and ‘the cloud’, is a computing power and software housed very much on-the-ground in a hardware of data facilities that require architected physical actual warehouses, and architecture in computer engineering terms.

Back to your fitness watch. As you run, your watch can calculate and produce real time analytics, such as: how fast you are running, what your average pace is, and your ‘cadence’ is (how many steps a second you are running). Sometime real time analytics will also tell you how fast your heart is beating and what ‘zone’ of exertion it is in—for which it will compare your heart-rate to statistical norms for people your age and size, at different levels of exertion, something that itself requires a lot of data and algorithms. Real time analytics are therefore ‘right now’ analytics, and they can be useful in helping you adjust things in the moment—in my case, run a bit slower to bring my heart down from the heart attack zone.

Once you have completed your run, your watch may transmit your data to the cloud. Computer programmes in the cloud can then put it together with other fitness watch user data to tell you how your run compared with other previous runs you did, how high you ran elevation wise on that run, and have run over the year, how you compare with others in your age group, etc. This is part of what we might call data analytics. In fact, this is often data analytics that uses big data capacity, as it lets you compare your data with hundreds, thousands and even millions of others. These ‘others’ might be others with your same watch and App, but if you have linked to some broader fitness App, such as Strava, this may have connections to users of lots of different types of watch. Strava might link to Instagram and Facebook, and have data-sharing agreements that enable it to pool information from even more people to create big data. This data then needs to be analysed using machine learning, which for example can ‘cluster’ groups of similar users, that would simply be beyond human computation given the number of data points.

Big data: data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges. Oxford English Dictionary. It is characterized by ‘the three ‘vs’: high variety, high volume, and requirements for high computing power to process at velocity.

Your data together with this big data, will be fed into data analytic systems that use algorithms to tell you things about yourself and others around you: who you might want to connect with, who ran past you, who took the same route, who has run that route most frequently, etc. These systems will often try to sell you things as well.

You may see all this on your watch face, but you may find it easier to look at on your computer or your phone. In fact, your watch will automatically synchronise with your phone. It does not do this by linking into the cloud: it does so by Bluetooth that is a way your phone has of connecting with other devices. This means of connection means that the data goes straight from the computer on your watch to your phone without being beamed up to the cloud and back down again. In essence a quick form of mini network connects the two devices (IOT again). So, your phone and watch will be set up to automatically synchronise without any action from you, as soon as they are in close enough proximity for their wireless (Bluetooth) connectivity to reach.

While data going to a central computer or cloud takes some time, your watch and phone connect at what is called the edge. The transfer from watch to phone is known as edge computing. Typically, this sort of transfer of data offers more speed, because it reduces the distance between devices, and that can be useful. More speed equals less ‘latency’, which all sounds very complicated, but latency is just ‘delay’. The faster something moves, and the closer the distance, the less time it takes to get there. Edge computing therefore brings efficiencies.

Machine learning (ML): a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that works to build models and use them to classify data and predict outcomes, typically using statistical methods.

Your fitness watch can do other things. It can show you maps, and your route as you run, and after. It can jiggle on your wrist when you go past a turn-off you should have taken. It does this by being linked to a Geographic Information System or GIS, which enables it to plot runs on an online maps. The watch uses a range of sensors to ‘locate’ you, and geocodes the information into location data that can be put on a map. Typically, your watch will try to place you by linking you to a satellite thousands of feet above the sky. It will tell you ‘GPS’ on. The GPS is the ‘Global Positioning System’ involving a satellite navigation system that can tell within around 20 meters where you are. It will triangulate this data (data analytics again), with where you are in relation to wireless networks around you (the cloud again), and sometimes in relation to other devices near you (internet of things again) to improve the location detail. Sometimes you will connect to the GPS through wireless technology or mobile data technology. Sometimes you will do it without either because your watch or phone contains a ‘remote sensor’ that can be picked up by the GPS. Remote-Sensing is something that we will see feature as part of Early Warning Systems in the PeaceTech World (Chap. 9).

