Sheldon Himelfarb, CEO of PeaceTech Lab: Interview 1

jonathanriddickNovember 20, 2017February 13, 20211 Comment

The Technological Future of Peacebuilding

PeaceTechLab, an independent nonprofit, conducts pioneering work to utilize technology in building peace around the globe. President and CEO Sheldon Himelfarb offers his thoughts on the most groundbreaking aspects of the organization and where peacebuilding technologies are having the greatest effect.

Q: How was PeaceTechLab first formed - how did it get off the ground and what was the initial impetus for its formation?

A: PeaceTechLab was spun out by the US Institute of Peace, which has long recognized the importance of and participated in media and technology initiatives with peacebuilding goals. Over its 30 years, USIP has been trying to drive forward the expansion and innovation of technology’s capacity for peacebuilding, as it allows a peacebuilder to reach so many more people than other peacebuilding techniques, such as training or negotiations.

Additionally, there was recognition around three years ago that technology was inflecting everyone’s work in this field to a greater extent than ever before. There wasn’t a single problem being worked on at USIP - whether it was preventing election violence, corruption, gender violence or resource scarcity and so on – that wasn’t being touched by technological developments. As a result, the USIP wanted to ‘double down’ on how to amplify technology for peacebuilding above the potentiality for technology to do harm.

The core concept of the Lab is to enable new partnerships with the private sector as well as innovative financing strategies that are traditionally difficult to do as a government body. The PeaceTechLab as an independent NGO has more latitude in these areas.

Q: Could you briefly highlight the most significant projects currently being undertaken at PeaceTechLab, and the ones you personally are most excited about.

A: PeaceTech Exchanges, which involves entering conflict areas – Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar – and working with local civil society organizations that are seeking to promote reconciliation over conflict and greater government accountability. The idea here is to introduce existing civil society organizations, already doing great work, to new tools that help them do more, do it better and do it faster. Local technology organizations assist us with this, because they understand what is available and how best to use it in this environment. By the end of this year, PeaceTech Exchanges will have been undertaken in 15 different countries.

When we are out in conflict zones, working with different partners, we are able to identify promising uses for tech in peacebuilding. In partnership with organizations such as Amazon Web Services and C5 Accelerate, we have built a peace tech accelerator where we bring the most promising ideas in peace tech to Washington. There we work with the startups to provide them with the support necessary to succeed -- from training on how to build a leadership team, how to construct and execute on a business plan all the way to getting these peacetech initiatives in front of the right investors who can support their work.

Also never underestimate how significant data is for peacebuilding today. We’ve invested in a project called groundTruth Global, which aggregates data from social media, sensors, satellites, data and from all kinds of other sources and then uses analytics to understand how to leverage this treasure trove for new early warning insights on social and economic disruption in conflict zones. groundTruth Global is truly state of the art in the way that it leverages machine learning, multi-lingual processing, artificial intelligence and other tools.

Our collaboration with Drexel University’s College of Engineering has also acted as a major partnership initiative for PeaceTech Lab. We work with them to modify USIP’s peacebuilding and conflict analysis curriculum and adapt it. These courses are ultimately at the core of Drexel’s bold initiative to offer the nation’s first master’s degree in ‘Peace Engineering’. We need more people with technical skills in this field, not just the social scientists who understand conflict -- and this is one way to get it.

Q: One of the most significant projects undertaken by PeaceTechLab was in South Sudan in 2013 and countering hate speech. Could you summarize the methodology used in this project? How is hate speech identified?

A: Hate speech is not new – it’s been around for as long as conflict has been around. It has taken a turn for the worse in South Sudan through ICT technologies allowing hate speech to take place at a greater speed and volume than before. This can’t just be taken on with alternative messaging; more foundational work needs to take place.

The project we undertook involved working with local partners to aggregate examples of hate speech and develop a robust lexicon to identify it. This was then used to train on the ground partners and tailor existing tools to identify hate speech, which often operated in coded language. We also conducted analysis to correlate the use of hate speech and actual violence that took place, to draw a line leading from one to the other that was not anecdotal.

Q: There is a significant body of research that suggests greater access to ICT technologies in conflict zones has in some cases exacerbated violence. Do you agree with this assessment? What are the best ways to mitigate against this possibility?

