18. June 2021

On 3 June 2021, SaferGlobe hosted a virtual Teams event interrogating the use of technology in peacebuilding. ICT4Peace Special Advisor Sanjana Hattotuwa joined Christina Dahl Jensen, Senior Advisor for Innovation, DanChurchAid/Folkekirkens Nødhjælp and Maria Mekri, Executive Director of SaferGlobe to speak at this event, which was facilitated by Niina Mäki, SaferGlobe Fellow on Peace Technologies and Responsible Design. The event was not recorded and held for a select audience, mainly from Finland and Europe, around what really peace technologies meant today, and how they would evolve in the future.

Sanjana’s presentation started by interrogating what ‘peace technologies’ meant, noting that it was vital to ground the use, design and application of any technology aimed at peacebuilding in country, culture, community and context. The design of technologies aimed at communities in protracted violent conflict could not be divorced from their participation and input. Sanjana noted that specific peace technologies aside (e.g. platforms, web services or apps designed for a specific purpose around peacebuilding) social media’s use would fundamentally drive the negotiation of conflict and peace in many contexts. Accordingly, he noted, social media vectors would be for many the technology they used for peace, and conflict transformation, above and beyond the introduction of a new app or service. This complex media and information ecology he stressed was essential in a wider, critical appreciation around the use of technology in peacebuilding. Engagement with issues like critical race theory, majoritarianism, class, caste, gender, identity were, he argued, vital in the design and application of peace technologies. Accordingly, there also needed to be greater scrutiny over platform governance, especially of large social media companies.

Sanjana also noted that political and media cultures matter in the expansion and entrenchment of peace technologies, requiring designers and those who seek to use them to be mindful of, as noted earlier, specific context of application. Technology, ICT4Peace highlighted, cannot supplant socio-political and rights issues decades in the making, and which required democratic redress. There is no digital peace without a just peace offline. Going on to flag the importance of stories and storytelling (in peacebuilding) Sanjana said that violence or its transformation is largely governed by epistemic contest – which stories were told, by whom, and how. Calling it a new frontier of disinformation, Sanjana noted that the instrumentalisation of scepticism was fuelled by the degree to which platform affordances were now used by political entrepreneurs and their proxies to produce propaganda. This, he noted, was very hard to address, especially in high adult literacy but low media and information literacy contexts (allowed for the dissemination and engagement with content without critical comprehension).

The importance of human rights was underscored by Sanjana in platform governance, echoing in just 2021 moves by Facebook, Twitter and other large social media companies to more fully embrace and articulate rights in their platform governance. Sanjana flagged the corporate human rights policy introduced by Facebook in March, similar guidance by Twitter. Recalling points made earlier in an op-ed published on the website of Institute for Human Rights and Business, Sanjana stressed the importance of remediation and reparation in the meaningful implementation of these policies, to address over a decade of platform driven hate, harm and violence, including in offline contexts. In the emergent domain of social media regulation, Sanjana noted the possible impact on peace and conflict through effects to control, or censor, content online.

In the second round of submissions, Sanjana noted that social media content now mapped on to the basic needs, in addition to self-actualisation, in Maslow’s pyramid of basic needs. This required a whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach to address, ensuring the use of technologies was shaped to support democratic dialogues, social cohesion, and the non-violent negotiation of difference. To this end, Sanjana underscored the importance of a rights-based platform governance. Flagging the work of Cortico for Twitter, Sanjana noted the importance of looking at platform health, and the timbre, tone and thrust of conversations online as indicators of offline concerns, trends, anxieties and fears. This symbiotic or ecosystems perspective he stressed was essential, without treating the offline and online as entirely distinct domains.

Noting issues around sexism, AI and ML biases, inequity, inequality, racism and discrimination, Sanjana noted that social media companies interested in conflict transformation needed to embody fully and first the principles they sought to instill amongst their respective user bases. Moving away from purely technocratic approaches, context and community led development, and building technology to enlighten instead of extract or exploit, Sanjana ended by noting, were first principles in any peace technology.

Image courtesy Share America.