PeaceTech Drivers

Abstract

This chapter examines how digital transformation of peacebuilding connects to digital transformation in closely related areas, such as humanitarian intervention and development. I also consider the connection with digital transformation of security and even war. I set out the main drivers of PeaceTech.

1 Locating PeaceTech

Beyond business marketing, new technologies and capacities are impacting distinctively on other spheres of life. Some of these spheres are connected with distinctive aspects of business that are key to social ordering, such as financial services, or ownership of property. Others deliver ‘public goods’ such as how healthcare is planned for or delivered, how government interacts with us, or how policing takes place. Some examples of what I term ‘SomethingTechs’ are set out in the box below.

‘SomethingTechs’

FinTech: financial technology, which consists in the use of innovative technologies applied to the financial industry. FinTech includes mobile payment apps, cryptocurrency based on block chain. (Fintech Weekly, 2023)

PropTech: ‘all the tech tools Real Estate experts use to optimize the way people buy, sell, research, market, and manage a property. These innovative technologies are also known as Real Estate Tech, Retech, Realtech, CRE Tech depending on which lens you’re looking through. However, at its core, prop tech always means robust alignment between real estate and technology.’ (Ascendix, 2023)

GovTech: ‘GovTech is a whole of government approach to public sector modernization. It emphasizes three aspects of public sector modernization: citizen-centric, universally accessible public services, and whole-of-government approach to digital government transformation.’ (World Bank Govtech)

MedTech: a combination of medical technology and healthcare interventions.

ClimateTech: ‘Technological solutions that mitigate the impacts of climate change and build resilient communities.’ (Reichert, 2020)

WeddingTech: Is this a thing? New smart rings can now be purchased as wedding rings, that transmit couple’s heartbeats to each other. Really! (Cassidy, 2023)

(For more SomethingTechs see Nathany, 2021.)

There are areas very close to that of peacebuilding, where technology is also playing a key role in innovation. Indeed, PeaceTech can be understood to intersect with these spheres of digital transformation, all of which intersect with each other. These are: tech use for humanitarian intervention, tech use in development intervention (including GovTech), and tech-based security interventions. (see Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Peacebuilding Gears

The synergies between these cognate-Techs and PeaceTech are two-fold. First, the suite of innovation tools is virtually identical—it is often the same type of tool and same type of intervention that is used in each area. Second, the subject matter of each is close to that of the others. Those in the field often talk about ‘the triple nexus’, that is—the interlinkage between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding interventions and actors (see ICVA, n.d.). This triple nexus recognizes the ways in which conflict causes humanitarian crisis, and longer-term development and social justice needs, that if not met continue to operate in a cycle with the conflict. PeaceTech applied to peacekeeping, peacemaking and building draws on and is connected to development and humanitarian digital innovation, with processes, tasks, and digital tools that overlap.

Also overlapping, is digital transformation in the security and war sphere. Military responses to prevent or address conflict involve many of the same tasks with the same difficult backdrop as peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. For example: understanding where violence is taking place and responding to it, strategic communication with local populations, Early Warning Systems, and logistics of mobilizing projects involving people and goods in complex and violent geo-political environments. These tasks are carried out often using the same tools and techniques as PeaceTech.

We will examine these related fields further.

2 Humanitarian and Development Tech Initiatives

Humanitarian organizations have embraced digital transformation to support provision of humanitarian relief. Being on the relief frontline can also mean being on the frontline of negotiations with conflict actors. The International Red Cross/ Red Crescent, for example, must often negotiate forms of micro-peace agreement with armed groups to get its relief safely to people in need, and has a digital innovation unit to enable support aid delivery. Digital transformation for the Red Cross includes using a range of technologies: Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, voice recognition, robotic automation, new digital platforms, crowd-sourcing, GIS, drones, open source software, and mobile apps. Increasingly, the logistics of relief delivery relies on online information systems that can track supplies, but also armed check-points, and incidents. ICRC’s RCView—a platform described as ‘a digital ecosystem’ is used to ‘visualize all aspects of a disaster response effort, delivering real-time information for decision making and coordination’. This type of development—critical to humanitarian responses to conflict—overlaps with the types of platform now used for ‘situation analysis’ in peacekeeping (see further Chap. 11).

