Peace, Tech, Business, AI

I took a week off from book production and promotion to focus on another and increasingly related obsession—creating a for-profit peacebuilding sector, presumably with a focus on information technology and the like.

What follows are some first thoughts and a new first initiative—at a time when I thought I might be scaling back.

A (Strange) Week at the Office

In this case, it wasn’t planned—at least not by me. It just so happened that AfP had scheduled events on Tuesday and Thursday and my friends at the Highlands Forum had organized a third in between. I also hadn’t planned for Abby Rapoport plus two of my Highlands friends to show up at all of them which made them unexpectedly charged—and fun.

All three would get me out of the house and break one of my cardinal rules—not going to the AfP office more than once a week.

Add to that the serendipitous fact that I am just beginning to take AI seriously, overcoming my doubts, and thinking about how it could enhance my own work as well as what the peacebuilding community as a whole are trying to do.

While I could see the potential—including when Notebook LM turned my book into an informative and often funny podcast—I didn’t expect anything really cool to come out of the three events.

I was wrong in two key ways. To begin with, it is more important than ever for us to create that new peacebuilding and business sector. But, as the crappy images my AI created suggest, we have a long way to go before we get there, a point I will return to in ending this post.

Not a New Idea, But….

As someone who fits almost all of the stereotypes of a 1960s leftist, this was not something I thought much about until the late 1980s when I was already a full professor who was no longer satisfied just being a political scientist.

By then, I was active in the Beyond War movement that was based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Most of my mentors were early inventors and corporate founders in the first round of tech startups.

All of a sudden, my interest in technology that went back to my freshman year in college when I learned to code and then in my first political science research methods course that introduced me to ways that computers, statistics, and modeling could help activists like me end the war in Vietnam.

Twenty years later, my new friends were suggesting that we could take the skill set and entrepreneurial mindset that they were developing in Silicon Valley and use them to ramp up what peacebuilders could accomplish until we reached the paradigm shift I had also been obsessed with since my undergraduate days.

I got hooked about what we could learn from startup culture and the tech industry. I even thought about going back to school and getting an MBA.

At first, I was something of a lone wolf. Very few of my colleagues had any interest in exploring for-profit environments despite the fact that some promising initiatives were taking place in adjacent fields such as disaster relief reflected most notably in Operation Strong Angel which brought together serving military officers, international NGOs, and the tech industry.

There have been a few attempts to build for profit peacebuilding networks, but even the most promising ones like Silicon Peace (oddly enough based in Ireland rather than California) and the Peace Tech Lab (originally located at the United States Institute of Peace) sputtered and died.

Other initiatives are being incubated at American Universities, including San Diego, Drexel, and my own George Mason, none of them have gotten very far either.

So, my initial enthusiasm had been tempered by a strong does of reality. Besides, what did I know about building businesses? After all, I had resisting those brief temptations to get that MBA….

Three Overlapping Events

It was in that context that my colleagues organized these three events. None of them was intended to be a game changer, but each moved one needle in a positive direction.

First was an invitation only event aimed on rethinking funding sources now that USAID and other streams have disappeared. To say that many of AfP’s larger members have been devastated by the cuts would be a gross understatement. It’s not just the loss of funding, but the sense of impending doom that many of my colleagues feel. So, the first session look at a number of options including creating what would amount to fee for service consulting groups. Plans for creating at least one of them are underway. I won’t be involved because my own work is focused on the United States and this group will work abroad. Nonetheless, I’ll track its progress so that we can eventually build on its successes here.

Second was the Highlands event that explored the impact of climate change and other problems on political instability in the Sahel. In that sense, it did not explicitly explore creating a peacebuilding sector. However, because it brought together some of the people who had been at Tuesday’s session along with colleagues they had not yet worked with often with ties to the Department of Defense suggested other ways of building a peace/tech sector. Again, a bit distant from what I’m working on with the Highlands Team, but great food for thought.

Finally, along with two AfP hosted the second of what we expect will become an annual expo showcasing of the ways peacebuilders are using technology in their work. Unlike the first two events, this one featured specific projects that people are already developing. Two of them stand out.

