11. May 2021

ICT4Peace warmly recommends reading the excellent Report by Julia Hofstetter, Senior Advisor ICT4Peace, called:  Digital Technologies, Peacebuilding and Civil Society – Addressing Digital Conflict Drivers and Moving the Digital Peacebuilding Agenda Forward. This research and report was commissioned and published  by the University of Duisburg-Essen Institute for Development and Peace and the University of Duisburg-Essen Institute für Entwicklung und Frieden (INEF). The report can be found here.

The report provides a critical and pragmatic review of the ongoing digital Peacebuilding debate as well as of  some selected ICT for Peacebuilding applications. It provides insightful and useful recommendations and practical guidelines. Julia concludes her analysis:

“As both conflict and peace stakeholders increasingly use digital technologies, the peacebuilding community has to develop a better understanding of how to identify and overcome current shortcomings of digital peacebuilding and redefine peacebuilders’ role in the light of digital conflict drivers and new conflict frontiers in cyberspace. Moreover, the transformative potential that digital peacebuilding offers has so far been realized only to a limited extent. Digital technologies promise to innovate peacebuilding, especially regarding the emancipation of local civil society and alternative infrastructures of peacebuilding.

However, many participatory digital peacebuilding projects have a limited approach to inclusion and are rather ‘extractive’ in that the local population is often treated as a mere source of data. ‘Digital inclusion’ and empowering local actors should go beyond collecting data on civil societies’ opinions and needs and encompass the program design and technology development phase as well, to ensure local communities’ agency and ownership of digital peacebuilding programs.

For instance, data obtained through crowdsourcing could, when shared with local civil society actors, help communities to collectively identify and communicate their own priorities and needs in a more targeted manner and to take a more active role in peacebuilding processes. However, how meaningful inclusion and giving affected communities more agency could look like in practice is difficult to determine. Integrating local knowledge and ensuring agency and ownership by local populations requires additional resources for coordination and might thus be difficult to implement.

This might be difficult to achieve, especially with advanced data science methods and large amounts of data, which require considerable technical expertise and time to understand. Local civil society’s inclusion and agency in developing peacetech and tech- enabled initiatives will also have to include efforts to mediate discriminatory structures within society to prevent digital peacebuilding initiatives from reinforcing the marginalization of certain groups.

Developing a better understanding of these dynamics, and coming up with strategies on how to shift from ‘inclusion’ of civil society to ‘agency’ in and through digital peacebuilding in practice, will have to take center stage on the future agenda of digital peacebuilding. Research on the digital divide and its implications for discrimination in digital peace-building should also include developing metrics to measure digital inclusion and the preconditions for access to participatory digital processes.”