Can Innovators be Peacebuilders? A Peace Innovation Action Plan

What's the 'Uber for peace'? How can we 'disrupt conflict'? Such questions are taking Silicon Valley and other innovation environments by storm, but most peace scholars and practitioners recoil from questions like these. So how can we leverage the deep interest in peace by innovation actors to create more socially responsible and impactful pro-peace innovations? We argue that if peacebuilding scholars can offer more systemic expertise and guidance, social and technological innovation outputs can better build peace. Weoutline a new approach to peace innovation, defined as: Innovation that expressly aims to facilitate the prevention of conflict and/or alleviate the harmful consequences of human suffering when conflict occurs, and which accepts responsibility for its own intended and unintended outcomes. This article reviews this agenda's most promising avenues, which can fundamentally transform both peacebuilding and social innovation.