So what did a group of peacebuilders say to these questions during Build Peace 2015? They were pretty evenly split between whether we are on a positive or negative trajectory of change. Climate change was a big concern, noting that as we face increasing environmental challenges we’ll struggle with increased economic insecurity, competition over resources, and public health disasters. Others noted we’re in a positive trajectory; conflicts and violence have declined globally, and living standards and lifespans are generally on the rise.

Interesting things happened when we looked at if we are able to influence the future. Everyone moved to the same side of the room. It was unanimous; everyone in the room could influence the future. This is an awesome testament to the nature of peacebuilders; despite everything they may be dealing with there is a general sense of hope and optimism. Peacebuilders become peacebuilders because they believe there is a possibility to move from conflict to peace. Unfortunately, when we dug deeper and talked about how people are able to influence the future, we were stuck at peer-to-peer, or conflict specific influence. As peacebuilders they are able to work with one person to overcome trauma, to change their engagement within a conflict, to possibly stop someone from becoming armed and perpetuating violence. But there was a clear sense that changing the future on a systemic level was out of reach.

This is an important truth: peacebuilding struggles to address the macro structures that perpetuate the drivers of conflict. We need to evolve beyond resolving specific conflicts towards building the foundations of a world that doesn’t drive people towards conflict.

To help build a vision for a post-conflict world, we’ve begun mapping emerging alternative structures of equality and inclusion. We’re tracking four foundational transformations that will challenge traditional power structures and support just, equitable, and productive futures for all.

Futures thinking can help to level-up peacebuilding to systems level change by shining a light on how these transformations are changing global structures and opening up opportunities to build equity, opportunity, and dignity for all.

1. New Design: Infrastructures that are designed specifically to support peace through inclusion, diversity, and open access are becoming more sophisticated. A failure to design our spaces in promotion of peace have let to dramatic negative effects; cities and criminal justice systems around the world, for example, are rethinking how they design their spaces in the service of peace.
2. New Information Flows: open and multidirectional. In Africa alone, 1 billion people have access to new information and communication channels for the first time ever. Throughout colonization education was highly regulated as a method of control, leaving nations almost empty of university-educated citizens. Many countries are now graduating their first generations of highly educated youth. At the same time, access to the internet is further breaking down barriers to accessing and sharing information. This transition will create new experts, new narratives, and new forms of accountability.
3. New Ways to Organize: Throughout human history we have slowly been leveling up our scale of organizing: from the family and the clan, to the farming community and the city, to the nationstate. Today we have the tools—from SMS to chat apps and social media—to organize both at the global scale and peer-to-peer. As internet penetration reaches 100% access globally, this will have profound effects on how we organize our societies and make collective decisions.
4. New Economics: Pope Francis recently came out strongly against capitalism and mass consumerism. There’s growing awareness that our dominant economic model may lead to our demise as the constant search for profit and economic growth is leading to unsustainable levels intrastate inequality and environmental degradation. While alternative models of exchange are slowly emerging, we need to systematically understand which are effectively scalable to create a viably competitive model of value and exchange.

Institute for the Future is looking for partners and sponsors to help us map the future of systemic peacebuilding. We are using a mixed methods approach of 1) participatory national futures, 2) traditional futures thinking research, and 3) collaborative research with industry leaders, grassroots activist and peacebuilders, and government officials. This approach will build dialogue across hierarchies, improve futures literacy in partner countries, and function as action research—making the future come alive as we seek to understand the opportunities and challenges it presents.

Tessa Finlev (@futressa) is Research Director at the Institute for the Future

The response I got from the panel was not particularly satisfying. What surprised me, however, is the number of participants who came up to me throughout the remainder of the conference thanking me for asking the question or saying that I’d really struck a chord (many more than, say, those who congratulated me on the PEACEapp award for the Peace Superheroes). I’m not sure if it’s because my interlocutors had worked in various African countries which are literally being mined of their natural resources in order to produce technological hardware and/or the accompanying energy needs and saw the irony of implementing a cell phone based intervention to address a conflict borne out of the production of those very cell phones. Or if there happened to be a significant number of rabid environmentalists at the conference. Or  maybe this was just a nerdy way of flirting with me.

