The campus came alive this summer with a four-day workshop on deliberative technologies for peace, marking the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies’ first return to summer programming since the pandemic.

The workshop took place from June 24 to 27 under the theme “Deliberative Technologies, Computational Democracy, and Peacemaking in Highly Polarized Contexts.” It was co-sponsored with the Tokyo-based Toda Peace Institute and moderated by Lisa Schirch, Lecturer at the Kroc Institute, and Richard G. Starmann, Senior Professor of Peace Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute. Nearly 50 peacebuilders, democracy experts, and computer scientists from around the world met to discuss how deliberative technologies can be used to promote democracy and social cohesion and reduce polarization. The workshop grew out of Schirch’s long-standing collaboration with the Toda Peace Institute and explored and developed the constructive role that technologies can play in peacemaking.

“We were able to bring together not only practitioners from Afghanistan, Palestine, Myanmar, Colombia, Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and the United States, but also about a dozen computer scientists from various companies focused on developing technologies to promote democratic deliberation,” Schirch said. “The depth and breadth of experiences, voices and innovative ideas shared in the conversation were inspiring and really speak to the potential for impact these forums generate.”

The workshop included breakout sessions to learn how to use different platforms and the opportunity for regional groups to discuss how they could use the technologies to promote peace and democratic processes. “Technology is increasingly being used to fuel polarization. That’s why in this workshop – and in my broader research project with the Toda Peace Institute – we want to explore how we can actively counteract this trend by using technology to strengthen peace and social cohesion,” Schirch said.

The project began in 2016 to study the impact of new technologies on peace and democracy. A series of workshops followed, leading to another global research project, an edited book, and the creation of a Council on Technology and Social Cohesion. Schirch is one of three co-chairs of the council, which includes a dozen leading organizations expressing concern about the impact of technology platforms on society. She took nine students from the Kroc Institute to the council’s launch in San Francisco in February 2023 at a sold-out conference with 250 attendees. Several students were able to get internships and jobs as a result of contacts they made with technology companies at the conference. Two students accompanied her to the council’s first meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in December 2023.

A few months later, in March 2024, the Keough School of Global Affairs sponsored a symposium on deliberative technologies in Washington, DC with Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and students from the Kroc Institute – further evidence of the importance of strategically developing the place and function of deliberative technologies in peacebuilding.

Schirch’s work has been recognized by leading technology companies such as OpenAI and Google’s Jigsaw, as well as by the Vatican. With a team of technology experts involved in researching democratic input into AI, Schirch explored the use of deliberative technologies to gather public input on the ethical principles and rules for OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In July 2024, Father Paolo Benanti, who led the Vatican’s “Rome Call” on AI ethics, invited Schirch to present her research at a global conference of religious leaders discussing AI ethics in Hiroshima, Japan. The location was chosen to highlight how technologies like AI and the atomic bomb can have devastating consequences for society.

In his workshop, Schirch not only presented current plans for the use of technologies, but also suggested ways to continue a learning community to share insights, risks and ideas on how to safely use these new technologies to support peacebuilding in polarized contexts.