Remote-sensing/sensors. Remote-sensing is the process of detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation at a distance (typically from satellite or aircraft). Special cameras collect remotely sensed images, which help researchers ‘sense’ things about the Earth. United States Geological Survey.

Finally, your watch may track other things than running. Here AI or Artificial Intelligence may come in (see, e.g., Bosch account of AI in fitness watches). Artificial intelligence using algorithms might give you new statistics such as your ‘fitness’ score over time (see for example Strava on how they calculate a fitness score,). Your watch may have artificial intelligence software that enables it even to ‘learn’ activities that were not programmed in in the place. The software, for example may calculate the lengths in a swimming pool, by using previous swims and matching length with strokes counted. Artificial intelligence perhaps now conjures to mind Open AI’s ‘GPT-4’, an online tool that produces ‘human like’ responsive answers to any question you write. However, AI is any system of computing that produces responsive and changing predictive outputs based on the data it holds and computes, and it is involved throughout our lives already.

Artificial Intelligence: The simulation of human intelligence by machines, often using machine learning, neuronal networks and sophisticated models and algorithms.

3 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Who knew fitness watches were so complex and used so many multiple innovative technologies? They are one small part of a wider digital revolution that touches every aspect of life, characterised by the ‘blurring of boundaries between the physical, the digital, and biological worlds’ (McGinnis, 2023). This revolution, emerging in the last decade or so, has been called ‘the fourth industrial revolution’. There is a little debate as to what the first three were (see further Schwab, 2015).

Most noticeably, the current digital revolution has revolutionised business, whether of watch-makers or in other areas, by reshaping connectivity, production, consumption, and the speed and efficiency at which things can be done. In fact, regular watchmakers are not the makers of fitness watches. The makers of fitness watches are the makers of phones such as Samsung and Apple. We will come back to this.

Interestingly, while I said the digital revolution has ‘noticably’ revolutionised business, many underlying technologies are designed to remain unnoticed. Digital innovation now permeates most of the online tools we use, and many of the ‘things’ around our house. It includes the cookies that stalk us invisibly as we search through the internet, gathering information about us from our google searches until they know us better than our best friend and perhaps more even than we know ourselves. It includes Apps we sign up to for much daily business (that also gather data on us), and the things around us such as the sensors that switch on lights or heating automatically.

Here the main purpose of digital transformation is to build competitive advantage and increased sales and profit. We probably also think of it as a ‘developed country’ thing, gone a bit mad. I am not sure my fitness watch has in fact improved my fitness. But I do now at least know how unfit I am.

What, then, are the incentives for PeaceTech as digital transformation of peacebuilding?

4 Key PeaceTech Technologies

I spent so long talking about fitness watches in the middle of a PeaceTech book because I have found it is important to think in fairly simple ways about how these technologies actually work in real life. Understanding what they do and do not do, where they do it, and what types of capacities and infrastructure are needed to use them, is necessary to using digital technology wisely in a live conflict. Conflict creates challenging infrastructure, security and capacity issues, and using technology to challenge conflict is more complicated than using it to measure running.

Also, trying to use digital innovation for peacebuilding, involves knowing at least a little bit about the difference between ‘the cloud’, and ‘the edge’, or between artificial intelligence and machine learning, or GPS and GIS. Technicians will use these terms lightly and quickly. You will have to trust them to do their work. However, if you are going to have a sense of how to hire or contract the right skills, write specifications for the work, or be able to interrogate the adequacy of security of the digital products that emerge with reference to particular conflict contexts, then you will need some technical knowledge. Just as, technical experts will ideally have some commitment to understanding what it is you do, and the particular constraints relating to your work.

PeaceTech and the use of technology to resolve conflict also has to be pursued understanding the wider moment of digital transformation that is happening at speed. Digital transformation is driven by both business interests and ongoing technological innovation. Business courses on digital transformation often map the key technologies driving change within businesses, to consider how they drive change. These courses are designed to help people work with digital transformation within their business as people who understand the business rather than the ‘tech’, but also see that they need tech to remain competitive. I have found these courses very helpful to seeking to ‘do PeaceTech’ better. They tend to cover a list of ‘digital transformation technologies’ that is made from many of the things which the fitness watch mechanisms illustrated.