In the weeks since the conference (one of which I spent in Sweden which has one of the highest levels of technological penetration in the world and the rest of the time traveling around Mozambique which has one of the lowest levels of technological penetration), I’ve further mulled over the question. At Build Peace 2015, when there was discussion about the divergence of technology and peace, it focused on the use and implementation of the technology (securing data, protecting identity, legal aspects etc).  What seemed to be lacking, however, was taking into account the whole value chain and lifecycle of technology (especially the hardware), from looking at the resources necessary for its production, through the planned and/or rapid obsolence of many technological products, all the way to the environmentally safe way of disposing of technological hardware. In other words, the conversation about “Do No Harm” while using technology for peacebuilding was too narrowly focused on the “active use” part of the hardware’s lifecycle.

Perhaps there is an element of personal bias in this, as I have a tendency to look at big picture systems and getting righteously indignant about structural violence (in the Galtungian sense). So I spend a lot of time being mad at economic systems and government institutions. And it is why within the Peace Superheroes digital game, we wanted to take a broad spectrum approach and address not only direct violence, but also cultural and structural violence across faultlines that include center-periphery, human-nature, access to information etc. We don’t yet know if taking a big systems approach to game design is an effective way to teach peacebuilding skills in a fun and engaging way, but we are certainly aiming to find out and iterate as we need to. Certainly, it has been at times overwhelming in the conception stage.

So in order to not completely impede participants at Build Peace 2016 while tackling this issue of divergence between technology and peace, I suggest the following:

• discussion about the whole lifecycle of technology in at least one panel and/or presentation
• sharing of resources about most conflict sensitive and sustainable tech manufacturers and products
• a targeted direct action taken by the conference participants to educate/ persuade/ collaborate with a tech manufacturer to help them develop more conflict sensitive products.

Peace on!

In the fields of peacebuilding and international development assistance, procedures for M & E can be overly rigid, coercive, and slow. The very words “monitoring” and “evaluation” can strike fear in the most seasoned practitioners, conjuring images of NSA eavesdropping and sweaty-palmed high school students suffering through standardized exams. M & E protocols often focus on measuring “outputs”—e.g. the number of workshops delivered or wells for drinking water drilled—rather than on the transformative “outcomes” or “impact” that they seek to promote. The session on “Evaluation Methods” at the April 2015 Build Peace conference in Cyprus explored strategies for assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of technology-based peacebuilding programs.

Marshall Wallace, an evaluation expert who participated in the session, offered a cautionary example of M & E at its worst, focusing on an international development organization’s project to build schools in a conflict-torn region. This project placed one new school on a mountaintop between two communities that were at war with each other. As soon as the school was built, a militia from one of the communities seized and occupied the building as a military outpost, at which point fighting broke out over this strategic location, ultimately destroying the school. As soon as the building was destroyed, the fighting died down—only to flare up again after the development organization rebuilt the school in the same location. This pattern repeated itself several times, exacerbating the chronic conflict and instability in the district. And yet, the development organization hailed this project as a success—because each time that the building was rebuilt, it was counted as another new school!

To work effectively in conflict zones, practitioners need to adopt habits of reflective practice, which has been defined as “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.”[i] Figure 1 visualizes a model of reflective practice developed by Gary Rolfe: action (the “what”) is followed by learning (the “so what”), which is followed by adaptation (the “what next”), which in turn shapes future actions in an ongoing cycle.[ii] This iterative and collaborative model of “Learning and Adaptation” is better suited to facilitating effective work in complex environments than traditional linear Monitoring and Evaluation mechanisms.

 

After the opening presentation, the participants in the workshop divided into three working groups, each one focusing one how to develop a “Learning and Adaptation” protocol for a hypothetical peacebuilding project. One group discussed a project to advance national reconciliation and the peace process in Northern Mali, the second discussed a project to prevent violence surrounding football matches in the English Premier League, and the third focused on a project to curb sexual harassment on the street in Cairo. In each case, the participants were urged NOT to try to develop the perfect operational approach from the start, but rather to develop a protocol for learning quickly from failures and successes, and to adapt their approach based on this new information.

 

The working group on curbing sexual harassment in Cairo was facilitated by Sawsan Gad of the World Bank. After a brief brainstorming session, the group chose as its course of action the idea of creating an online mapping tool to identify danger spots in the city. The group spent most of its time discussing its learning and adaptation strategy for assessing this tool’s effectiveness and making potential refinements.

As a starting point for its strategy of “learning by doing,” the group articulated the following theory of change: “By increasing awareness of the more and less dangerous areas of Cairo, women will be better prepared to avoid street harassment.” The participants discussed various approaches for testing the validity of this theory, and explored how they might adapt their approach in light of what they learned. For example, if certain areas of the city were not generating much data for the project, they might use paper maps to supplement online reporting tools. In the event that the project were to produce useful data, an important priority would be to leverage the impact of that information by generating media coverage of the problem of sexual harassment, as well as to share the data with police and to incentivize constructive policymaking on this issue by local and national authorities.

 

Sawsan’s group embraced the instruction that they should “start with action,” so that they could learn and adapt quickly from their failures and their successes. But this guideline for discussion generated resistance from some participants in the other groups. As Marshall Wallace, who facilitated the Northern Mali group, noted:

I am always struck how people in working small-group sessions contend that they can’t do a good or “realistic” job because of the limitations inherent in small-group sessions: limited time, lack of information, lack of the “right” people. This complaint ignores that real program design sessions are almost exactly like the small-group sessions at workshops: we never have all the time we want, or all the information we want, yet we still have to make decisions.

When designing a program, Marshall pointed out, it can be liberating to not expect to get everything right the first time around:

This is why I so much enjoyed the reframing of “Learning and Adaptation.” Yes. Stop worrying about the gaps, do something, and see what happens. Learning is the key measurement. What did we learn that changed the way we act? If a team continues to act the same way after “learning,” then they didn’t .

 

 

 

[i] Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 18.

[ii] Gary Rolfe, Knowledge and Practice (London: South Bank University Distance Learning Centre, 2001).

As well as sharing our success, I think we need to be open about sharing ideas and concepts that perhaps didn’t go so well. This is a hard thing to do, but I’m a firm believer in ‘failing fast / failing forward’. There was some challenge to this notion at Build Peace as obviously failing in a peacebuilding context can have some pretty bad outcomes. I agree with this broadly, but when developing tech solutions that are part of peacebuilding projects, I think the tech part ‘failing’ is okay (and dare I say, quite possible) – as long as we share why it ‘failed’ and ensure this is reflected in the next iteration / project.

The context of tech as part of peacebuilding projects is important here too. Having a background in tech rather than peacebuilding, it might be assumed that I’m from the school that believes tech alone will provide the solution. While I’d love this to be the case, I think the way we will succeed is by using tech intelligently within peacebuilding work. International Alert has had nearly 30 years building peace, with local staff on the ground in our country offices and it’s my job to make sure our practitioners know what technology is available, where tech can help and then develop and implement tools and technologies that complement their peacebuilding work.

I was fortunate enough to talk at the Build Peace Labs on day two and I would wholly endorse them returning for next years’ event. Hearing about exciting new projects was really inspirational and being able to provide feedback and hopefully some good advice was one of the highlights. Personally, being picked out as ‘one of the nerds from International Alert’ was a professional high point that may never be beaten.

Our lab talked about our #peacehack hackathon series and thanks to all those who attended and gave us some very probing questions and some great advice and feedback. I’m pleased to let you know that there will be a series of international hacks this year taking place on 26th and 27th September. Sign up at www.international-alert.org/peacehack for more info, to take part or even run a hack in your country.

As for the setting of the conference, I think hosting Build Peace in Cyprus was a masterstroke. To be in a country still bearing the physical scars of conflict inspired me greatly and I had numerous similar conversations with colleagues old and new – the next host venue has a lot to live up to. Many congratulations to the Build Up team, all the wonderful speakers, panellists and participants.

So still full of that inspiration and energy, we move on. I’ll be taking lots of the ideas and learning forward with my colleagues at Alert and hope that we can continue to ‘be dangerous together’.

Our Build Peace discussions would have benefited enormously from the input of engineers and programmers that have experience designing and implementing these kind of systems. There wasn’t a large presence of technologists or programmers at Build Peace to provide input on these and other challenges. Incentivizing them to become integral members of the peace tech community will be an important next step, followed by targeted technical discussions on potential solutions.

