Digital Peacebuilding?

Digital Peacebuilding?: The Socio-Technicality of Transforming Armed Conflict explores how we can make sense of the increasing use of digital technology in peacebuilding. It studies digital peacebuilding at different stages of conflict, including conflict prevention, conflict mitigation, peace mediation, and sustainable transitions from armed conflict. Moving beyond a focus on individual tools, the book encourages a 'post-digital' posture that enables a reflexive position vis-à-vis the appeal of digital innovation. Instead, it suggests exploring how technologies are always socially embedded, and how the socio-technicality of digital peacebuilding conditions prospects of conflict transformation. To this end, the book encourages a critical-reflexive engagement with how claims about technology and society shape digital peacebuilding. It also explores how these dynamics and outcomes differ globally depending on variations in the degree of digitalization of the conflict context, and levels of political repression. The book presents comparative empirical research on digital peacebuilding initiatives from South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, as well as illustrative examples from several other cases. It delves into a variety of applications, including social media monitoring to counter harmful speech, the use of mobile phones and mobile apps to enable localized early warning and early response, the integration of artificial intelligence in digital dialogues to support peace processes, and everyday online interactions that can foster societal reconciliation and political change. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Andreas T. Hirblinger is a Senior Research Associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute's Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). He has been a Senior Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and a visiting researcher at the School of Transnational Studies, European University Institute (EUI). He holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge