New Hope through Advanced Control and Automation Systems: Delivering e-Citizen Services in a Post-Conflict, Transition Region - The Case of PBC and PASS

Post-conflict regions with transition economies represent the most complex and difficult international stability challenges. Civic regulation and control applications, which are the basis for citizen participation in civil affairs, can be difficult to deploy in these settings. This paper sets out a control systems application developed by PBC called PASS which provides practical, cross-community, e-citizen solutions in post-conflict, developing region in transition. The paper highlights ways that control applications and automatic technologies help stabilise a society recovering from conflict. It demonstrates how automated control systems can embody something far more than mere functional capability. It also explores the socio-technical systems and processes by which local actors successfully engage in innovative control systems developments to improve social stability. Finally, drawing together key socio-technical systems themes found in data from the PBC/PASS case study, it derives a tentative theory of human-machine symbiosis in international stability contexts.