Artificial Intelligence (AI), Conflict, and Peace.


GLOBAL PEACE INDEX 2026
 


Artificial intelligence is reshaping how peace and conflict arewaged, observed, and analysed. In this environment Positive Peace – the attitudes, institutions, and structures that sustain peaceful societies – becomes both more important and harder to build, because the technologies of conflict now spread faster than the institutions of peace. In the past year, there were more than 60 active state-based conflicts, thousands of terrorist attacks, and over 180,000 people killed in conflict, with drone use surging across both state and non-state groups, as shown in Figure 5.1. The same year also saw a surge in the deployment of AI in mediation, atrocity documentation, language access, and conflict early warning. The defining peace and conflict question of the late 2020s is no longer whether AI will reshape global peacefulness, but along which dimensions, at what speed, and to whose benefit.

The number of states with a recorded drone strike has increased more than 200 per cent.


Two trajectories are unfolding at once. On the first, AI is compressing the kill chain, lowering the marginal cost of lethality, and concentrating compute and capital in a handful of firms and states. On the second, AI is widening participation in peace processes, translating humanitarian information across hundreds of languages, accelerating the documentation of war crimes, and offering early-warning signals on conflict escalation that were impossible only a decade ago.

Both trajectories are accelerating, but they are not balanced: the infrastructure for AI-enabled war is already in the field, while the infrastructure for AI-enabled peace remains fragmented, underfunded, and largely uncoordinated. This section first looks at three conflicts where AI has been most extensively deployed: Ukraine, Gaza, and the Israel-Iran exchanges that culminated in Operation Epic Fury in early 2026.
From there, the section looks at AI's growing energy and compute demands, and the fragmented state of AI governance. It then sets out how AI can be used for Positive Peace, before closing on the choices facing policy makers from likely advances in AI over the next decade.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres


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