Unlocking Technology for Peacebuilding: The Munich Security Conference’s Role in Empowering a Peacetech Movement


Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Artur Kluz: “This week’s annual Munich Security Conference is taking place amid a turbulent backdrop. The so-called “peace dividend” that followed the end of the Cold War has long since faded. From Ukraine to Sudan to the Middle East, we are living in an era marked by increasingly unstable geopolitics and renewed–and new forms of–violent conflict. Recently, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, measuring war since 1945, identified 2023 as the worst on record since the Cold War. As the Foreword to the Munich Security Report, issued alongside the Conference, notes: “Unfortunately, this year’s report reflects a downward trend in world politics, marked by an increase in geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty.”

As we enter deeper into this violent era, it is worth considering the role of technology. It is perhaps no coincidence that a moment of growing peril and division coincides with the increasing penetration of technologies such as smartphones and social media, or with the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality. In addition, the actions of satellite operators and cross-border digital payment networks have been thrust into the limelight, with their roles in enabling or precipitating conflict attracting increasing scrutiny. Today, it appears increasingly clear that transnational tech actors–and technology itself–are playing a more significant role in geopolitical conflict than ever before. As the Munich Security Report notes, “Technology has gone from being a driver of global prosperity to being a central means of geopolitical competition.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. While much attention is paid to technology’s negative capabilities, this article argues that technology can also play a more positive role, through the contributions of what is sometimes referred to as Peacetech. Peacetech is an emerging field, encompassing technologies as varied as early warning systemsAI driven predictions, and citizen journalism platforms. Broadly, its aims can be described as preventing conflict, mediating disputes, mitigating human suffering, and protecting human dignity and universal human rights. In the words of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), “Peacetech aims to leverage technology to drive peace while also developing strategies to prevent technology from being used to enable violence.”This article is intended as a call to those attending the Munich Security Conference to prioritize Peacetech — at a global geopolitical forum for peacebuilding. Highlighting recent concerns over the role of technology in conflict–with a particular emphasis on the destructive potential of AI and satellite systems–we argue for technology’s positive potential instead, by promoting peace and mitigating conflict. In particular, we suggest the need for a realignment in how policy and other stakeholders approach and fund technology, to foster its peaceful rather than destructive potential. This realignment would bring out the best in technology; it would harness technology toward the greater public good at a time of rising geopolitical uncertainty and instability…(More)”.

How tracking animal movement may save the planet


Article by Matthew Ponsford: “Researchers have been dreaming of an Internet of Animals. They’re getting closer to monitoring 100,000 creatures—and revealing hidden facets of our shared world….There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas.

Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater hills made of sand and coral fragments that stretch out 300 miles toward Cuba. They were spending a lot of time “crisscrossing, making highly tortuous, convoluted movements” to be near them, Gallagher says. 

It wasn’t immediately clear what attracted sharks to the area: while satellite images clearly showed the subsea terrain, they didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. It was only when Gallagher and his colleagues attached 360-degree cameras to the animals that they were able to confirm what they were so drawn to: vast, previously unseen seagrass meadows—a biodiverse habitat that offered a smorgasbord of prey.   

The discovery did more than solve a minor mystery of animal behavior. Using the data they gathered from the sharks, the researchers were able to map an expanse of seagrass stretching across 93,000 square kilometers of Caribbean seabed—extending the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%, according to a study Gallagher’s team published in 2022. This revelation could have huge implications for efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems—seagrass meadows are a nursery for one-fifth of key fish stocks and habitats for endangered marine species—and also for all of us above the waves, as seagrasses can capture carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests. 

Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena that remain invisible to humans. More than 100 years ago, leeches signaled storms ahead by slithering out of the water; canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s; and mollusks that close when exposed to toxic substances are still used to trigger alarms in municipal water systems in Minneapolis and Poland…(More)”.

Situating Data Sets: Making Public Data Actionable for Housing Justice


Paper by Anh-Ton Tran et al: “Activists, governments and academics regularly advocate for more open data. But how is data made open, and for whom is it made useful and usable? In this paper, we investigate and describe the work of making eviction data open to tenant organizers. We do this through an ethnographic description of ongoing work with a local housing activist organization. This work combines observation, direct participation in data work, and creating media artifacts, specifically digital maps. Our interpretation is grounded in D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism, emphasizing standpoint theory. Through our analysis and discussion, we highlight how shifting positionalities from data intermediaries to data accomplices affects the design of data sets and maps. We provide HCI scholars with three design implications when situating data for grassroots organizers: becoming a domain beginner, striving for data actionability, and evaluating our design artifacts by the social relations they sustain rather than just their technical efficacy…(More)”.

Categories We Live By


Book by Gregory L. Murphy: “The minute we are born—sometimes even before—we are categorized. From there, classifications dog our every step: to school, work, the doctor’s office, and even the grave. Despite the vast diversity and individuality in every life, we seek patterns, organization, and control. In Categories We Live By, Gregory L. Murphy considers the categories we create to manage life’s sprawling diversity. Analyzing everything from bureaucracy’s innumerable categorizations to the minutiae of language, this book reveals how these categories are imposed on us and how that imposition affects our everyday lives.