MercyCorps, a development organization focused on humanitarian relief, has built-in digital transformation to its core ways of working. Funded by Cisco, it developed a five-year partnership ‘centered on delivering humanitarian aid and development assistance faster, better and to more people around the world by accelerating digital solutions’. Cisco is a major business that ‘offers an industry-leading portfolio of technology innovations’. It offers ‘networking, security, collaboration, cloud management, and more’ to ‘help to securely connect industries and communities’ (Cisco). Cisco has a strong corporate social responsibility ethos, and uses its capacities and philanthropy to support a range of partnerships such as this one, with non-governmental organizations, that we could broadly associate with humanitarianism and peace.

The Mercy Corps—Cisco digital innovation programme has supported development tasks such as: automated reporting systems to streamline operations; civic online forums that seek to improve inclusion of local people in development planning; using social media scanning to combat Covid-19 disinformation by targeting strategic communications at particular rumours; providing for digital cash and voucher assistance. These tasks overlap with peacebuilding ones when they occur in the same conflict settings.

3 CyberSecurity and SecTech

Increasingly war is fought not just conventionally but in cyberspace, and forms of cybersecurity are being developed to support actors trying to promote civicness. The point is illustrated by an interesting digitally focused Canadian non-governmental organization SecDev Foundation. To give a flavour, one of its initiative is ‘SalamaTech Syria’. This project points to the reality that

The Syrian conflict is the first protracted war to be fought on and through the internet. All actors use the internet to organize, plan, and share information; some use it to document human rights abuses and bear witness; others use it to propagandize, collect intelligence, sow fear, and win followers. Now, as the conflict drags on, many use it to maintain family and social connections, continue formal education, and learn new skills for the future.

The Syrian social media space has been dominated by the voices of militant actors. Social media is used as a weapon of war. By contrast, the voices of Syrian non-violent actors have been drowned out by the noise of violence and extremism. To the outside world, the concept of Syrian civil society has been largely reduced to that of powerless ‘refugees.’ SalamaTech has been working hard to correct this. (SalamaTech Syria)

In response, SalamaTech has provided very practical tools to help Syrian civilians stay safe and stay connected. These include: emergency tech support to Syrians who have been arrested or had their accounts hacked; digital safety audits and ‘real-time remediation’ for Syrian civil society organizations; and Digital Technology First Responders who provide in-person and remote training to empower women and youth, to become active drivers of peace and development.

A board member and founder of SecDev Foundation is Rafael Rohozinski, is Principal of the SecDev Group, and CEO of Zero-Point Security, whose core cybersecurity work overlaps with the mission of SecDev the NGO such as the SalamaTech project. SecDev Group provides not just cybersecurity, but also wider ‘thought leadership’ in areas such as cyberwarfare. Rohozinski himself combines a diverse set of connections between security services, cyber initiatives, international organizations, diplomatic initiatives and Universities (Centre for International Governance Innovation). In Part II we will come to understand the PeaceTech ecosystem that he in a sense builds and is part of through these connections.

4 WarTech?

Aspects of providing security overlap with what we might consider ‘WarTech’—‘cyberwarfare’ itself in a sense interlocks with the technologies used to combat it, as SecDev Foundation’s work illustrates. Digital innovation has also transformed traditional forms of warfare in ways that change the relationships between combatants—for example the use of armed drones (forms of robotic device) by the US in places such as Pakistan, where they engage in bombing those suspected of ‘terrorism’. Beyond this, digital innovation is applied to ‘smart-bombs’, and other forms of warfare machinery, that are taking warfare into an area where the distinction between hardware of guns and bombs, and the influence of thoughts and minds, are deeply entangled.

PeaceTech often relies on uses of technology that we associate with war. In the field of GIS, satellite and use of drones, actors such as peacekeepers are increasingly in a sense ‘appropriating’ what originated as WarTech, for peace process support, in a search for ‘better intelligence’ for peacekeeping missions. We will consider the implications further in Chap. 10.

5 Drivers of Digital Innovation: Value

Before we move on, it is perhaps useful to pause and think about why businesses adapt to embrace digital innovation, and what the drivers for PeaceTech might be. The new technologies outlined in the last chapter drive change in a number of different ways, illustrated by the fitness watch example, because they add value to the business. Value is the underlying driver of digital innovation in business, understood as creating a better more productive business with improved service provision and improved profits.