A: I’m familiar with some of the research you’re referring to, and there’s no question that technology is a tool that can be used for evil as well as good. I’ve also seen really compelling research showing that high penetration of ICT in societies is an important component of a culture of free expression and transparency that exposes corruption on bad governance.

There is no single narrative that technology is either spurring on conflict or helping to prevent it. What is clear, however, is that we have to do a lot more investment in amplifying the tools at hand that are able to build peace.

Sheldon Himelfarb is the CEO of PeaceTech Lab and a former foreign policy advisor to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was previously the CEO of Common Ground Productions and has managed multiple peacekeeping programs in warzones in Bosnia, Iraq, Angola, Libya and Macedonia.

About PeaceTech Lab>

Peace Journalism: The State of the Field

jonathanriddickNovember 16, 2017February 26, 2021

Peace Journalism: The State of the Field

What are the most exciting developments in the field of peace journalism today? And who is leading the charge? Professor Annabel McGoldrick, professor of peace and conflict studies, offers her thoughts.

Q - Where have peace journalism methods been most successful?

A: Probably in the Philippines where they set up their own conflict sensitive reporting initiative, Pecojon – peace journalism network with training courses; story ideas and discussions. There’s more to learn about the work of this organization in Jean Lee Patindol’s “Building a Peace Journalist’s Network From the Ground: The Philippines Experience.”

Q -What are the organizations and networks that are leading peace journalism's implementation and progression?

A:There is now a biannual publication called The Peace Journalist from the Global Peace Journalism Center at Park University, Missouri, which is doing important research in the field.

Also Mindanews, based in Davao City in the Philippine island of Mindanao, is a news cooperative that reports on issues of conflict and peace using peace journalism principles.

Q-Some research has suggested that social media tends towards the more positive and empathetic in comparison to traditional media sources. Is peace journalism likely to find social media a more conducive environment?

A: The communication scholar, Manuel Castells has said: “The rise of insurgent politics cannot be separated from the emergence of a new kind of media space: the space created around the process of mass self-communication”. Insurgent politics entails adding new voices and new perspectives so in that sense the process of mass self-communication, chiefly social media, is conducive to PJ. On the other hand, social media are a largely unregulated space so it is difficult to uphold the journalistic remit of factual reporting.

Q - Has any new research added to or potentially contradicted your own work, i.e. your research on psychophysiological audience responses?

A: I think this is a relatively new field and measuring emotional responses to anything is pretty new and complex. At the moment we’re all just confirming what intuitively makes senses in terms of audiences responses to peace journalism and are metaphorically just groping around the dark for the technology to measure what are actually very subjective responses. Many of us can testify to number of occasions where the media is part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Other research on audience responses to PJ include Christoph Daniel Schaefer’s “The Effects of Escalation vs. De-Escalation-orientated Conflict Coverage on the Evaluation of Military Measures”, as well as Wilhelm Kempf’s “Experimenting with de-escalation oriented coverage of post-war conflicts”.

Annabel McGoldrick is a lecturer in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney. She has previous experience as a TV news reporter and also works as a psychotherapist.

About Annabel McGoldrick>

The Future of Peace Journalism 1

jonathanriddickNovember 9, 2017February 26, 20211 Comment

The Future of Peace Journalism

by Jake Lynch

Peace Journalism has attained traction in journalistic communities where editors and reporters come to feel they would like to contribute, through their professional activities, to the prospects for peace in their society – or at least avoid inadvertently making them worse. Examples include Indonesia in the early 2000s, following the fall of the New Order regime of President Suharto, and the southern Philippines, where people are weary of the blight on their lives and prospects from long-running insurgencies, and where both elite and grassroots peace activism is meeting the demand for change.

But there are many initiatives underway at any one time, chronicled in the biannual publication, The Peace Journalist, published by the Global Peace Journalism Center at Park University, Missouri, and edited by Prof Steven Youngblood – who has introduced PJ to journalistic communities in locations including Uganda and Kenya. Peace Journalism has also grown rapidly in the field of scholarly research, with a large array of books (monographs and edited collections), book chapters, articles and special editions of academic journals (such as the one just out in Peace Review), latterly spreading to other languages than English.

