Keywords

1 Task-Based Digital Innovation

The stories in the last chapter focused on delivering a PeaceTech application focused on a single area and objective. The ecosystem appears to focus on incubating scattered PeaceTech hacks for tasks, in part perhaps because peacebuilding involves a diverse set of practices. PeaceTech appears as a messy tapestry of examples, and multiple accounts of ‘PeaceTech’ begin with mapping, because it can be difficult to paint a coherent picture of PeaceTech. The label PeaceTech suggests there is a whole that is more than the parts. But is there? Does PeaceTech as a ‘thing’ really exist?

This chapter examines PeaceTech as ad hoc digital peacebuilding-support, and consider how it supplements low-or-no tech practices, to create greater peace process reach and traction. I call this PeaceTech as ‘hack’, because it tries to make peacebuilding practices more efficient and effective through task-specific Apps, online methodologies of consultation, improved security of communication, or technical fixes for peace agreement implementation tasks.

In the following chapters, in contrast, we will consider PeaceTech bundles of work that have ambition to be ‘of scale’ and offer themselves as solutions at a system cross-conflict level. However, this chapter asks—is once-off applications in fact the main and best contribution of PeaceTech?

2 Peacebuilding Tasks

At the beginning of our PeaceTech journey, we asked experienced peacebuilder Andy Carl to map PeaceTech as a field and his work continues to influence ours and this book. He did not start with technologies, or interventions of scale. He noted that PeaceTech solutions could appear very ‘supply side’ driven—solutions produced for which no need has been articulated. Working from a more ‘demand side’ perspective, Andy set out a list of peacebuilding tasks and needs. His framework has a broad application to all forms of peacebuilding, but it is useful to showing how key tasks undertaken to create and sustain a peace process can be the subject of digital experiments in-country (for further examples focused on inclusion, see Hirblinger, 2020). I set it out here in modified peace process applied form.

Understanding (Analysis and Sense-making) Using Innovative Data-Driven Approaches

  • Conflict and situation analysis to inform peace and conflict prevention and management response strategies

  • Understanding and seeing trends and patterns

  • Media monitoring and news aggregating

  • Public perceptions, views and opinions analysis

  • Early Warning and conflict and security risk monitoring (including maps and satellite image analysis),

  • Processing and translating big data

  • New data generation

Learning (Knowledge and Skills-building) Using Innovative Communication Technologies, Data and Interfaces

  • Informing stakeholder’s peace process strategies, tactics and decisions

  • Conflict and peace-related data sets and analysis

  • Comparative learning

  • Knowledge-sharing

  • Informing of the strategic learning needs of primary parties in negotiations

Enabling and supporting mediation digitally through data, online meetings and virtual reality

  • Enabling virtual meetings

  • Facilitating consultation feed-in

  • Improving mediator access to comparative data

  • Helping mediators understand conflict contexts

  • Reaching hard-to-reach communities

  • Providing for education

Strategic communications and enabling participation in peace processes (with conflict parties, and wider society) using digital innovation

  • Encrypted channels of communication for digital mediation

  • Strategic Public Communications on peace processes and agreements

  • Alternative and safe (virtual) space(s)

  • (online) Digital Dialogues

  • Digital platforms for engagement

  • Enabling collaboration

Influencing and educating through digital means

  • Influencing Behaviour and Personal choices through gamification and online information

  • Promoting ideas, values, attitudes and behaviours through same

  • Mobilising tjrpigj sa,e

  • Countering abusive, coercive and militarised uses of digital technologies

  • Immersive Environments

  • Pro-Peace and Pro-settlement (positive) digital communications

  • Resourcing? (encouraging business community to value and invest)

  • Collecting Data and Countering Hate Speech and Rumours

Accountability and transitional justice using online mechanisms

  • Online advice, counselling and resources

  • Online memorialization and ‘visiting’

  • Listening and promoting understanding through online tools

  • Promoting digital engagement with transitional justice mechanisms

Countering cyber-attacks, rumours and disinformation

Managing (and organising)

