What we do
ICT for peaceful purposes
Since 2004, the ICT4Peace Foundation has championed the strategic, sustainable and meaningful use of ICTs for crisis management, disaster risk reduction and peacebuilding. The Foundation’s sustained and strategic input, stocktaking exercises, evaluations, briefings, workshops and ideation has contributed to the strengthening of humanitarian aid structures, as well as the peacekeeping and peacebuilding – at the United Nations, and beyond. Uniquely, we work at and are called upon by the highest levels of government and inter-governmental bodies and also have deep, trusted, multi-stakeholder connections to grassroots activist, civil society and rights movements.
Pioneering output includes working with the UN on crisis information management platforms, developing the Crisis Information Management Strategy of the UN Secretary General (A/65/491), technical evaluations of key humanitarian platforms, contributing to the development of path-breaking information exchange protocols, the hosting of information sharing and collaboration platforms, creation of mission and disaster specific wikis, training on situational awareness and open source intelligence gathering including social media verification, strategizing the use of Big Data around peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the development of a rights based approach to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in support of peacekeeping and curation of an annual, high-level UN meeting on crisis information management from 2008 – 2015.
Since 2017, we have pioneered the conversations around the ethics, rights and use of Artificial Intelligence and related fields in peacebuilding, including the laws around the use of autonomous weapons in peacetime. We are also actively contributing to the thinking and research around frontier technologies that will increasingly define the information, peace and conflict landscapes.
Promotion of a secure and peaceful cyberspace
An open, secure, stable, accessible and peaceful ICT environment is essential for all and requires effective cooperation among states, civil society and private sector to reduce risks to international peace and security, and secure economic and social development. ICTs provide immense opportunities for social and economic development and continue to grow in importance for the international community. There are, however, very disturbing trends in the global ICT environment, including a dramatic increase in incidents involving the malicious use of ICTs by State and non-State actors, including criminals and terrorists. These trends create enormous risks to peace and security in cyberspace for states, but equally for human security and dignity.
The use of ICTs for terrorist purposes for instance, beyond recruitment, financing, training and incitement, including for terrorist attacks against ICTs or ICT-dependent infrastructure, clearly threatens international peace and security. Together with the UN Security Council Counter Terrorism Executive Directorat (UNCTED) ICT4Peace launched Tech against Terrorism and supports actively the Christchurch Call launched by New Zealand and France.
In 2011 already, ICT4Peace called for a code of conduct and for norms of responsible state behaviour and confidence building measures for an open, secure, and peaceful cyberspace, and encouraged all stakeholders to work together to identify new cyber threats and develop solutions and agreements at national and global levels. In particular, it advocated against the increasing militarisation of cyberspace. ICT4Peace has supported international negotiations at the UN Governmental Group of Experts GGE) and the Open-ended Working Groups (OEWG I and II) in New York, as well as at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the African Union (AU) with policy recommendations and multiple publications, workshops. In 2014 ICT4Peace launched its Capacity-building programmes and in 2020 created The ICT4Peace Academy, in particular for Policy Makers and Diplomats from Developing and Emerging economies to enable them to develop and implement their National Cybersecurity Strategies, building CERTS and meaningfully engage in the UN GGE and in the OEWG I 2019-2021 and OEWG II 2021-2025, but also in bilateral and regional negotiations.
In 2019 at the OEWG I in New York, ICT4Peace issued a call to governments to publicly commit not to attack civilian critical infrastructure and proposed a ’States Cyber Peer Review Mechanism for state-conducted foreign cyber operations’. See also all ICT4Peace inputs to and comments on OEWG I and the ICT4Peace Submission to OEWG II 2021 – 2025.