Data for Peace: How Can Novel Data Sources and Technology Enhance Peace? (Call for Papers)

By Innar Liiv, Stefaan Verhulst, Evelyne Tauchnitz, Michele Giovanardi and Kalypso Nicolaïdis

A year ago, significant shifts in the global geopolitical landscape had profound implications for peace and security. As the international community continues to grapple with how to respond to the conflicts, there is growing recognition of the critical role that data and technology can play in fostering peace, and preventing future conflicts.

In light of this, we are calling for contributions to a Data & Policy special collection of papers centered on the theme of ‘Data for Peace: how novel data sources and technology can enhance peace?’

This collection aims to investigate the ways in which new data sources and technology can support enhancing peace by connecting local and global practices that strive towards social and political peace through the responsible use of frontier technologies. Moreover, we seek to examine how data collection, analysis, and use of data and technology can be designed and implemented in an ethical manner in order to align and combine a holistic vision of peace with respect for human rights, including civil and political rights. Finally, we seek to understand what legal and regulatory tools are necessary to ensure the ethical and responsible use of data and technology for peace.

Peace doves with circuits from publicdomainvectors.org

The papers will provide a comprehensive and multidisciplinary perspective on the use of data and technology for building peace, and offer insights and recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers working in this field.

Policy significance of this collection

The emerging field has notable policy significance because it offers a new approach to addressing some of the most challenging and persistent issues facing the world today. Computer-aided, algorithmic, and data-driven approaches to peace and peacebuilding can help to identify and target the root causes of conflict, potential for compromise in peace agreements, and can also improve the evaluation and monitoring of peacebuilding activities.

Key themes

• Novel and Non-Traditional Data Sources for Peacebuilding and Peace
• Conceptualization of Positive Peace Data
• Data Collaboratives for Peace: How to support peacebuilding by exchanging data across sectors?
• Computational methods to measure peace, international relations, and relations between local actors
• Predictive analytics for Peace
• Peace Agreements as Data: using technology, analytics, and visualizations to make sense of peace agreements quantitatively and qualitatively to maximize human potential to understand how compromise is reached
• Investing for Peace: Using technology, data, and algorithms to create transparent instruments to support investing in peace; conceptualizations of tokenization of peace
• Business for Peace: Novel data sources and methods to understand and reimagine the trade-peace relationship
• Towards Ethical Design and Implementation of Data-Driven Peace Technology
• Data asymmetries in the context of peacebuilding
• ’Low-tech’ vs ‘High-Tech’ Approaches in Data-Driven Peacebuilding
• Data for migration: tracking data flows, aiding migrants with data
• Tracking and assessing narratives for peace
• Monitoring human rights violations at times of conflict using data and technology
• Ambiguous or ambivalent uses of data and technology for peace, dual-use problematic
• Ethical and human rights-respecting collection, analysis and use of data and technology for peace
• Global governance approaches to regulate the use of data and technology for peace
• Searching for agreement on minimum ethical, legal and regulatory standards for the trustworthy use of data and technology for peace

Timetable

Authors are welcome to submit manuscripts as soon as they are ready, with a final deadline of October 2, 2023. Articles will be published as soon as possible after acceptance, in the interest of allowing authors to disseminate their work without unnecessary delay, and added to a curated page for the collection of articles. An editorial reflecting on their insights will be published in 2023.

Submission process

Authors should submit articles through the Data & Policy ScholarOne site, using the ‘Data for Peace Technology’ special collection option when prompted in the submission forum.

Before submission, authors should familarise themselves with the Instructions for Authors. Please feel free to use the LaTeX or Word templates. Note also that we have a template in Overleaf, a cloud-based, which has collaborative features and enables authors to submit directly into the Data & Policy system without having to re-upload files..

Note alsothat Data & Policy publishes the following types of articles, which authors will be prompted to select from on submission:

• Research articles that use rigorous methods that demonstrate how data science can inform or impact policy by, for example, improving situation analysis, predictions, public service design, and/or the legitimacy and/or effectiveness of policy making. Published research articles are typically reviewed by three peer reviewers: two assessing the academic or methodological rigour of the paper; and one providing an interdisciplinary or policy-specific perspective.
• Commentaries are shorter articles that discuss and/or problematize an issue relevant to the Data & Policy scope. Commentaries are typically reviewed by two peer reviewers.
• Translational papers are contributions that show how data science principles, techniques and technologies are being used in practice in organisational settings to improve policy outcomes. They may present original findings but are less embedded in the scholarly literature as research articles. They are typically reviewed by two peer reviewers, who assess the rigour and policy significance of the paper.
• Data papers that provide a structured description of an openly available dataset with the aim of encouraging its re-use for further research

You can read more on the Instructions for Authors here.

Data & Policy strongly encourages authors to make replication data and code available in an open repository, where this is possible (see the research transparency policy). All authors must provide a Data Availability Statement in their article that explains where the replication material resides, if it is available, and if not, the reason why it cannot be made accessible. Authors who link to replication materials will be awarded Open Data and/or Open Materials badges that display on the published article.

About the authors

Innar Liiv is Associate Professor of Data Science at the School of Information Technology, Tallinn University of Technology.

Stefaan Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of The GovLab, New York University, and also Data & Policy Editor-in-Chief.

Evelyne Tauchnitz is a Senior Reesarch Fellow at the Institute of Social Ethics ISE, University of Lucerne.

Michele Giovanardi is at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute.

Kalypso Nicolaïdis is Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute.

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This is the blog for Data & Policy (cambridge.org/dap), a peer-reviewed open access journal exploring the interface of data science and governance. Read on for five ways to contribute to Data & Policy.