Decentred dereliction in digital international relations: PeaceTech, ethics, and the cascading of moral responsibility

Abstract Ethics are commonly invoked to mitigate the adverse effects of digitalization on international practices such as diplomacy, humanitarianism, or peacebuilding. However, their productive role in shaping global politics has received little attention. This article elucidates how policy and guidance documents containing ‘PeaceTech’ ethics discursively construct normative vectors, i.e., moral claims that frame risks, suggest responses, and attribute responsibilities. We identify five major tendencies through which this takes place, namely the internationalizing, outsourcing, delegating, localizing, and individualizing of PeaceTech-related risks. These vectors produce a cascade of responsibility that reaches from the international to the local, from the public to the private sector and civil society, and from organizations to end users. Agents placed higher in the cascade mainly deal with abstract and systemic risks, while agents placed lower are responsible for dealing with tangible and personal risks. Yet the latter often have the least resources to respond to these risks, and have to weigh up whether to accept them and maintain critical data collection and analysis functions, or to reduce these risks while potentially jeopardizing PeaceTech. We describe how this can amount to what we call ‘decentred dereliction’, i.e., the abandonment of goals in and through digital peacebuilding.