Young people harnessing the power of technology and social media for peace initiative comes with the importance of the emergence of innovative use of young people to technology and social media in advancing their efforts in peacebuilding. From creating digital networks to spreading awareness of different causes and initiatives to raising funds, technology, and social media can be incredibly powerful tools showcasing that the future of peacebuilding lies prominently in the expanding use of technology and social media.

To promote and showcase these practices, Justice Call, a member of the GPPAC Youth, Peace, and Security Working group led along with other members and partners (Adeela, Building Blocks for Peace, Somos CaPAZes, Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect), the development of a platform that promotes stories of youth-led digital initiatives from the ground along with this best practices paper, which was prepared after one internal consultation and one public consultation.

As part of this initiative, the Technology for Youth, Peace, and Security (TECH4YPS) platform was created, which features stories of youth-led and youth-focused digital peace initiatives and resources for digital peacebuilding.

To advance our efforts, we are inviting you to share your stories and initiatives related to digital peacebuilding on our platform. We understand that many of you are actively working towards building peace in your communities, and we believe that your stories can inspire others to follow in your footsteps. 

Click Here to Submit your digital Initiative

Source: hhttps://cnxus.org/resource/best-practices-paper-young-people-harnessing-the-power-of-technology-and-social-media-for-peace/

Published in March 2020 by the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka (NCEASL), the Digital Citizenship Toolkit aims to address growing challenges online by equipping and encouraging younger generations to make better, smarter, and more ethical choices in the digital space. It reinforces their right to engage freely and effectively in the digital space, while emphasising their individual responsibility towards society at large. It has been formulated for audiences between the ages of 18 to 30 and is a valuable tool for anyone working and engaging with young people to consider in their future interventions, when reinforcing the importance of civic-minded citizenship among younger generations.

(https://cnxus.org/resource/digital-citizenship-toolkit/)

Digital technologies are also changing the character of conflict as parties increasingly rely on them to advance their objectives. Mediators and their teams need to consider additional factors such as the digital ecosystem of a given setting and how digital technologies and related data issues influence the power dynamics of a conflict. To address these new developments and help mediators and political affairs officers navigate the issues, the DPPA Policy and Mediation Division has prepared a Framework for Digital Technology-sensitive Conflict Analysis.

https://peacemaker.un.org/node/3791

Search for Common Ground undertook a study to examine how users in conflict-affected societies handle harmful content online, and to identify barriers that they face in using existing mechanisms such as content reporting to make their online spaces safer. The study was possible with financial support from Facebook.

Author: Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies (CPCS)
Published by: CPCS
Publication date: July 2020

“Peacebuilding always begins in the midst of crisis; challenging situations push us to get creative, strategic, and think beyond the way we’ve been doing things. How do we continue to build and nurture relationships with our partners, when most of us are now in zoom rooms instead of meeting face to face?”
Emma Leslie, Executive Director

The Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) has adapted our approach to peacebuilding to adjust to the “online” world we currently all live in. In consultation with our colleagues and partners, and reflecting in our teams on what this experience has been like, CPCS has identified key lessons learned, principles, and tips for peacebuilding online, captured in a series of learning papers to answer the question: What happens when peacebuilders go “online”?

This paper fills a gap in existing literature and practice: it brings together expertise on intersectional feminist approaches to technology with intersectional feminist approaches to peacebuilding.

Scholars and practitioners have explored how an intersectional feminist perspective delivers more impactful peacebuilding and how it mitigates bias and harm when applied to digital technology. 

This explorative study investigates how these two perspectives intersect in digital peacebuilding. We explore how a theoretical framework that seeks to analyse how different aspects of social and political identities create unique but often overlapping forms of discrimination, can amplify the opportunities and reduce the risks of digital peacebuilding.

The study is conducted by build up and commissioned by the Berghof Foundation and the Plattform Zivile Konfliktbearbeitung/ Platform Peaceful Conflict Transformation.

https://berghof-foundation.org/library/sealing-the-cracks

Violent conflict is on the rise, and increasingly, social media is playing an important role: political actors have used social media to target critics with disinformation, while COVID‑19 misinformation spread online has spurred hate speech to stigmatize groups. Current off-line and online approaches and tools to address these challenges seem insufficient to the task. Moreover, there are real dangers inherent in some current responses, such as exposure of human rights defenders to attack and restrictions on speech by governmental authorities.

This paper, the product of a working group of NGO and academic experts, aims to be a practical statement about the ‘weaponization’ of social media and peacebuilding responses to it. It attempts to articulate an emerging consensus among peacebuilders about what we know about working in this area, and very practically, what approaches are effective or promising. The goals are to provide a common starting point for addressing social media drivers of conflict for practitioners, both local and global; suggest some priorities for organizations, donors, and governments; and serve as a foundation for other related discussions.

Source: https://www.mercycorps.org/research-resources/social-media-conflict-peacebuilding

Background

‘Young people prefer violence over peaceful means’, ‘young refugees are sexual harassers’, ‘young people are spreading hate online’ … the list of disinformation and hate speech on the fundamental role of young people in building peace goes on and on. These often unpunished harmful narratives are particularly worrisome, as they undermine the crucial work of young people in building peace and jeopardise their physical and mental health.

While a lot has been done to shed light on the phenomenon of disinformation, notably in light of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the infodemic that followed, European members of the United Network of Young Peacebuilders (UNOY Peacebuilders) expressed lacking guidelines to dismantle harmful narratives targeting young peacebuilders and young people at large.

Aim

The Young Peacebuilders’ Guide to Tackling Harmful Narratives entails a concrete step-by-step methodology and tools to support young peacebuilders in their fight against harmful narratives, as well as four concrete alternative narrative campaigns that were developed by UNOY Peacebuilders members.

Rather than creating the umpteenth resource that sheds light on the issue of harmful narratives, this by-youth-for-youth guide is a collaborative document that encapsulates the work and input of 11 UNOY members who took part in UNOY Peacebuilders’ capacity development programme—Youth Promoting Peaceful and Cohesive Societies in Europe—held between April and June 2022, as well as the insights of experts in disinformation and media development at large.

Source: https://cnxus.org/resource/the-young-peacebuilders-guide-to-tackling-harmful-narratives/