The peace & anti-war movement faces a daunting challenge: war has become paradigmatic. The economic and social dominance of the US Military Industrial Complex, and the deeply-embedded militaristic cultures of powerful Western nation-states dislocate and devalue peaceful and non-violent solutions to international differences. This challenge is compounded by the increasing tenacity with which global powers co-opt the tech sector and employ cutting-edge technologies such as AI and robotics to enhance the lethality of their forces. The result is the growing prospect of existential global conflict, and a concomitant arms race that steals research power and resources better employed in enhancing human thriving.
We pursue peace when the differences between conflicting sides are so significant as to appear intractable. We pursue peace when the dominant narratives between antagonists become dehumanizing. We pursue peace knowing that from the seed of war only human misery and environmental destruction bloom. We pursue peace knowing that the luxuries of persisting with the old ways of confronting the war paradigm are no longer sustainable. We seek new ways to build a peace paradigm with all the urgency encouraged by the promise that peace holds for a thriving human and natural world.
The Peace Lab is a research and advocacy institute committed to building a peace paradigm through the application of new methods and technologies. We aim to be the reliable source of original data analysis on matters pertaining to peace and non-violence. We sound the alarm on how the military coopts new civilian technologies and tech-sector workers for war, and how data is collected and privacy compromised by the surveillance state. Our work, in essence, is to show how everything has become militarized and - unless that is changed - war becomes ever and always inevitable. Given that a key pillar of sustaining the war paradigm is information operations, especially the production of narratives that naturalize war as the solution, we aim to provide the peace and anti-war community with novel methods to evaluate the functioning and impact of these operations.
The Peace Lab is well placed to develop new strategies through the training, education, and experience of its research and advocacy team. The research skills of our team members include, among others, machine learning- and AI-aided social media analysis, computer vision, and archival research methods. We are experts on prominent and ignored global conflicts, and the militaries that fight them. The Peace Lab combines computer science methods (especially Natural Language Processing) with a deep knowledge of the media landscape surrounding war, a sensitivity to war’s human costs, and public data sets on global conflicts, to develop a new depth and breadth of analysis to the interaction of media and the Military Industrial Complex. We have forged connections with local and national peace groups and research institutes through shared experiences in action-focused activism since 2017, and are well-positioned to share the results of our research with the peace and anti-war community with whom we share our purpose.