The Swiss PeaceTech Alliance (SAPT) was created in 2022 around the expertise of two pioneer academic institutions EPFL (Essential Tech Centre) and Geneva Graduate Institute (Tech Hub) and the practitioner platform Geneva Peacebuilding Platform (GPP).
In a period of changing strategic landscapes, the nature of conflict is becoming increasingly multifaceted, dynamic, hybrid and protracted, reaching many contexts across low, medium and high-income economies. Be that violence in the household, or urban violence or fully-fledged wars, conflict has many faces and with an impact in both physical and virtual worlds.
Against this backdrop, this project builds a dual connection between ‘peace’ and ‘tech’. On the one hand, it refers to the role of ‘technological innovation’ to enable more effective prevention, monitoring, containment, and resolution of violence and conflict; on the other hand, it refers to the role of ‘peace’ – in terms of principles, frameworks, capabilities and objectives – in the design and development of technologies to prevent harmful consequences of technology on people, societies and the environment.
In a society increasingly disrupted by technology, PeaceTech aims to both bring about innovative technologies to promote peace and assist in new technological innovation with ‘peace by design’. Novel approaches and methodologies at the intersection of peace and technology are needed, as much as the development of a new integrated, multidisciplinary understanding across the diverse professional communities associated to the ‘tech’ and ‘peace’ sectors. Multi-stakeholder alliances have an increasing importance in the field peace promotion. They can leverage on their complementary expertise to break sectorial silos and bridge capacities in order to achieve greater impact and accelerate the achievement of sustained peace for all.
Responding to the growing need to address conflict and build peace in both physical and virtual worlds, this project will stimulate peace innovation through concrete solutions based on technology; and vice versa, it will support the inclusion of peace promotion peacebuilding and peacemaking principles in technological innovation, with a critical eye on sustainability and the long-term effects of technology in peace and conflict.
This ground-breaking approach will leverage on the long tradition of Switzerland as neutral actor pioneering in peace promotion, as well as on its well-known excellence in science and technology.
The main differentiating element of this research project is the complementary traction that the two founding leading academic institutions (Geneva Graduate Institute and EPFL) will have to tackle the pressing unmet needs at the intersection of peace and technology, and implement tech solutions that will be well-substantiated and scalable.
This will not be possible without engaging a critical mass of experts, organizations, initiatives and other partnerships at national – including from the Swiss Confederation –, and international levels, and facilitating interactions and exchanges therein. Accordingly, Geneva Graduate Institute and EPFL will join forces with the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform (GPP), leveraging on its acknowledged traction to act as a ‘knowledge hub’ to advance new knowledge and understanding of peacebuilding issues and contexts, and to facilitate the interaction on peacebuilding between different institutions and sectors in Switzerland and worldwide.
The project was initiated by Dr. Achim Wennman and Dr. Klaus Schönenberg, who remain strategic advisors in this project.
Timeline: 2022-24
Keywords: Peacebuilding; Peacemaking; Technology; Digital technologies; Artificial Intelligence; AI; Peace studies; Conflict; Security; Transdisciplinary; Applied research.
Funding Organisation: Federal Department of Foreign Affairs(FDFA)
