Berghof Foundation: 50 years of conflict transformation

Digital pathways for peace
Digital tools and in particular
social media will make it
possible to create wider
inclusivity and integrate a
broad variety of perspectives,
interests, and needs into a
negotiation process.
Twitter, Instagram and other social media
channels are important tools for activists to raise
awareness of human rights violations and social
injustices. When in 2020 the footage capturing the
murder of George Floyd spread via social media,
activists quickly joined calls for demonstrations
that revived the #BlackLivesMatter movement
at unprecedented scale and speed. Practically
all protest movements in recent years have been
fuelled and transformed through the use of social
media; notable examples are the Gezi park protest
in Turkey, the Arab uprisings, the #EndSARS
protests in Nigeria and the 2019-20 Hong
Kong protests.
However, at the same time, we are
witnessing how digital technologies and artificial
intelligence are fundamentally reshaping the
nature of armed conflict and present a set of new
challenges to human rights: fully autonomous
weapon systems with limited accountability
and proportionality can reduce the possibility
of military casualties and lower the threshold of
war. Authoritarian governments increasingly use
digital surveillance to control and repress restive
populations and inconvenient civil society actors,
while political arsonists exploit social media to fuel
hatred, manipulate public opinion and exacerbate
social polarisation. Democratic governments and
social media platforms are often ill-prepared to do
much about it.
As peacebuilders, we cannot afford
to disregard ongoing developments in digital
technology and artificial intelligence. We need
to engage with them proactively, ethically and
transparently while constantly reflecting on
possible negative consequences. If we fail
to do so, we leave this field to those who see
new technologies as an opportunity to control,
manipulate and repress populations, to gain
political influence, and to conduct warfare by
ever more heinous means.
At Berghof, we have been combining
peacebuilding and digitalisation for a number of
years in Germany. Our digital peace education
projects www.friedenfragen.de, Streitkultur 2.0
and #vrschwrng, which are presented in detail in
this publication (see page 106), have spearheaded
our exploration of digital peacebuilding. Recently,
we have expanded our engagement in this field to
other contexts. In Lebanon, we are supporting an
inclusive group of social media influencers from
various communities and confessional groups in
their efforts to de-escalate tensions, advocate
for inclusive citizenship concepts and uphold a
constructive forward-looking dialogue on key
national priorities.
When violence erupted in Lebanon in
2019 and 2020 and polarised messages went
viral on social media, this group of influencers
was able to use its prominent status and wide
reach to confront sectarian messaging and incite
narratives with alternative messages that promote
non-exclusionary identity concepts and shared
values of citizenship and empathy. Based on
these promising experiences, we intend to further
develop and deepen our engagement with digital
conflict transformation both geographically
and thematically.
There is growing consensus that
digital technologies are key tools to prevent,
resolve, transform and manage conflicts. Digital
technologies can help us improve our conflict
analysis by increasing the volume and variety of
information that can be gathered at low cost and
in real time, and provide innovative means for
managing and visualising that information. With
the help of digital technologies, we will also be able
to better facilitate and sustain engagement with
conflict parties and improve our understanding
of their positions and relations. While digital
technologies will never be able to completely
replace the sensitive, human-to-human interaction
of high-level mediation that is contingent on the
mediator’s need to gain the trust of the conflict
parties, they will nonetheless allow us to adapt the
mediation strategy and the design of the peace
process c
ontinuously to ongoing developments and needs.
Digital tools and in particular social media
will make it possible to create wider inclusivity
and integrate a broad variety of perspectives,
interests and needs into a negotiation process.
They enable peacebuilders to assess the views
and opinions of the wider population, and inform
and educate the public and organised actors
about the negotiations, the agreement and its
implementation. This will ultimately increase the
legitimacy and ownership of the peace process.
114
115