PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars

Front matter

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PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars

Christine Bell

Index

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christine Bell grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, studied at Selwyn College Cambridge, Harvard Law School, and Queen’s University Belfast. She is Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform—PeaceRep, and part of the team responsible for the PA-X Peace Agreement Database. She has a long-standing mediation practice and academic engagement in peace and transition processes that aim to end violent conflict. Her work on peace processes has won the Francis Deak Prize of the American Association of International Law, and the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize, and in 2023 the PeaceRep team won the Royal Society of Edinburgh Mary Somerville Prize for excellence in team research, in recognition for its PeaceTech work relating to digital support for peace processes.

She is also Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh, and Assistant Principal (Global Justice), University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Professor, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University of Belfast.

PeaceRep is a programme that provides comparative research and PeaceTech innovation to support peacebuilding efforts in violent conflicts. In particular, the programme provides evidence-based support to the mediation, design and implementation of peace and transition processes globally with a focus on inclusion. PeaceRep focuses on some of the most complex contemporary conflicts, working with local researchers both within country and among displaced diaspora communities from: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine.

Christine Bell’s full research profile can be seen here.

Christine Bell, ORCID ID https://orcid.org/0000-0003 -0233-4410 xiii

LIST OF FIGURES

Peacebuilding Ripples Peacebuilding Gears Connecting Experts

Expert Clusters

‘PeaceTech’ Gartner Hype Cycle

21 39 171 172 200

XV

Chapter 1

Abstract The PeaceTech World described in this book is a racy, developing and exciting one. It harnesses peacebuilders, digital technology entrepreneurs and often local communities of activists, in pursuit of peace process innovation and influence. Their aim? To promote more peaceful relationships, more just structures and fairer outcomes, so as to prevent, de-escalate or resolve conflict. This chapter introduces PeaceTech World.

Keywords PeaceTech ¢ United Nations l.l PEACETECH IN ACTION

Seán sits in his air-conditioned office in the capital city of a very hot country with a ‘peace process’. He works for the United Nations (UN). His job involves deciding how to spend funds pooled by countries who cooperate to support the peace process. The money is used to support local peacebuilding projects in-country. There is one problem. There is not much of a peace process in evidence. There was a peace agreement many years ago. Then a revised one when the first did not work. Then more revisions. Each

© The Author(s) 2024 l C. Bell, PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38894-1_1 agreement tried to make the preceding ones work—amending them, adding new ‘implementation matrixes’? and new timelines. Despite these efforts, the ‘peace process’ barely exists.

Sean works and lives in the country. Except for the one week in six that he gets off which he uses to go home or recuperate in tourist spots in neighbouring countries. As an ‘international’ he works in a building in a ‘compound’—a gated community where lots of the diplomatic embassies and international offices are behind the same perimeter fence. Sean’s credentials as an international mean he cannot leave the compound easily: it is considered too unsafe. He does not just work in the compound but lives there too—in a different building in a more residential section. His world exists between these two buildings, and in the cafes and coffee shops around them. Except for a few days every two months, when the team visits projects ‘out there’ in the countryside. His home life is through his screen. He does not like that things are the way they are.

Sean’s job involves monitoring and reporting on how all the funded projects are going, so he has to put together a lot of project reports, and data relating to the country. He spends huge amounts of time gathering data, and cutting and pasting it into his reports. It is much more boring than what his family thinks he does. He tries to use this information to present to the donors how their money is spent, and what it is achieving. It takes forever, so he and his colleagues are working on an automated system to try to capture the data, and decrease the manual work.

Sitting in Geneva, Paul works on this same country, and sort of for the UN. He works to deliver food aid to places where people are going hungry. Many of those places are in countries experiencing armed conflict. Today he gathers international experts online. The organization he works for has just won a major award for peace. In fact, this organization does not ‘do peace’: it does food aid. Now his boss has questioned, if people think that food and peace are connected and have given us a prize for peace, should the organization try to measure the ‘peace impacts’ of its food aid? Sometimes they have been aware that programmes such as enabling people to get cattle are co-opted by armed groups for income, or trigger cattle rustling between warring communities.

When does food aid build peace and when might it have a negative peace impact? His boss has asked Paul to help to design a dashboard to help measure peace impacts, or warn of war impacts. This dashboard could then help the organization to think more systematically about how their proposed delivery of food aid might affect the conflict or help encourage peace.