New technologies enable companies can to deliver a better product to their customer. For example, new improved fitness watches give people a range of options that their ordinary watch never could. Hence the label ‘smart watches’.

New technologies can enable businesses to be efficient. They can help to streamline internal processes making businesses more agile and efficient. New data systems can help track where products are in a delivery supply chain to make delivery faster. Data crunching can help companies predict when there might be a demand for their product—for fitness watches say at Christmas and New Year, meaning they manufacturers can make sure they have sufficient stock, in the right warehouses to sustain timely delivery.

New technologies can increase business opportunities. For example, data analytics might be able to identify which types of people are regular customers, and where a customer base could be expanded to a new demographic, or new products sold to existing customers, for example where a fitness watch user might have a tendency to buy particular types of shoe.

In the SomethingTech areas set out above, the drivers of digital innovation will be a bit different from those set out above in the pure commerce field. For example, where governments attempt to engage in digital transformation it will often be in an attempt to improve services to the public—for example a planning portal may help people track planning applications; an App may help people pay public utilities bill. Innovative dashboards may improve transparency and responsiveness of government—for example by surveying people on future plans, or letting them see where their taxes have been spent. Efficiency of some government processes may be improved, for example, because electronic forms of bureaucracy can be automated reducing the need for people to be employed to enter data manually. ‘GovTech’, therefore has a distinctive set of drivers of change, that connect to a particular set of relevant digital transformation technologies.

6 Drivers of PeaceTech

What then are the drivers of PeaceTech, as digital innovation relating to peacebuilding? What value does PeaceTech add to the practice of ending wars? I suggest the following are the main drivers.

6.1 Creativity-at-work

PeaceTech has partly emerged because of a mutual alignment between people who approach life creatively. Different types of peacebuilding look very different. The practice of negotiating ends to conflict—say trying to negotiate a peace agreement—can look like high end level ‘diplomacy’ between governments and international organizations in which ordinary people get a bit lost. However, at the level of the everyday conflict, peacebuilding is often a creative enterprise in bringing people, ideas, activism and communication together to try to build a vision that would enable people to displace use of violence. Digital transformation has been driven not just by business and profit, but by creative industries such as gamers, artists, visualizers. There is perhaps a natural tendency of peacebuilders to creativity, and therefore a synergy between tech and peacebuilding as creative fields. Some examples illustrate.

Butterfly Works is an Amsterdam-based social design studio ‘pioneering the use of co-creation and design thinking in international development’—interestingly with a predominantly female team. As part of a GIZ (German Agency for International Cooperation) peace initiative on Yemen, it worked to co-create games with Yemeni designers. Arabia Felix, a series of six mobile games designed to inspire users to strive towards peace, through quests, treasure hunts, puzzles and decision-making challenges (for the story more fully, see here; see also the game’s Facebook page. The Games can be downloaded and played in both Arabic and English on Google player).

The project shows different forms of creativity at play: co-creation from Global North and South (albeit as a northern-led initiative); digitally connecting young people from different locations who could otherwise meet; peace games, that challenge war games; and a creative attempt to gently challenge attitudes. Within two years the games had 40,000 downloads. Arabia Felix by the way, means ‘happy or flourishing Arabia, and in ancient geography was the comparatively fertile region in southwestern and southern Arabia that included Yemen. It contrasted with Arabia Deserta—barren Arabia, and Arabia Petraea—Stony Arabia. (Britannica) So even the name navigated the complex divided history of Yemen.

6.2 ‘Shiny’ (‘Now I’ll eat you, so prepare your final plea’)

People are attracted to ‘shiny new’ things and want to give them a go, to see if they produce shiny new results. There appear to be shiny new things to use ‘out there’, so why not try to apply them to innovate with regard to peacebuilding? PeaceTech exists partly because applying new tech tools to improve peacebuilding practices seems to make sense. A range of quite different actors have become interested to drive and support PeaceTech in part because it is a ‘new kid on the block’ (CMI, 2020). The move of a range of governments to support PeaceTech has been motivated by wanting to be at the front end of innovation, as well as out of conviction that new forms of digital innovation offer immediate improvement of peacebuilding practices.

Yet, a more general disruption of peacebuilding sees a push against ‘supply-driven’ peacebuilding interventions often from global north, rather than demand-led peacebuilding support that is responsive to the requests from activists in the Southern-based countries in which peace process predominate. Perhaps, like the villainous crab on the Disney cartoon Moana, who uses his shininess to gobble all the fish attracted by it, we should be cautious of ‘shiny’ as a reason to do PeaceTech.

