The Janus Effect: Social Media in Peace Mediation

Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, presented at “Social Media and Mediation: the good, the bad and the ugly”, a workshop held in Geneva on 10 July 2018, organised by the UN Department of Political Affairs, DiploFoundation, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, swisspeace and researchers from Harvard University have joined forces to develop the #CyberMediation initiative to explore how digital technology has influenced the mediators’ role in preventing and resolving violent conflicts.

Sanjana’s presentation, delivered remotely, was anchored to the work he had pioneered around the use of technology in peace negotiations and mediation processes, from as far back as 2001. Download his presentation as a PPT here, or as a high-quality PDF here.

Sanjana talked about the One Text negotiations platform that was used in the Sri Lankan ceasefire negotiations process from circa 2001. A video overview of the platform, which was built using commercial off the shelf software (COTS) called Groove Networks (created by Ray Ozzie, and subsequently bought by Microsoft) can be seen below. The platform at the time was, inter-alia, multi-lingual, multi-stakeholder, asynchronous, fully encrypted, multi-media, with tools for decision support, resource library, decision modelling and issue framing.

A lot of the issues outlined at the #cybermediation meeting were prefigured and addressed 17 years ago. Sanjana brought home some of these issues into today’s social media dynamics, also anchored to how new media were in some contexts used and abused to incite violence. He left the workshop with a few key questions and observations (echoing those made at the keynote address delivered at the Build Peace conference in 2014),

• What is the future of Track 1 / high-level negotiations, and frames like the Chatham House Rule, in a world where radical transparency, wittingly and by design, or unwittingly and through accident, is the norm?
• How will streams of narratives in multiple forms of story-telling and media impact the framing of peace mediation?
  What if the next billion coming online and using social media have a very different understanding of the normative values of peace mediation, based on liberal democracy and judeo-Christian values? Will the negotiation of difference around a mediation process be its own driver of violence?
• How can and will big data play a role in a peace mediation process? To what degree can and should we use social media to ascertain a pulse of a given context, and in doing so, what assumptions are we making about the quality and nature of participation, representation, voice and agency?
• How can peace mediators and a mediation process sift the noise generated by social media, from what is actionable intelligence that can help shape the discussions, and the contours of the mediation process?
• What are the ways that the weaponisation of social media can impact a peace meditation process, beyond the simplistic assumptions and caricatures of hacking promoted and paraded by Hollywood? How can weaponisation impact the way we see and engage with a context, frame conflict, capture ground truths, shape the contours of a process, and be engineered to promote an intended outcome of just one, powerful, stakeholder or party?

In the ensuing discussion, Sanjana made the point that the discussion should be anchored to the intended aims and outcomes of a peace mediation process, that in turn had to be grounded contextually. He cautioned against the search for “a perfect tool”, a phrase used in the morning, and also around the discussion of “social media” as a homogenous entity that was the same no matter where in the world it was used. Instead of talking about various apps and ICTs, Sanjana noted that it would be more beneficial – for the workshop and the #cybermediation process – to anchor the discussion to specific contexts, and what in those contexts, peace mediators wanted to see, achieve and were shackled by (at Track 1, 2, 2 1/2 and Track 3 levels).