Beyond Replication: Recentring Community and African Leadership in PeaceTech

Abstract

For facilitators who work in armed-conflict and post-conflict contexts, PeaceTech is a term that is
regularly cropping up in professional and academic discourse. It is increasingly shaping how
peacebuilding organisations work, from analysing conflict to aiding the course of mediation,
potentially pre-empting conflict, and supporting early warning systems. However, the majority of the
data, infrastructure, and governance that underpins these tools are focused outside the regions where
these technologies are supposed to support, in fragile areas where many conflicts occur. This paper
examines the structural economy of the data that builds PeaceTech, with a lens on African contexts
where actors operate in sometimes highly complex conflict environments but often have limited
influence over how these technologies are created to interpret those lived realities. This paper argues
that current development metrics are reproducing the extrinsic data metrics that reinforced existing
global asymmetries in the past and have failed. The research highlights how the imbalances in data
that trains artificial intelligence, infrastructure, capacity, and governance authorities have undermined
the technical reliability, trust and, most importantly, the legitimacy of these digital tools used in these
settings. There is a response to this: a shift towards African-led data governance and community
centred PeaceTech ecosystems, rooted in African needs, skills and lived experience. It also outlines
how the African Union could support ecosystem mapping by building coalitions which are anchored
in data infrastructures that mobilise and enable local civil society organisations and peacebuilders to
retain control over the data and technologies that shape conflict analysis and peace interventions.