PRESENTATION: Digital Ceasefire

With warfare as its backdrop, Digital Ceasefire examines how digitalisation blurs the line between soft power and hard military power. Scanning the horizon, digital rights activist and Digital Ceasefire author Brett Alexander Solomon unpacks how TikTok has become an alternate battlefield, how semiconductor supply chains have become as strategically important as oil routes, and how pre-positioned code waiting to be activated can weaken an adversary without a shot being fired. Like soft power, digital power can be stealthy and operate below the radar, but it is increasingly militarised, even when it is not kinetic. Digitalisation is transforming old-fashioned propaganda into cognitive warfare and, accelerated by AI, is reshaping how wars are fought, drawing civilians into digital hostilities and algorithmic rage even as they go about their everyday lives. This presentation examines the privatised digital battlefield and the emerging hierarchy of Digital States within an unfurling technostrategic order, ultimately asking how we can move beyond these new forms of coercion and force. Could digitalisation ultimately reduce the need for hard power? How is international law managing to constrain these tensions? As one of the pioneers working at the intersection of human rights and new technologies, Solomon sets out what Digital Peace could look like, and how a reimagined form of soft power might help us get there.