Keywords

1 Who Does PeaceTech?

Remember the opening stories in the book. Seán struggling to distribute peacebuilding funds to local groups, to shore up (or substitute for?) a failing peace process. Atem and Samuel designing an App to stop kidnappings and cattle rustling. Aker wondering how to address sexual violence. Nick, observing satellite earth images and seeing conflict unfold.

Let us return to the stories to observe who is doing PeaceTech, why, and what drives their digital innovation efforts.

1.1 Observe First, the Collective Story

This is a story where digital technologies not previously available are now central to the business of peacemaking activities, but often in an ad hoc, unconnected, and experimental way. They involve a range of organisations: traditional peacebuilding communities; and also organisations who have some connection to peacebuilding even if it is not their main business. These last can include University researchers tracking agricultural developments, or private companies such as the satellite companies, who have become involved in PeaceTech intentionally or unintentionally say by putting their capacities open-source, or taking on a PeaceTech-related job.

1.2 Observe Each Story

Each story shows very different types and scale of peacebuilding actor with very different relationships to the conflict and any peace process. They show very different personal and organisational energies and incentives, and very different types of access to financial and technological resources for digital innovation, as the short examination of each below shows.

2 Local Peacebuilders

Local peacebuilders Atem, Samuel and Aker will have perhaps a lifetime commitment to address the social troubles around them in an attempt to improve their lives, and those of their community. They will engage with both conflict and peace process over decades, but may have limited resources to work with. They will have copious expertise in how the conflict ‘works’, often not really recognised as such. They will likely see the conflict less as a singular conflict but as a complex system in which types of conflict: armed-actor violence, gender-based violence, violence against children, and the structural violence of social injustice, all operate to reinforce each other in ways that are difficult to unravel and disrupt. They will often ‘multi-hat’ in different roles and organisations simultaneously, as peace and social justice entrepreneurs.

Local Peacebuilders will often understand the potential for conflict system mutations with a predictive and analytical capacity that outpaces the most advanced technology. For example, how armed actors will adapt into organised criminals who run drugs or people-trade along routes they once used for arms; or how programmes to demobilise armed actors send them home with weapons, increasing intimate-partner violence against women. This local peacebuilding expertise is vital to making sure a peace process works by creating a connectivity between projects of social justice that over time can extend and legitimise a narrower peace ‘deal’ into a social contract.

3 International Peacebuilders

In contrast to the local actor, the international actor such as Seán or Paul may in not ever be in the country ‘properly’ if at all. They may monitor and assess from afar, whether that is the relative safety of a gated community within a capital city, or outside the county altogether. Like local peacebuilders they will often be deeply committed, and passionate about peacebuilding, but ultimately they do it as a career choice rather than a life necessity born of their situation.

Those in-country may struggle to get a sense of a huge, wide diverse country they will never fully see or know. Their presence will be temporary, from less than a year to a maximum of around three years, although they may return for stints across a lifetime and career. They may be isolated to one part of it, with in-person interactions with local peacebuilders and conflict parties constrained. Those outside country will work with information about what is going on. This itself is the subject of digital innovation—virtual reality depicting conflict landscapes has been used to sensitise remote UN staff to local contexts they work on.

All of these people and their organisations will work with things called: log-frames (setting goals and indicators of ‘success’), ‘theories of change’ (that define what they are trying to do), and even ‘exit strategies’ (that specify the end-goals for success that mean that the international organization may be able to leave, and take its staff and resources to another conflict situation). The need to square these bureaucratic demands with partial knowledge of hugely local complex conflict system, will often drive digital innovation, in particular regarding data.

4 Private Companies and Philanthropy

Less visible but present in our stories were private companies. These may involve an entrepreneur who is passionate about peace, or is from a conflict country. The business person may offer local peacebuilders the company’s tech know-how, directly by setting up a philanthropic wing, or indirectly by a strong commitment to open source technology. Examples include SecDev Foundation and SecDev Group; and the Cisco support for MercyCorps, set out in Chap. 4. Individuals at the heart of these businesses may have originally set up in business for a peace-related purpose. Or they may view peace and security as inter-related. Their philanthropic contribution to PeaceTech may well be part of a broader commitment to ‘do good’, closely aligned to what they understand to be the social value of their own business. SecDev Foundation’s SalamaTech, for example, built on the cyber-risk awareness of SecDev Group, to design its support to civilians in Syria.

Even without this type of deep peace commitment, businesses have a range of business incentives to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities that may drive them to contribute to PeaceTech.

