Cross-posted from the TechPops website, curated by Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF), Berlin, where Sanjana Hattotuwa – Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation – was one of just 100 globally asked to contribute an article on the future of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, post-pandemic.
Download the article as a PDF here.
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Coronavirus is a wicked problem, to use American philosopher and system scientist C. West Churchman’s term from 1967, referring not to evil but a multi-variate problem-space that resists resolution, and further, becomes more complex the more attempts are made at solving it. Arguably, so were peace operations before the pandemic. But what Coronavirus has done – although not everyone realises it and there is significant variance in how prepared institutions are – is to render even more complex and interwoven the conflict landscape in a peace operations theatre.
The interdependencies of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in all forms of peacebuilding and peace operations pre-date the pandemic. As much as violence and its generation are enabled by digital platforms, including social media, these platforms also contribute to and help in conflict transformation, including the mitigation of hate, toxicity and violence. In the long-shadow of Coronavirus – especially in existing geographic theatres of peace operations – ICTs will be, in both old and entirely new ways, inextricably entwined in how conflict dynamics will seed and spread as well as in how peace operations deploy and respond. In this short article, I delve into both the overarching context of application, as well as six specific ideas for innovative roll-out of ICTs in peace operations, post-pandemic.
The pandemic impacts everyone, but not everyone is impacted equally. Peace operations will also deal with the fallout of Coronavirus collectively, though to varying degrees of operational complexity. Entire geographies will need to be remapped on account of new drivers of instability and a systemic fragility that teeters on the verge of complete collapse. States, weakened by protracted violent conflict or complex political emergencies, now face added challenges to institutional frameworks that are weak and unable to deliver essential services. New elites will emerge, who will use health indicators, access to healthcare infrastructure and medicine and, eventually, immunity as a new currency to broker deals and power. This new post-pandemic elite will create new socio-political, economic, communal and religious division, anchored to identity, gender, geography, health, mobility, access to services and economic production.
Epidemiological tracing will produce data that will be commodified. With this commodification will also come counterfeit, allowing the purchase of records and identities to pass through, or gain access into areas – both local and international – that symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers of the virus will be, with good reason, barred from. The resulting stochastic spikes in infections will result in socio-political and economic instability that could lead to entire areas – already impoverished, or newly discovered as community transmission hotspots – to be sealed off, adding to morbidity and mortality. Violent othering and xenophobia – seeing those ‘not from or one of us’ as the carriers of Covid-19 – will lead to armed ghettoization of neighbourhoods, communities, and geographic areas.
Peace operations that had mapped the topographies of violent conflict will need to embrace new drivers of instability from aspects of society and polity they may never have dealt with in a sustained and systemic manner – including, but not limited to the provisioning of and access to healthcare, clean water, disinfectant, soap and sanitation. The most mundane things – like lining up for bread, accepting cash, using a toilet, sharing a meal, going for prayer, mourning the dead, celebrating a birth, attending a wedding, caring for the elderly – will carry the greatest risk in societies already rent asunder by poverty and violence. Peace operations will have to plan for the rapid escalation in violence that is the consequence of virus vectors that have not been accounted for. Through negligence, ignorance, opportunism or malevolence, the pandemic will spread as quickly as it can, to the greatest degree it can. Peace operations at present are not geared to respond to this level of indiscriminate infliction amongst the populations they work with.
In a recent presentation to the UN Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Peace Operations (DPO), I explored six pillars the UN’s systemic response to the pandemic could be anchored to, including peace operations.
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be” – in Hamlet, Shakespeare asks us to think about what more we can be, beyond what is known. It asks of us a simple question – what is the world after Coronavirus that we seek to inhabit? When so many talk about returning to normal life – invisible yet inherent in that statement, and often through no fault of the person who desires it – is a systemic violence. Inequity and inequality, the evisceration of public services including health for decades, the over-reliance on fragile supply chains, the growth of unsustainable products and services, the hidden labour that fuels commerce and industry, the poverty of governments and the paucity of planning – all these are more of what the ‘normal’ 2020 began with. Do we go back to that? Do we go back to peace operations design and deployment as it once was? Will the UN, states, private and public institutions revert to type?
I risk disappointment to hope this isn’t the case, but strongly argue that even a pandemic will not automatically bring about lasting change unless there is agitation for it from within institutions, as well as the general public. Herein lies the rub. Institutions are extremely capable of perpetuating the problems they were setup to address. Business continuity is not about innovation or reform – it is about carrying on as one always did, with a minimum of disruption. But deviation from the normal – brought about by Coronavirus – must result in lasting innovation, and institutional responses, that do not return to what exacerbated the spread and impact of the virus. The virus is in this light the perfect change-agent, with no patience around arguments against why something cannot be done, and instead strengthening voices, until recently at the margins, who articulate a vision for community, country, region and world as a better, more just and peaceful place.
