White Paper: Human-AI Collaboration in Conflict Analysis: Text Classifier Development with Peacebuilders

This paper documents a collaborative research process involving peacebuilders and data scientists in Kenya and Sudan to develop AI-based text classifiers for monitoring online polarization and hatespeech. The method describes a participatory annotation process in which practitioners and domain experts contributed to problem definition, annotation design, iterative validation, and model evaluation. Fine-tuned BERT-based classifiers were trained on collaboratively annotated datasets and evaluated against held-out test sets. In each case, the models produced enhanced contextual alignment, reduced misclassification driven by cultural nuance, and increased practitioner ownership of AI tools. The resulting models (Kenya-polarization and Sudan-hate speech) are open-source and accessible via HuggingFace. The study contributes empirical evidence that participatory AI development can simultaneously improve technical robustness, contextual validity, and normative alignment in sensitive humanitarian domains. 17 pages, 5 tables V2 published with Build Up report formatting; no content changes