Categories We Live By explores categorization in two parts. In part one, Murphy introduces the groundwork of categories—how they are created by experts, imperfectly captured by language, and employed by rules. Part two provides a number of case studies. Ranging from trivial categories such as parking regulations and peanut butter to critical issues such as race and mortality, Murphy demonstrates how this need to classify pervades everything. Finally, this comprehensive analysis demonstrates ways that we can cope with categorical disagreements and make categories more useful to our society…(More)”.

Private tech, humanitarian problems: how to ensure digital transformation does no harm


Report by Access Now: “People experiencing vulnerability as a consequence of conflict and violence often rely on a small group of humanitarian actors, trusted because of their claims of neutrality, impartiality, and independence from the warring parties. They rely on these humanitarian organisations and agencies for subsistence, protection, and access to basic services and information, in the darkest times in their lives. Yet these same actors can expose them to further harm. Our new report, Mapping Humanitarian Tech: exposing protection gaps in digital transformation programmes, examines the partnerships between humanitarian actors and private corporations. Our aim is to show how these often-opaque partnerships impact the digital rights of the affected communities, and to offer recommendations for keeping people safe…(More)”.

Manipulation by design


Article by Jan Trzaskowski: “Human behaviour is affected by architecture, including how online user interfaces are designed. The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the regulation of behaviour modification by the design of choice architecture in light of the European Union data protection law (GDPR) and marketing law (UCPD). It has become popular to use the term ‘dark pattern’ (also ‘deceptive practices’) to describe such practices in online environments. The term provides a framework for identifying and discussing ‘problematic’ design practices, but the definitions and descriptions are not sufficient in themselves to draw the fine line between legitimate (lawful) persuasion and unlawful manipulation, which requires an inquiry into agency, self-determination, regulation and legal interpretation. The main contribution of this article is to place manipulative design, including ‘dark patterns’, within the framework of persuasion (marketing), technology (persuasive technology) and law (privacy and marketing)…(More)”.

Six ways to democratise city planning 


Report by DemocracyNext: “To live in thriving and healthy cities, we propose six possible ways to instigate systemic changes that can democratise the governance of urban planning decisions through Citizens’ Assemblies. Depending on a city’s current starting point, at least one, if not multiple, of these options can be seen as an initial ‘way in’ to begin making systemic changes to urban planning decision making. The six ways are outlined as different entry points on the following page…(More)”.

Handbook of Artificial Intelligence at Work


Book edited by Martha Garcia-Murillo and Andrea Renda: “With the advancement in processing power and storage now enabling algorithms to expand their capabilities beyond their initial narrow applications, technology is becoming increasingly powerful. This highly topical Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work, assessing its effect on an array of economic sectors, the resulting nature of work, and the subsequent policy implications of these changes.

Featuring contributions from leading experts across diverse fields, the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence at Work takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding AI’s connections to existing economic, social, and political ecosystems. Considering a range of fields including agriculture, manufacturing, health care, education, law and government, the Handbook provides detailed sector-specific analyses of how AI is changing the nature of work, the challenges it presents and the opportunities it creates. Looking forward, it makes policy recommendations to address concerns, such as the potential displacement of some human labor by AI and growth in inequality affecting those lacking the necessary skills to interact with these technologies or without opportunities to do so.

This vital Handbook is an essential read for students and academics in the fields of business and management, information technology, AI, and public policy. It will also be highly informative from a cross-disciplinary perspective for practitioners, as well as policy makers with an interest in the development of AI technology…(More)”

Not the End of the World


Book by Hannah Ritchie: “It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. Did you know that: 

  • Carbon emissions per capita are actually down
  • Deforestation peaked back in the 1980s
  • The air we breathe now is vastly improved from centuries ago
  • And more people died from natural disasters a hundred years ago?

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance, and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you’ve been told about the environment. Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn’t, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.      

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality…(More)”.

Language Machinery


Essay by Richard Hughes Gibson: “… current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As is quietly acknowledged in the footnotes of scientific papers, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. In the 1940s, the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated that language use could be both described by statistics and imitated with statistics, whether those statistics were in human heads or a machine’s memory. Shannon, in other words, was the first statistical language modeler, which makes ChatGPT and its ilk his distant brainchildren. Shannon never tried to build such a machine, but some astute early readers of his work recognized that computers were primed to translate his paper-and-ink experiments into a powerful new medium. In writings now discussed largely in niche scholarly and computing circles, these readers imagined—and even made preliminary sketches of—machines that would translate Shannon’s proposals into reality. These readers likewise raised questions about the meaning of such machines’ outputs and wondered what the machines revealed about our capacity to write.

The current barrage of commentary has largely neglected this backstory, and our discussions suffer for forgetting that issues that appear novel to us belong to the mid-twentieth century. Shannon and his first readers were the original residents of the headspace in which so many of us now find ourselves. Their ambitions and insights have left traces on our discourse, just as their silences and uncertainties haunt our exchanges. If writing machines constitute a “philosophical event” or a “prompt for philosophizing,” then I submit that we are already living in the event’s aftermath, which is to say, in Shannon’s aftermath. Amid the rampant speculation about a future dominated by writing machines, I propose that we turn in the other direction to listen to field reports from some of the first people to consider what it meant to read and write in Shannon’s world…(More)”.