How can technology support peace efforts on the ground?

I and many others have been thinking about this question for some time, and I can tell you we have not found a definitive answer yet. But we are getting there.

Allow me to focus on that last keyword: ground. If there is something that is important for peace processes it is precisely for them to stay grounded. For mediators and peace workers, but also for politicians, a key task is making sure that the process of peace stays connected to people’s daily lives. I think technology (specifically communication and information technologies like social media, text messages, and the like) can help. I see five functions for it.

The first function has to do with horizontal coordination: bringing together all the different actors working across a peace process. In 2014, Ukraine was immersed in a series of dynamics that would affect its social structure profoundly: two of them were the war in the East of the country and the Euromaidan protests. Coming from a mediation and dialogue organization, my colleagues from mediatEUr and I arrived in Kyiv in 2014 with a clear question: is there room for us here? Would it make sense to build dialogue? And is someone doing dialogue already? The answer to all three questions was “yes”: we found about 20 different dialogue initiatives, mainly community-driven, but also including the larger National Dialogue process that the OSCE had launched. Work was being done, but it was not integrated into a broader process; it was not grounded. Mainly, because the different initiatives were disconnected.

Having a couple of digital natives in the team, we launched a Dialogue Support Platform. Put simply, it was a community of practice with a website that participants could use to share their content and learn from each other. In doing so, we hoped to build a good picture of what mediation and dialogue looked like in the country and facilitate horizontal exchange.

The second function has to do with bridging the different tracks of a mediation process. In Ukraine, the national dialogue launched by the OSCE was going through several challenges: mainly, it was disconnected from the work done in the municipalities by Ukrainian and foreign mediators.

Anyone who has worked in mediation has seen this plenty of times. It is often framed as a question of coordination, inclusion and process design. In our time, I think there is also a struggle for attention. There is too much information to process, and too little time for it. If I look around the room today, I see laptops and cellphones, and I am competing with them to maintain your attention and curiosity. The implication for mediators today is that we have to “fight” for the attention not only of our stakeholders, but also of those who can take the content of our work and do something about it.

This leads me to the third function: communication and visibility. Mediation outfits put a great deal of resources into producing invaluable reports that are read once. We need new ways to communicate our work clearly and easily, and technology can help.

Over the last year, my colleagues at mediatEUr and I have been working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. We call this project Voices of Syria. Our perception is that many people are speaking today about the return of refugees to Syria, but few are asking refugees themselves, and fewer are making sense of what they have to say. We facilitated dialogue sessions with met men, women and youth living in different refugee camps where they discussed their points of view about the future of Syria, the challenges they are facing now as refugees, and the conditions for a safe return. That is a lot of information; hundreds of very different and often competing views.

When the time came to present the results, we had a choice: either we summarized and condensed what we had heard, or we presented all of it. In the first case, we would have lost the richness of the information, and failed in our task to represent the complexity of conflict. In the second case, we would have quickly lost the attention of those who can act upon our findings.

Online communications have proved key for us here: with a very simple web platform that we call Voices, we have built a series of reports that we can regularly update. We include online maps so we can focus on the points that require attention, guiding the reader through the content while still allowing them to stop and take in as much of the content as they want (or can).

The fourth function of technology is to facilitate analysis and a good understanding of the local context. Typically, this is done through extractive means: the words “big data” and “machine learning” come up as tools to listen into social media and draw conclusions for programming. Two examples of this are the projects I participated in last year, in Ukraine and Bosnia. With the help of data scientists, we listened into social media to measure the perception of the reforms process and the impact of extremist content and hate speech online.

Increasingly, donors are dedicating resources to private companies who are much more efficient and well-versed in the technologies required to do this type of work. Some call this a privatisation of peace work.

While a lot of this work is done from the outside, many organizations who are building mechanisms to connect directly with people while still respecting privacy and conset. Through crowdsourcing, for instance, they help strengthen the inclusivity of the process. The fifth function of technology, in my understanding: expanding the reach of the process so we may include those who cannot participate otherwise.

That mediation is primarily about human interaction is clear. It is also clear that technology poses both opportunities and challenges to our work. But I want to leave you with a final thought: we need to think of online communications and technologies not just as a tool, but as an infrastructure and a context.

Paraphrasing the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, we no longer live with technology, we live within it. Whether mediators decide to engage with it is entirely up to the needs and design of their process: where transparency is important, they may use technology to communicate with the public. Where coordination is important, they may use social media to keep everyone connected. Where geography or security make it difficult to bring people of different beliefs together, online communications can help. Where confidentiality is key, they may want to stay completely off-social media to avoid breaches. But throughout, technology will continue to impact the daily lives of the people they work with and, as such, be a fundamental part of our efforts to stay grounded.

In 2021, mediatEUr became Conciliation Resources EU/mediatEUr.