When we say that Paul ‘sort of? works for the UN, what does that mean? He works for an agency within the United Nations that operates almost as an independent organization within the UN’s broad umbrella (see Foley, 2023, p. 4). While in some deep sense Sean and Paul work for the same organization, in another sense they do not. Their different suborganizations will not ask them to work together, and in a sense do not trust each other. Trust cannot exist within departments, even less so across them, as much of the data is sensitive to the particular job each agency does. Sometimes the information is sensitive because it could be helpful to ‘war tech’. Information on networks of civic groups, for example, can be used to target activists. Sometimes, however, there is no trust between agencies for much duller bureaucratic reasons. It is sensitive that the organization views things a certain way. Views of particular armed groups, or state armies, for example, need to be discussed within organizations, but can cause a diplomatic incident if they are seen as the formal or even informal position of the organization.

Sean and Paul may never learn of each other, and their projects will be locked down to those ‘who need to know’ within their own agency or department. If they do meet in ‘shows and tells’, they will never be asked to collaborate, and will not be allowed access the other’s finished data system. Could it not be a different way, they wonder?

Out beyond the capital city, Atem who is from the country works as part of a Churches project trying to support local agreements to end conflict arising from cattle theft and kidnapping. He gets money from Seán’s fund. The conflict Atem is engaged with is between local communities and armed groups. But it has curious links to the ‘national conflict’. For example, there is overlap between local organizations and the main armed groups that operate country-wide. Conflict in his area can trigger conflict in other places, and vice versa. Atem’s childhood friend Samuel—also with activist commitments—is doing a PhD on local agreements and peacebuilding initiatives ‘from the bottom up’ at a University in Norway. Samuel is studying there on a scholarship targeted at people from his country. But he spends most of the time ‘in the field’, or in other words ‘back at home’. Atem and Samuel figure that—if they created a simple

App, they could support information sharing between social activists and create a crowd-sourced way to monitor the implementation of agreements and perhaps even help support new ones being reached.

Everyone ‘knows’ when kidnappings or killing of cattle that signifies an agreement’s breakdown is going to happen. If they had a safe and secure and fast way to communicate with each other, perhaps attacks could be prevented, by simply moving people and animals out of harm’s way. Could Atem and Samuel provide this? A ‘data-driven initiative’ in Samuel’s Norwegian university offers funding, and the Informatics Department offers to help. Samuel and eager young computing academics design and deliver a prototype App for communication. Atem works with Samuel to develop the App and trial it in the field. It proves quite simple and effective, where there is connectivity, or at least for some reason agreement violations subside. The difficulty is that when the App does not work quite right or needs improved, the Norwegian Informatics Department staff cannot always spare the time and resources to develop it.

Aker is Atem’s sister. She listens to her brother talk, and wonders if a similar App could help with her work. She works in an organization supporting victims of sexual violence. Sexual violence existed before the conflict, during it as part of armed violence, and has continued even in moments when peace has been celebrated. Could they have a similar App to assist in prevention and reporting of sexual violence? She wonders about whether this would really work for the issues and people she serves. Have Atem and Samuel thought about whether women will be able to participate in their initiatives? Most of the people with information about imminent attacks will be women: they hear and swap information from across communities as they go to collect fire wood to cook, or to get water. This is also often when attacks against women occur as they stray farther from safe areas when climate change makes both water and wood scarce. But women often don’t own phones, and when technically they do, they often don’t control when they are used, or get to take them outside the home.

Is sexual violence not also something that should be reported on and taken seriously as violence ‘to do’ with the conflict? What is peace, she wonders, if resolving conflict is does not resolve this violence? Peace processes and wars come and go, and the reasons given for violence against women change, but their experience of violence does not.

Nick is sitting in an office in an Ivy League University in North America. He and his team are looking down on the same country from above. They have developed a capacity to use open-source satellite technology and images to monitor agricultural development. They have worked collaboratively across social science and geospatial technology and can now use the many publicly available satellite images to try to understand drought and where crops are doing well and where they are failing. This work sheds light on how the lives of people are affected by climate change and helps inform development organizations to support local communities to be ‘resilient’. Nick’s team also monitors what happens when crop failure becomes a driver of displacement as people move in search of food. Until recently Nick’s research would not have existed, but has been made possible because publicly accessible geospatial imagery is now free or very cheap.

Today, as they monitor crops they notice something strange. In the area they are zoning in on, all the roofs have disappeared from the houses. This triggers alarm: people take the roofs off houses when they are moving. The houses contain metal that has a value. But the crops are still in the ground, so why are people on the move? Nick and his colleagues get other satellite imagery, and look more closely down the road. They see villages burning just a short distance away. The villagers seem to know that an armed group is moving through with violence, and are fleeing. Nick and his team triangulate their satellite data with local evidence by WhatsApping some contacts in the area—yes, this is what is happening. There are other villages further down the road who do not seem to know they are in the pathway of a marauding armed group. Nick and his team agonise— there is a prospect of huge violence and civilian death, if villagers down the road do not move. The team faces a dilemma. Will they go public with what they know and warn villages down the road? Or is this something they should not interfere in? After all, they were only trying to look at crops. Nick makes a decision and goes public, warning people locally of what is coming.