In Part II of this book we will look further at how the above technologies have been used for a range of peacebuilding activities, and in particular those focused on creating and sustaining peace mediation, agreement and implementation. I focused on fitness watches because if we focus in on how digital innovation can assist in ending wars, the new bundles of technologies that fitness watches illustrate, are the technologies that have had a real traction in the PeaceTech field. We will explore how through the chapters as follows.

Peacebuilding as Hack: Mobile and cloud technology to produce a range of practical peacebuilding tools often for local communities, to support any peace process. PeaceTech has often worked to support ‘app-ization’ of peacebuilding support tools (that is, turning ways of doing things into usable phone Apps); gaming, used as a mechanism of trust-building, communication and even data-collection; and other forms of digital consultation, that are crucial to peace processes. Distinctions between edge computing, and cloud computing, become important for low band-width communities because they enable some things to be done without being on line, and uploaded in moments of connectivity. Edge-cloud decisions also have implications for personal security—for example if sensitive information is on personal devices and needs transmitted off them. We will consider the ways that PeaceTech offers new ‘hacks’ to analogue peacebuilding modalities.

Conflict Early Warning Systems: Geocoded Information Systems (GIS). Geocoded, spatial knowledge technologies, for example, geolocation of data, satellite imaging, remote-sensing, and drones, are key to trying to develop Early Warning Systems to alert people to conflict. Interestingly, the use of satellites and drones often does not get dedicated attention on business courses because they are not germane to marketing. They may seem a strange technology to think of with regard to peacebuilding, because we often understand things like satellite and drones to be more associated with conflict, or at least securitization, than with peace.

However, GIS often provide important ways of mapping conflict, that can be used to support its prevention, for example through ‘Conflict Early Warning Systems’ (CEWS) that attempt to combine observed phenomenon such as troop movements, that can be correlated with other data, such as rise in conflict events such as killings. We will consider how this type of innovation is used with other data, and machine learning to try to create CEWS, in Chap. 9. Once only available to militaries, are increasingly becoming part of the tool-kit of political and peacekeeping missions put in place to implement peace and transition agreements.

Peace Analytics: Data analytics, involving real time analytics, and big data. Data relating to conflict events, to other indicators of peace, such as political stability or democracy, and on peace processes themselves (including our own PA-X peace agreement data), is now all part of PeaceTech. Monitoring conflict, creating dashboards on conflict drivers (such as poverty), and trying to map change over time, or provide easy access to ways of measuring ‘peace impacts’, are all key to peace process implementation activities. Also often used in the PeaceTech field, are techniques of using population-wide analysis of social media feed—Twitter/X and Facebook—to understand perceptions of a conflict or peace process. This data can be used for purposes such as, understanding perceptions on peace agreement proposals; engaging in more effective or ‘strategic communications’ around a peace agreement initiative such as a referendum; or for understanding and combat the types of disinformation and hate speech that are at play in undermining peace efforts. We will consider Peace Analytics in Chap. 11.

Underpinning connective tissue: Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). Forms of natural language processing, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, underlie CEWS, GIS, and Peace Analytics in different ways, drawing on the now extensive—and ever growing—data relating to peace and conflict.

5 Conclusion

We now turn to examine the drivers of PeaceTech and how to locate it in terms of other types of innovation in connected fields.

Questions

  1. 1.

    In what ways do you notice you are in the middle of a ‘digital revolution’?

  2. 2.

    What advantages does it bring?

  3. 3.

    What concerns you about it?

  4. 4.

    Is digital transformation a ‘global north’ thing?

  5. 5.

    What type of capacities do you think the different technologies need?

  6. 6.

    Could you rank which capacities are easy to acquire, and which are hard to acquire?