Press Release - The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Peacebuilding: Why Human Rights Must Guide Its Design
Read The NewsSeptember 22, 2025 – Zürich, Switzerland – Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) has increased interest in the role it can play in peacebuilding efforts, particularly in conflict mapping and analysis. Yet, AI remains fundamentally a dual-use technology. The same AI technologies that can aid peacebuilding efforts can also spread inaccurate information, amplify division, and deepen social polarization.
As AI enters the mainstream and reshapes societies worldwide, it also brings unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The International Panel on the Information Environment’s (IPIE) technical paper, Artificial Intelligence and Peacebuilding: Opportunities and Challenges, outlines how AI can aid peacebuilding amid current global challenges. Produced by the IPIE’s Scientific Panel on AI and Peacebuilding, this technical paper is based on the analysis of 600 documents, including peer-reviewed articles, policy reports, and case studies from diverse global sources, and reviews the current state of AI peacebuilding research and practice and offers recommendations to policymakers and the private and academic sectors on how to better harness AI’s potential for peace.
AI is rapidly being leveraged for peacebuilding efforts, including monitoring conflict risks, supporting humanitarian coordination, and fostering peace dialogues. But these tools can also expand repression, surveil civilians, and spread disinformation.
Professor Fredrick Ogenga, Chair of the IPIE's Scientific Panel on AI and Peacebuilding, cautions that:
Even if human rights guide the design of AI, human intervention must play a central role in safeguarding its potential for good. This echoes the importance of locally-generated data to ensure AI supports context-specific peace efforts. Local knowledge and methods in addressing data poverty and enabling data sovereignty in the Global South is essential to have grounded, inclusive, and locally informed approaches to AI in peacebuilding.
As generative AI (GenAI) continues to advance, it will play an increasingly important role in peacebuilding. This includes personalized conflict resolution training and upskilling, supporting peacebuilding infrastructure and knowledge management, negotiation support, mental health engagement, and peacebuilding effectiveness.
But even the most sophisticated AI tools may exacerbate rather than prevent conflict if deployed in unhealthy information environments. A separate IPIE report shows that 63% of experts have expressed significant concern about the potential of GenAI to perpetuate biases, amplify harassment, and spread misinformation.
For AI to genuinely benefit peacebuilding efforts, the IPIE's report concludes that human rights principles must be integrated from design to deployment. This includes privacy protection, civil and political rights, accountability, and safety. The successful integration of AI into peacebuilding requires a careful balance between innovation and protection. It remains a tool whose impact depends on larger political and economic ecosystems.
Dr. Evelyne Tauchnitz, Vice Chair of the IPIE's Scientific Panel on AI and Peacebuilding, adds:
Security can be imposed through surveillance and force, but peace demands the protection and flourishing of rights and freedoms. Without this ethical compass, AI built for security alone can fuel war and violence, driving new forms of repression, discrimination, polarization, and emotional detachment. This is why civil and political rights, in particular, such as the right to life, privacy, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and non-discrimination, must guide AI in peacebuilding.
The Panel's five recommendations on the use of AI in peacebuilding efforts are:
- Center fundamental human rights and Do Not Harm principles from design to deployment.
- Fund evidence-based intiatives and make data on both successes and failures widely accessible.
- Support smaller, locally relevant language models that reflect diverse contexts.
- Promote transparency and accountability for dual-use AI tools.
- Build partnerships across the peacebuilding, development, and technology sectors.
While AI offers significant potential for advancing peace, success requires robust governance frameworks, sustained investment in context-specific research and infrastructure, and a commitment to human rights protection. A proactive approach is necessary to prevent AI from becoming an increasing source of instability.
ENDS
Further details about the IPIE, the Scientific Panel on AI and Peacebuilding, and this report can be found at www.IPIE.info.
For media inquiries, interviews, or more information, please contact Press@IPIE.info.
About the IPIE
The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) is an independent and global science organization providing scientific knowledge about the health of the world's information environment. Based in Switzerland, the IPIE offers policymakers, industry, and civil society actionable scientific assessments about threats to the information environment, including AI bias, algorithmic manipulation, and disinformation. The IPIE is the only scientific body systematically organizing, evaluating, and elevating research with the broad aim of improving the global information environment. Hundreds of researchers worldwide contribute to the IPIE's reports.