Diplo Blog

Title of event: The Potential of Virtual Reality for Peace Mediation

Date 5 Nov 2020 

The Internet, as we know it today, has evolved from a platform of the tech, academic, and research elite, to a tool for the general public, given its wide adoption by the mainstream modern society (Naughton, 2016). Without the benefit of hindsight, few could have predicted the evolution of the Internet and how it’s continuously being shaped by economic and social changes.

Internet governance (IG) is about the rules, policies, standards, and practices that determine how cyberspace is governed. It goes beyond technical and infrastructural considerations, and addresses the legal, economic, developmental, sociocultural, and human rights implications of cyberspace. 

Formed in 2006, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multistakeholder forum for discussing these issues. Multistakeholderism – the participation of all relevant stakeholders – is really the core value and a core practice of the IGF. 

It is widely assumed that human rights and electoral democracy are mutually supportive and inextricably linked. There can be little doubt that the regular holding of free and fair democratic elections is essential for citizens’ enjoyment of human rights. Nevertheless, the recent emergence of a range of different issues, including the misuse of digital technologies in voting, brings new challenges to the democratic process within both long-established and transitional electorally democratic countries.

By Katarina Andjelkovic, Andrijana Gavrilovic, Natasa Perucica, Katharina Hone, and Jovan Njegic

By Katarina Andjelkovic, Andrijana Gavrilovic, and Natasa Perucica

75 years ago, humanity created the United Nations in order to safeguard peace, promote human rights, and enable development. Given the challenges of that time, it was a necessary step toward a more stable and secure world.

In recent years, DiploFoundation has received a growing number of calls from course participants to include video interaction in our online courses. This post reflects briefly on the use of Zoom meetings in Diplo’s online learning activities, and aims to inspire a wider discussion within Diplo’s community on the use of video chat.

The artificial intelligence (AI) Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) can write texts on any topic. OpenAI, the organisation that developed and released it as a beta version in June 2020, describes it as a general-purpose application for creating text, ‘allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task’. GPT-3 is a scaling up, by two orders of magnitude, of the previous model released by OpenAI, making it ‘the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) application available today’. 

On 21 September, DiploFoundation launched the humAInism Speech Generator as part of its humAInism project. By combining artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and the expertise of Diplo’s cybersecurity team, this tool is meant to help diplomats and practitioners write speeches on the topic of cybersecurity.