What are our ethical guidelines? There was an overwhelming consensus about a need for the ethical application of technology in our peacebuilding work. Participants all seemed to agree that “do no harm” should be a central tenet of this field. However, more discussion is needed on what exactly that means and how exactly that plays out in practice. We need to delve into creating and applying ethical guidelines in practice. It is critical that these guidelines, like our projects, are scalable and do not become diluted as tech projects are adopted and adapted in various (post-)conflict situations.

This is especially true given the discussion about the creation of a peace tech industry that relies on private companies (see a debate about this here). There are important ethical implications of monetizing peacebuilding work through private companies, including the collection of personal data as users come online in post-conflict countries. One very significant risk is that post-conflict communities will pay for the technology with their data — after all, there has to be a profit incentive somewhere. How these companies then use that data may not be regulated or may be used in ways that are ethically dubious. Current laws and corporate social responsibility guidelines may need to be updated to take ethical and legal considerations into account.

What about security? Working in post-conflict situations always involves security risks, as does the widespread use of information technology. Systems can be hacked, users can be targeted (by governments or others), and information can be used by spoilers to foment unrest and violence. As a community, security should be a primary consideration in developing peacebuilding programs that utilize technology. How can we best ensure that our tech tools are secure? What steps do we need to take to ensure that our tools are used securely, and how do we deal with the possible exploitation of our tools by peace spoilers? We should work to develop a set of good practices for working securely in this field.

What do we do about changing regulatory frameworks? Finally, how do peacebuilders ensure that their work does not violate laws or regulatory frameworks? As technology changes and expands, so do the laws and regulatory frameworks that govern their use. These include changes to criminal laws, laws governing freedom of expression, website registration requirements, laws restricting encryption, laws restricting anonymization tools and many others.

Moreover, technology is increasingly being used by courts and prosecutors in investigations and trials–sometimes limiting the potential for peacebuilding. For example, as peacebuilders turn to technology, repressive states in turn cite that technology use as evidence of criminal activity.

How can peacebuilders ensure that their tech tools do not violate these legal and regulatory frameworks? How do we as a community help shape frameworks to promote openness and security? A peacebuilder working across jurisdictions will need to account for multiple legal systems and potential risks. Those of us designing programs with users across the globe will also need to ensure that our users understand the legal implications of their work. That doesn’t mean just signing an informed consent form, but really helping users understand the legal framework that governs technology use in their country and how they can best protect themselves.

Moving forward. As we move forward with our projects as a community, reflection on these issues will be critical. They are fundamental to a sustainable peace tech industry (whether “private,” “public,” or somewhere in between).

JustPeace Labs hopes to drive discussion and thought on these questions and challenges. We are building relationships with programmers who can help solve some technological challenges by using the latest advances in computer science. We are currently working on a white paper addressing the issue of CSR, ethics and peace tech. We are also engaged in research on regulatory frameworks and relevant laws.

The Bureau of International Crisis is developing an IT tool, the Amygdala System with one objective: to give people living in conflicted regions the possibility to be involved in their own peace processes. The Amygdala is one of the promising new ideas that were presented at the conference.

However, we hope that it was not just about presenting tools but making of the Build Peace conference one of the first steps to find means and then apply them wherever needed. The Bureau of International Crisis wants to make that call and urge the peacebuilding community to work hard to be sure that peace won’t remain a privilege shared by an elite. We have to involve all the parties, to give a role to everyone. In that prospect, the Amygdala System is an ambitious project, we need the implication of all to turn it into an efficient peacebuilding tool. The Bureau wants to meet with experts and professionals to work and share more ideas. We hope that the Build Peace conference was the start for real connections.

We would like to thank the conference organizers for giving us the chance to have a stand and connect with professionals. Let’s work hard and develop more ideas to build concrete peace.

To get my message across I use print and electronic media, which in our case means using CDs, radio and television to spread knowledge at the grassroots and share it with others and in turn to get feedback. At the conference, I found further guidance and inspiration learning how my colleagues were getting their own messages across via SMS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, cartoons, music and many other ways.

I am excited at the prospect of replicating some of these methods myself back home.

It was also good opportunity to sit with like-minded people to discuss and learn from one another’s experience. For me, it was good occasion as being from a developing country I was able to share my in-depth knowledge of change with other change-makers who often look west for new ideas.

