# Engineering for Peace and Diplomacy
## 4 Peace Engineering
### Tech-Enabled Peace  
Although engineering amounts to more than using technology to solve societal problems, engineers need to be cognizant of the role that technology plays in creating a peace culture vs. a war culture while addressing peace and development-related issues. Technology for peace, sometimes referred to as PeaceTech, whether low-tech or high tech, can serve a variety of purposes. It can contribute to the wellbeing of communities worldwide. It can help \"support non-proliferation regimes and institutions,  
Figure 4: Peace engineering as an integrated field cutting across various engineering and non-engineering disciplines.  
maintain a strategic deterrent to conflict, reduce the impact of conflict on noncombatants, [and] design resilient infrastructures and communities\" [49]. It can also be used to monitor the responses of physical, social, and natural systems to climate change, population growth, and urbanization. The importance of technology in contributing to peace-related activities is emphasized by two groups in the United States; the PeaceTech Laboratory, which operates in partnership with the US Institute of Peace (see www.peacetechlab.org) in Washington, DC, and the Peace Innovation Institute at Stanford University in California (see www.peaceinnovation.com).  
Since its creation in 2015, the PeaceTech Laboratory (PTL) has focused on the role that technology, media, and data play in violent conflict prevention, diffusion, and recovery. It has also demonstrated through case studies how technology can transform data into action to detect issues such as hate speech, prevent election violence, and predict how violent conflicts could create social and economic disruption worldwide. The PTL has also spearheaded in-country training of the next generation of peacebuilders through the PeaceTech Exchanges program. Finally, it has developed an 'accelerator' platform to support entrepreneurs and startups (37 as of 2018) among individuals interested in developing technologies to predict and avoid violent conflicts, mitigate and diffuse existing conflicts, recover from conflicts, and address some of the complex issues mentioned at the start of this paper.  
Similarly, the Peace Innovation Institute (PII) emphasizes the importance of technologies for positive peace, referred to as _mediating technologies_. These technologies \"connect [mediate] people--oftentimes strangers--from divergent backgrounds to facilitate positive engagement\" [50; 51]. Examples include sensor technologies, satellite technology, communication, and computation technologies, enabling people to communicate, sense, detect, predict, and coordinate actions. Such technologies can be further extended to include those involved in various types of community infrastructure that provide populations with shared services (e.g., water, energy, food, transportation, communication, etc.). Another contribution of the PII has been to show how tech-enabled peace can be measured. _Peace data_ collected by the PII have demonstrated that mediating technologies can help to (i) uncover unseen positive social interaction among populations in otherwise perceived hostile environments, and (ii) emphasize the economic value proposition of peace through entrepreneurial activities.  
Both the PTL and PII have highlighted the many opportunities for research and development, innovation, business development, and entrepreneurial ventures in the emerging field of tech-enabled peace. With a market of about 7.6 billion customers (in 2019), a clear majority of whom prefer peace to war; the PeaceTech industry has a bright future. The question remains, though, as to how to create a global natural and scalable ecosystem of 'doing well by doing peace' that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship (business and social) while protecting innovators globally.