Anne-Marie Buzatu promoted to Executive Director of ICT4Peace

ICT4Peace is pleased to announce that Anne-Marie Buzatu, Vice-President and COO was promoted to Executive Director of ICT4Peace on 12 December 2022 by the ICT4Peace Foundation Board.

Anne-Marie Buzatu joined ICT4Peace as a Senior  Advisor in May 2019 and subsequently became Vice-President and COO of ICT4Peace. She was deeply involved in the 2020 ICT4Peace Strategy Review Exercise under the leadership of Amb. Martin Dahinden, Vice-Chair of ICT4Peace.

Anne-Marie then actively  promoted and expanded the ICT4Peace Capacity Building Program with the launch and building of the ICT4Peace Academy in June 2021.

Among her recent achievements her research and publication of the groundbreaking report From Boots on the Ground to Bytes in Cyberspace: Mapping Study on the use of ICTs in private security services by commercial actors, funded under a mandate from the Swiss FDFA Peace and Human Rights Division. stands out. The mapping study looks at how Information and Communications Technologies are impacting the private security, and considers the benefits and challenges to existing regulatory frameworks and standards, in particular human rights.

Before joining ICT4Peace, Anne-Marie was Deputy Head of the Public-Private Partnerships Division at DCAF in Geneva where she worked for nearly 12 years. In this role she led, under a Swiss government mandate, the development of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), a multistakeholder initiative which set out international human rights compliant principles and standards for the private security industry. She subsequently led the creation of the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA), the mutistakeholder oversight mechanism for the ICoC, where she also served as Interim Executive Director.

She also led the development of the Zurich-London Recommendations on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism Online (2017), which sets out human-rights based recommendations for governments to prevent terrorist use of the Internet. Anne-Marie has also contributed to several other innovative approaches to (human) security sector governance, including the Montreux Document, the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights and the Global Network Initiative.

An international lawyer by training, she also worked for several years in the information technology sector as a web developer and database administrator. This low-level understanding of information technologies enables her to bridge the expertise divide, translate between policy and technology specialists, and identify pragmatic and effective cybersecurity policy and governance approaches.

Anne-Marie has published several policy papers and articles in the areas of private security and cybersecurity. Publications include: New Dog, Old Trick: An overview of the contemporary regulation of private security and military contractors (2008), Towards an International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers:A View from Inside a Multistakeholder Process (2015), a chapter entitled “The Emergence of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers” in the textbook Business and Human Rights: From Principles to Practice (Routledge 2016), a chapter on “Global Cybersecurity and the Private Sector” published in the Routledge Handbook of International Cybersecurity (2020), and an essay entitled “Advanced Persistent Threat Groups Increasingly Destabilize Peace and Security in Cyberspace”(2021).