LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE FOR
PEACEBUILDING AND TECHNOLOGY
In wrapping up the workshop, Woocher returned to his original observation that peacebuilding is very broad and encompasses many different activities. He noted that the workshop was most successful in generating practical ideas when participants considered specific applications of technology, such as election monitoring. One way to extend this success may be to move discussions into the field. An example of this, noted earlier in the day by Dickover, is technology camps, where people go to a community and work with local actors could facilitate the identification of key issues and approaches to moving forward.
Tipson spoke more broadly of the need for groups to know what kinds of societal goals they wish to achieve. “To some extent the peacebuilding community talks too much about peace and not enough about the agendas that peace should be part of.” If an organization’s only objective is peace, someone who does not have that objective has a major advantage. Peacebuilders need a positive agenda that attracts new and different sets of players for whom nonviolence is a key objective. “That’s true in all of the peacebuilding problems that we’re looking at—there has to be a broader agenda for what change we want to see a society accomplish.”
As an example, Tipson pointed to the need to be more insistent about determining rules governing the Internet. Governments need to come together to develop “some kind of consensus around the way the Internet and these technologies surrounding it are going to be managed,” he said. The United States needs to be proactive in engaging with other countries to counter the efforts of the governments of China, Russia, and other countries to advance a more restrictive approach. As governments have gotten more sophisticated in their approaches to controlling communications, countries and groups that support liberalization need to become more sophisticated as well.
Technology can serve civil disobedience and civil mobilization, Tipson said, as a component of broader strategies for political change. It can help people organize and mobilize around particular goals. It can spread a vision of society that contests the visions of authoritarian regimes. And it can contribute to experiments in peacebuilding, such as better elections or formal “truth and reconciliation” processes.
Tipson urged the workshop participants to clearly identify peacebuilding problems and then ask how technology could help solve those problems.
The problems may be related to conflict prevention, conflict management, dispute resolution, postconflict reconciliation, or opposition to authoritarian regimes. Those involved in peacebuilding and technological development can benefit by working together to determine what capabilities would help in each of these settings, and how technology can help provide those capabilities.