  • Project planning

  • Evaluating Peacebuilding

Interestingly, ‘PeaceTech enabler’ organisations often also start with tasks, and match possible ‘methodologies’ enabled by digital innovation. ConnexUs, which describes itself as a ‘social network’ and involves a collaboration between Build Up, and peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground, for example, provides an interactive web-based Digital Peacebuilder’s Guide. It is a terrific resource, worth exploring for inspiration. It provides a choice of ‘goals’ and each goal is linked to a set of digitally enabled tasks, which links to a ‘digital peacebuilding approach’, that includes a good description of the digital tool or technique, what the skills needed are, and examples of each in action.

The Guide is a great ‘ecosystem’ intervention that supports digital design and capacity. The list of tasks overlaps with Carl’s. It includes tasks such as ‘advocacy awareness’ that have analogue methods, and some digital peacebuilding techniques that have no analogue counterpart—digital information hubs, or games, that can be used for peacebuilding. You can use it to find real world examples of the types of digital innovation in the list above.

3 ‘One Thing’ Digital Technologies

There are a number of digitally transformative technologies that come into play in ‘once-off’ PeaceTech applications, as some examples illustrate.

App-isation. Seldom discussed as a game-changing technology on business courses (although the underpinining mobile technology is so-discussed), the capacity to put small programmes into simple ‘Apps’, that is forms of programme that can be used simply and easily from a mobile/smart phone, opens up PeaceTech solutions that are easy use in conflict contexts. These tools also have a data-gathering function. KoboToolbox, for example, provides a survey/data collection tool for challenging settings. KoboToolbox can be used online or offline, and synchronises in brief moments of connectivity, enabling also transfer off local mobile phones. It provides those collecting data with pre-programmed automated ways of creating statistical graphs and forms of descriptive analytics regarding the results of any survey.

Another interesting example is eyeWitness to Atrocities, provided by Lexis-Nexis and International Bar Association. This is an App that provides a mobile camera capacity to human rights defenders to document human rights abuses. The App uses meta-data and ways of storing and recording that enable verification but also storing in a trusted chain of custody, in ways that are designed to meet robust fair trial standards relating to management of evidence. The App can be ‘disguised’ on phones, where issues of human rights defender security requires.

Gamification. A range of self-managed deliberation tools provide forms of gamification or deliberation that aims to bridge polarization on contentious issues relating to the peace process. Sole Self-organised Learning Environment, Colombia, for example, has used a self-organised learning environment platform in Colombia to engage people in answering big social questions, with a view to peacebuilding. Also in Colombia the Atrévete online deliberative platform, was designed to support a deliberative process to address controversial peace process issues (see Restrepo, 2018).

Virtual Reality. Virtual and augmented reality has played a role in enabling visualisation, and forms of gaming. The UN DPPA Futuring Peace initiative already mentioned, has experimented in a number of countries in a number of different ways with using virtual reality to connect a range of people, including mediators, to situations in-country (UN DPPA, 2021).

Big Data. Big data from varied resources plays a key role in informing understanding and mediation efforts, and can be garnered from social media platforms, and large-scale surveys. Forms of machine learning, can enable information from say, peace process submissions, to be parsed into subjects very quickly, and brought together with other data points such as Twitter/X or other social or online media analysis.

Data visualisation. Date interfaces and dashboards, and interactive maps, enable ways of participative interactive visualization of information about peace and conflict situations, and also enable access to resources. For example, the Syria-Carter Centre Syria conflict mapping project has used analysis of open-source information related to the Syrian conflict, together with consultations with people in-country, to document and map over 200,000 conflict events in Syria. It also maps changing relationships between thousands of armed groups and changes in the lines of control between them. This information is used to provide mediators and humanitarian responders with up-to-date analysis of developments in Syria.

4 Peace Tech Value-Added

What does PeaceTech as Hack, offer to peacebuilding? In the business world digital transformation projects are driven by the concept of literal ‘value’—what they add to the business profits by adding efficiency, speed, or automation of tasks that reduce staff costs. If you look at the lists above, the digital methods change the core peacebuilding practices add value in a number of ways.

