The PeaceTech Alliance's interview with ORF Science, published 16 September 2026.
BY Michael Mürling / ON 16 SEPTEMBER, 2026
The PeaceTech Alliance spoke with ORF Science (published 16 September 2026, interview by Lukas Wieselberg, with Principal of the PeaceTech Alliance, Nathan Coyle, answering on the Alliance's behalf) about the one rule that decides whether something counts as PeaceTech at all: Do No Harm. Any tool built for peace can just as easily be turned toward conflict, and once profit enters the picture — what the Alliance calls "triple-use" — that tension only grows. Branding a technology as PeaceTech doesn't resolve that; at best, it's honest about the risk rather than pretending it away.
Do No Harm as the test. Asked whether there's a principle underneath all the different things PeaceTech can mean, the interview is direct: every intervention connects communities or divides them, and unintended harm can fuel conflict just as easily as help can ease it. That's already the standard peacebuilders apply before stepping into any community. With technology, the potential for harm is even greater, which is exactly why the Alliance treats "Do No Harm" as non-negotiable rather than aspirational. If something can't be measured against it, the Alliance's position is simple: it shouldn't be called PeaceTech at all.
Rooted in Austria. Hosted at AIT, the Alliance spans the University of Graz, the Diplomatic Academy Vienna, the University of Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, Danube University Krems, the International Institute for Peace, the Austrian Centre for Peace, GAIA-X Hub Austria, and the Open Knowledge Foundation as international partner. That coalition has carried the same Do No Harm standard outward, into the UN Cyber Hub in New York, the OSCE, Brussels, and UN venues in Geneva and Vienna — including this year's PeaceTech event at Geneva Peace Week.
Practice over definition. Asked what PeaceTech actually is, the Alliance is asked constantly, and stays wary of answering with a fixed definition. Its preference is to let the field prove itself through what gets built and tested, with room for ongoing criticism, rather than settling the meaning of the word in advance.
What it looks like when it works. Rather than describing PeaceTech abstractly, the interview points to tools already in use: Ushahidi, the crowdsourced crisis-mapping platform built after Kenya's 2008 election violence and still used to track violence in real time; UNOSAT, the UN's satellite imagery service, used during the Sudan war to locate burned villages and displacement camps for humanitarian responders; and the Uncensored Library, where Reporters Without Borders rebuilt censored journalism inside Minecraft so it stays reachable in countries with restricted press freedom.
Lived experience over lectures. Rather than explain the field from the front of a room, the Alliance would rather bring colleagues directly into these conversations — pointing to its invitation to Hiroshima survivor and 2017 Nobel Peace Prize representative Setsuko Thurlow as the kind of encounter no presentation replaces.
Built from practitioner input. The interview closes on Voices from the Field, the Alliance's free, open-source chatbot built with the Austrian Centre for Peace and grounded in feedback from over 200 peacebuilding practitioners, most from the Global South — a tool shaped by the people expected to use it, not by a definition agreed on beforehand.
Read the full interview (in German) on ORF Science.