The Hague, the carrot and the stick

A surprise announcement it wasn't anymore.

After a month of hints, a slow drip of news articles and a 30-second mention in President Trump's recent UN General Assembly speech it finally become official last Friday, October 9: Marco Rubio announced further sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC). That announcement dropped just hours after Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

According to reports, quiet lobbying had been going on behind the scenes by Dutch diplomats, to no avail. Pleas were rebuffed; the Court was to be dismantled 'brick by brick'.

Though Rubio might have to join a queue. Because Russia's former president Dmitry Medvedev has previously expressed his desire to strike The Hague with a hypersonic missile.

Obviously, these are very different threats, made by very different governments with very different relationships to us Dutch.

Still, there is something striking (pun intended) about two of the most powerful states setting their sights on institutions in that beautiful city behind the dunes.

And I suspect the queue of leaders with reasons to dislike parts of The Hague will not be getting much shorter in the foreseeable future.

The Hague, a name and city which, apparently, provokes surprisingly strong feelings among a certain set of leaders around the world.

The Hague.

The International City of Peace and Justice.

I am from The Hague.

And the recent developments have raised my eyebrows quite a bit (where they weren't raised already).

The Hague is not particularly a very intimidating place. Few people abroad would be able to point it out on a map. There is a beach. Our king lives there. And there are a lot of civil servants. It is admittedly quite official and occasionally boring.

To people abroad, I often just say I am from Amsterdam, the place where I went to university. It saves the explanation, although identifying yourself as an Amsterdammer has its own associated consequences.

The Hague is also not a particularly large city, with just over half a million inhabitants. About the same size as Baltimore in the US, or Vladivostok in Russia. A bit like Canberra, perhaps, or how I would imagine Washington DC to be. Only I would hardly dare call The Hague a global metropolis. Technically, the city doesn't even have its own research university (only a satellite campus of Leiden University). And yet, without fully appreciating it while growing up, this relatively small city behind the dunes has become a home to countless international organisations and institutions.

But it turns out that The Hague has started to mean something rather different elsewhere.

This summer I biked with a friend through the Balkans, where we met many amazing people along the way. One afternoon on one of our stops in Serbia, after having cycled for about 100km, we stopped for a much-needed cold beer.

As we were settling down, we were approached by a slightly tipsy local. After mentioning that we were from The Hague, he looked at us and informed us:

"We Serbians hate three things. Bosnians, Muslims and The Hague".

We decided then and there that, for the remainder of our time in Serbia, we would be from Amsterdam. Just to be safe.

To him, The Hague has come to represent something very different.

What The Hague represents:

Prosperity, peace, and the rule of law are not one-off achievements. They require continuous investments, including when that work might feel boring, unnecessary or 'weak'.

For us Europeans, it lately has been hard to miss the massive investments in defense that have been happening on our continent.

On all fronts, defence budgets are growing. The investments in drones, planes, and bombs have been immense and necessary to strengthen our collective 'wielding of the stick' in response to a deteriorating security environment.

At the same time, there has been a worrying reduction, or cuts, in the 'carrot' side of the equation. Investments in international aid is down across the board (23.1% in real terms in 2025). Current international peace building projects are struggling to find funding. With Peace Direct describing projects being halted and organisations closing. Let alone finding the money necessary for the problems of tomorrow.

The stick is currently very visible. New aircrafts to be shown, a faster drone to be flown

The carrot, just as necessary, is often far less visible.

Once power is acquired, it is difficult to relinquish. The threshold for deploying drones and planes is substantially lower when you already have them at your disposal than when their purchase must first be justified. Once they are acquired, it is hard to let them gather dust.

Why Gwaihir?

Although having spent quite a few of my waking hours programming, I don't think software will solve any of the problems above. Nor do I think that there should be another AI startup pretending that it will.

But I do believe that good and reliable tools, help and matter. And with the pace of AI being so relentlessly fast, even for its adherents, there is a real opportunity to help speed and scale the work of investigators, diplomats, humanitarian organisations, and public institutions.

That is why, against this backdrop of these ICC announcements, we are bringing forward the release of Gwaihir.

We are an engineering organization with the goal of building the AI tools needed for public-interest institutions.

Our first product, soon to be trialled and released to a select set of organizations, will be 'Investigations' inside our Dove workspace.

We're building a new kind of document: the living investigation. Located inside Dove, our AI investigation workspace for organizations will aim to turn documents and web sources into continuously updated, cited investigation reports.

“Investigation reports shouldn't be only static documents.”

An Investigation combines the different aspects of a research notebook and a collaborative document, while allowing AI agents, automations, sources, and tools to be attached directly to parts of it.

Instead of simply writing a report, you will be able to connect your findings to their underlying sources, attach agents to specific research tasks, and keep track of how an investigation develops over time.

An agent might monitor regulatory filings, another might investigate connections between organizations, and a third might track developments across hundreds of news sources.

No more copy-pasting between ChatGPT and your Word document. This will be a first in, hopefully, a broader family of 'agentic files'. Documents that not only have information, but can have tools and agents attached to them that continue working over time.

Only a start

There are still many questions unanswered, to which we do not have an answer at the moment. To what extent can we develop architectures for AI agents that promote peace and resolve conflicts? How can we make sure civilians are more than a model parameter? How can we give a diplomat the same strength of AI tools that a general now has access to? What tools are needed to prevent agentic flooding of government services? And closer to home, can we use AI tools to scale public oversight on agencies that have traditionally been hard to oversee?

And just as importantly, how do we build this without requiring organisations to surrender control of their most important sensitive information to somebody else's AI platform?

The plan is not to have them solved by tomorrow, nor next week. But to steadily build and chip away at these questions.

Investigations is our first attempt. Later releases will hopefully address other parts of the system, such as "Haven", a safe way to move and store your data in the EU.

Come build with us

For now; come join us, help build with us. If you are a builder, come join us.

If you are an organization planning to move or expand to The Hague, definitely reach out. We are looking for a small, select set of organizations who would like to contribute to the first version of Investigations.

If you're a builder and these are the sorts of problems that you would like to work on, we'd like to talk too. Gwaihir is an engineering organization first.

There are a lot of people building increasingly complex sticks. We'd like to spend some time figuring out how far we can scale the carrots too.

Let's scale the carrots, and not only the stick.

1% to the planet,
1% to humanitarian and institutional renewal initiatives.