Something he did not expect happens. Another armed group further down the road mounts an ambush, and kills many of the first armed group. In the North American University, Nick and his team feel uneasy. This is not what they meant to happen. But was it their fault? What do they think should have happened? Are they playing God?

1.2 INrTRODUCING PEACETECH

These PeaceTech stories are all drawn from real life, amended a little: the country and their coincidence in it are mostly fictional, as are some of the details. The key elements, however, are drawn from practices I have encountered across a number of violent conflicts going on in the world, and often do all co-exist in some form within a single country. The stories illustrate real-world efforts concerning the business of peace, the business of development, and the business of war, all of which rely on digital technology to achieve their goals. As you go through this book, you may recognise some real-life examples that resemble those above, and we will see yet other examples of digital innovation and peace-focused applications.

These are stories of what we are calling ‘PeaceTech’—that is—innovation in the use of digital technologies to support peacebuilding. This book maps out ‘PeaceTech’ as an emerging set of peacebuilding activities that connect to a wider digital revolution that affects all aspects of all our lives. The book assesses how PeaceTech aims to end violent conflict in deeply divided societies.

PeaceTech World, however, operates alongside ‘WarTech World’, where the same technologies also carry significant risk for escalating conflict, targeting civilians, or undermining the political institutions that offer an alternative to violence. Can tech really be used for good and to end conflict? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits? Or are PeaceTech and WarTech inevitably part of the same picture—each attempting to outwit the other, in a mutually building dynamic?

1.3 Asout Tuts Book

This book aims to set out PeaceTech as used to support peace and transition processes, and introduce some of its potential and some of its challenges. I hope the book will support those who aspire to ‘do PeaceTech’ in some form or other. I draw on my own experience in incubating PeaceTech projects as part of a dynamic research group in PeaceRep, www.peacerep.org which has innovated to produce what I term in Chap. 11—‘Peace Analytics’. Through this work I have been part of what is being termed the ‘PeaceTech Ecosystem’ that I talk about in Chap. 6— that is, a set of practitioners, researchers, funders, tech entrepreneurs, and people living in conflict, that are seeking to support use of technology in peacebuilding, and who have a sense of being in a network with each other.

I relate the book to a wider context of digital transformation, to understand how PeaceTech sits as part of this broader ‘fourth industrial revolution’ moment. Digital transformation technologies are often central to business development discussions because they re-shape how businesses make money. Business consideration of digital transformation understands new technologies to have complicated ‘disruptive’ effects on normal ways of doing business, that have a wider set of consequences for which business becomes dominant in an area, which one thrives, and which one fails. I am interested to explore when and how use of technology shapes the peacebuilding field. Peacebuilding is not a set of market transactions, but an attempt to engage in a complex political practice. So what happens when new technologies are used?

I also try to focus on PeaceTech from a ‘how to do it’ point of view, rather than just analysing it. There are many good reports trying to map out PeaceTech, but few that engage with the practical struggles involved in doing PeaceTech and how these shape what emerges. Yet, academics are beginning to consider the ‘politics’ of PeaceTech, as what they call a ‘socio-technical’ system that produces a ‘socio-material’ reality. This means: that the way of doing something through a particular technology, can shape the ends of what is produced, to produce perhaps something different from what was intended (see e.g., Hirblinger et al., 2022). In our work, we have experienced a lot of trial and error, that has given us both confidence and doubts about what PeaceTech can and should do. The book is partly an attempt to share our learning and deliberations.

The book is written with the flavour of a ‘business practice / self-help’ book for would-be PeaceTech enthusiasts who want to engage. Apologies if you are a person for whom that style or project grates. I hope I also reflect the self-critical reflection that I think should be carried alongside any PeaceTech practice, and help shape its ambition and design. I add questions at the end of each chapter to support reflection.

I also want the book to join up four groups of people who might be interested to know more.

The first group are people involved with and engaged in peacebuilding as researchers, students or practitioners, or even just because they live in a conflict, who are curious to understand digital innovation in their field better. They might be curious about the potential of a digital innovation to address a very specific problem; or they may need to understand tech jargon for their job; or are just the sort of people who are attracted to new ways of working.

