Technology is transforming global treaties

The word treaties don’t exactly conjure images of modern world. But as with other aspects of business and society, technology is rapidly changing how treaties are monitored and enforced with profound implications for worldwide governance and international law.

Treaties are legally binding international agreements between two countries. But for treaties to work, we need to be able to quickly and precisely discern compliance and results. This has been challenging, violators by nature are inclined to subterfuge.

To meet this challenge, across dozens of treaties, research communities are marshalling new technologies to produce fertile environment delivering untold levels of data and knowledge on underlying conditions and results measurement.

Technology is generating orders of magnitude increases in data quantities. Vast environment of instrumentation and computer hardware are being deployed. Today scientific communities and governments combine cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and visualization tools.

While individual technologies have made important contributions, the real strength behind these developments is their use in combination.