The quest for nonmilitary solutions to chronic regional conflicts gives rise to a dynamic engineering field.
By Mark Matthews
In a Zoom call from Istanbul, Turkey, Chris McNaboe shares a time-lapse visualization on his MacBook Pro. An electronic file opens to a few tiny dots, resembling bacteria under a microscope. As seconds pass, more dots appear, of varied sizes and colors. Soon, a multihued mosaic fills the screen. It’s a pleasing image, but it tells a grim story: how armed groups—each represented by a dot—proliferated, gained or lost territory, and formed or severed alliances in Syria’s central Aleppo region over a two-year period.
McNaboe, a Middle East field officer for the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, has used such data to figure out who’s who in Syria’s brutal civil war so that he and his colleagues can establish contacts on the ground and present accurate information to parties working to end the fighting. “With so many different groups claiming to be active and important, who do you need to talk to if you want to try and cool this down?” he asks.
The combatant-tracking tool is one of a number of software platforms that together give the Atlanta-based center an encyclopedic, fine-grained picture of the decade-long clash, documenting more than 200,000 separate events, about 70 references for each of hundreds of armed groups, tens of thousands of unexploded munitions that need to be cleared, and month-by-month snapshots of military control at more than 8,000 locations. The data-rich effort drew on experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Human Rights Science, Arizona State University, Silicon Valley tech firms, and the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project, which uses multiple information-gathering tools to monitor violence around the world.
McNaboe is not an engineer. He holds a master’s degree from what is now the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California. But his deft deployment of the Syria Conflict Mapping Project has vaulted him to the forefront of a transformative new field: peace engineering.
Usually defined as “the application of science and engineering principles and technology to promote and support peace,” this emerging interdisciplinary field comprises engineering academics and students, conflict-resolution experts, social scientists, and nongovernmental groups. Its practitioners use a range of technology, data analytics, and systems-engineering approaches to prevent or quell conflicts—within and beyond US borders—as well as to identify and mitigate the causes.
Call to Action
Signs suggest the nation needs peace engineers: the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and desire to pull back from Middle East combat reflect both war fatigue and the limits of military power when confronting non-state adversaries in unstable regions. Even hawkish policymakers argue for a bigger investment in what former US defense secretary Robert Gates calls the “nonmilitary instruments of power.”
“What do we always do with radical Islam? We bomb it,” says Philip Breedlove, a retired US Air Force general and former supreme allied commander in Europe. He spoke during an online presentation from Georgia Tech, where he is a distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, a civil engineering alumnus, and a peace-engineering champion. “We use the military. We go after it with steel and tritonal,” an explosive used in bombs, when other tools would cost less and achieve more. “And economically, did we have a plan for recovery in Syria? Do we have a plan now that addresses the root causes of radical Islam? The answer is no.”
Syria’s desperate recovery inspired five civil engineering seniors at Drexel University. They faced a forbidding landscape: what started in 2011 with the Bashar al-Assad regime’s harsh breakup of peaceful demonstrations had morphed into a combination of civil rebellion, extremism, and proxy war among major powers. Consequently, at least 450,000 people have died, millions have been displaced, and tens of thousands have been tortured or imprisoned. As a whole, Syria has sustained well over $100 billion worth of damage.
From their 5,000-mile remove, the students worked out a manageable approach. At the urging of peace-engineering pioneer Joseph Hughes, a University Distinguished Professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel, the students teamed up with the nonprofit Zomia Center, a research alliance specializing in conflict-torn ungoverned spaces, and Anand Gopal, a sociologist-journalist, assistant research professor at Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War, and Zomia board member. They zeroed in on Manbij, a war-scarred city in north-central Syria that Zomia researchers had studied. Strategically located, Manbij has at various times been controlled by the Syrian government, Islamic State fighters, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The city was also used as a base by US and French forces.
As their 2021 senior design project, the Drexel team developed plans for a future soccer field and community center in Manbij. The soccer field could help with postwar reconciliation, the students were told. The community center would provide a blast-resistant basement meeting space. In designing the soccer field and community center, the students employed a systems-engineering method to find out what the city needed, drawing on existing community survey data provided by Arizona State and high-resolution satellite imagery. They gathered information on education, the residents’ age and socioeconomic breakdown, and the condition of water, sewer, and power systems. With this information, they produced what Hughes describes as a multidimensional map of a distressed city—and a possible blueprint for actual recovery efforts.
Mangrove Mystery
Advances in technology and its widespread adoption make the current period ripe for peace engineering, Hughes and Breedlove argued in the Winter 2020 issue of The Bridge, published by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). “Engineering strategies to improve the quantity and quality of positive behaviors and to reduce destructive behavior are now achievable,” they wrote.
