The U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) new Digital Policy 2024-2034 is an important step in developing standards and programs on rapidly evolving digital and emerging technologies that can accelerate progress toward U.S. development and humanitarian goals around the world. But technology can also hinder progress and drive conflict and violence, and it is vital to mitigate these risks at a time of record-breaking global fragility and violent conflict.
The digital policy recognizes the pivotal and growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the need for inclusion of local individuals and communities. It also builds on other relevant U.S. government policies and frameworks, including USAID’s AI Action Plan and the U.S. International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy.
But the policy, released in July, neglected to integrate peacebuilding, conflict prevention, and civilian protection. Including those is critical to ensuring USAID’s use of digital technologies addresses the drivers of conflict, violence, and fragility, as well as manages and prevents risks. Notably, USAID developed this policy without many of the recommendations put forth by civil society organizations who are USAID partners working on these issues including via a USAID consultation held and written feedback submitted in June. To meet the current moment and follow its own humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding policies, USAID must robustly integrate conflict- and atrocity prevention, peacebuilding, and civilian protection approaches into this policy. Fortunately, it has another chance to do that in the development of the policy’s forthcoming implementation plan.
After all, peacebuilding, conflict prevention, and civilian protection are part and parcel of — not separate from — USAID’s development and humanitarian work. Violent conflict and fragility are some of the most complex, urgent challenges impacting the populations that the foreign aid agency serves. Today, there are more active conflicts than during World War II. An estimated 300 million people will need humanitarian assistance and 130.8 million will be displaced in 2024 due to violent conflict, weather-related and environmental emergencies, and other crises. Furthermore, 15 countries are experiencing mass atrocities, and five others face imminent risk of them occurring. Since 2018, the world has broken global conflict records, and this trend is increasing, not abating.
Digital technology is crucial to addressing these risks and threats. Already donors, including USAID, are leveraging innovative technology to bring about positive change and solve some of the world’s most pressing development challenges by transforming how people access information, goods, and services, by spurring economic growth, and by improving development outcomes.
At the same time, the negative impact of digital technology on violent conflict, security, democracy, and human rights is undeniable. In late July and early August, violent protests erupted across the United Kingdom, triggered by online disinformation falsely speculating that a Muslim migrant was the perpetrator in the death of three girls. In Iran, the government is using AI-powered facial-recognition technology to monitor women’s compliance with oppressive morality codes. And everywhere, local civil society, which is integral to building the sustainable peace necessary for development and resilience, continues to face severe cyber threats such as online harassment and data breaches, especially women in peacebuilding and human rights.
What Happened to ‘Coherence?’
USAID in 2022 issued a statement for implementing partners urging “complementary collaboration across humanitarian, development, and peace actors in pursuit of a common agenda.” The goal of this “Humanitarian, Development and Peacebuilding (HDP) nexus” was to promote more coherence across the agency’s efforts in these sectors s “to maximize impact and sustainability of programs across different kinds of assistance and to reduce the need for humanitarian assistance (HA) over time.” Simply put, the HDP nexus recognizes these three sectors have been siloed, and promotes a cultural shift that ensures humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding programs are integrated so they can solve interconnected problems. . Specifically, the agency’s own principles for work in the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding fields clearly note it must “champion conflict integration,” referring to deliberate efforts to carry out conflict prevention across different programming, “and opportunities for enabling or building peace where possible.”
So it is particularly striking that Goal 1 in the digital policy, which aims to “propel development and humanitarian outcomes through an infrastructural approach to digital technology and services” fails to mention conflict and peacebuilding. By the term “infrastructural approach,” USAID means digital investments are building blocks for national-scale innovation that encompasses policies, regulations, and human capacity to use technology. USAID could have simply expanded Goal 1 to include peace outcomes alongside development and humanitarian outcomes, and link the implementation of Goal 1 to the use of digital peacebuilding technologies, including digital dialogue tools that can include civil society in peace processes or chatbots that promote peaceful conversation (which are currently omitted from the policy).