6.3 It Is Lower Risk to Fund

Supporters of PeaceTech may have been drawn in because it enables them to ‘do good’ in new more effective ways. Philanthropy—that is money donated from business to do ‘good things’—has often been a bit wary of supporting activities that can seem ‘political’ such as peacebuilding. Similarly, people we may think of as purely profit-focused, such as venture capitalists who invest somewhat experimentally in businesses they think might just make a big profit, or investment bankers that invest other people’s money to make interest, and other tech-focused companies, may have business reasons to support PeaceTech. They will often have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) requirements, and sometimes also their own commitments and reasons to engage in some sort of social justice intervention alongside their wish to make money.

These financial entrepreneurs often support PeaceTech as a way of being seen to ‘do good’ and even trying to do good. They may also get involved because they can add value by connecting the businesses they invest in to support PeaceTech projects. The new EUI Global PeaceTech Hub, for example, is supported by Kluz Ventures, a private investment firm that is ‘passionate about new technologies’. Kluz Ventures understands its investments to be about ‘long term returns across private and public markets’ but also articulates a vision to invest in companies that are in some sense changing the world in a good way (Kluz Ventres, About). Supporting PeaceTech is a way of connecting companies with the side of the angels (Nicolaïdis & Giovanardi, 2022).

We may feel that ‘supporting peacebuilding’ is a nice thing and not a bit political. But think for a moment about the conflict in Ukraine that is raging at the time of writing this book. Many people think that fighting this war is the only way to create ‘peace’. Arguing for negotiations, appears to suggest that compromise with a country that has invaded your country is a good thing. That view is controversial. Yet, in most conflict countries wars are waged in the name of peace and justice, sometimes cynically and sometimes not. In fact, all sides in most conflicts claim that they have turned to war in pursuit of a just peace, and peace mediation must traverse conflicted concepts of what the war is ‘about’.

Businesses can be reluctant to try to change conflict contexts, whether through philanthropic giving or corporate social responsibility, because conflicts are messy and complicated and have ‘sides’. Deciding what is a good peacebuilding intervention to fund is not the sort of calculation businesses are well placed to make. Plus they may seek to do business with all of the actors in the conflict at some point down the road.

Supporting PeaceTech’s provision of the technological tools for peacebuilding can feel a bit safer than supporting what people might do with them in complex conflict contexts. It will feel closer to their business ‘tech’ mission. But also, provision of tech tools, is detachable, in a sense, from what people do with those tools.

6.4 Evidence-Based Approaches to Intervention

Digital innovation offers the possibility of more evidence-based approaches to peacebuilding. While the early 1990s saw peace negotiations as somewhat of an experiment, over time the practice became more structured and complex. Given that the practice is over 30 years old and, as we shall see next Chapter (5), has a patchy record of success, there is a strong wish to develop peacebuilding policy with an evidential basis. Ongoing pressure on public budgets means that funding peace processes and peacebuilding brings increasing pressure to be rigorous in terms of only funding interventions that have a clear capacity to acheive a clear outcome.

The search for evidence-based policy, drives some PeaceTech initiatives, including our own. A broad range of research attempts to correlate what goes into a peace agreement with peace process outcomes; and indeed seeks to understand and measure the overall success of peace processes themselves. For example, data has been used to suggest that peace processes in which women are included, are more successful than those where they are not (Krause et al., 2018). As we will see further, using data to define and measure what might be the ingredients of success, is not simple.

6.5 Global Southern-Based ‘Needs Must’

Although we might think of technological development as a global north dominated affair, in fact PeaceTech innovation has often been developed in the Global South to respond to pressing needs in conflict-affected states. Necessity is the mother of invention. For example, one of the much-cited PeaceTech initiatives is Ushahidi. The name comes form the Swahili word for ‘testimony’. Ushahidi provides an online platform for using crowdsourcing to collect and geocode and map, information about incidents and events. It grew out of tech colleagues who worked in 2008 to establish a digital platform to monitor and map post-election violence in Kenya. The platform that emerged enables the rapid collection, management and analysis of crowdsourced information.

