The Future of Peacebuilding: Why Investing in PeaceTech is Essential in Today’s Geopolitics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Artur Kluz and Stefaan Verhulst: “In today’s geopolitical landscape, marked by escalating tensions and technological advancements, there is a significant opportunity for technology to contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding: i.e. peacetech. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his recent speech on Technology and the Transformation of US Foreign Policy, emphasized the crucial role technology plays in geopolitical contests and its potential as an “engine of historic possibility — for our economies, for our democracies, for our people, for our planet.” His assertion that “security, stability, prosperity — they are no longer solely analog matters” underscores the necessity to urgently focus on and invest in technological innovations that can support peacebuilding in the digital age.

Peacetech is an emerging field that describes a range of technologies that can be used for peacebuilding. From satellite internet constellations and early warning systems to AI-driven conflict prediction models, peacetech has the potential to transform the landscape of peacekeeping and conflict prevention. With its diversity of applications, it can support institutions’ peacebuilding or conflict prevention activities by providing insights faster and at scale. It can empower local populations to promote their safety and security and help observers predict future conflict…(More)”.

Training new teachers with digital simulations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Susan McKinnon Foundation: “This report shows the findings of a rapid review of the global literature on immersive simulation for teacher preparation. It finds that immersive digital simulations – and corresponding supports – can create significant positive shifts in trainee teacher skills, knowledge, and self-efficacy. The evidence is strong; of the 35 articles in our review, 30 studies show positive improvements in trainee teacher outcomes. The 30 studies showing positive effects include studies with rigorous designs, including a comprehensive systematic review with many well designed randomised controlled studies (the ‘gold standard’ of research). Benefits are seen across a range of teaching skills, from classroom management and teaching instruction through to better communication skills with parents and colleagues.


Six active ingredients in the implementation of digital simulations are important. This includes incorporating opportunities for: [1] instructional coaching, [2] feedback, [3] observation, [4] visual examples or models of best practice, [5] high dosage, that is, practicing many times over and [6]
strong underpinning theory and content… (More)”.

LOGIC: Good Practice Principles for Mainstreaming Behavioural Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “This report outlines good practice principles intended to encourage the incorporation of behavioural perspectives as part of standard policymaking practice in government and governmental organisations. Evidence from the behavioural sciences is potentially transformative in many areas of government policy and administration. The 14 good practice principles, organised into five dimensions, present a guide to the consistent production and application of useful behavioural science evidence. Governments and governmental organisations looking to mainstream behavioural public policy may use the good practice principles and case studies included in this report to assess their current policy systems and develop strategies to further improve them…(More)”

Generative AI and Democracy: Impacts and Interventions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Demos (UK): “This week’s election announcement has set all political parties firmly into campaign mode and over the next 40 days the public will be weighing up who will get their vote on 4th July.

This democratic moment, however, will take place against the backdrop of a new and largely untested threat; generative-AI. In the lead up to the election, the strength of our electoral integrity is likely to be tested by the spread of AI-generated content and deepfakes – an issue that over 60% of the public are concerned about, according to recent Demos and Full Fact polling.

Our new paper takes a look at the near and long-term solutions at our disposal for bolstering the resilience of our democratic institutions amidst the modern technological age. We explore the top four pressing mechanisms by which generative-AI challenges the stability of democracy, and how to mitigate them…(More)”.

Digital Media and Grassroots Anti-Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book edited by Alice Mattoni: “Delving into a burgeoning field of research, this enlightening book utilises case studies from across the globe to explore how digital media is used at the grassroots level to combat corruption. Bringing together an impressive range of experts, Alice Mattoni deftly assesses the design, creation and use of a wide range of anti-corruption technologies…(More)”.