Knowledge and wisdom are everywhere – not just “the west”. I believe that by harnessing the power of technology, and melding it with our traditional context, we can achieve a meaningful peace.

The most relevant example that I presented was “Da pa sa”, my weekly television programme on violent conflict. The programme touches on all the different interrelated facets at play: issues of religion, “tradition”, “values” and sin – as well as stereotypes and the role of community elders and modern legal systems.

Since I am working in deeply conservative areas, women’s participation in social affairs is not allowed. My TV programme reaches inside homes, where men, women, and children all have access. One question I had at the conference was, how to use new technology to achieve this same goal?

My question received a positive response from many colleagues and I got good feedback, which will be very useful for the future.

Grassroots approaches and the use of technology also become more important with the changing trend of conflict from inter- to intra-state. Now each problem needs to be addressed with a local solution. But how can one spread such local wisdom and knowledge to the wider world? The ultimate answer again lies in technology.

We also addressed some confusing questions that stem from the interaction of technology with peace and conflict. Questions such as:
• What is terrorism?
• What’s the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist?
• Why are some people and places labelled with negative images whereas others are not?
• And, most importantly perhaps, how one can overcome these challenges?

All of the questions were debated openly and frankly both in and outside of the conference.

Every one shared his and her own perspective and enriched us with their knowledge. They also prepared us further to address the challenges we face on a daily basis in carrying out our mission to promote and bring peace in this world.

Context. Recognizing the need for context-specific technology use, we will make it easier for peacebuilders to unleash the power of technology in ways that are designed for and with the input of the peacebuilding community to ensure each application is situation-specific. Our development platform will also address difficult challenges specific to using technology in post-conflict settings, such as the ethics and security of using mobile apps in peacebuilding work, and the inequalities in access to technological tools amongst local communities.

Access. By creating a robust and easy-to-use tool for mobile application development, more organizations and peacebuilders will have access to the benefits of technology. Based online and designed for non-technical users, the application will increase access to technological tools amongst traditionally harder to reach constituencies, such as women and rural communities. Grassroots organizations will not need special software, equipment, or technical capacity to use our platform. Anyone, anywhere, can use it.

Inclusion & Participation. It will also allow peacebuilders to reach larger groups of people, collect better information, engage in more in-depth analysis, and do so quickly, in peacebuilding contexts where timing is critical and resources are scarce. With more people able to design mobile apps specific to their context and goals, more people will be included in the peace process. This will generate a new social infrastructure where communities feel more connected to peacebuilding programs, and more invested in seeing their success.

Empowerment. Our app development platform is designed to empower local civil society organizations, which may lack the capacity to design similar tools in-house, to be able to use technology in their work. By increasing direct access to peacebuilding programs, local civil society groups and communities will become empowered participants in creating peaceful societies, thereby increasing the legitimacy of technology in fragile post-conflict environments and making information sharing horizontal (between beneficiaries) rather than hierarchical (from beneficiaries to donors/implementers).

How it works. The development platform will allow peacebuilders to quickly design, create, and implement mobile applications to support their work. For example, an organization working on rule of law or governance issues will be able to gather information from local communities by designing a survey application using the platform. Another organization would be able to use the interface to create a mobile application to inform communities of upcoming elections information, town-hall meetings, security updates, or other critical information that has traditionally been difficult for peacebuilders to disseminate quickly and efficiently across communities or in rural areas. The interface could also be used by peacebuilders working in the field to securely collect and send data about crimes and human rights violations, the environment, or local economies. Or it could be used to create a central hub of information and communication to facilitate cooperation between peacebuilding organizations. The types and uses of the apps that can be developed on our platform are many– we will develop features and add-ons to be able to address the most common app types, as well as provide opportunities for customization.

The platform will also include tools for easy data analysis. Peacebuilders will be able to gather data from their mobile applications or other sources, such as government open data. It will be easy to analyze information and create visuals to support findings and reports, improve advocacy and awareness-raising efforts, or measure the impact of their programs.

The interface will be intuitive and will require very little training and no technological expertise to operate. The applications will be web-based, and therefore will work across mobile platforms (such as Android, iOS, FirefoxOS, and others). There will be built-in features unique to peacebuilding contexts, such as language support, image/shape support (for example to allow communication with illiterate users), encryption, verification, and data analysis. We will also offer opportunities to customize the platform to the needs of specific organizations through an extendable plugin system.