However, there can also be more profit-oriented business benefits to PeaceTech, beyond those of CSR. Not-for-profit innovation in the peacebuilding field, can build expertise for the company’s for-profit business by offering a ‘proof-of-concept’ example of an experimental but potentially profitable technology. An offer of small-scale satellite use for ‘conflict early warning’, may enable its development and later purchase by, for example, a country’s intelligence service, with the business losing control over exactly when and how its technology is used.

Other businesses may engage in PeaceTech as a paid element of their business offer, either as the entire offer or as paid-for PeaceTech application of a more general technology. These last may then have little interest in fully interrogating conflict and peace impacts, and have to develop forms of conflict-awareness ‘on the hoof’.

Elon Musk for example, has used his Starlink Satellite system to provide mobile broadband to Ukraine. This is a digital innovation that can ‘beam in’ internet capacity in hard-to-reach places, such as Ukraine became after Russia invaded and particularly as it targeted Ukraine’s telecommunications infrastructure. There is some ambiguity as to whether Musk’s company was paid by the US government, and if so whether fully (Smith, 2022).

Even if the motivation was altruistic, being a lead provider of satellite-enabled internet in places with no cables is a significant business prize. Being able to demonstrate capacity in a context such as Ukraine has a proof-of-concept benefit that can assist future commercial take-up.

Musk, however, quickly encountered conflict-related dilemmas. News reports and his own tweets, have indicated that while he was happy for the internet to be used for civilian government, he was unprepared to have the mobile internet used to enable Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes (Sabbach, 2023).

Musk may have been concerned to draw a distinction between supporting Ukraine’s defence of civilians, and supporting Ukraine’s pro-active war effort—particularly one that could escalate by attacking Russia on Russian soil. Enabling civilian tasks and military ones seem different. However, he may also have been concerned not to be seen to be actively involved in the conflict in ways that might draw him and his business interests in as targets. Both concerns, of course, are legitimate.

5 Universities

Universities also feature on the edge of our PeaceTech stories: remember Nick—a North American researcher in North America, and Samuel—an African student at a ‘Norwegian University’. Both of these researchers—one a researcher on agriculture and one a peace and conflict researcher (double-hatting as local peacebuilder), had ways within their University system to gain skills or partnerships that enabled them to innovate with technology.

Our own PeaceTech work at the University of Edinburgh comes out of this type of relationship as described in the next chapters.

Universities often comprise the ‘research and development’ engines of PeaceTech, developing proof-of-concept work to support peacebuilding applications. However, they can also act as conceptual developers of the field of PeaceTech, and PeaceTech enablers, who seek to support students and practitioners to enter the PeaceTech world

A number of initiatives centred in North American Universities, have been central to building both technological capacity, and PeaceTech as a field of scholarly activity. These include:

Peace Innovation Lab, University of Stanford. This Lab has been at Stanford since 2008, initially as a class then a project within the Persuasive Technology Lab and then as its own Lab. It focuses on the connection between business, technology and peace, with a particular mission to ‘catalyse a PeaceTech sector’. Their work lies at the intersection of behavioural psychology, technology, innovation and business.

Peace Innovation Institute (Hague). Produced as a spin-off from Peace Innovation Lab in 2018 in collaboration with the City of the Hague, the Institute provides a focus on the relationship between peace and business, or as they put it ‘making peace profitable’! This Institute describes its mission as to ‘catalyse a peace tech sector and industry’ and ‘create new frameworks and curriculum for the ethical and safe deployment of emerging technologies and innovation’. In particular, it is working to provide a ‘Peace Data Standard’ to allow organisations using technology to ‘measure their peace impact in the background’. The idea is to try to address structural issues in capitalism by reconfiguring how corporate social responsibility is activated for peace by providing a credible way of measuring a company’s peace contribution—a bit like ‘carbon credits’ in the environmental field (see Guadagno et al., 2018).

Beyond North America, similar initiatives exist.

University of Ulster has had an InPeaceLab, with activities relating to the relationship between peacebuilding and technology.

European University Institute (EUI) Global PeaceTech Hub, already mentioned, is recently formed but placed to play an important networking role for academics and practitioners, as the name ‘hub’ suggests. The Hub brings together EUI’s School of Transnational Governance, TheGovLab, and the University of Lucerne’s Institute of Social Ethics, and focuses on exploring PeaceTech as a globalising phenomenon.

