Understanding PeaceTech: A think piece to support the development of Peace Analytics

First commissioned in 2016, this ‘think piece’ examines how technologies can and are being used in efforts to build and sustain peace. The paper delves into what PeaceTech is, how it is different from other types of ‘tech’, and what it means for the future of peacebuilding. The paper gives examples of ten organisations doing groundbreaking work in the PeaceTech space, before offering a framework for understanding PeaceTech and snapshots of innovation. The paper then goes on to list potential challenges, such as issues around access, digital literacy, ethics and marketplace competition, and ends by discussing future opportunities for PeaceTech to meet the challenges of the 21st century

PeaceTech:Digital transformation to end wars

Why are we willing to believe that technology can bring about war... but not peace? PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End War is the world's first book dealing with the use of technological innovation to support peace and transition processes. Through an interwoven narrative of personal stories that capture the complexity of real-time peace negotiation, Bell maps the fast-paced developments of PeaceTech, and the ethical and practical challenges involved. Bell locates PeaceTech within the wider digital revolution that is also transforming the conduct of war. She lays bare the 'double disruption' of peace processes, through digital transformation, and through changing conflict patterns that make processes more difficult to mount. Against this backdrop - can digital peacebuilding be a force for good? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits? PeaceTech provides a 12-Step Manifesto laying out the types of practice and commitmentneeded for successful use of digital tools to support peace processes. This open access book will be invaluable primer for business tech entrepreneurs, peacebuilders, the tech community, and students of international relations, informatics, comparative politics, ethics and law; and indeed for those simply curious about peace process innovation in the contemporary world.</p

PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars

Why are we willing to believe that technology can bring about war… but not peace? PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End War is the world's first book dealing with the use of technological innovation to support peace and transition processes. Through an interwoven narrative of personal stories that capture the complexity of real-time peace negotiation, Bell maps the fast-paced developments of PeaceTech, and the ethical and practical challenges involved. Bell locates PeaceTech within the wider digital revolution that is also transforming the conduct of war. She lays bare the ‘double disruption’ of peace processes, through digital transformation, and through changing conflict patterns that make processes more difficult to mount. Against this backdrop – can digital peacebuilding be a force for good? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits? PeaceTech provides a 12-Step Manifesto laying out the types of practice and commitment needed for successful use of digital tools to support peace processes. This open access book will be invaluable primer for business tech entrepreneurs, peacebuilders, the tech community, and students of international relations, informatics, comparative politics, ethics and law; and indeed for those simply curious about peace process innovation in the contemporary world

Global PeaceTech : unlocking the better angels of our techne

The double-edged nature of technology pervades human history. Today, the potential for peace offered by the internet, social networks, mobile devices, digital identities, AI, blockchain, big data, geospatial information, is matched by the risks of disinformation, polarisation, online violence, surveillance, data privacy, cyber-attacks, and power concentration. Faced with this knife-edge between the bright and dark sides of disruptive technologies, how do we conjure up the better angels of our nature? Many agents for change around the world have sought to employ and regulate new technologies to foster peaceful processes under the aegis of “PeaceTech” initiatives. This paper introduces “Global PeaceTech” as a new field of social inquiry in the context of International Relations and Global Affairs, with the aim of analysing the global context in which these initiatives are embedded and interconnected, in order to draw prescriptive lessons. The deployment of technology for peace entails legal, political, economic, and ethical dilemmas that transcend national borders and require new models of transnational governance. By bringing together the world of “tech-for-good” and the field of international studies broadly defined as the study of patterns of global change, “Global PeaceTech” fills a gap at the intersection between peace studies and global governance and promotes policy innovation at the transnational level. The paper offers an overview of this agenda in four parts: Part I starts from the IR literature and explores the relationship between technology, peace and war. Part II defines the main differences between PeaceTech and Global PeaceTech. Part III sets out a new research agenda in Global PeaceTech, introducing core analytical concepts and research methods, and discussing its potential political and societal impact. In Part IV, we conclude by presenting a series of example of relevant research areas as a reference for further research in Global PeaceTech

Ways of seeing:Peace process Data-viz as a research practice

This article uses John Berger’s idea (1972) that images are connected to ‘ways of seeing’ to reflect on the creation of interactive visualizations of peace agreement and peace process data. We reflect on three visualizations created during a three-year long collaboration. We first describe our data, the peacebuilding ambitions for its use, and why we produced interactive forms of visualization. Second, we describe how the process of producing these visualizations created an interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration, which also connected different epistemic and geographic communities involved in peace processes. We term this ‘visualization-as-scoping’. Third, we reflect on both ‘what we saw’, through the process of visualization, how it affected policy, and the lessons we learned regarding visualization in the peacebuilding field. In the article we argue that our experience of ‘visualization-as-scoping’ inverts traditional assumptions about the connection of data visualization to policy-influence. In place of the notion of visualization-as-communication, focused on transmitting clear policy ‘messages’, we point to visualization-as-scoping as a practice of interchange, critique and re-iteration. Using John Berger as inspiration we suggest that the ‘ways of seeing’ that result can usefully disrupt the idea of a data producing singular policy prescriptions, and rather enable people to grapple better with the complex political processes they are involved in

