War, Peace, and Artificial Intelligence.
The world’s first AI-powered assistant dedicated to supporting peacebuilders.
For an audio version of this essay see here
Over the last year, I have been responsible for the AI program at Conflict Dynamics International a not-for-profit dedicated to preventing and resolving violent conflict.
At Conflict Dynamics, we support peacebuilding efforts in conflict-affected countries, including Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Nigeria.
Very specifically, we offer support, training, and facilitation to civil leaders involved in dialogue, mediation, and negotiations.
We work with civil society organisations, to prepare for and participate in peace processes— supporting them with analysis, research, and skills training and helping them to develop their ideas around political processes and governance.
Essentially helping them to answer two questions:
What kind of political process will bring about peace?
What kind of governance will keep the peace?
The philosophy underlying this work is simple.
Inclusive political processes and governance arrangements are more likely to deliver a durable peace — a peace that is fair, stable, and prosperous.
In situations of armed conflict, political processes are often reduced to a conversation between the men with guns, who reflect a narrow, if critical, set of interests around which it is difficult to build long-term peace and prosperity.
By supporting civic leaders, we expand the scope of the conversation.
This, in turn, expands the interests that are accounted for, the solutions that are possible, and the strength of the peace that can be negotiated.
To give you a concrete example, we are currently supporting the mediation efforts taking place in Addis Ababa around the conflict in Sudan, where, among others, a coalition of Sudanese civil society organisations are engaged in a peace initiative designed to end the conflict.
I want you to imagine a young woman, a youth representative invited to take part in peace negotiations.
She has a visceral understanding of the issues facing her community but lacks access to specialist knowledge, technical expertise, drafting skills, research capability, and creative space, and so comes to the table at a severe disadvantage.
If any of you have participated or worked on negotiation processes, you may recognise this scenario.
Civil leaders are often marginalized for the sin of not carrying a gun, but because the technical expertise to shape the direction of dialogue is concentrated in the hands of the few, they can be further disadvantaged.
Enter Akord AI, the world’s first copilot for peace.
An AI-powered assistant with a mission to democratise peacebuilding expertise by providing civic leaders and everyday citizens with access to the insights, knowledge, and tools of peacebuilding.
Version one of Akord AI is focused on the conflict in Sudan, where it has been rolled out to Sudanese civic leaders.
It has six key features, designed to enable creativity, research, drafting, and access to peacebuilding expertise.
The first of these are AI-powered peacebuilding insights. Users can engage with a custom-trained AI designed to answer questions and explore approaches to dialogue, mediation, governance, and peacebuilding.
Akord AI is trained on the principles of independence, impartiality, and neutrality and has been developed using a curated database of peacebuilding and Sudan-specific knowledge, providing users with the kind of expertise that is usually the domain of international lawyers and mediation professionals and academic experts.
The second is an old-fashioned digital library of peacebuilding best practices, case studies, and Sudan-specific knowledge, including, for example, previous ceasefires, memoranda of understanding, peace agreements, and Sudanese constitutions, with users able to download documents onto their devices.
Third are automated citations, a minor but critical feature. A lot of AI products obscure the origin of their data, offering an incomplete list of sources. In Akord AI it is primary feature designed to ensure transparency and verifiability.
Akord is trained on a curated data set, and answers to all prompts are fully referenced using Chicago citation style, with users able to click through to the document and page number of each source.
Fourth is access to specialized tools and frameworks.
CDI has developed a framework for thinking about and developing options for political processes and governance arrangements.
Akord AI has been trained in these tools, enabling users to access an informed creative partner when it comes to thinking about their political future.
Fifth is the capacity to import and export documents.
For example, a user can upload a draft ceasefire agreement and request improvements based on historical examples of Sudanese ceasefire agreements.
Sixth is multilingual support.
Akord AI is available in Arabic and English, both as an interface and an AI.
A few other things are worth noting: we have deliberately built a lightweight web-based application for environments where the internet is costly, intermittent, and low bandwidth.
Users are able to download answers as shareable documents, and we are providing online and real-world guidance and training to enable users to get the most out of Akord AI.
And to be clear, this is just the beginning.
In addition to growing the breadth and depth of the data lake and peacebuilding library and continuing to train and improve our AI, we will over the next 18 months expand to cover conflict zones around the world, starting with South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria, and evolve to provide support to professional diplomats, mediators, and negotiation experts for the UN, national governments, and not-for-profits.
Our Product Road Map includes voice functionality, multimedia responses, different interfaces, multiple new languages, a WhatsApp integration, predictive analytics, and collaborative tools to enable users to work together on political processes.
As the technology evolves, and we build the necessary trust in the tool, we see space for Akord to act as an active mediation advisor, predicting conflict, collating perspectives, identifying points of convergence and divergence, and presenting potential solutions to the parties to the conflict.
With AI improving rapidly and exponentially, the possibilities for Akord AI are immense, but building it also made us acutely aware of the AI’s limitations.
As I see it, there are three constraints with the current technology:
The first is adoption.
This will be overcome in time, but AI in its current form remains difficult to access for many people, especially those in conflict-affected countries — in part, this is because of weak internet connectivity, but equally challenging are the text-based interfaces that dominate the AI UX — the art and science of engaging a text-based AI is just not intuitive to a lot of people.
The second is data.
AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, and because of the institutional failure that comes with war, data on conflicts is notoriously incomplete, even more so when it comes to the fuzzier stuff, like public opinion or the underlying interests of protagonists in the conflict.
The third and most profound is the nature of war itself.
War is caused by love and hate, fear and greed; wrath and glory, not an absence of intelligence.
It follows that intelligence, no matter how powerful, is only a small part of the solution.
AI will in its design and use reflect the purpose, character, and wants of its maker, our capacity for both war and peace, for good and evil. And so it will be used for war, as it is in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine, and for peace as we plan to use it in Sudan and eventually around the globe.
The hope, the faith is that we are more good than evil, more peaceful than warlike, and so with luck and effort, AI will, on balance, serve the better angels of our nature.
But it’s not going to happen if we don’t make it so.
On the ledger of war and peace, we are investing heavily on the side of war.
We need to change this.
Akord AI is part of the effort to rebalance.
Our vision is that in time, we will grow and expand and contribute to an AI ecosystem designed to resolve conflict so that the eternal debate on human nature is resolved in favor of peace and prosperity.