Remoteness and capacity. Hacks offer a capacity to work more remotely from the people being interacted with, and therefore with staff and budget efficiencies, but also provide capacity to navigate lack of safe travel, or dangers in face-to-face meetings.

For example, in Ukraine in 2014, a Donbas Dialogue Platform was created to provide a way for those who looking for nonviolent resolution of the conflict in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, to interact and share ideas across divided communities. In Northern Ireland, INCORE, CAIN have provided a database of physical memorials to victims across the country, with geolocations and photographs. The memorials database is also available in ‘App’ form, enabling not just those who may want to visit the memorials, but others moving around Northern Ireland, to explore memorials. However, the resource also enables relatives of victims who may not be able to visit memorials due to it being unsafe to visit them, or because they are living abroad.

Scaling up and out. Hacks offer a capacity to reach and incorporate the views of more people because of greater systematic capacity to survey, greater capacity for automation of survey and responses, or because innovation reaches new constituencies who are remote physically or disengaged from formal processes. Twitter/X analysis, for example, can reveal social attitudes (at least of twitter/X users), and inform how to influence audiences, or what forms of disinformation need combatted. These are new peacebuilding tasks that digital transformation in a sense enables and creates.

In a peace process, digital innovation can improve the reach of consultation, for example, in Libya, an interactive website in Arabic established in 2017, relating to the UN’s National Action Plan for Libya. A key element of this Plan was the organization of a National Conference and a preparation process. The website enabled people to engage with the process and submit views (see further UN DPPA, 2019; Lanz & Eleiba, 2018). Everyday Peace Indicators, and SMS to reach remote communities, already mentioned, provides another example.

Appeal to new constituencies. Hacks also may extend peacebuilding’s reach, to children and young people, and in particular young men who are the recruitment ground of armed groups, but also possible next-generation peacebuilders. Butterfly Works, Arabia Felix games discussed earlier, are an example.

Scientific method. Hacks offer an apparently more ‘scientific’ method for reaching people and obtaining information, because of capacity to quantify communications and responses, or perceptions and attitudes surveys, made in peace processes, rather than give impressionist or personally biased information as to ‘what people think’ (although of course other biases exist).

New mechanisms of influence. Hacks offer new and different ways to influence. Digital developments such as ‘gamification’ of peace that aims not just to engage people in questions of peace, but in a sense to get into their mind, to shape their attitudes towards particular situations, or to change ideological positions. During peace processes, digital innovation can improve strategic communication, or help to counteract disinformation or counter-messaging. For example, PeaceTech Lab has developed Hate Speech Lexicons in different languages that understand overt and coded vocabularies of hate speech, across dialects, to enable hate speech in social media to be identified, monitored and combatted in conflict areas.

New Systems of Support. Digital interfaces, offer new mechanisms for institutional support. For example, in Sudan the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility (CSRF) aimed to support a range of international actors and interventions to have a ‘conflict sensitive’ approach, so that they coordinate to supported a struggling peace process (at time of writing, disrupted by conflict). It works by providing guidelines, research and a space for ‘critical reflection’ on conflict sensitive practice. The interface provides an interactive map of Sudan, designed to support aid workers and peacebuilders.

5 ‘Ad hoc-ery’—Good or Bad?

Ad hoc digital peacebuilding is responsive to people just wanting to do ‘one good thing’. But is it sustainable? Is ongoing experimentation or ‘hactivism’ good or bad? Does it deliver on the promise of digital transformation in the peacebuilding field? And—perhaps most crucially—does it address the wider disruption of peacebuilding in a positive way?

Some practical concerns arise, such as whether some of the technology invented for ‘one purpose and context’, can be re-used and re-purposed. Or can a business model can be developed to sustain the initiative? Even a cursory glance at PeaceTech initiatives indicates the number of experiments and software innovations that have disappeared into the mists of time. Perhaps that does not matter if a very context-specific, time-limited use was intended. But, at least, questions should be asked about use of resources, efficiency and what constitutes good design practice.