Our project will use the global reach of the web and its latest developments to build a platform that everyone can use, from any device or system. In particular, our project will take advantage of the following technologies:

• HTML5. The web was conceived as a “universal” medium with no walled gardens owned by major platforms or corporations. This idea informs the premise of our project. We will be using HTML5 and the latest web technologies to create a global reach, making sure we leverage features like offline-capability (Appcache, service workers) to provide service to areas with low-connectivity. Our tools will work on every device.
• SMS-based interfaces. Using services like Twilio or Frontline SMS, our platform will allow peacebuilders to reach people living in low or 0-connectivity areas.
• Modular, pluggable architecture. We intend to design the system with a modular architecture so that once the project is open-sourced people and organizations can easily build plugins for their use-cases.
• Integration with existing tools and workflows. Peacebuilders will not have to learn a whole new application and interface to utilize this tool. Instead it can be integrated with existing software like Google Docs or LibreOffice.

In this way, JustPeace Labs brings the power of technological tools to the global community of peacebuilders and in turn increases inclusivity and local ownership of peacebuilding initiatives. We welcome your ideas and feedback. Please contact us at jen@justpeacelabs.org.

Building peace is about transforming conflict dynamics into peaceful ones. A large aspect of this transformation relates to changing behaviours that pertain to violence and conflict into ones that foster peace. And this is an area where new technologies have been considered to be extremely promising. At Build Peace 2014, for example, the majority of projects presented aimed to foster peaceful attitudes or change behaviour, and 32% of peacebuilding projects that use technology currently contained in the Build Peace Database aim for ‘behaviour change’. By attitudes we mean the ideas, beliefs and values that influence actual (enacted) behaviours. The theory of change in most of these projects is that technologies are particularly well suited to help present alternative narratives that can contribute to changing attitudes and in doing so, ultimately behaviours.

Getting an understanding of the potential roles of technology in affecting behaviour was of course important in itself, but this year at Build Peace we are aiming to go deeper:

• What behaviours are we talking about specifically – what are ‘peaceful’ behaviours?
• And at what level: individual, group, community?
• Are there particular types of technologies that can generate enough social capital to bring those behaviours about, and even if there are, is this enough to achieve peace?

As a conference sub-theme, ‘behaviour change’ will be explored through our keynotes and some of the Short Talks, but these questions will be discussed in more depth during the panel on ‘Changing Behaviours Through Technology’, chaired by Stanford Peace Innovation Lab co-director Mark Nelson. In this discussion, the panel will present different views, and invite questions from the audience and social media, on the various actors (who) that can help change behaviours, including for example the role of the private sector, those whose behaviours need transforming, and the processes that have been used in practice to effect those changes.

In addressing most possible answers to these questions however, it becomes difficult to escape the question of power.

What do we mean by empowerment?

Power and empowerment, though related, are different things. In his Communication Power (2009: 10), Manuel Castells defines ‘power [a]s the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favour the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values’. He further distinguishes between power to and power over. Empowerment can then be seen as the process through which an actor acquires power.

In peacebuilding, the empowering quality of new technologies focuses on increased participation, where technologies afford more people the opportunity to make their voices heard; the ability to share information in near real-time at the global level and thus shape the peace and conflict narratives; and the ability to more effectively mobilise a larger proportion of individuals and groups than even before (through social media for example). From there the debate often centres on the fact that new technologies also facilitate state surveillance, propaganda and the tracking (and often silencing) of activists. These processes and their consequences are essential to discuss and better understand. Examples will be presented through some of the conference keynotes and Short Talks, and our panel on ‘The Power Dynamics of Technology for Peacebuilding’, chaired by Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Adviser at the ICT4 Peace Foundation, will delve more deeply into these questions, asking (among other questions):

• How can technology ensure participation?
• Can ‘technology aid in envisioning, creating and sustaining new forms of governance as much as it can displace and breakdown old dispensations’?

And this brings us to the point where empowerment and behaviour change meet.

Empowerment and behaviour change

Our definition of power above automatically implies the enactment of certain behaviours (power to) or the possibility to influence others’ behaviour (power over). But as Sanjana Hattotuwa puts it, ‘those who wield emancipatory technology aren’t by extension necessarily more democratic, or liberal’.

