Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, has since earlier this year, and at the invitation of the compelling Resonant Voices Initiative (RVI), engaged with civil society and other stakeholders, including the media, in the Balkans regions on strategic communications, effective online media strategies and countering violence extremism.
Read detailed updates and reports around this engagement from earlier this year here and here. Sanjana was also on the jury in Durrës, Albania from 14-17 September 2017.that selected winning teams who now go on to further develop their ideas.
From 15-17 November, Sanjana was again invited by RVI to mentor three of the winning teams – Story2Tell, Humans of the Balkans and Ordinary Heroes. These pilot projects, which will engage in work till the end of January 2018, will operate either in the country of origin or have wider, Balkan foci. Sanjana’s mentoring starting with a half-day interactive session on challenges in creating narratives with a clear link to countering online radicalization, shaping theories of changes and embedding ways to mitigate risks and prevent violent push backs on narratives exposed through different alternative narrative and direct CVE campaigns.
RVI’s pilot projects are all aimed at strengthening resilience against the encroachment of radicalism in whatever guise, and anchored to online fora. Sanjana will mentor the three teams till the end of January on communications design, audience targeting, content production, risk mitigation and directly addressing violent extremism online, to the extent each project is designed to.