To evaluate the impact of PeaceTech hacks, I suggest there are three different ways of understanding the relationship between PeaceTech ‘task-focused’ experiments, and the practice of peacebuilding, that speak to the nature of the contribution.

5.1 PeaceTech as Retro-fitting

When you have an old house and you want to say, add wall and roof insulation to bring it up to the energy efficient standards of new houses, you will be ‘retro-fitting’. Retrofitting is the act of adding something more technologically advanced than previously existed, long after the building has been built, to make it more efficient.

PeaceTech as hack in a sense ‘retrofits’ digital innovation to standard tasks, as a colleague alerted me to (on retro-fitting see Walker, 2023). In nearly all of the examples above, what is offered is a new digitally enabled way of doing something better—such as, building trust, improving communication, monitoring outcomes, that was part of past peacebuilding practices. What the technology offers is a better more efficient way of doing something that used to be done another way—a form of value.

5.2 PeaceTech as Modularization

However, sometimes what PeaceTech seems to offer a more radical modification of peacebuilding practices than the retrofitting analogy captures.

Many of the communication, participation and inclusion examples seem to offer not just better efficiency but a new form of ‘adaptive peacebuilding’ responsive to peace processes needs (De Coning, 2018). Adaptive peacebuilding focuses less on achieving pre-defined peacebuilding outcomes, and more on dynamic support to complex political processes where unexpected things happen.

Desai and Lang, examining the development work of PulseLab Jakarta, have suggested that we should think of digital innovation, less as ‘retro-fitting’ and more as ‘modularization’ (2022). Modularization is an idea, at the heart of contemporary business practice, that a standard base machine can be customised in multiple ways by the attachment of different modular components in different combinations. Adding different components can change what it is that the machine is and does: a phone can become a top-spec camera; a drone can become a weapon.

Modularization in business has the advantage of creating a flexible production system that enables multiple customised configurations while reducing what is re-fabricated each time. It reconfigures production processes from Engineer-to-Order to Configure-to-Order operating models; in other words, from ‘building-from-scratch’ to ‘assembling-from-parts’ production. The advantages are: less effort to customise; reduced costs; and reduction of internal complexity in fabrication machines by standardising components, and reducing the number of variants to design. Modularization therefore brings businesses flexibility, agility and cost savings.

What does ‘PeaceTech as modularization look like? How does it shift the ‘production process’ of peacebuilding, and what advantages might modularization bring in this domain?

PeaceTech as modularization is in a sense set out in the ConnexUs way of looking at things. The ConnexUs Guide asks—what are you trying to do, and rather than retro-fitting a standard new ‘thing’ to that practice, it points to a new way of bolting digital innovation onto the practice, depending on your skills, resources, and capacities, in ways that make you differently agile, flexible, and efficient in the practice. However, the bolting on also customises the practice to be something different than it was before, different in scale, in reach, in responsiveness.

Often the digital module added to peacebuilding task achieves several things at once. Peace gaming, for example, can build trust and civicness between young people, but without them having to travel and meet each other when that is not possible. The ways in which they game provide further data—for example how moves are made that can be fed back into algorithms that tell us something about what builds trust and how an individual’s choices change over time. The gameification of peacebuilding can reach huge numbers—in the case of Arabia Felix, 40,000 kids—a population that would have taken a massive resource for any organization to reach using analogue methods. Similarly, surveying online can deal with issues of security and access in complex field situations; and using online automated ways of processing surveys, enables many more people to be surveyed, and their opinions weighted mathematically in an instant, without embedding huge data team in a UN Mission. Modularization therefore brings the capacities of scale, remoteness, and behavioural influence already mentioned.

But of course, the question is whether all of these things are always better? Further, these same digital techniques can be bolted on as modules to attempts to destroy peace processes and employ logics of war. Bolting the same tools to war-making tasks, leads to more agile, flexible and efficient ways of pursuing war, that change what we even constitute to be war—for example cyberwarfare itself.