Private Thought and Public Speech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by David Bromwich: “The past decade has witnessed a notable rise in the deployment of outrageous speech and censorship: opposite tendencies, on the face of things, which actually strengthen each other’s claim. My aim in this essay is to defend the traditional civil libertarian argument against censorship, without defending outrageous speech. By outrageous, I should add, I don’t mean angry or indignant or accusing speech, of the sort its opponents call “extreme” (often because it expresses an opinion shared by a small minority). Spoken words of this sort may give an impetus to thought, and their existence is preferable to anything that could be done to silence them. Outrageous speech, by contrast, is speech that means only to enrage, and not to convey any information or argument, in however primitive a form. No intelligent person wishes there were more of it. But, for the survival of a free society, censorship is far more dangerous.  

Let me try for a closer description of these rival tendencies. On the one hand, there is the unembarrassed publication of the degrading epithet, the intemperate accusation, the outlandish verbal assault against a person thought to be an erring member of one’s own milieu; and on the other hand, the bureaucratized penalizing of inappropriate speech (often classified as such quite recently) which has become common in the academic, media, professional, and corporate workplace. …(More)”.

Digitalization in Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jessamy Perriam and Katrine Meldgaard Kjær: “..shows that as welfare is increasingly digitalized, an investigation of the social implications of this digitalization becomes increasingly pertinent. The book offers chapters on how the state operates, from the day-to-day practices of governance to keeping registers of businesses, from overarching and sometimes contradictory policies to considering how to best include citizens in digitalized processes. Moreover, the book takes a citizen perspective on key issues of access, identification and social harm to consider the social implications of digitalization in the everyday. The diversity of topics in Digitalization in Practice reflects how digitalization as an ongoing process and practice fundamentally impacts and often reshapes the relationship between states and citizens.

  • Provides much needed critical perspectives on digital states in practice.
  • Opens up provocative questions for further studies and research topics in digital states.
  • Showcases empirical studies of situations where digital states are enacted…(More)”.

Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper with Dolores Albarracín, Bita Fayaz-Farkhad & Javier A. Granados Samayoa: “Unprecedented social, environmental, political and economic challenges — such as pandemics and epidemics, environmental degradation and community violence — require taking stock of how to promote behaviours that benefit individuals and society at large. In this Review, we synthesize multidisciplinary meta-analyses of the individual and social-structural determinants of behaviour (for example, beliefs and norms, respectively) and the efficacy of behavioural change interventions that target them. We find that, across domains, interventions designed to change individual determinants can be ordered by increasing impact as those targeting knowledge, general skills, general attitudes, beliefs, emotions, behavioural skills, behavioural attitudes and habits. Interventions designed to change social-structural determinants can be ordered by increasing impact as legal and administrative sanctions; programmes that increase institutional trustworthiness; interventions to change injunctive norms; monitors and reminders; descriptive norm interventions; material incentives; social support provision; and policies that increase access to a particular behaviour. We find similar patterns for health and environmental behavioural change specifically. Thus, policymakers should focus on interventions that enable individuals to circumvent obstacles to enacting desirable behaviours rather than targeting salient but ineffective determinants of behaviour such as knowledge and beliefs…(More)”.

Quantum Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Primer by Jane Bambauer: “Quantum technologies have received billions in private and public
investments and have caused at least some ambient angst about how they will disrupt an already fast-moving economy and uncertain social order. Some consulting firms are already offering “quantum readiness” services, even though the potential applications for quantum computing, networking, and sensing technologies are still somewhat speculative, in part because the impact of these technologies may be mysterious and profound. Law and policy experts have begun to offer advice about how the development of quantum technologies should be regulated through ethical norms or laws. This report builds on the available work by providing a brief summary of the applications that seem potentially viable
to researchers and companies and cataloging the effects—both positive and negative—that these applications may have on industry, consumers, and society at large.

As the report will show, quantum technologies (like many information technologies that have come before) will produce benefits and risks and will inevitably require developers and regulators to make trade-offs between several legitimate but conflicting goals. Some of these policy decisions can be made in advance, but some will have to be reactive in nature, as unexpected risks and benefits will emerge…(More)”.

Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Paula Bialski: “Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings.

The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don’t feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness…(More)”