Harnessing Social Media for Religious Peacebuilding: Faith in the Digital Age

This study explores social media’s potential as a tool for religious peacebuilding, focusing on its capacity to foster harmony through faith-based values in a digitally connected world. With 5.24 billion users globally and 90.8 million in the Philippines, where religion shapes cultural identity, social media offers unprecedented opportunities to connect faith communities, amplify sacred narratives, mobilize action, and educate for peace. Drawing on global and Philippine examples, we examine how platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok channel religious teachings to promote reconciliation, while addressing challenges like polarization, misinformation, hostility, and slacktivism. Historical narratives, including Hong Kong’s Yellow Umbrella Movement and the Philippines’ #FaithForTruth campaign, illustrate faith’s role in digital peacebuilding. Eight strategies, grounded in religious ethics, propose harnessing social media’s strengths: global reach, real-time engagement, education, and community-building to counter division. By embedding values like forgiveness and truth, religion transforms social media into a sacred space for peace, offering a model for conflict-affected regions like Mindanao

Extracting Named Actors from Text: Using Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Peace and Conflict Studies

This report explores the potential role of Named Entity Recognition (NER) in peace and conflict studies, drawing insights from PeaceRep’s use of the technology to extract signatory organisations from a large-scale database containing peace agreements – the PA-X Peace Agreement Database. PeaceRep’s successful application of NER in extracting signatory data from peace agreement texts provides an example of how to navigate complex textual data relevant to ending conflict, in a time where we increasingly require data as evidence for decision making. As text remains the primary medium in this domain, NER emerges as a crucial tool in identifying, extracting, and structuring key data, facilitating streamlined research and information extraction. Highlighting NER fundamentals and methodological approaches, this report advocates for transparent artificial intelligence, human oversight, and a functional approach tailored to peace and conflict studies. Accompanied by practical demonstrations in Python Jupyter Notebooks, the report showcases NER’s applications—from document summarisation to geospatial and temporal analysis. Ultimately, it emphasises NER’s potential in deciphering complex textual data while emphasising, and recommending, the need for nuanced approaches that balance NER’s strengths with its limitations in this critical field

Great expectations: a study of technology, peace, and education in Sri Lanka

The ubiquity of technology, a global decline in peacefulness over the last year (Global Peace Index, 2024, p.14), and the unique place educational spaces occupy in learning – if not unlearning – what we think we know about technology and peace all underscore the importance of pursuing research that crosses disciplines, seeks new intersections to examine, and reconsiders where and how certain research methods can be used. Rooted in the perceptions of war-affected educators and learners, this transdisciplinary thesis examines the intersection of technology and peace in educational institutions in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Framed theoretically by the Sociology of Expectations and the everyday peace paradigm, this study leverages the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) approach, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observations as complementary research methods. Data for this study on technology for peace in education, or PeaceTech, was collected in two public schools and one civil society organization (CSO) between 2022 and 2024 during Sri Lanka’s concurrent political and economic crises. The scope of the study includes between 30 to 50 participants for the EPI portion of data collection (dependent on research site), over 75 interview participants – some of whom sat for more than one interview, as well as others who are not formally counted that shared informational conversations, and over 450 survey respondents – dozens of whom are double counted in that number as they completed both the Baseline and Final surveys. Batticaloa, a coastal city (and district) in Eastern Province is a highly diverse area populated by Hindu Tamizhs, Muslims, and small Sinhalese Buddhists and Christian populations. Serving as a primary security hub for the Sri Lankan military, Batticaloa and the surrounding area endured significant violence throughout the country’s civil war. Eastern Province was determined to be liberated in 2007, two years before the formal end to the wider civil war in 2009. More recently, Batticaloa was impacted by interethnic violence in 2019 when the Christian congregation at the Zion Church was attacked by suicide bombers from a neighboring Muslim community on Easter Sunday. Amongst the plural contexts of civil war and regional, interethnic conflict, Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Education and associated offices have designed, delivered, and iterated a range of peace education programs in the nation’s public schools. The digitalization of Sri Lanka has also been a key priority of recent administrations. As such, within this national context of prioritizing peace, education, and digitalization following the civil war, Sri Lanka is arguably becoming a legitimate PeaceTech hub. This endeavor has also been supported rhetorically and financially by international development agencies and domestic civil society organizations alike. Three key findings in this thesis contribute to the existing scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Peace Studies, and Education. First is a participatory conceptualization of Technology for Peace developed by operationalizing the Everyday Peace Indicators method. This distinct approach to defining ‘PeaceTech’ proves equally feasible and accommodating of a broader perspective of what constitutes a technology that works for peace to include digital, analogue, and natural technologies. Survey data yielding participatory statistics based on EPI Technology for Peace indicators also shows that perceptions of PeaceTech in the three educational institutions largely did not change over time. Second, data from semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations reveal the extent to which technology is integrated in the delivery of peace and peacebuilding education in the three host institutions. Though educators in all research sites hold high expectations of technology integration for delivering peace-related content to their learners, there is a discernible difference between the access to technology, the quality of instruction, and the demonstrable learning outcomes between the public schools and the CSO. That peace itself is understood as political, however, is evident across all locations. Third, by framing Technology for Peace indicators as expectations, this study expands the Sociology of Expectations theory into the everyday space and encourages STS, a traditionally interpretivist field, to consider a better, more responsible form of applied positivism as relevant to our work

Virtual Reality Technologies as PeaceTech : Supporting Ukraine in Practice and Research

Peer reviewe