This article was originally published on Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs on February 13th, 2026 and reposted on the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech Website. Please find the Columbia University Journal article here.
Following the peace agreement signed on October 13, 2025, between Gaza and Israel, and the subsequent establishment of the Board of Peace as a new internationally mandated body overseeing Gaza’s stabilization and reconstruction, President Donald Trump signed the charter for the initiative at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. These events mark a fragile, yet vital moment in the global pursuit of stability. It comes after a period of intense global dialogue, engagement, and diplomacy: from August 2025 peace meeting at the White House, which brought together American, European, and Ukrainian leaders to the 2025 United Nations General Assembly. Together, these events expose with stark clarity a hard truth: peace is both urgent and extraordinarily complex. It demands strategic and systemic thinking, early action before conflicts escalate, international coordination, and above all, a solid infrastructure of trust. The question now is whether the emerging field of PeaceTech can rise to this task and become a true partner at the negotiating table. What is already evident, however, is that PeaceTech is rapidly emerging as an essential force shaping high-stakes peace negotiations, redefining how trust is built, data is shared, and agreements are forged.
Traditional methods of diplomacy and mediation are struggling to keep pace with the digital nature of modern conflict, where information warfare, cyberattacks, and AI-driven disinformation can escalate tensions in real time. The stakes are immense: without new tools and approaches, in an era where conflict is fought as much through data as on physical battlefields, peacebuilding risks becoming obsolete. The challenge is no longer only political, but technological; if war has evolved, peace must evolve with it.
The idea that peace requires systems, not just goodwill, is as old as civilization itself. The Roman Empire gave the world the notion of the Pax Romana – a golden age and order sustained by law, military strength, extensive trade networks, and infrastructure. The conflict had not disappeared, but a strong enough framework existed to contain it. Later eras sought their own formulas: the Congress of Vienna emphasized balance of power; the League of Nations and the United Nations built peace through treaties, diplomacy, and multilateral institutions. Each era relied on the tools available at the time. Yet, each revealed how fragile and imperfect peace is.
The 20th century produced examples of mediation that underline what is required. The Camp David Accords in 1978 showed how agenda-setting and third-party guarantees can help find an agreement. The Dayton Accords in 1995 demonstrated how satellite imagery and hard evidence could force negotiators in Bosnia to face reality. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 revealed the value of confidential backchannels that allowed adversaries in Northern Ireland to explore compromises without political risk. In each case, peace was achieved because the death toll and violence was halted, uncertainty was reduced, enforcement mechanisms were credible, and trust was built enough for some leaders to imagine a different future.
Today, the conditions of negotiation have changed radically from the era of traditional, state-to-state diplomacy, when conflicts were shaped primarily by armies, territory, and formal treaties. Conflicts now unfold in an environment shaped as much by algorithms and satellites as by armies, saturated with AI, satellite data, hacking and online propaganda, and widespread digital monitoring. Yet, the same technological revolution that fuels war and conflict also provides new instruments for peace. A new paradigm of “triple-use” technology is emerging and it spans commercial markets, defense applications, and supports peace efforts. Artificial intelligence, space-based data and verification, encrypted communication platforms, digital health systems, and immersive simulations are no longer peripheral. They are emerging as essential components of what might be called the “digital mediator”. While PeaceTech refers broadly to the use of technology to save lives, safe guard human dignity, prevent, mitigate, or recover from conflict, the digital mediator represents a specific function within it, where technology itself becomes an active participant in negotiation and peace processes, helping leaders analyze data, model outcomes, and build trust.
Recent years have provided glimpses of this future. In 2025, the CSIS Futures Lab used advanced machine learning techniques to model pathways toward ending the war in Ukraine, producing structured options for mediators to consider. Alongside such modeling efforts, PeaceRep’s PA-X Tracker has been monitoring Ukraine’s pathways for negotiation, providing policymakers and mediators with interactive data on agreements, actors, and implementation. Inclus, a digital platform for collaborative conflict analysis, has been used in Ukraine to engage conflict stakeholders in shared roadmapping and agenda-setting. By enabling parties to visualize interdependent issues and test solutions together, Inclus equips mediators with a data-driven framework to move negotiations beyond entrenched positions toward inclusive agreements. The African Union has begun to employ AI in its early warning systems, scanning social and news media for signals of rising tensions that might be defused before violence erupts. The World Food Programme has deployed blockchain-based aid distribution in Jordan and Syria, ensuring that food and cash assistance reaches displaced populations transparently. In Yemen and Ukraine, Hala Systems has combined AI with satellite imagery to monitor ceasefires, giving negotiators and international observers real-time verification of compliance, similar to the real-time monitoring capabilities provided by ICEYE.
Technology is also beginning to play a role in confidence-building and empathy. Digital health platforms are now delivering telemedicine and mobile diagnostics in war-torn regions from Ukraine to Gaza, showing how shared humanitarian initiatives can become early dividends of peace. In Washington, the North Star Project has gone further, creating AI-driven “digital twins” of world leaders to simulate negotiation outcomes, offering foresight into how strategies might unfold.
Taken together, these developments suggest that technology can address the very obstacles that usually undermine peace. Misinformation can be countered by AI monitoring and satellite verification that establish a shared factual baseline. Uncertainty can be eased by encrypted channels that allow leaders to test compromises safely and by virtual simulations that make the dividends of peace tangible.
This is what a “Pax Technica” toolkit might look like. It would not replace human diplomacy, but it would provide platforms that make diplomacy more credible and humane. Just as the Pax Romana relied on roads, law, and trade to sustain order, and the postwar international order on treaties, institutions, and norms, peace in the twenty-first century will depend on a new kind of infrastructure: one built with AI, data, satellites, and digital trust systems.
Yet, significant risks remain. The same tools that can advance peace can also distort it. To prevent misuse, technology must be governed justly and transparently, and peacewashing – the use of peace rhetoric or technology to create the appearance of peacemaking while concealing practices that sustain conflict or power imbalances – must be avoided. These technologies demand vigilant human oversight. Artificial intelligence can reproduce bias, satellites can be hacked, and digital platforms can be manipulated. No algorithm, however advanced, can replace moral courage, empathy, or political will. When governed with care and designed responsibly, these tools can strengthen mediation, build transparency, and restore the trust on which peace depends.
To realize this potential, PeaceTech must be embedded into the very architecture of modern diplomacy, and developed and governed with foresight, integrity, and shared responsibility. Policymakers, technologists, and peacebuilders must work together to establish common standards, ethical safeguards, and mechanisms of accountability that make technology a trusted instrument of negotiation and peace. The task ahead is to build not just new tools, but a new infrastructure of trust capable of sustaining peace in the digital age.
If past eras built peace through roads, treaties, and institutions, our task now is to build it through technology. From the Pax Romana to the Congress of Vienna, from Dayton to Good Friday, peace has always been humanity’s most complex challenge. It has required true will, vision, sacrifice, and institutions strong enough to hold adversaries together. Now, in the digital age, we stand at the threshold of a new paradigm: where PeaceTech rises as the new frontier of peacemaking. This is a world where technology is not viewed as a tool to fuel conflict, but takes its place at the negotiating table, an indispensable partner in the effort to end wars, rebuild societies and restore human dignity.