Digital tools as experts in international peace and security

Abstract

Abstract Over the past decades, knowledge about peace and security has become increasingly mediated and co-produced with and through digital objects such as databases, indicators, apps, big data and data analysis algorithms. Only recently has the literature begun to recognize this. This article addresses the gap in the literature by exploring the centrality of digital objects' design in their emergence as experts in relation to international peace and security practices. By centering the politics of design, we contribute to broader debates on the effects of technology for who/what is considered an expert in contemporary international policy. Through a material-semiotic analysis of the UN SanctionsApp and the Security Assistance Monitor database, and semi-structured interviews with creators and users, we show how the normative goal of inclusion is inscribed into digital artifacts and translated into use. These cases were selected based on their inclusion of relevant state and nonstate actors into policy decisions, and our findings suggest that usage and material infrastructures play an important role in how this purpose is advanced. We shed light onto how digital expert objects produce actionable knowledge via the web of relations implicated in their production and highlight the importance of practitioners' participation in the making of such objects.