Build Peace 2015

Dalia Haj-Omar

Dalia Haj-Omar is a Sudanese human rights activist. Her work focuses on supporting Sudanese civil society on international advocacy, communications, and the strategic use of new media for campaigning. She co-authored the Sudan Chapter to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net publication (2013 & 2014). Dalia told the story of how her work with youth naturally brought her to digital activism and campaigning. Through her experience with Sudanese civil society, she commented on the interaction between technology and local infrastructures for peace.

Sheldon Himelfarb

Sheldon Himelfarb is President of the newly-created PeaceTech Lab. The Lab was launched by the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC to work at the intersection of technology, media, and data to help reduce violent conflict around the world. Sheldon talked about how the global ubiquity of low‐cost, easy‐to‐access technology is changing the way information and capital flow. This emergent reality has unleashed a new breed of social entrepreneur and has expanded corporate presence in conflict zones, creating market‐based peacebuilding opportunities.

Patrick Meier

Patrick Meier (PhD) is a test pilot for next generation humanitarian technologies. He presently serves as Director of Social Innovation at QCRI where he develops and prototypes Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies with multiple humanitarian organizations. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response” (2015) and blogs at iRevolution.net. Patrick shared lessons learned over the past few years of UAVs (drones) deployed for humanitarian missions.

Socrates Stratis & Esra Can Akbil

Socrates Stratis (PhD. Architect and Urbanist) is a tenure track professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. Esra Can Akbil (Architect, Urbanist, Designer) is a founding member of Etika Studio and Archis Interventions_Cy. Socrates and Esra are part of the Imaginary Famagusta group, working on the Hands-on Famagusta project. Socrates and Esra explained how Hands-on Famagusta is creating an interactive platform for Cypriots to reach common visions of a unified post-conflict Famagusta.

Changing Behaviours through Technology

While PeaceTech has now demonstrated the ability to elicit positive social behaviors at scales and speed previously unimagined, the potential for misuse, and particularly for disastrous unintended consequences, is very real.

Chair: Mark Nelson, Stanford Peace Innovation Lab

Panelists: Mukhtar Hersi Mohamed, Puntland Development Research Center; Valerie Oliphant, SIMLab; Ronny Edry, Peace Factory;

Read the panel blogpost.

Power Dynamics of Technology for Peacebuilding

Relationship between power and peace has always been a key marker violence. The capacity to overcome or exacerbate violent conflict depends largely on how power is used, by whom and for whom – echoing the theme of the conference.

Chair: Sanjana Hattotuwa, ICT4Peace Foundation

Panelists: Oren Murphy, USAID Office of Transition Initiatives; Philip Thomas, D3 Associates; Sabrine Saad, Saint Joseph University

 Read the panel blogpost

Introducing Tech to Traditional Peacebuilding Programs

Issues about the relevance, value, and efficacy of technology in traditional peacebuilding initiatives. While technology has an unrivalled power to broaden the spaces and opportunities for such exchanges, it can also be perceived as an alien mechanism.

Chair: Cindy Chungong, Search for Common Ground

Panelists: Dr Ioannis Tellidis, Kyung Hee University; Aaron Shneyer, Heartbeat

Read the panel blogpost

Kenny Dalsheimer – Peace in Our Pockets

Kenny Dalsheimer is a documentary filmmaker based in Durham, North Carolina. His new film Peace in Our Pockets presents an inspiring Kenyan case-study in peacebuilding with timely lessons about how technology and people-to-people organizing can transform social spaces. The film was produced to be used as a catalyst for dialogue and action and a resource for for peacebuilders, policy makers, conference organizers, and educators around the world. You can watch a trailer here.

Ali Eyal – Tourist Trips in Baghdad

Ali Eyal is a visual multimedia artist from Baghdad, Iraq. Tourist Trips in Baghdad documents the illusion of tourism in Baghdad through a tourist’s photo album. The imagined visit portrayed in the photo album took place on October 25, 2013, where the guests took 35 pictures that filled their hearts with happiness as they explored different parts of Iraq.