PeaceRep Team, University of Edinburgh. We too work in particular to develop ‘Peace Analytics’, in the form of a new capacity to understand through structured and unstructured, quantitative and qualitative data, the ways in which peace is incubated, created and sustained, as set out in throughout this book.

6 PeaceTech Funders

All of the PeaceTech projects in our initial stories needed funding, whether it was funding for PeaceTech innovations, research monies for digital innovation, or funding for core work in which digital innovative practices were used. PeaceTech engages a broad array of funders engaged supporting PeaceTech that include:

  • University research-grant-giving organisations

  • Donor states

  • International organizations and funds

  • Businesses and private philanthropy

7 PeaceTech ‘Enablers and Connectors’

A number of key PeaceTech organisations work as ‘PeaceTech enablers’. These organisations seek to build PeaceTech capacity and ways of working, and develop and support good practice. There again are different scales of organixation here, but three key organisations with three slightly different missions are important and useful to understanding this type of role.

PeaceTech Lab. PeaceTech Lab and its CEO Sheldon Himelfarb have been at the heart of the development of PeaceTech as a concept and a tool. They are in a sense the foundational enablers. The lab began life as a Center of Innovation at the US Institute of Peace (USIP), in 2008, and became a non-profit in its own right in 2014. In its own words it ‘drives action-oriented solutions by bringing a diversity of experts together: data scientists, social scientists, engineers, MBAs, global influencers, media ambassadors, and creatives’ to ‘collectively develop effective peacebuilding solutions’. This work has been incredibly diverse. PeaceTech Lab has programmes on digital challenges to peace such as misinformation and hate speech. However, it also runs a ‘PeaceTech accelerator’, that helps support PeaceTech start-ups—in particular with secure access to cloud computing but also by offering workshops on easy-to-use Tech for peacebuilders, as well as a Master’s programme. It has also supported similar labs in other countries, see PeaceTech Lab Netherlands.

Build Up. An interesting connector organisation, in its own words Build Up is, ‘a global non-profit that works beside local organisations, to identify and address emergent challenges to peace through interventions, research and training, that combine best peacebuilding practices, participatory methodologies and digital technologies’. This statement speaks to double disruption, in viewing new technologies as capable of responding to a shifting peacebuilding field, in which digital transformation may also be a threat. One of their key programmes relates to digital conflict, and the other to participation or inclusion in peacebuilding.

Build Up

  • enables local groups to access technological capacity and funding for innovation

  • supports innovation in peacebuilding

  • provides tools that enable groups and individual to use technology even where they have few technical experts

  • provides thought-leadership on the principles and values that should underpin PeaceTech.

Its work is critical to plugging some of the ethical gaps we address in Chap. 13 by providing guidelines for good practice.

New York University, Center for International Cooperation (NYU CIC). NYU CIC is a non-profit centre housed at New York University that focuses on policy connecting politics, security, justice, development and humanitarian issues. This organization has had a focus on data and worked as PeaceTech enablers, with a strong connection to the United Nations, who it works to support.

Types of Organization in the PeaceTech Ecosystem

  • Peacebuilders—local and international—looking to increase tech savviness.

  • Private company CSR/Philanthropy Wings

  • Ecosystem-building enabler and connector organisations and networks

  • Companies with relevant software

    • Companies focused on a peace impact

    • Companies for hire

    • Hybrid companies with a range of outputs and motives

  • Individual tech experts: Visualizers, software engineers, data hard ware engineers

  • United Nations (and other similar regional organisations)

  • Universities

  • Funders

    • State funders

    • University Grant funders

    • Entrepreneur funders

    • Not-for-profit funders

8 United Nations

The United Nations operates as a PeaceTech innovator, and PeaceTech ‘enabler’, by:

  • Innovating to produce PeaceTech applications and connected digital innovation

  • Enabling by supporting the wider infrastructure for PeaceTech to be engaged in by others externally

The UN seems to be the only possible location of a PeaceTech masterplan that could cohere initiatives across countries and contexts. However, in practice it has a lot of different PeaceTech spaces and initiatives that seem very scattered. This is because the UN is a bit ‘like this’—big and departmentalised with organisations within organisations (remember Seán and Paul?). It therefore tends to work with broad policy directions and discrete organisational responses.

8.1 UN Policy Direction: Digital Transformation

Digital development has been set as a strategic objective by the UN Secretary General (essentially the CEO of the UN), and this is translated into departmental missions even if the exact mechanism of translation is not always clear. Indeed, it has been a bit chicken-and-egg: digital transformation in some departments preceded and drove the wider strategy, propelled by that Department’s needs. A number of general and department-specific reports and policies therefore underpin particular areas of peace-related digital innovation (see box for key examples), giving the UN its own internal PeaceTech ecosystem.