“Empowerment does not automatically result in behaviour change, and simultaneously, who decides whose behaviours need changing is largely a product of underlying power structures and dynamics.”

As one speaker put it, ‘behaviours and even attitudes may be in harmony at a group or community level, and it doesn’t necessarily translate into the governance structures or systemic change necessary to build peace’.

This is why this year at the Build Peace conference, we are asking how the use of technology is resulting in the creation of alternative infrastructures for peace. The ‘whether’ question is also important, but with an increasingly large number of projects and use cases that highlight the potentials for technology to help build peace, yet come up against the barriers outlined above, it become more pressing to gain a better understanding of the ‘how’.

Of course this is not an exhaustive list of questions that will be addressed during the conference – much more will emerge over the course of the weekend. But it highlights where, as organisers, we have come from in outlining the debate. Where we go from here, whether you are joining us in Nicosia or following it all on social media, is up to you! And we very much look forward to it!

 

What was the project’s process for ethical storytelling?

90 people took part in the six films. The project used ethical storytelling principles as follows:

• Ethical storytelling is inclusive: The storytelling process was open to anybody within Northern Ireland society that felt they had a story to tell. Advertisements in local press and radio encouraged people to come forward and the project held 18 public information events that were open to people to come forward to talk about their experiences during “The Troubles”;
• Interactions with interviewees have clear boundaries: Participants were all given a project “Code of Practice” explaining what the project’s staff conduct and the project’s approach would be whilst working with them;
• Relationship and trust building are key: All participants had a minimum of 3 meetings with project staff and filmmakers to explain the documentary process, to record their interview and for follow-up work. In reality the project met with many participants up to 5 times;
• The process and final portrayal of a story must respect the wishes of the interviewee: All of the participants had the final say of what their interview looked like and what it contained, so that they were happy with its contents before it was included within each of the films. This involved showing each participant their recorded interview in full;
• Ethical storytelling includes partnerships: The project worked “with and in” communities and not “to and on” them, meaning that it partnered with a number of key not-for-profit gatekeeper organizations that worked with specific sections of society to ensure inclusiveness of the initiative.
• Ethical storytelling incorporates “duty of care” for participants: The project had a “duty of care” for each person. To ensure that the project did not re-traumatize the participants, it developed a signposting and referral service to counselling services in Northern Ireland that specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder and the Troubles. The project also had a budget to pay for participants’ initial consultation and some subsequent appointments if necessary.

Outputs

The project developed the following:

• Six 30 minute documentaries of how the Northern Ireland Troubles Impacted on Border Communities;

• 20 Extended Interviews with participants explaining life in the area during this conflict;

• A purpose built website http://borderlives.euthat contains the films and interviews, along with maps detailing the local area as well as an interactive timeline about the development of the Northern Ireland Border, and a Blog detailing how the approach and methodology used by the Project team;

• A Smartphone App for iPhone and Android Users;

• A Social Media presence that included Facebook, Twitter and YouTube including the sharing of 7 Web virals that was used to promote the Project;

• An e-learning course, based on the footage gathered from 90 participants. The Course, http://www.borderlivesrethink.eu, is free and features 4 modules Restart, Remembering, Renewal and Reconstruction. The modules feature video clips, external links, questions and key learning points throughout the course and covers topics such as the role of narrative in conflict and moving forwards, the role of a border in conflict & identities in conflict.

Since its launch in September, the website has received nearly 25,000 hits. The films have been seen online nearly 8000 times, and the e-learning has been accessed over 4500 times.

See the project in numbers here.

An independent evaluation of the project made the following conclusion:

“There is a clear legacy aspect to the Border Lives project which has potential to contribute on an ongoing basis to peace building both in Northern Ireland and the southern border counties and in other conflict contexts. There is scope for the project resources to be used in a range of settings: educational, community and online and with a range of audiences both single identity and cross-community and with young people, those who lived through the conflict as well as newcomers to Ireland. The innovative use of new technology and social media to address these issues is a core element of this project and brings a new dimension to dealing with what are, in many cases, very old and long standing issues”

Border Lives Film Preview from Border Lives on Vimeo.