Ushahidi has now developed a business model that sustains its work. It invites donations, and receives grants for projects. It offers a basic platform for free, and an ‘Enterprise plan’ for bigger scale platform capabilities—a form of ‘servitization’. It is a good example of what is called ‘re-usability’ in design model, and the platform has now been used in other places for example, to ensure fair elections in the US, Kenya and Nigeria, documenting police brutality in Portland during Black Lives Matter protests, and helping women address sexual violence in Egypt.

Also located within Kenya and Nairobi are a number of other creative initiatives that have a digital focus, and operate collectively to position Kenya at the heart of PeaceTech. For example Build Up, a ‘peacetech enabler’ who we will look at more next Chapter, holds key trainings in Kenya with a presence there. Busara, a Center for Behavioural Economics, is a nonprofit organization that uses social and behavioural science, including innovative approaches to data and technology, to address problems that include conflict. For example Busara’s project in Uganda, assessed the ‘behavioural effects of conflict exposure’, seeking to understand how exposure to conflict affected social preferences, including decisions to use violence.

Our own work relating to exploring a digital peace process for Yemen, in association with other partners, revealed multiple organizations within Yemen engaged in digital peacebuilding that collectively had interesting tech capacities. This included women’s groups networking through WhatsApp, and groups such as Deep Root Consulting, with a strong interest and capacity in new technologies, as well as Butterfly Works discussed above in Chap. 4, and further in Chap. 8 below.

Similarly, in Syria an audit of use of technology by activists found extensive use and innovation (British Council & Build Up, n.d.). Initiatives, such as the SecDev SalamaTech, have emerged to provide layers of professional security expertise to these types of organic local initiative.

PeaceTech has therefore some potential to support local actors to take control of their own modes of production. It also offers mechanisms to adjust imbalances of knowledge between local actors and international actors: to render the local more knowable to internationals, and to enable locals to connect to and influence international agendas.

6.6 Supporting More Inclusive Peace Processes

As the Everyday Peace Indicators project of Chap. 2 illustrated, PeaceTech offers innovative solutions of scale for including the public in peace processes. It offers innovative ways of reaching hard-to-reach populations, and conducting surveys or polling on peace process options and drafts. ‘Digital inclusion’ for peace processes is a key PeaceTech development (see further, Hirblinger, 2020). Hirblinger defines digital inclusion in peace processes as meaning that ‘the voice of conflict stakeholders is integrated into that peace process in the form of digital data’ (2020, p. 10).

Examples include Facebook consultations in Myanmar ceasefire negotiations (prior to the current coup); digital platforms for negotiations which included capacity to upload submissions in Colombia; offline and online consultations in preparation of the Libya National Dialogue. In addition to providing digital tools to enable people to input to peace processes, forms of machine learning now have capacity to enable views to be more quickly parsed from electronic submissions, in ways that can be quickly fed to mediators. A project in Chile for example, used natural language processing to compare respondent’s views on the priorities for the constitution, with the language of the constitution; a proof-of-concept study in Yemen, demonstrated how topics could be modelled on consultation responses (Arana-Catania et al., 2022).

6.7 Covid Effect

Covid-19 displaced many internationals from conflict zones who as they were relocated home. It also led to lock-downs, emergency laws, restrictions on association, and an urgent need for medical supplies. As in all areas, Covid-19 drove a greater uptake of digital technologies as things like online meetings became a necessity. Conflicts create some similar constraints to Covid—people stuck in places, international flights being shut down, and individuals being unable to meet safely in person. As I write, for example, emerging conflict in Sudan has led to rapid evacuation of most international staff, displacement of civilians, and people confined to houses, so key communications relating to any attempt to broker peace will have to happen remotely. Covid-19 digital innovation therefore remains useful.

7 Disruption of Peacebuilding Practice

A final driver of digital innovation is a response to the reality that peacebuilding practices and processes are in a moment of flux and even crisis. Conflict patterns are changing, and the global order that supported the evolution of peace processes and mediated ends to conflict is changing.

Digital innovation appears to offer some capacity to respond to this crisis. We now turn to consider disruption.

Questions

• 1. Where do you think digital innovation seems useful in humanitarian, development and security interventions?

• 2. What do you think are its risks in these areas?

• 3. Can war ever be a ‘pro-peace’ intervention?

• 4. Can you think of other drivers of PeaceTech?

• 5. How do you feel about the word ‘disruption’?