Institutionally, the UN works to try to join up initiatives. The Innovation in the UN Quick Guide, is really a website of resources that tries to pull together a picture of where and how innovation is happening. Interestingly, the Guide begins by ‘acknowledging innovation is complex, uncertain and somewhat disorderly’.

A UN Innovation Network (UNIN), attempts to cohere the work across the organisation, and to galvanise and connect to an ecosystem of technology, civil society, and academic partners outside the UN system, thereby leveraging innovation for the shared goal of peace.

UNIN subscribes to Principles for Digital Development, by humanitarian organisations, informed by early UN departments, and country and organisational initiatives (see timeline on about page).

Individual units within the UN, under this broad policy direction and driven by their own needs, have often their own digital transformation initiatives in the PeaceTech space.

UN Global Pulse is described as ‘Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab—a hub for experimentation to support and advance the UN Charter’. This in particular has developed Pluselab Jakarta (jointly between UN (Global Pulse) and the Government of Indonesia), and Pulselab Kampala (an inter-agency initiative established under the UN Resident Coordinator). These Labs work in a sense as ‘ecosystem builders’, similar to PeaceTech Lab, by supporting projects and innovation. While largely development-focused, they connect to conflicts in their respective regions directly, and indirectly.

PeaceTech-Relevant UN Policy

  • Keeping Watch: Monitoring, Technology and Innovation in UN Peace Operations (Dorn, 2011)

  • Performance Peacekeeping: Final Report of the Expert Panel on Technology and Innovation in UN Peacekeeping (UN, 2014)

  • UN Secretary General’s Strategy on New Technologies (UN, 2018)

  • The UN Secretary-General High Panel on Digital Cooperation Report (UN, 2019)

  • Data for Peace and Security (NYU Centre on International Cooperation, 2019)

  • Policy on Peacekeeping-Intelligence (UN, 2019)

  • Strategy for the Digital Transformation of UN Peacekeeping (UN, 2021).

Digital transformation strategies are now in place across peace-related departments, as we turn to.

8.2 UN Digital Innovation Cell, UN Department of Political and Peacekeeping Affairs

The Digital Innovation Cell is a unit within the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, established in 2020 that is a sense is most central to PeaceTech. This department houses most of the UN’s political work on peace processes and in particular the Mediation Support Unit (UN MSU), which supports peace negotiations. The innovation cell is ‘an interdisciplinary team dedicated to helping the Department and its field presences to understand and explore, pilot, and scale new technologies, tools, and practices in conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding’.

UN DPPA MSU has also conducted a report into Digital Technologies and Mediation in Armed Conflict (UN, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2019), as part of developing a Digital Toolkit (UN DPPA, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. (n.d.)) for mediators and these are available as an online resource.

The Toolkit describes three main technologies that are used by peacemakers:

  • social media

  • geographic information systems

  • data analytics

It also notes technologies of interest: blockchain and GIS systems—in which the UN has a distinctive capacity. The toolkit also identifies four main tasks that digital innovation assists:

  • Conflict Analysis

  • Engagement with Conflict parties

  • Inclusivity

  • Strategic communications

Two other aspects of the Innovation Cell’s work deserve mention as critical to the ecosystem. First, the provision of an open access Peace and Security Data Hub, modelled on the UN’s Humanitarian Data Exchange—itself also a useful PeaceTech resource. These are essentially data repositories which work to curate relevant global data and make it easily accessible on CKAN, an open source data management system. Second, a Futuring Peace initiative aims to ‘encourage interdisciplinary approaches such as futures thinking and speculative design and their practical limits to peace processes in a world of increasing complexity’. These two initiatives work in an ‘enabling’ capacity to create a wider infrastructure and community for PeaceTech.

8.3 Peacekeeping and Political Missions

Peacekeeping—a vital components of third party support for peace agreements—has seen further digital innovation initiatives. In 2021 a new Strategy for the Digital Transformation of UN Peacekeeping was published (2021), however digital transformation was already underway.

A digital interface—the Situational Awareness Geospatial Enterprise (Sage) Computer IT system (Manning, 2018) now supports Mission reporting in select countries, using the Ushahidi software discussed earlier. The system provides for incident reporting by peacekeepers, and for ‘situational awareness’, and has diverse forms of data feeding into it. This tool is part of an attempt to provide Peacekeeping ‘intelligence’, to support safe and effective operational capacity, and can now ingest a huge amount of data, including that collected from intelligence technologies that are themselves experimental for the UN (for example, tethered balloons, see Druet, 2021).

