Current Research Project :

Organizing Peace: An Algorithmic Analysis of Four Centuries of International Law and the Decline of War

My dissertation utilizes machine learning to systematically analyze each of the 79,287 international treaties signed between 1648 and 2023. For this project, I trained an AI how to automatically classify treaties by their topics, signatories, and a variety of additional metrics to measure how the negotiation of more than 200 million words enshrined within an increasingly vast array of agreements has collectively shaped the social and legal institutional architecture of the international system and its ability to promote peace over the last four centuries. Through computational treaty analysis, changes in the structure of the international system can now be seen accumulating over time like so many strata in the “fossil record” of international relations.

The graphic above depicts the general topics of every known international treaty signed over the last 374 years as a percentage of all treaties signed during each rolling five-year period. By looking at any vertical slice of time, we can retroactively infer a great deal of important information about what the primary international concerns and legalized actions were during that particular period. When appraising the relative distribution of treaty topics in this way a variety of trends are immediately noticeable, from the dominance of conquest, colonization, and peace treaties during the 17th and 18th centuries, to the explosion of new and more peaceful treaty types throughout the 19th century and beyond, including those concerned with diplomacy, communication, transportation, trade, institutions, and the mutual establishment and acceptance of territorial boundaries.

Breaking down each general topic category further helps elucidate how international consensus was built across an increasingly vast array of issues over time. Territorial consensus was built through more than 1,300 land border agreements, 700 maritime boundary treaties, at least 65 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreements, in addition to almost 3,500 agreements regulating the High Seas, environmental issues, airspace, outer space, and other global commons.

Consensus was built in a similar fashion through the negotiation and implementation of over 12,000 trade and resource related agreements, nearly all of which were signed during the last two centuries and were made possible thanks to the signing of a similar number of agreements establishing and regulating global infrastructure.

The cumulative effects of the negotiation and implementation of at least 3,000 diplomacy related agreements, 2,000 travel and immigration treaties, 1,500 international shipping related agreements, 700 postal service agreements, 500 treaties regulating transnational railways, 600 governing international roads, 2,000 agreements facilitating air travel, and over 1,000 telecommunications agreements, has dramatically increased the ability of states to connect, communicate, and cooperate over the last four centuries.

As the world has become increasingly interconnected in this way over time, the pace of international treatymaking would slowly and then suddenly rise from just 19.7 treaties per year during the 17th and 18th centuries, and roughly doubling every fifty years after that, eventually reaching an average of 910.4 new treaties being signed every year of the 21st century. This would mean that more than 74% of all international treaties concluded over the last four centuries were signed in just the last 20% of that period. Put another way, it took the world 289 years to negotiate and conclude its first 20,000 treaties, but only 40 years to sign the next 20,000 agreements, and has been signing just under 10,000 new agreements every 10 years since the late 1970s.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates just how dramatically our world has changed as the result of the negotiation, signing, and implementation of nearly 80,000 international treaties over the last four centuries. Collectively, these treatymaking effects have increasingly promoted cooperation over armed conflict, as slowly and then suddenly, humanity transitioned from a highly anarchic world of conquest and colonization, with fewer than 20 new treaties signed globally each year and 67% of which would only signed after war was concluded, to one that is much more cooperative and better organized in which more than 900 new treaties are signed every single year and well over 99% of which are peacefully concluded, as a result of the cumulative organizational effects of tens of thousands of international agreements that collectively relegate most global competition to trade wars and gray-zone conflicts, rather than the historical norm of open war.

These graphics represent just a tiny fraction of the current and potential future output of this project, as determining each treaty’s topic was just one of several coding schemes used. The application of each additional one to the fossil record of international relations, reveals another layer to our history and provides a new lens through which we can better understand the community, consensus, and peace building effects of treatymaking over time.

Keywords: Peace, International Organization, International Structure, International System, International Order, International Law, Treaties, Anarchy, Global Governance, International Security, International Relations, Computational Treaty Analysis, Computational Text Analysis, Machine Learning, Topic Modelling, Algorithm, Decline of War, Armed Conflict, Long Peace, Great Power Conflict, United Nations, History of International Law.

Published Research

Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Weapons

The Artificial Intelligence Arms Race: Trends and World Leaders in Autonomous Weapons Development Co-authored with Denise Garcia

PDF Version

Research Supplement: The Dark Horses in the Lethal AI Arms Race. Contains information on the AI and autonomous weapons capabilities of three additional countries, Japan, Israel, and India, which were not able to be included in the publication due to word count restrictions.

Citation Information: Haner, J.K., Garcia, D. “The Artificial Intelligence Arms Race: Trends and World Leaders in Autonomous Weapons Development”, Global Policy, Volume 10 (3), pp. 331-337. DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.12713

Abstract: Autonomous weapons technologies, which rely on artificial intelligence, are advancing rapidly and without sufficient or accountability. Oversight of increased autonomy in warfare is critically important because this deadly technology is likely to proliferate rapidly, enhance terrorist tactics, empower authoritarian rulers, undermine democratic peace, and is vulnerable to bias, hacking, and malfunction. The top competitors in this arms race are the United States, China, Russia, South Korea, and the European Union.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, AI, autonomous weapons, arms race, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), killer robots, proliferation, terrorism, authoritarian regimes, democratic backsliding, democratic peace theory, United States, China, Russia, South Korea, European Union.

Cybersecurity