Posted on Mon 22 Jul 2024
WAPOR Annual Conference 2024 presentations including:
A video version of 2 presented by Colin Irwin, is also available by selecting this link.
Posted on Fri 22 Dec 2023
Colin receives the 2023 WAPOR Asia Pacific Lifetime Achievement Award
Dr Colin Irwin is a Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool. He is the founder of Peace Polls, an initiative which is unique, first of its kind policy intervention tool with global values to seek and support peace in conflict areas using Public Opinion Research. He was the principal investigator on the project 'Peace Building and Public Policy in Northern Ireland'. As part of the Northern Ireland peace process, he conducted eight public opinion polls in collaboration with the political parties elected to take part in the Stormont talks. Since then, he has extended his work around the world to include the Balkans, Middle East and Asia completing ‘peace polls’ in Macedonia in 2002, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2004, Serbia and Kosovo 2005, UK Muslims in 2006, Kashmir 2007, Israel and Palestine 2008, Sri Lanka 2009/10, Syria 2014 and Cyprus 2016/17. This work is reviewed in his book ‘The People’s Peace - Pax Populi, Pax Dei’ published in 2012.
Dr Irwin, or simply Colin to all the WAPOR friends, has been an ever-active colleague at every conference and meeting, with his impeccable research and understanding of transitional societies. His track record of professional integrity and academic excellence is unparalleled. As the most experienced academic using public opinion research in conflict areas, his list of achievements is endless. But what makes Dr Colin even more special is his desire to learn from warring factions while developing his research instrument. His effortless ability to talk and understand different point of views and transparent-to-the-core work ethics that even the worst of the conflict creators can actually trust the pace making process.
Dr Irwin has a multi-talented personality. He was born in England where he grew up on the south coast attending school and art college in Bournemouth. As Scientific Officer of the British Sub-Aqua Club he salvaged a Bronze Age craft from Poole Harbour in 1964 and lived in the first underwater house with an artificial atmosphere in 1965. In 1968 he turned his attention to the Canadian Arctic and in the 1970s where he sailed the Northwest Passage, crossed Arctic North America by dog team and voyaged from Scotland to Iceland, Greenland and Hudson’s Bay, living all along with the Inuit community. This journey had a major impact on his personal life and future professional choices. He received his joint Master’s Degree in Anthropology, Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of Manitoba in 1981 with a thesis on Inuit ethics and a Doctorate in Social Science from Syracuse University in 1984 with a dissertation on the nature of human conflict and how the Inuit developed a culture and society without war. Today, as an expert on public opinion, public diplomacy, and peace processes he has advised the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations (DPKO) on their procedures and best practice; lectured in the US, UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia and authored over 100 articles, papers, and books on these topics. As a Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool he is presently developing a perception based ‘People’s Peace Index’ to globalise and mainstream his ‘peace polls’ methods in all peace processes.
It is our privilege and honour to bestow the WAPOR Asia Pacific Lifetime Achievement Award 2023 to Dr Colin Irwin, not just for his unparalleled achievements in the field of public opinion research, but also for being a truly remarkable torchbearer of peace making and uninterrupted, uncompromised flow of people’s perceptions even in the worst possible conflict areas. For being a brand ambassador not just for the public opinion research in transitional societies, but also for the WAPOR values and ethos, that we all share and cherish.
Posted on Tue 31 Oct 2023
OpenAI awards grant to the RemeshAI team to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by law.
Posted on Sat 30 Sep 2023
AI, Peace Polls and Public Diplomacy
Employing the latest AI technology (Bilich et al. 2019) or traditional face-to-face public opinion polls (Irwin 2020) makes no difference to the political realities of using public opinion and public diplomacy for effective peace making. In this paper the author compares and contrasts the peace polling and public diplomacy employed in support of the Northern Ireland peace process 25 years on from the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (Agreement 25 2023, Irwin 2002) with equivalent UN work in Yemen (OSESGY 2020) and Libya (Irwin et al 2021) using Remesh AI Large Scale Digital Dialogues, and making peace in the frozen conflicts and wars of Eastern Europe: Moldova, Transnistria, Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbas, with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Critically the vetoes of the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and OSCE Member States not only fail to stop wars but also prevents effective peace making through public diplomacy that engages with the opinions of the publics caught up in these conflicts. The success of the Northern Ireland peace process provides us with a ‘work around’ for these apparent intractable political problems. The British Government as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council was able to veto any ‘mischievous’ interference from other UN Member States in Northern Ireland and the parties/sides to the conflict were allowed to manage their own NGO funded informal public opinion/public diplomacy peace process in parallel with the formal Governments’ led negotiations (Irwin 2002). Polling from Moldova suggests the publics there want peace (Koneva 2022), could make peace (SeeD 2022) and would welcome the same opportunity to manage their own peace process (The Government of the Republic of Moldova, 2022). Perhaps, when all else fails, all publics should be given the opportunity, tools and resources, AI or otherwise, to make peace if they can.
References
Agreement 25 (2023) Queen’s University Belfast, April 17-19.