When it comes to social media, these platforms are neither intrinsically conducive nor otherwise to PJ. The original thesis behind PJ is that the operation of journalistic conventions leads to a dominant form of 'war journalism' when reporting conflicts – not merely war reporting, in the sense of reporting on wars, but a mode of representation that leads readers and audiences to infer that further violence is legitimate, necessary, even inevitable. These conventions arise not from the intrinsic properties of news but from the organisational imperatives of news industries. If you're a daily newspaper, you are likely to concentrate on the events encompassed in the 24-span between editions… however, when reporting conflicts, that can lead to a pattern of big bangs: bombs, bullets and battles. What is missed out is the process(es) that lead up to the events – so readers are deprived of any opportunity to appreciate how these processes could be diverted towards less violent outcomes.

Now, of course, daily newspapers, while still important, are nowhere near as dominant as they were. And some have used social media to create, and bring to a wide audience, very different forms of representation, enabled by the different organisational imperatives of the media in which they are operating. Brandon Stanton, for example, started with his Facebook-mounted photo blog, Humans of New York, then went on to cover the war in Syria from the viewpoint of families fleeing to seek sanctuary in Europe, in partnership with the UN High Commission for Refugees.

On the other hand, a recent (Sep 2017) report by the International Crisis Group identified the expansion of social media in Myanmar, as repressive laws were lifted after 2011, as a factor in the spread of Buddhist nationalism – which has, in turn, exacerbated the Rohingya crisis. Whether one is operating in mainstream or social media, the need for some critical self-awareness, and some specific agenda to give peace a chance (not to advocate peace, just to give it a chance) is an essential safeguard against unwittingly paving the way to further violence.

There's a mountain of published research on PJ now, which contains a multitude of perspectives on a multitude of contested points and ongoing debates.

Jake Lynch is chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. He has worked as a correspondent for the Independent and Sky News, and was previously an anchor for BBC world news.

Peacekeeping and Africa’s Evolving Infosystems

jonathanriddickNovember 8, 2017February 25, 2021Leave a comment

Peacekeeping and Africa's Evolving Infosystems

By Steven Livingston

In 2011, The Africa Center for Strategic Studies commissioned a research report to determine the spread of ICT technologies across Africa and subsequent effects on peacebuilding efforts. Professor Steve Livingston offers further insights into his research and policy recommendations.

A policy piece such as this one is not generally associated with any conceptual breakthroughs. But I think that the clearest breakthrough came in the form of two separate conclusions we came to through weeks of on-the-ground work in Africa.

The original purpose of the trip was to address issues related to African conventional legacy press. The Africa Center wanted to look at radio, tv etc. and ask whether it was supporting or undermining peace efforts. For example, these organizations have a history of being involved in hate speech, and most famously contributed to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Going into the project, almost immediately, it became apparent the most important development occurring was the burgeoning use of mobile telephony. These are technologies and networks that most in the global north don’t even know exist and certainly don’t study. These are not smart phones but simpler technologies, using systems such as ‘Frontline SMS’, which is a way of aggregating text messages, both receiving them en masse and sending them out en mass.

Frontline SMS, among others, is used to facilitate collective action. For example, in the Kivu region of Eastern Congo, a conflict zone where state and military forces are not present, low-wattage radio stations and basic cell phones are used to create a low-tech security zone. Users will send a text message to a radio station that may be using Frontline SMS as an interface. The message will consist of simple announcements – deaths, births – but can also contain notifications or warnings e.g. an approaching force from the Lord’s Resistance Army, heading in a particular direction.

These texts would then be broadcasted as a community bulletin board service by the radio station, and encourage a wider region to take precautions. Cell phones in places like central Africa are able to facilitate community projects that would not be feasible in the absence of cell phones, low-wattage radio stations and technologies such as Frontline SMS. Brought together, you are facilitating a greater degree of security for vulnerable communities in remote regions.

