International Day of Peace

 Between 2022 and 2026, three Armed conflicts have served as the operational test bed for AI in war . Ukraine shows how cheap,expendable autonomous hardware spreads at scale . Gaza shows how AI moves into the cognitive core of military targetin g. The Israel-Iran exchanges show how AI now coordinates campaigns across multiple domains at machine speed . The war in Ukraine is the most consequential testing ground for autonomous and AI-enabled systems in modern combat . By December 2025, Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine’s Defence Procurement Agency had supplied 2.4 million firstperson-view drones in a year, with total armed forces uptake on track for three million units. Ukrainian production capacity is reported to have reached as many as five million drones in 2025, drawing on more than 500 domestic manufacturers via the Brave1 defence-tech accelerator launched in April 2023. Figure 5.2 shows drone strike events and resulting fatalities from 2018 to 2025; Ukraine is sep...

  The conflicts profiled above show how AI is currently being used in warfare . However, the rapid advancement and uptake of  AI technologies in warfare means that the number of potential threats and applications is likely to increase significantly in the next decade. These applications and threats are likely to come in one of three forms: • Tactical threats , such as the use of AI-controlled drones warms . • Strategic threats , such as using AI to coordinate entirewarfare operations . • Existential threats, where AI control of critical decision-making systems could lead to mass-casualty events .   By 2030, the baseline usage of drones as seen in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran is likely to spread. Counter-drone systems like Epirus’s Leonidas, naval surface drones like the Magura family, and dedicated swarm-coordination software will mean that the cost of lethality keeps falling and the response time of human commanders keeps shrinking. Drone swarms are a particularly s...

  As AI capabilities have increased rapidly, investment has also risen, with both compute and capital increasingly concentrated in a handful of countries. In 2024, US private AI investment reached US$109 billion, against China’s US$9.3 billion and the United Kingdom’s US$4.5 billion, and the US accounted for 40 notable frontier models against 15 from China and three from Europe. At the same time, the cost of running these models has dropped dramatically, as shown in Figure 5.5. Inference for GPT-3.5- equivalent performance fell from about US$20 per million tokens in November 2022 to US$0.07 by October 2024, a 280-fold drop in less than two years. Cheap inference combined with expensive training favours a small set of firms and states: those with the capital to build frontier models , and the customer base to spread the cost of inference across millions of users This concentration carries a direct energy cost. The  International Energy Agency projects global data centre el...

AI is not only being used to shorten kill chains and enhance coordination capacity in wartime. A parallel set of applications, smaller in scale but expanding quickly, uses the same underlying technologies to support peacebuilding, mediation, atrocity documentation, language access, and early warning of conflict. A September 2025 meta-review of more than 600 documents in the field found that these tools are showing consistent value across multiple use cases, but face acute and persistent gaps in funding, evaluation methodology, and human-rights safeguards. In budget terms, documented AI for Peace programs operate three to four orders of magnitude below the scale of frontier-AI investment , as shown in Figure 5.7. The asymmetry is so large that AI for Peace is best understood not as a counterweight to military AI , but as a parallel ecosystem that has emerged in spite of, rather than because of, the dominant investment pattern. The most developed applications of AI for Peace are in...

 The Global Peace Index indicators were originally selected with the assistance of the expert panel in 2007 and have been reviewed by the expert panel on an annual basis. All scores for each indicator are normalised on a scale of 1-5, whereby qualitative indicators are banded into five groupings and quantitative ones are scored from 1 to 5, to the third decimal point. Global Peace Index Map .

In the contemporary geopolitical landscape , new conflict dynamics are being fundamentally reshaped by technological disruption, shifting state stabilisation models, and complex proxy networks. As traditional multilateral frameworks face gridlock, global security is increasingly defined by cross-cutting digital battlespaces, resource scarcity, and highly transactional peace mediation . The Drivers of New Conflict Dynamics Contemporary conflicts are shifting away from traditional, symmetric interstate warfare toward complex, multi-layered environments defined by several distinct pillars: Technological Disruption & Digital Battlespaces : The rapid integration of cyber warfare, artificial intelligence (AI), commercial drone tech, and space weaponisation has completely blurred the line between war and peace. These tools grant non-state actors disproportionate power projection and allow state actors to conduct deniable operations. The Rise of Hybrid & Proxy Networks : Conflict con...