Welcome to the United Nations

Innovation

In January 2020, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs launched the Innovation Cell, an interdisciplinary team dedicated to helping the Department and its field presences to understand and explore, pilot, and scale new technologies, tools, and practices in conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding. Responding to the Secretary-General’s call on the UN system to accelerate its uptake of innovative methods, the Innovation Cell catalyses innovation in peace and security, while providing a forum for colleagues at UNHQ and in the field to engage collaboratively in human-centred design and problem-solving.

The Cell is part of the UN’s Innovation Network (UNIN) and works to galvanize an ecosystem of technology, civil society, and academic partners outside the UN system on peace and security use cases, thereby leveraging innovation for the shared goal of peace. 

 

Key Documents

Innovation:

 

Resources

Guides

Digital Applications 

  • Peace and Security Data Hub – Repository for UN peace and security data (DPPA and DPPA-DPO)
  • Diplomatic Pulse – Web search of diplomatic press releases (DPPA and Qatar Computing Institute of Technology)
  • Sparrow – Twitter media monitoring tool (DPPA and The Idea Bureau)
  • Warbler (DPPA and Kanari AI) – Transcription and translation tool
  • Sweet Victory - A Game about Behavioural Science for Peace (DPPA, Bad News and the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab)
  • Lisan - Iraqi, Yemeni, Sudanese and Libyan dialect corpus (DPPA, American University of Beirut and Birzeit University)
  • Geoguard – A geospatial data dashboard visualizing relationships between conflict and water scarcity

Documentaries

 

Articles

News Articles

Medium Channel "Futuring Peace"

DPPA "Politically Speaking"

Oil Working Group Bulletins

 

Virtual Reality Experiences

Contact

Reach out to us at DPPA-Innovation@un.org for questions, comments and ideas.

Visit https://futuringpeace.org/ to learn more about the Innovation Cell’s exploratory projects.

Follow us at https://medium.com/futuring-peace and https://dppa.medium.com/ for innovation-related think pieces and approaches. 

Follow @UN_Innovation to learn what UN entities are doing in the space of innovation.