More recently, a distinct system called the Comprehensive Planning and Performance Support System (CPAS) aims to support ‘adaptive management’ by peacekeeping missions, by providing a data basis drawing on formal datasets and mission-specific data and reporting, to support better planning and decision-making (see further De Coning & Brusset, 2018). We will return to these in later chapters.

8.4 Other Peace-Related Departments and Digital Innovation

All of the key UN organisations whose work connects to peacebuilding also have digital transformation initiatives. The UN Refugee Agency—UN HCR that has responsibility for those displaced by conflict also has an Innovation Service, which includes a programme on digital inclusion of refugees in planning (UNHCR Digital Inclusion). UN Women has an innovation strategy, focused across its work. It has supported the PeaceFem App which we have been involved in creating, as described in the next chapter. The UN Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, which coordinates its human rights work, and works critically conflict-affected states, has a Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology including a useful resource page. UNICEF working for children’s rights also has a digital transformation mission and addresses the impact of digital technology on children.

9 The Ecosystem

The above panoply of initiatives and actors describes what has been described as a PeaceTech ecosystem—coined by NYU CIC. The ecosystem refers to the diverse range of actors and institutions building a PeaceTech concept and practice (Panic, 2020). The metaphor of an ecosystem refers to ‘complementary dynamic environments in which innovative approaches are implemented’.

It is possible to set out this ecosystem in lots of detail that attempts to map all the main PeaceTech projects globally. Indeed NYU CIC and EUI have done just this in interactive actual mapping of diverse projects. The EUI interactive mapping sets out 170 PeaceTech projects. The NYU CIC map is connected to an Ecosystem report (Panic, 2020).

Nearly all the PeaceTech reports produced spend time mapping and illustrating PeaceTech to try to capture what it comprises. They produce long lists of interesting examples. By the time reports are published, however, the world they describe is already out of date. Collectively, they reflect an ecosystem that is constantly changing and populated by eclectic actors and initiatives that come and go. The NYU CIC and EUI mappings are online and interactive and ongoing, in part to enable mapping a fluid PeaceTech world, with maps that can be changed over time.

The NYU-CIC report suggests five elements are important to building the PeaceTech ecosystem in the future:

  • Building trust through human-centred approaches

  • Capacity building

  • Innovation

  • Providing principles and frameworks

  • Building community and partnership

10 A Word About Ecosystems

Rather than doing organisational/initiative mapping—the existing ones are ongoing and excellent—I have focused more on thinking about the types of organisations involved and why they might be involved. Not just, ‘who’ is doing PeaceTech, but why and how?

I am interested in how the ecosystem is produced and what it in turn produces.

The word ecosystem is interesting here. We think of an ecosystem as ‘just there’. Yet, the whole idea of an ecosystem is an attempt to talk about both agency and natural development and how they come together—say, to create a garden.

We know that things we do and don’t do affect a garden’s ecosystem—like putting slug pellets or not putting slug pellets on our vegetable patches. Other changes to the garden ecosystem happen randomly—like a major frost that destroys some plants but not others. Yet others are produced by legal regulation—preventing people from using certain pesticides. The ecosystem will also have boundaries that are often artificially created and sustain the particular form of life there—whether it is by the garden wall, or our labelling of a particular habitat as being ‘its own ecosystem’.

Ecosystems, like life itself it would seem, develop stochastically. This is a great word that means ‘partly by design and partly due to random elements.’ In other words, we only control so much.

11 Conclusion

It is worth asking—what does the PeaceTech ecosystem sustain, what does it not sustain, what could we re-balance if we could? Are the motives of those in the ecosystem aligned? Does that matter?

These seem important questions for understanding how to access and navigate the ecosystem. My functional account of the types organisations involved in the PeaceTech ecosystem set out above, starts to tell a story of how complicated it can be to figure out how to work on a new digital strategy in the peacebuilding field.

I now turn to give examples of how we provided two PeaceTech tools, by way of illustrating how PeaceTech emerges in practice and connects with this ecosystem.

Questions

  1. 1.

    Do any of the types of organization in the PeaceTech ecosystem surprise you, and why?

  2. 2.

    Are there any types of organization missing?

  3. 3.

    What do you think this ecosystem would be good at producing? What might it struggle with?