"This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivi ... ty and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames the discussion from a peacefocused perspective, providing a response to the work done by others who have focused on the ways technology makes violence more likely." (Abstract) more

"The expansion of access to mobile phones in the developing world has provided new opportunities for development and peacebuilding institutions to reach communities, and for communities to develop local development and peacebuilding solutions. Kenya has seen a particularly high concentration of prog ... ramming geared towards using mobile phones for banking, election monitoring and violence prevention, using crowdsourcing methods to collect and share information. While there have been a number of notable crowdsourcing programmes that have been successful at preventing violence, there remains limited theorisation in the peacebuilding community about why these successes occurred. Using Fearon and Laitin’s (1996) models of inter-ethnic cooperation, intra-group organising and inter-group policing, we explore whether success in crowdsourcing for violence prevention is a function of direct intra-community organising, or is an outcome of previously unavailable information being broadcast on traditional media such as radio." (Abstract) more

"This paper will critically explore why mobile phones have drawn so much interest from the conflict management community in Kenya, and develop a general set of factors to explain why mobile phones can have a positive effect on conflict prevention efforts generally. Focusing on theories of informatio ... n asymmetry and security dilemmas, collective action problems, and the role of third party actors in conflict prevention, it aims to continue the discussion around Pierskalla and Hollenbach’s recent research on mobile phones and conflict risk. Given the successful, high profile uses of mobile phone-based violence prevention in Kenya I will identify a set of political and social factors that contribute to the success of crowdsourcing programs that use mobile phones, and explain what makes them transferable across cases for conflict prevention in other countries. The primary findings are that a population must prefer non-violence since technology is a magnifier of human intent, that the events of violence start and stop relative to specific events, the population knows to use their phones to share information about potential violence, and that there are third party actors involved in collecting and validating the crowdsourced data." (Abstract) more