Hughes practiced peace engineering before it got its name. In the early 2000s, when he was a professor at Rice University and later at Georgia Tech, he worked in Cabinda, Angola, to find out what had destroyed the mangrove forests, once a habitat for the abundant sea life consumed in the restive region. Angry local residents blamed the loss on oil spills resulting from offshore drilling by international companies. But satellite imagery analyzed by Hughes’s team, which included other faculty members and graduate students, showed that ocean currents would keep spilled oil from moving inland and that a wide beach separated the mangroves from the offshore rigs.
The team concluded instead that roads built to transport timber were the culprits, along with sediment buildup. Designed without culverts, the roads had altered the area’s hydrologic profile, depriving the mangroves of circulating water and tidal cycles. The Angolan officials and residents didn’t believe the team’s findings at first; it took a convoy to the area, a helicopter trip, and public hearings sharing the collected data to persuade them. For the team, “it was an incredible learning experience,” Hughes recalls.
Like Hughes, Alpaslan Özerdem was a pioneer in applying his engineering expertise to a war-torn region. After studying civil engineering at Istanbul Technical University, he earned a doctorate in peace studies and conflict resolution in 1999 from York University in the United Kingdom. His 1998 thesis found “an alarming tendency for urban water supplies around the world to be damaged by war either directly or indirectly.” Probing how water systems in Bosnia were rebuilt after the 1992–1995 Balkan war, he faulted international aid agencies for a solely technical approach that hindered communities’ recoveries. When rehabilitated systems fail, he noted, it’s often the result of technology that is “not appropriate to the local physical, organizational, and economic environment” and has been installed “without incorporating a good level of local participation.”
Two decades later, Özerdem sounded a similar theme before the United Nations Security Council, describing a missed opportunity for reconciliation in postwar Bosnia. He cited the rebuilding of Stari Most, a treasured sixteenth-century footbridge across the Neretva River in Mostar. The span had connected Bosnians on the east side of the river and Croatians on the west before collapsing amid heavy Croatian shelling in 1993. “The international community built almost an exact copy of the bridge, which was a great success,” Özerdem told the diplomats. But the reconstruction went forward without providing Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks opportunities “for building bridges of trust between themselves” aimed at healing “deep emotional wounds.”
By then, Özerdem had become dean of George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, which has since been renamed in honor of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Seeking to rejuvenate the field of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, he started the graduate-level peace-engineering lab to explore the nexus between peace and technology. “I really want the Carter School to be relevant to communities affected by armed conflict,” with research that comes up with “replicable and scalable solutions,” he says. “I think the use of technology and engineering gives us many opportunities.”
The pairing of peacemaking and engineering “really is like a mixture of the mind—left brain, right brain. I don’t know which side is which right now,” Elana Sokol, one of three PhD-track peace-engineering fellows at the Carter School—none of them educated as engineers—said in a September panel discussion. Her research focuses on smart city technologies and the kinds of data they can collect, including on individuals. “Where peace engineers can fit in so well is that we’re thinking about more of those risks and misuses and the bigger picture.
Collective Wisdom
Carter School Fellow Keil Eggers specializes in capturing personal narratives on a large scale and employing software to find patterns and anomalies that provide revealing insights. As an undergraduate activist at GMU, he demonstrated for Palestinian rights. Now his approach is more nuanced. He says he has “a better sense of what my role needs to be,” one with “a different type of convening power and tools behind me.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution, Eggers helped run a story-collection project called Our Tomorrows at the University of Kansas Center for Public Partnerships and Research. Thousands of narratives collected across the state were fed into a database intended to give citizens a voice in setting policy for early childhood education. Comments were recorded and analyzed using SenseMaker, a software platform developed by the firm Cognitive Edge, which infuses quantitative data with qualitative context. The same process of story collection and analysis could prove useful at the start of peace talks, providing adversaries with an agreed-upon baseline of “what’s happening on the ground,” Eggers suggests. It would not be a substitute for traditional peacebuilding tools, he underscores, noting “you have to do all the groundwork to build partnerships, work with people.”
Eggers plans a bold use of SenseMaker that may turn into his dissertation project: preventing the next US civil war. During a September panel discussion on Zoom, he flashed a scene of January 6, 2021, rioters scaling the US Capitol walls to show that a dystopian collapse of the republic was not all that far-fetched. He hopes to collect 10,000 stories from people across the United States about events that affect their vision of the future; apply analysis to probe for opportunities for positive change; and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop signal detection and early warning of violent outbreaks.
The Carter School, Stanford University’s Peace Innovation Lab, and engineering schools at Drexel, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Colorado Boulder make up the Peace Engineering Consortium. Their effort has elements of other initiatives that encourage students to tackle humanitarian needs at home and abroad, such as Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), Engineers Without Borders (EWB-USA), the NAE-sponsored Grand Challenges Scholars program, and the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC).