Does this matter? Most tools can be used for good and ill, as we discussed in Chap. 2. It does, I think. Enabling modules that can be used not just for peacebuilding but for war-making, or as we will see in the next chapters, vice versa, puts us in a curious fake-real space where war and peace themselves are intertwined in new ways.

For example, a key dynamic of double disruption is the attempt to game peace processes by claiming to be involved in conflict resolution by countries and militarized actors at the international level. The ability to articulate peace to be war and war to be peace, and to fuel this with disinformation, when coupled with peacebuilding’s potential increased ‘virtual’ nature, leaves ‘reality’ somewhat suspended across the board. However, virtuality may have upsides as well as downsides. Hirblinger argues that some of the ‘non-tangible’ outcomes digital technologies are not fake but part of a ‘a subjunctive sensitivity for future worlds that ‘could’ or ‘should’ be’ (2023, p. 113).

5.3 Hacks as Experimental Response to Disruption

A related, even more provocative idea as to ‘what is really happening’ is suggested by David Chandler’s work in the development field (2017). Chandler suggests that a kind-of unravelling of certainty as to ‘big development interventions’, reflects a new recognition of the profound political difficulties of achieving structural change. He suggests that in the absence of believing in structural interventions, the experimental once-off-hacks that digital innovation offers are attractive. He uses the term ‘hacktivism’ and an analogy with ‘life hacks’. Big issues cannot be solved, but experimental ‘hacks’ that offer small improvements may make a big difference. You can’t cure the pain of human existence, but you may be happier if you make your bed in the morning, sort of thing.

Chandler seems both attracted by a move, as he sees it, from the certainty and hubris of international development interventions, but also says that the move to ‘hacks’ is also a move to accept a socio-economic status quo, given an inability to change it.

Does this have resonance in the peacebuilding field? If the ‘big peace process’ is no longer possible in the world’s most protracted conflicts, and logics of war, and political marketplace are prevailing over logics of civicness, then supporting local people to ‘do their own thing’, including in a remote way by providing digital resources, is perhaps the only sensible intervention. It is interesting, is it not, that Seán in Chap. 1 was working for the UN, but on local peace—not something that could perhaps be immediately recognised as a ‘threat to international peace’ that the UN was set up to address. Yet, local agreement-making makes sense as a strategy for unravelling a complex conflict system in the new double disruption context: particularly if no other peace process is possible. However, does it essentially admit defeat to a national conflict status quo?

6 Conclusion

Is the ‘hacktivism as status quo’ charge fair? Not entirely. Perhaps I am wrong, but Chandler himself seems a little conflicted as to whether experimental responsiveness to particular development challenges, given the difficulties of structural change, is to be welcomed as less hubristic and more practical, or rejected as pro-status-quo. Plus, any problem with ‘ad hocism’, lies not in the digital technology’s impact, but in the scattered, overlaid, un-strategic practices of peacebuilding itself. Was it already a set of hacks, and if so was that bad?

On the whole my view is that, if a conflict system as in a system made up of related conflicts, rather than a singular conflict, exists and needs to be unwound, then perhaps it is time to ask …

How do local actors try to build peace from nothing? What activities of international peacebuilders support this? How do local people engaged in ‘civicness’ attempt to widen and deepen elements of a peace process into something capable of having nation-wide impact. What would it mean to really leverage PeaceTech to support these activities?

Could digital innovation be more ambitious and help cohere them into an incrementalist vision of piece-by-piece ‘conflict unwinding’ that was understood as a strategy where the sum would be more than the pieces? I think there is something in how hacks can be made to add up.

Questions

  1. 1.

    Which analogy for how PeaceTech do you think works best?

  2. 2.

    What are good and bad about ‘life hacks’? Do these same things apply to PeaceTech ‘hacks’?

  3. 3.

    Should PeaceTech try to be more systematic? How?