First is Phoenix, which was launched a year or so ago by Build Up, whose board of directors I sit on. Build Up is itself not interested in creating a for profit sector—indeed, everything it does is explicitly couched in non-commercial terms. Nonetheless, they are developing a growing market for this piece of software that allows peacebuilders to ethically track social media activities

Second were a series of AI tools, most notably Didi which combines core concepts from peace and conflict studies with the potential of AI. Based in Israel (which has more than its share of tech startups), Didi ‘s current version scrapes publicly available data so, as its web site puts it, “when humanity meets technology, we can find a pathway to peace.” Although not as well funded as Founder and CEO Shawn Guttman would like, its demo suggests tremendous potential.

I Collect Interesting People Once Again--Transcend

To be honest, I no longer go to conferences primarily to be informed.

Instead, I try to live up to the way I describe myself when I lead a workshop and ask people to introduce themselves using only six words.

I, in fact, only need four.

I collect interesting people.

I also almost always succeed.

In this case, it happened ten minutes into the first session when Ola Mohajer walked in and, when asked, said she worked at the United States Institute of Peace. A few minutes later, she said that she also was creating an AI peacebuilding startup of her own, Transcend. Then, she said that she would soon be leaving USIP and working on this full time. No shrinking violet, she kept asking tough questions which grabbed not only my interest but that of the Highlands Forum team. So, we invited her to Wednesday’s event (her focus at USIP was on Africa) and to the tech expo on Thursday. She and I then met for breakfast on Friday to explore how I could help Transcend launch itself.

She initially grabbed my attention when she said she wanted to create a peacebuilding alternative to Palentir which I have long admired for its technical sophistication and long worried about because of the ways it has been used. I also knew that she would not benefit from Palentir’s initial funding from the likes of Peter Thiel and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s startup arm.

For the moment, at least, she is bootstrapping the company with the kind of enthusiasm I’ve rarely seen in the peacebuilding community that reflects her personal history. She is a refugee from Lebanon who ended up in Canada studying biology and religion until her interests came together around international conflict which led her to get a graduate degree at Columbia before landing at USIP. Only in her mid-thirties, therefore, she has accumulated a ton of practical, real world experience and enough technical expertise to build a team that can build a bespoke AI agent that focuses on our community’s needs.

But as we talked at the same Northern Virginia coffee shop that we both love, I realized that she and her friends can get the company going without the nine figure investment Palentir got. More importantly, they can provide a service that we desperately need, especially now that so many of our larger organizations have seen their funding cut dramatically.

The example she showed me should illustrate that point.

Peacebuilding organizations spend a lot of time and money “mapping” the conflict they are working on using any of a number of fools like USAID’s Conflict Assessment Framework. A team can literally take months and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in doing such a map which at best gives it a limited picture of the situation on the ground and/or points it in a few general directions on which to base their programs.

Transcend does not seek to replace those efforts. What it can do is use AI tools to quickly analyze all of the available data, develop a basic systems map, indicate potential areas in which peacebuilders can intervene, and keep improving/updating its analyses in a matter of hours (or less) and at a fraction of the cost.

My Role

Spending time at those three sessions and, then, hanging out with Ola took me back to the post I wrote last week on what I called my Savior Complex or the way my desire to change the world by the end of the month (it is July 1 today, so I have a lot of time).

In this case, I don’t have the technical skills to develop an AI tool nor do I have the cash to invest in a company like Transcend.

But I can give Ola and others I met a bit of advice and introduce them to people I know. In Ola’s case, I can pay for her coffee at Godfrey’s (which is well worth a visit if you are anywhere near Falls Church VA). I can also include her on the team I’m building to help introduce Peacebuilding Starts at Home beyond the “usual suspects” we typically reach.

More on that in the weeks to come before my book of the same name is published.

Remember Those Ghastly Images?

And Ola and I have plenty of work to do.

Just take another look at those ghastly images I’ve included in this post.

Don’t blame Perplexity or Gemini which created them. They did their best.

Blame the peacebuilding community. We have made so little progress in developing a peace-business-technology sector that we didn’t give those Ais any decent data to work with.

It’s up to people like Ola and Shawn Guttman of Didi to do that.

I’ll have fun accompanying them on the ride.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.