Can apps promote inclusion in peace and security policy-making?
Luisa Lobato and Victoria Santos analyse how technology is designed to make information accessible and democratize research at the UN Security Council
There are numerous barriers to widening participation in peacemaking processes. One of the most important yet insidious can be access to information. Getting a seat at the table at key negotiations is an obstacle in itself, and on top of that less established actors often face distinct challenges when negotiating with great powers that command extensive research and intelligence capabilities.
Perhaps the most striking example of this is the UN Security Council (UNSC) where non-permanent members with limited resources negotiate on complex sanctions regimes with the five permanent members and their sprawling research apparatuses. Indeed, a Brazilian diplomat interviewed in our research emphasized the ‘difference in human, financial and academic resources between the permanent members and the elected members, which makes the performance in the subsidiary bodies and in the sanctions regimes very unequal’.
In response to this, non-permanent members increasingly draw on new technologies to access information on sanctions. In this blogpost we show how new technologies are making knowledge more accessible to those who might otherwise be excluded from peace and security policy-making and have the potential to upend the power dynamics of policy research.
How apps make information accessible
The need to address uneven access to information has long been recognized by key actors at the UNSC. Organizations such as the Security Council Report produce resources like guidebooks that help diplomats participate in a range of UNSC discussions in a well-informed manner.
A particularly useful new tool aims to reduce knowledge asymmetries at the UNSC in relation to past and present sanction regimes: the UN SanctionsApp. The UN SanctionApp was created in 2013 as an output of the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), a large group of scholars and practitioners who analyse the impacts and effectiveness of UN targeted sanctions. Core to their work is ensuring that research on sanctions addresses policy-relevant questions.
Apps and databases make information more easily accessible by being interactive, searchable and by allowing easier comparisons. Unlike conventional research publications, information can be easily accessed, navigated and extracted through copy/paste, download options and hyperlinks.
Design matters. Tools like the UN SanctionsApp have normative ‘goals’ and are designed to include actors who would otherwise be unable to participate in international peace and security policy-making by packaging and conveying relevant knowledge.
The aforementioned Brazilian diplomat noted that a digital app is uniquely positioned to support his work in UN Sanctions committees, since ‘an application is (…) much more likely to be consulted and to make this bridge [between knowledge on sanctions and his work at the UNSC] than, for example, the PDF of that seminal text on sanctions’.
This bridging may reduce the barriers to accessing sanctions research and expand what counts as relevant research to include the content produced through the app’s regular updates.
How apps democratize research production
Beyond making research more accessible, apps invite users to become part of the research production process. UN SanctionsApp is continuously being redesigned in response to user input and feedback. Notably, this continuous redesign also responds to the decisions and preferences of creators, and to broader shifts in infrastructure, in funders’ incentives, and in the field of peace and security itself — which in turn impacts users’ expectations and interactions with these tools.
For example, UN SanctionsApp team first consulted with several diplomats working with UN sanctions in order to come up with the app’s initial design. Later, a web version of the app was created, following users’ feedback that they would like to have something at hand at the on their laptops, in order to more quickly access and navigate through relevant cases and documents.
Conclusion
Does this all mean that diplomats no longer read books and articles? Are digital technologies a silver bullet for the problem of knowledge asymmetry in international policy-making? Certainly not. However central digital technologies are to contemporary society, humans remain crucial to knowledge production and to the assembling and operations of digital objects. Digital technologies also cannot solve all problems of access.
But technical artifacts and the politics of design play an important role in contemporary peace and security policy-making, especially when they become part of everyday life in policy circles. On the one hand, the work of app creators helps shape the provisional form of research that policy-makers consume. On the other hand, use by practitioners’ can reinforce the normative goals platforms were designed for by promoting transparency and inclusion and keeping these objects policy-relevant.
Apps and databases designed to include more actors in policy-making offer relevant spaces for bridging the gap between expert knowledge and diplomatic practice, help in disseminating expert knowledge beyond conventional channels and make such knowledge accessible to a wider range of actors than would otherwise be the case.
Read more about this topic in the full article ‘Digital tools as experts in international peace and security’. It was published in the September 2023 issue of International Affairs and is free to access until 30 November 2023.
Luisa Lobato is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of International Relations of PUC-Rio (IRI/PUC-Rio) and Academic Coordinator of the Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLab) at the same institution.
Victoria Santos is a lecturer at the Institute of International Relations of PUC-Rio (IRI/PUC-Rio).
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