Diplomacy Redefined
Increased regional flare-ups and their destabilizing consequences, including political unrest, refugee crises, and environmental degradation, have helped peace engineering gain traction. Early steps in the field’s establishment included a daylong symposium in 2003 hosted by Bucknell University and a 2004 Engineering for Social Justice conference hosted by Caroline Baillie at Canada’s Queen’s University, the first of a series of events affiliated with the network Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace. In 2011, the NAE and the US Institute of Peace set up the Roundtable on Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding on ways of applying technology to conflict prevention and rehabilitating war-torn societies.
Peace engineering also draws on scholarship by, among others, Donna Riley, engineering education department head at Purdue, and Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena at the Colorado School of Mines. Service-learning pioneers have advanced the movement as well.
Bernard Amadei, the visionary founding president of Engineers Without Borders and a longtime peace-engineering enthusiast, was active in the NAE-USIP Roundtable. In 2010, the University of Colorado Boulder civil engineering professor hosted a four-day Cyprus meeting of some 40 participants from EWB-USA and EWB branches in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Greece. The purpose was to come up with “peace-engineering-driven” initiatives in the eastern Mediterranean around water, energy, and food. A second meeting occurred the next year. Political barriers to collaboration stymied most of the joint projects, but these were at least considered and planned, Amadei wrote in a 2019 article in the journal Sustainability. The encounters led to “priceless lifelong friendships,” and “showed that peace is possible when engineers and scientists of various countries work on critical issues in a collaborative way despite geopolitical or other constraints.” Amadei wants to see such engineering diplomacy initiatives scaled up and advertised “so that they become standard practice.”
Amadei’s Cyprus gatherings represented a variation of “track 2 diplomacy”—informal meetings that have at times progressed to official exchanges. A notable example: the secret Israeli-Palestinian talks leading to the breakthrough Oslo peace accords of 1993. Engineers are not without influence in US diplomatic ranks. At the State Department, acting science and technology adviser Allison Schwier holds a chemical engineering PhD from Columbia, and Allie Davis, a student of Amadei’s and recent PhD graduate, is now a foreign affairs officer in the Office of Conservation and Water, working to strengthen water security around the world. (See “Wellsprings of Hope,” page 22).
If Schwier and Davis exemplify roles to which engineering students can aspire, peace engineering goes further, exploring areas where policymakers arguably have fallen short and citizens and nongovernmental groups have had to step up. These include human rights, sustainability, climate change, and US domestic problems like gun violence—a key interest of Drexel’s Hughes and some of his students. “This is a big idea; this isn’t just a narrow field of study,” says Elisabeth Gilmore, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carleton University in Canada. A chemical and environmental engineer, she was a AAAS fellow at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 and 2011 and has also been affiliated with the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Unlike the study of international relations, she adds, the intent of peace engineering should be “to equip ourselves to do this in a way that is consistent with sustainable development, consistent with ideas of human dignity, making sure that what we do are things that people want.”
Conflict Minerals
Ramiro Jordan and his colleagues had that kind of big picture in mind when they organized the November 2018 joint conference of the World Engineering Education Forum and the Global Engineering Deans Council around peace engineering. Held at the University of New Mexico, where Jordan is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate dean of engineering, global initiatives, the event put forward an expansive explanation of the new field: “the intentional application of systemic-level thinking of science, culture, technology, and engineering principles to directly promote and support conditions for peace.” A call for papers asked: “How can we create a forum where academia, industry, governments, banks/finance, NGOs, multilateral organizations, R&D centers, concerned citizens, public stakeholders, and leaders interact to continue the conversation/action on Peace Engineering?”
Susan Lord, professor and chair of integrative engineering at the University of San Diego and an ASEE fellow, was one of some 500 attendees from around the world. She wondered if the event’s multiple topics had cast too wide a net. “It was such an assortment I found it difficult to figure out what the focus was. The community was not well defined,” Lord says. Still, the conference showcased the imaginative ways that traditional engineering curricula can incorporate social justice themes. In one paper, Lord described an entry-level circuits class in which students consider the human costs of building smartphone capacitors that contain tantalum—a “conflict mineral” that enriches militias accused of atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Peace engineering gained key institutional support beyond academe when Jordan formed a partnership between UNM and Albuquerque-based Sandia National Laboratories. A 2020 concept paper by Nancy Hayden, a systems research analyst, and seven other Sandia scientists outlined a natural fit between the US Department of Energy lab’s purpose of developing “advanced technologies to ensure global peace” and engineering schools’ task of “educating engineers in the application of systems engineering and complexity science to . . . peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping.”
The paper, which also noted synergies with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and NAE’s Grand Challenges, underscored the need to anticipate and address the disruptive impacts of climate change. “The future environment will challenge the assumptions upon which current frameworks for peace and security have been built,” creating instabilities that likely would “outpace the ability of institutions to respond,” the authors cautioned. The UNM-Sandia group envisions “new partnership models with universities, NGOs, and private industry on innovative technical R&D [to] fill critical gaps and build a pipeline of talent.”
If that happens, peace engineers can expect expanded access to advanced technology once reserved for government intelligence operatives. Already, United Nations agencies and organizations like Bellingcat, an independent investigative nonprofit, and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which monitors local conflicts in 50 countries, can exploit an array of satellites providing real-time, high-resolution images, along with mapping and data analysis tools that can capture violent incidents and migration and displacement of populations. The groups also rely on the growing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and translation capabilities of natural language processing.
Information also floods in from unmanned aircraft systems—drones—deployed for such nonmilitary uses as search and rescue, land-use mapping, medical supply delivery, and civilian protection. Gordon Hoople, a member of Lord’s department at USD, and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, a political sociologist in the School of Peace Studies, coauthored Drones for Good: How to Bring Sociotechnical Thinking into the Classroom. One of their case studies describes how the Predator, a US tool of targeted killing, was initially used for a humanitarian purpose: the drone complemented satellite imagery to establish proof of war crimes in Bosnia.
The Sentinel Project, a Canadian nonprofit that employs technology to prevent atrocities, including genocide, has reported successful drone-based early warning of conflict in Kenya’s Tana Delta region. But government restrictions on unmanned aircraft have limited their use, as has their association in some countries with lethal US military strikes. As a Sentinel study reports: “Sightings can easily strike fear or sow confusion among communities and individuals who may not be aware of the benevolent objectives of the system operators.”
Disinformation Watchdogs
While engineers work to integrate drones into conflict prevention and peacemaking, they are becoming ever more adept at tracking and countering malign use of social media. Michael Best, an MIT Media Lab veteran who is now a professor and director of Georgia Tech’s Technologies and International Development Lab (T+ID), doesn’t call himself a peace engineer. Yet his work in Africa would qualify. To prevent election-related violence caused by the spread of disinformation on social media, Best led a joint Georgia Tech–United Nations University project to develop cross-media tracking centers. Equipped with software called Aggie, the centers scooped up and rapidly analyzed social media reports and shared information with legitimate news outlets and election observers.
During 2016 elections in Ghana, Aggie collected and combed through more than 300,000 reports from Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and RSS sources for incidents over a period of three days, the team reported. Best’s lab also developed—in close collaboration with the Liberian diaspora—a video-rich website, which it continues to host, documenting the public hearings and other work of Liberia’s post-civil war Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“The place where you can draw the straightest line . . . between technology and violence reduction, I would say is in the area of election violence,” says Sheldon Himelfarb, president and CEO of the nonprofit PeaceTech Lab in Washington. He credits Best with outstanding use of technology to prevent such outbreaks.
The kind of disinformation Best sought to dispel in Africa threatens more than elections and “could be the biggest trigger for violence in the future,” contends Himelfarb. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he notes, lives were lost unnecessarily due to misinformation surrounding vaccines. Prejudice also triggered violent incidents, prompting the PeaceTech Lab to create the COVID-19 Violence & Response Tracker. With help from tech companies, Georgia Tech, Rongo University in Kenya, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a global team collected, analyzed, and visualized data based on more than 360,000 reports of violence. The effort “was kind of a test case” of using big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to understand and isolate the drivers of violence, Himelfarb says. Taking a step further to combat dis- and misinformation, Himelfarb hopes to generate international support for a media equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that would make science-based recommendations for setting “objective, transparent standards for a healthy global information environment.”
A healthy environment of any kind remains remote in Syria, where the Carter Center’s McNaboe began tracking fighting forces as a new hire nine years ago. During that time, he has met with most combatant groups, except the Islamic State—“We didn’t feel like it was safe for us to do so”—and he has also met with the al-Assad government. “I don’t think we have made a difference in terms of arms trafficking or levels of violence, unfortunately,” he acknowledges. But he’s proud that the Carter Center is trusted by UN officials and other mediators as a source of verified data. “Every conflict ends with the political settlement,” McNaboe continues, reflecting the results-driven approach of the center’s founder and leader, a former US president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who trained as a reactor engineer. “Even if you are militarily superior, in the end you will need some political settlement. And so, where we have moved the needle perhaps a little bit is in getting people to focus on what that political settlement might be and try to develop it further.”
Engineers take note: even with the best skills and technology, peace isn’t easy or quick.
Mark Matthews, Prism’s former editor, is a book author and freelance writer based in Washington, DC.
Design by Francis Igot