The second group are those from a business background who are interested in digital innovation and how it works more generally. These people may find something interesting about when and how digital innovation is impacting on the unfamiliar world of brokering peace, and learn more about how business interests are increasingly involved.

The third group, are those who are from a more technical digital background such as data engineers, software developers, who perhaps seek more meaning and value in their life and work, and want to understand what their type of work could bring to something that has a wider global significance such as peacebuilding.

Finally, I want the book to influence the development of those already involved in building the PeaceTech world—hence my concluding ‘Futuring Peace—Manifesto’. As I will sketch out in Chap. 6, an alreadypresent ecosystem of humanitarian, development, peace and conflict, human rights and business actors are engaged in PeaceTech. In the last years, governments in Norway, Finland, and Switzerland have articulated ambitions to drive PeaceTech in some sense. PeaceTech innovation is at the heart of the UN’s attempts to transform its work in a digital transformation strategy. Yet while offering new potential, all this activity and rapid proliferation risks spinning into duplication, competition and incoherent development. Moreover, PeaceTech innovation can have complicated consequences, as Nick’s story indicates. I therefore use the book’s conclusion to offer thoughts as to how PeaceTech should proceed.

1.4 Book STRUCTURE

The structure of the book is as follows.

Part I: What Is PeaceTech? sketches the basic questions regarding what PeaceTech is, where it sits with reference to the broader ‘digital transformation moment’. I set out the main digital technologies shaping the field.

Part II: Doing PeaceTech describes who is involved in PeaceTech and some of their incentives. I illustrate the use of the main PeaceTech technologies through what I suggest are the four main pockets of activity: Ad Hoc peacebuilding support (PeaceTech as ‘hack’ ); Conflict Early Warning Systems; Geographic Information Systems, and remote-sensing including satellite data; and data-driven support to peace processes that I term—Peace Analytics.

Part III: PeaceTech Challenges draws together the ‘how to’ elements of early chapters to set out particular key challenges in thinking about, designing and using PeaceTech applications. I also point to the new legal and ethical dilemmas and the ways our existing frameworks do not address them, and point to new emerging frameworks. In conclusion, I assess the future directions of PeaceTech and contribute a short ‘manifesto’ to shape it if it is to do good rather than harm.

Throughout I draw on the PeaceTech work that I and the team I am part of have engaged in and learnt from.

1. What is your reaction to the stories?

2. What examples of PeaceTech can you think of?

3. Is PeaceTech a good term, or can you think of other terms to use for digital technology and peacebuilding?

REFERENCES!

Foley, C. (2023). The protection paradox: How the UN can get better at saving civilian lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hirblinger, A. T., Hansen, J. M., Hoelscher, K., Kolås, Å., Lidén, K., & Martins, B. O. (2022). Digital peacebuilding: A framework for critical-reflexive engagement. International Studies Perspectives, 243), 265-284. https://doi. org/10.1093/isp/ekac015

TAIl last accessed 1 May 2023.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nce-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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PART I

What Is PeaceTech?

CHAPTER 2 PeaceTech: What Is It?

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

Keywords Civicness; Digital innovation; Peacebuilding; Peace processes; Technology

2.1 LEGACIES

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

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

© The Author(s) 2024 13 C. Bell, PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars, https: //doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38894-1_2 l4 C. BELL

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

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

2.2 DEFINING PEACETECH

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

The following definition is a useful starting point:

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

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

PeaceTech Definitions PeaceTech is....

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

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

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

— Tools that foster positive outcomes like enhanced social wellbeing, sustainable economies, stable governance, rule of law, and safe and secure environments.

— And so much more. (Peacetechlab)

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

2.3. Waar Is DIGITAL INNOVATION?

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

Yet, both the examples above involve forms of innovation. If you read Firchow and Mac Ginty’s work, you will find out about an interesting project called ‘Everyday Peace Indicators’, involving a creative attempt to measure the success or failure of peace processes ‘from the bottom up’ (see also Everyday Peace Indicators). They used SMS texting to generate l6 C.BELL bottom up peace indicators and measure perceptions of peace in hard-toaccess populations. No-one engaged in implementing the peace process had ever really bothered to ask people what they thought peace should look like, or what they wanted from it—what would have to change for them to experience peace? Yet, why should international supporters of peace processes define what ‘peace’ looks like from a perspective of ‘when can we leave’? Is it not important that peace is felt in people’s everyday lives, far from the capital cities that international actors reside in? Everyday Peace Indicators are now taken seriously by international organization as a way of benchmarking positive change, these include organizations like the World Bank that we think of as disconnected from local communities.

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

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

2.4 Wuat Is PEACEBUILDING?

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

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

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