Maximón Monihan and Sheena Matheiken – La Voz De Los Silenciados

Maximón Monihan and Sheena Matheiken are director and producer, respectively, of La Voz de los Silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless). La Voz is a poetic feature film that thoughtfully draws attention to the issue of modern day slavery that persists throughout the globe. This magical-neo-realist modern day silent film takes us inside the mind and heartbreak of Olga, a deaf teenager brought from Latin America to New York City under the false pretenses of attending a “Christian Sign Language School.”

Talia Lefton – Meeting Point

Talia Lefton is a fiber artist who creates large and small scale cloth and paper installation pieces. Her Meeting Point installation combines knitting and weaving to create a soft welcoming space in which thoughts and ideas can be shared, imprinting a specific sense of time and place.

Jonny McEwen – theWalls

Jonny McEwen is an artist with a 20-year history of engaging with creative peace building. In his latest work, he uses new media to explore ideas about separation and division. He comes from a divided city, Belfast Northern Ireland — a city divided in places by walls called “peace lines” or interfaces. theWalls uses video and code to create an ever-changing wall that dissolves and rebuilds itself continuously. The work is presented as a video projection. The work is continuously generating from code, meaning it develops in real-time and has no end.

Roseline de Thelin and Jason Meek – Exploring the Choreography of Contesting Space

A series of interactive community art events using expressive arts inquiry, a process-oriented method of facilitation and action research that encourages and supports people to gain fresh perspective about conflict and other disorienting dilemmas through movement, creative expression, and embodied experience. Exploring your relationship to object, space, culture, and identity.

Klaus Pinter – dance

Klaus Pinter, born in 1968, is an artist who lives and works in Vienna. He presents art prints to animate an audience to try out dance steps. Paper, music, dance…

Sarah Queblatin – Mandala Earth Story

Sarah Queblatin is a restorative arts practitioner integrating arts relief and community art with regenerative community design for communities in transition from conflict and disaster through her project Mandala Earth Story. She sources her main inspiration from earth wisdom, spiritual, and indigenous beliefs and local knowing with her community partners. In 2012, she was given the Arts and Healing Network Next Generation Award for her work with leaders, communities, and youth.

Ivan Sigal – Karachi Circular Railway

Ivan Sigal is a photographer, writer, and media theorist. He is currently working on four projects focused on urbanization in Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the northeastern U.S. Karachi Circular Railway is a forthcoming web documentary and installation that traces the path of the defunct Karachi Circular Railway.

Mark Simpkins and Cathal Coughlan – Palindrone

Mark is an artist, activist and part time research fellow at Central Saint Martins. Cathal Coughlan is a musician/songwriter and sometime technologist, best known for his work with the groups Microdisney and The Fatima Mansions. Their work, Palindrone, is a sound installation that tracks the database maintained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that records reported strikes by US/UK drones (UAVs).

Solei Arts and Nadia Westcott – The Color Exchange

Solei Arts in collaboration with Nadia Westcott presents The Color Exchange, an on-site public mural designed to resemble a re-imagined city map. The mural will be an interactive experience for passersby, who will be invited to help us create the mural by having conversation with a stranger.

Diana Weymar – Interwoven Spaces

Diana Weymar is a Maine, USA based fabric artist. Interwoven Spaces invites the Nicosia and Build Peace 2015 communities to create a new space by stitching into a fabric map of the area surrounding the crossing point between the Greek Cypriot community and the Turkish Cypriot community at Ledras Street, in Nicosia.

Sasha Kinney – Heal the Nation

Sasha Sasha Kinney is a grassroots political organizer and freelance consultant who advises Picha Mtaani and Pawa 254 on social movement-building and social enterprise management. Picha Mtaani, Swahili for ‘street exhibition’, is a youth-led peace initiative that primarily seeks to create space for young people to reconcile and become agents of reconciliation to their respective communities. They have produced the short documentary Heal the Nation. You can watch a trailer here.

Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou – flag restoration

Lia Lapithi is a Cypriot artist born in 1963 in Nicosia, where she lives and works. She presents a restoration of the Cyprus flag, questioning what should or is worth preserving.