Bilich, J., Konya, A., Masood, D., and Varga, M. (2019) Faster Peace via Inclusivity: An Effective Paradigm to Understand Populations in Conflict Zones, AI for Social Good Workshop at NeurIPS, Vancouver, Canada.
Irwin, C., Masood-Alavi, D., Waehlisch, M., Konya, A., (2021) Using Artificial Intelligence in Peacemaking: The Libya Experience,WAPOR 74th Annual Conference, November 2-6.
Irwin, C., (2020) The People’s Peace Second Edition: Public Opinion, Public Diplomacy and World Peace,CreateSpace, Scotts Valley, CA, p. 4.
Irwin, C., (2002) The People’s Peace Process in Northern Ireland, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2002.
Koneva, E., (2022) Moldova and Transnistria in the context of Russia’s war with Ukraine.
OSESGY News (2020) Cutting-Edge Tech in the Service of Inclusive Peace in Yemen, 3 August.
SeeD (2022) About SCORE Moldova.
The Government of the Republic of Moldova (2022) THE TRANSNISTRIAN ISSUE WAS THE SUBJECT OF DISCUSSIONS BETWEEN THE HEAD OF THE REINTEGRATION POLICY OFFICE ALIN GVIDIANI AND THE RESEARCHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, DR. COLIN IRWIN. 19 July.
Posted on Fri 10 Mar 2023
https://www.flickr.com/photos/parliamentrm/albums/72177720300700547
https://www.flickr.com/photos/parliamentrm/albums/72177720300832368/with/52242231216/
Posted on Fri 10 Mar 2023
Panel No. 7. WAPOR 75th Annual Conference, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 10-13 November 2022.
Colin Irwin, University of Liverpool
Panel Abstract ‘Ukraine: Public opinion in a time of war’
Public opinion on the war in Ukraine is subject to the political interests of the UN member state’s relationship to that war. These interests are given shape and agency by the state’s media environment ranging from ‘free and fair’ to managed Orwellian state control. In this environment how can we objectively measure public opinion and draw conclusions about what is ‘true’? How can our framing of questions asked and interpretation of results in context help us to understand the phenomena of ‘war, peace and public opinion’ in our efforts to promote peace and prevent violent conflict?
The war in Ukraine provides us with a ‘natural experiment’ to explore these questions through the comparative study of public opinion in a number of UN member states that includes the protagonists, Russia and Ukraine, their respective allies around the world, and third party states that might view the war as simply a European affair. The panel includes papers on public opinion in the years leading up to and during the war in Ukraine and Russia with a focus on their populations support for the war and their nations objectives. Other papers include opinion in a selection of European, NATO and non-NATO states from around the world, allied, or not, with Ukraine or Russia. Additionally, given the involvement of the US and Russia in the wars that presaged the war in Ukraine, most notedly Syria, public opinion from the Arab world is included.
The war in Ukraine marks a paradigm shift in world affairs that distracts us from the existential threats of climate change and a mismanaged world. But did it have to be so? Did we ‘sleep walk’ through currents of public opinion unfolding on the world stage that brought us to this tragedy that should and possibly could have been avoided?
Paper Abstract ‘Public Opinion and Global Security’
With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia the prospect of a third world war became a reality if NATO forces engaged with Russian forces in the defence of Ukraine. In this context the imperative to give adequate attention to the needs of humanity and the planet in terms of global pandemics, climate change and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are not being given the attention they require. Together these threats of world war and environmental collapse posse an existential threat to the entire global population. With all these points in mind the research proposals for a World Peace Poll published and discussed at numerous WAPOR conferences are visited again and placed in the context of the author’s work with the UN and OSCE over the past two years. Research in the public domain is reviewed from Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Kashmir, Sudan, Bolivia, Iraq, Moldova and Transnistria to illustrate the successes, failures and lessons learnt using both AI Digital Dialogues and conventional public opinion polls. It is concluded that with the deployment of a World Peace Poll to provide both baseline and tracking data on all conflicts it would be possible to better prepare the world and mitigate the existential threats to world peace and security in this our twenty third century.
References
Irwin, C. J., Masood-Alavi, D., Waehlisch, M., Konya, A., Using Artificial Intelligence in Peacemaking: The Libya Experience, WAPOR 74th Annual Conference, November 2-6, 2021.
Irwin, C., Gilani, I., Gilani, M. B., A critical review of the UN75 Global surveys presented to the 2020 UN General Assembly, WAPOR 73rd Annual Conference, October 6-10, 2020.
Irwin, C. J., The People’s Peace Second Edition: Public Opinion, Public Diplomacy and World Peace, CreateSpace, Scotts Valley, CA, (2020).
Posted on Wed 27 Oct 2021
As part of the Libya panel download the paper "Using Artificial Intelligence in Peacemaking: The Libya Experience" as part of the 2021 WAPOR Annual Conference 'Speaking Truth to Power: Public Opinion in a Time of Crisis'.
Posted on Wed 17 Feb 2021
Read the UN 'Innovation Cell' Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs (DPPA) Futuring Peace article: What the "Lords of the Arctic" teach us about Inclusive Peace. Available on their website here: