The PeaceTech We Want

At The PeaceTech We Want Online Summit (19 October 2026), peacebuilders, technologists, researchers and policymakers explored how to bring the open movement closer to those working on peacebuilding and conflict mediation.

Brett Solomon’s closing keynote traced his 20 years at the intersection of human rights and new technology, including Access Now and RightsCon, and argued that the tech sector has shifted “from being our friend to becoming our enemy”. He praised the PeaceTech conference for showing a sector trying to “flip the switch” and demonstrate technology as a force for good, while stressing that the sector’s growing maturity comes with growing complexity.

Solomon challenged the field with uncomfortable questions: how are we using technologies to solve problems technology itself helped create; how are we patching tech solutions onto inherently non-technical problems; and how are we protecting ourselves from the very technologies we use to protect us? He argued we are only at the beginning of the digital revolution and in a difficult transition period, recalling the unmet promise of a “culture of peace” at the millennium and listing poor decisions on poverty, climate, colonisation, the SDGs, and the UN’s peace and security mandate—while permitting the digitalisation of warfare with almost no constraint.

He outlined four quadrants of this new warfare: network and infrastructure control, information interference, cyber operations, and autonomous/AI-enabled systems. War has “escaped the battlefield,” he said, becoming pernicious and pervasive, and because digitalisation has transformed civilian life, digitalised warfare is everywhere—so peace must be waged there too.

He posed the core paradox that “digitalisation equals war,” then asked how digitalisation or technology can equal peace. He noted that people increasingly see Big Tech as destructive, exploitative, dangerous, and privatised—the surveyor and exploiter of data, controlled by a handful of billionaires—so PeaceTech must show that tech can also be for good. He invoked John Perry Barlow’s 1996 cyberspace declaration as a naive but perhaps newly relevant moment: maybe technology can be transformed from an instrument of conflict into a force for peace, and if big tech builds empires, peace tech can build bridges between communities.

He proposed a definition of digital peace as a state of nonviolence free from digital hostilities sustained by laws, norms, and technologies that prevent digital conflict. He noted there are no agreed indicators of digital peace, meaning we may already be in a state of digital war without knowing it. Reviewing 2,257 peace and ceasefire agreements, he found almost none mention new technology, cyber, TikTok, or Facebook; peace is still defined by tanks and troops while conflict is increasingly defined by technology. He offered a seven-step blueprint for digital peace—protection of critical infrastructure, state restraint, arms control, laws and norms, company governance, humanitarian frameworks, and civilian protection—and urged peace tech to engage the broader legal, political, and normative developments, not only case-by-case tools.

Speaker

Brett Solomon – Human rights advocate, technology policy expert, and author of ‘Digital Ceasefire’

Brett Solomon is a human rights advocate, technology policy expert, and author of Digital Ceasefire, a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press examining the digitalisation of warfare and the pursuit of digital peace. He is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law, where he co-leads the Digital Ceasefire and De-escalation project. He is the co-founder of Access Now, where he served as Executive Director for 15 years, and the founder of RightsCon, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age. He has spoken at the United Nations, the European Parliament and the World Economic Forum, and delivered TEDx talks on digital democracy and the right to peaceful protest in the digital age. He has previously worked with Amnesty International Australia, Oxfam Australia, GetUp! and Avaaz.

Below, the slide presentation used during the keynote is available for download.