Instead, the policy focuses on examples of technologies for humanitarian and development purposes, including, for example, the use of AI to increase tuberculosis case-management capacity. But without peace and security, any development gains are easily wiped out, requiring costly humanitarian assistance—again. Humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding goals are mutually reinforcing, as repeatedly stated by USAID and other bilateral and multilateral donors. The digital policy’s failure to consider how digital technologies can prevent conflict, protect civilians, and build peace is a serious gap. This oversight disregards how digital technologies in a conflict system can have intentional or unintentional impacts that can help build sustainable peace or, conversely, significantly contribute to conflict and fragility.
The policy also should promote coherence with the U.S. government’s prevention-oriented canon of law and relevant strategies, including the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability based on the Global Fragility Act that was adopted by Congress in 2019 and is now up for reauthorization, as well as the U.S. Strategy to Anticipate, Prevent, and Respond to Atrocities, the U.S. Strategy and National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, and the U.S. Strategy to Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally. To integrate these laws and policies, USAID must not merely mention them, but instead meaningfully link implementation of the digital policy to the various goals and objectives of these prevention-oriented initiatives. In doing so, USAID can align and coordinate its overall objectives across its humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts that involve digital technologies, resulting in smarter and more effective foreign assistance.
The implementation plan also should emphasize violence prevention that employs gender sensitivity and undertakes iterative gender analysis. Such an approach would recognize the differing ways in which men, women, boys, girls, and gender minorities are impacted by, take part in, and prevent, reduce, and mitigate violence, as well as incorporate that analysis into all phases of USAID programming to address the unique online and offline threats faced by different genders in conflict-affected and fragile States. Again, USAID’s 2022 note for implementing partners stated that gender equality must underpin the agency’s efforts as a “cross-cutting commitment.” Technology can innovatively promote gender equality and inclusion and elevate the participation of women in peacebuilding. While the digital policy addresses the gender-related effects of digital technologies on the humanitarian and development sectors, it ignores the peacebuilding sector. Without a robust, and integrated approach in the digital policy that prioritizes gender-sensitive conflict- and violence prevention, USAID’s programs will miss the crucial link between gender equality and building sustainable peace.
Maximize the Good
The digital policy missed an opportunity to address conflict- and atrocity risks caused by digital technologies, along with mechanisms to prevent and mitigate such risks. USAID can strengthen the policy significantly through the forthcoming implementation plan, with a greater level of specificity in outlining programmatic efforts. . For instance, the implementation plan can facilitate programs that build resilience against AI-generated disinformation, as AI can significantly increase the capacity of bad actors to create disinformation on a large scale via text, images, video, and audio that can drive violence and atrocities. A comprehensive response should include digital-literacy tactics such as “prebunking,” which preemptively exposes disinformation so people can identify it when it spreads.
The implementation plan can also provide a framework for programs that raise awareness of confidential reporting channels for digital extortion that can expose women, girls, and other marginalized groups to offline violence, and it should promote programming that strengthens the cybersecurity capacity of local women peacebuilders. USAID also can tackle divisive social-media algorithms that drive polarization and extremism online by working with governments and technology companies to put in place design-governance features of online platforms, such as the design of algorithms or like/dislike/share features, that promote peace and violence prevention. Design governance of technology platforms avoids moderation of user-generated content, instead choosing to put in place platform features that steer users toward behaviors and habits. These features could include so-called “bridge-based algorithms,” which push social-media posts that resonate with diverse audiences to avoid social media feeds filled with arguments and vitriol, and allow users to opt out of design features that encourage greater usage of and time spent on the platform, which can lead to social media addiction and polarizing behavior online.
The digital policy’s emphasis on “do no harm” and on human rights is crucial, but that falls short of detailing how digital technologies can actively contribute to building social cohesion and to conflict prevention. For example, USAID needs to explore how AI can be used to prevent atrocities, such as through AI-powered early warning early response (EWER) mechanisms that link online analysis with offline atrocity prevention. Successful examples could be scaled up, such as in Syria, where the Sentry indication and warning system, developed by Hala Systems, uses acoustic sensor data, reports from people on the ground, and open-media scraping to detect warplanes in flight, predict future violent events, and issue warnings to civilians.
