Article by Stefaan Verhulst, Nadiya Safonova and Hannah Chafetz: “The world is facing increasingly complex challenges, including higher levels of conflict, displacement, political polarization and social fragmentation. Addressing these challenges requires new tools and approaches that can support conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and advancing resilient societies.
PeaceTech is the intentional use of technologies and data to save lives, safeguard human dignity, prevent, mitigate, or recover from conflict, enable accountability, and help people live with dignity, agency, and security.
Yet while enormous investment has gone into technologies of war, comparatively little attention has been devoted to technologies explicitly designed to prevent violence, protect civilians, strengthen resilience, and build lasting peace. This mapping seeks to help fill that gap.
Drawing on desk research conducted between February and May 2026 and learnings from supporting the 2023 – 2025 Kluz Prize for PeaceTech, we identified and curated 100 current and potential use cases of PeaceTech across the conflict cycle and for long-term peacebuilding.
This mapping is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation and the diversity of peacebuilding contexts, no single review can capture every current or emerging PeaceTech application. Instead, the 100 use cases are designed to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities, identify promising patterns, and stimulate further discussion, research, and innovation across the field.
More detailed case studies about these use cases along with the potential and risks of PeaceTech will be published in our forthcoming white paper this fall.
The 100 Use Cases
Figure 1. Screen capture of 100 Use Cases of PeaceTech
The 100 Use Cases are categorized by maturity level. As shown in the above spreadsheet, we identified:
- 20 established use cases that have been deployed at scale with evidence of impact;
- 20 growing use cases that have active pilots or are in the early stages of deployment;
- 20 use cases in the conceptual stage of design; and
- 40 unexplored use cases that have potential but have not yet been fully established or deployed.
In what follows we outline several key themes across each of these categories. Three broader observations emerged from reviewing more than one hundred current and future examples:
- Most PeaceTech today focuses on responding to conflict rather than preventing it.
- AI starts to appear across nearly every stage of the conflict cycle.
- The largest innovation gap lies not in hardware but in coordination, governance, incentives, and trusted institutions…(More)”.