On the potential for Cell Phones to act as Catalysts for Political and Ethnic Violence

The real problem here is collective action being misused, not the technology. A concept to consider here is ‘affordance’, and by that I mean the ability for something to afford a use. A technology that produces a range of potential uses inevitably results in it being applied to do all kinds of things. That digital connection can be used to warn a village of a marauding band of guerrillas, to allow for the transfer of money, or, unfortunately, for more nefarious ends.

Studies that have determined cell phones and related technologies to be encouraging violence are flawed. These researchers are often numbers-driven. 'Large-N' data sets often provoke pessimistic conclusions about why violence is occurring more generally, while those who do case studies tend to have much more upbeat assessments. The propensity to use large-N data sets leads to spurious correlations that only appear to be there.

A mobile phone can produce any kind of outcome, including coordinating violent actions. The kind of outcome that is produced has to do with the intentionality of the people using it. This can be distributing mosquito nets and preventing malaria; or, it can be used to coordinate violence.

What is wrong with this hypothesis is that the researchers are finding that as the usage of mobile phones increases in a region, the reported number of violent incidences is also rising. This is an information paradox.

Firstly, the mere awareness of a norm that one should not do something (like an act of violence) will obviously result in a spike of those incidences being reported. This correlation fails to consider this feature. Increased levels of education, the availability of media, these things lead to greater sensitivity that being subject to violence by a band of attackers is not normal or acceptable. Secondly, the availability of a cell phone is creating opportunities to report violence. A colleague of mine in Nairobi described to me his one thousand contacts on his cell phone, the vast majority located in remote villages across the region. They regularly text him and send him information, information that would be hidden to anybody outside of these communities before the advent of cell phones.

The cell phones have not caused these events, it is provoking awareness of these events in the first place. Its not the number of violent events that has changed, but the sensitivity to, and the instruments used to measure the events, that has changed.

Professor Livingston is a professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs at George Washington University.

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Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?

jonathanriddickNovember 6, 2017February 22, 2021

Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?

Interview with Professor Neil Malhotra

Political polarization and legislative gridlock frequently dominate the headlines in today’s media. In a 2016 research project in the Journal of Political Communication, Professors Matthew Levendusky and Neil Malhotra explored whether this media coverage is itself exacerbating the problem of polarization. Their analysis revealed that coverage of polarization was influencing some Americans to moderate their positions on certain issues. However dislike and distrust of the opposing party was amplified by coverage that emphasized division and discord. Professor Malhotra offers some further thoughts on his work in the following interview.

Q: What was the most surprising or disruptive finding from your research?

A:We had maybe thought that media coverage presenting America as polarized would polarize Americans in terms of their issue attitudes given previous research on conformity. However, the anti-conformity we observed was striking given that people do not view extreme partisans as people they want to be. We expected that media coverage of polarization would increase affective polarization, but were surprised that the effects exceeded that of issue polarization. This is line with much recent research, however, that views polarization less in terms of issues and more in terms of emotional responses to the “other side.”

Q: How has this area of research evolved since your publication?

A: We wanted to explore the issue of partisanship and polarization outside the survey context, where many people criticize survey responses as “cheap talk.” We recently published a paper in the American Journal of Political Science showing that partisanship affects people’s real economic choices outside the survey context in labor and product markets.

Q: Your research indicates that voters are moderating their positions when they come into contact with media descriptions of a divided electorate. How could this be utilized in today’s political climate to try and inhibit polarization?

A: I think it suggests that people do not view extreme individuals as role models. So public shaming of extremity and approbation of moderation may be effect. At the same time, I think it also shows that issues are likely the wrong metric by which to assess polarization, and affective responses to opposing partisans are much more meaningful.

Q: The field of ‘peace journalism’ focuses on using media and journalistic practices to encourage reconciliation in divided societies. Can we draw from your research that American media should be taking a similar approach? Could excessive coverage of polarization be unethical?

A: The media has a responsibility to report the truth, so I don't think they should shy away from reporting that societies are polarized if that is what the data says. However, too often the media constructs narratives based on episodic stories and not enough from broad patterns of data. This was the case of crime coverage, and I think there is a similar phenomenon with coverage of polarization. However, the rise of data driven journalism may be changing things.

Neil Malhotra is a professor of Political Economy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He has written and been published extensively on American politics, political behaviour and survey methodology.

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