USAID can strengthen the implementation plan with an emphasis on “pro-social design” principles and tools. Pro-social design applies digital innovations to not only accelerate development outcomes, but also to encourage an integrated strategy of humanitarian and development aid and peacebuilding that promotes healthy interactions, safety, well-being, dignity, and peace. There are numerous examples of such technological innovations that help build sustainable peace, including automated conflict-analysis tools that help peacebuilders better map out conflict dynamics to identify starting points for peacebuilding interventions and the use of immersive virtual reality (VR) to promote empathy and understanding in conflict zones. Peacebuilders can use these tools for more effective conflict- and atrocity prevention, and policymakers can use them to design more effective policies and programs that better address the drivers of conflict, violence, and fragility.
Hardwiring Civil Society Into Implementation
The digital policy rightly has a comprehensive focus on local actors and communities and supports USAID’s significant commitments to increasing “localization,” defined by USAID as “the set of internal reforms, actions, and behavior changes that…ensure [USAID’s] work puts local actors in the lead, strengthens local systems, and is responsive to local communities.” USAID laid out its principles and goals for localization in its 2022 Local Capacity Strengthening Policy, which followed USAID Administrator Samantha Power’s pledge in November 2021 that 25 percent of USAID funding would go to local partners within the next four years and 50 percent by the end of the decade (though recent reports indicate the agency is nowhere near that goal, with only 10 percent going to local organizations). But while the digital policy emphasizes localization, it does not specifically address locally-led peacebuilding, which shifts decision-making power and program responsibilities to local actors and is vital for understanding the needs and values of communities impacted by conflict, violence, and fragility.
Localization efforts within the digital policy implementation plan need to include support and learning from a broad range of stakeholders to build sustainable peace, especially civilians, civil society, human rights defenders, and journalists working locally. These often-overlooked actors have essential needs and capacities, such as knowledge of conflict and atrocity risks and what works and doesn’t work to prevent and reduce violence and build sustainable peace. It is vital for this policy to pair local leadership and expertise with the capacity to use emerging digital peacebuilding tools because local communities in conflict-affected contexts are critical to accurately identifying the online warning signs of impending violence and atrocities, including dehumanizing rhetoric on social media.
USAID must therefore thoroughly consult with local actors so these early warning and response tools are fit for purpose in the contexts in which they operate. While the policy acknowledges various risks to civilians in conflicts associated with digital technology and the importance of engaging local stakeholders to understand the digital ecosystem, it does not promote conflict-sensitive risk analysis. The implementation plan can lay out a mechanism for USAID to work in partnership with local communities to successfully build peace online as well as offline.
Looking Ahead
Our organizations, the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) and Nonviolent Peaceforce, submitted extensive comments on the draft digital policy, noting the concerning absence of peacebuilding and conflict prevention in the document. This feedback also represented AfP’s membership of more than 225 peacebuilding organizations in 181 countries around the world — including Nonviolent Peaceforce — as well as AfP’s Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice, which gathers digital peacebuilders working to prevent and address conflict spurred by digital technologies and to harness digital tools to amplify peacebuilding interventions. Together, we argued that the agency’s digital draft policy, which focused heavily on crisis response, needed more attention to preventing crises, including violent conflict and atrocities and, when all else fails, to protecting civilians. Disappointingly, the recently released policy does not reflect any of these recommendations.
The forthcoming digital policy implementation plan is an opportunity to fill these gaps in the policy and make U.S. foreign assistance more innovative over the next 10 years so that it can address record-breaking and escalating global violent conflict trends. To do so, USAID must thoroughly integrate principles from conflict- and atrocity prevention and what we’ve learned about protecting civilians into the implementation plan. Such an approach will enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of all of USAID’s programs and policies, empower and elevate local civil society, and address the deep-rooted drivers of instability in conflict-affected and fragile States.