Peacetech practices and their potentials for empowerment, participation and peace

Abstract

This thesis takes as its starting point the empowerment and participatory potentials of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for peacebuilding that ubiquitous availability – even in conflict-affected area – seemingly presents. It seeks to explore the nature and extent of this transformative potential. It shows that the way this question has been framed to date leads to subtle and often implicit forms of technological determinism, where hopes are placed on new technologies to fix longstanding issues within peacebuilding. This thesis therefore proposes combining a practice lens with a performative view of the materiality of technologies. This performative view is translated in the concept of ‘affordances’ of ICTs – the possibilities offered for action. And so rather than asking whether new technologies can empower peacebuilders, it reframes the question towards how ICTs are actually being used in practice – what affordances are being leveraged – and whether these practices support or hinder the empowerment and participatory potentials often attributed to ICTs in peacebuilding. Practice is conceptualised as composed of three main elements: materials (including technological affordances), competence and meanings.The empirical focus of this thesis is on the Build Peace community of practice, a first global community dedicated to peacetech – the practice of using ICTs for peacebuilding. First an analysis of Build Peace discursive and material practices constructs peacetech practices-asentities to show what its constitutive elements are and how they are integrated together. The second empirical section of the thesis focuses on the performance of peacetech practices through ethnographic observation of a peacetech project in Burundi. It examines both the project’s implementation and the development of its technology. The insights generated from this mixed method approach show that ICTs can indeed afford greater participation in peacebuilding and initiate new forms of engagement in these processes, potentially resulting in empowerment. However this is less due to their ubiquitous availability and more to a combination of various technological affordances unfolding within managed, facilitated processes by actors already engaged in peacebuilding at the local level. More fundamentally this thesis shows that despite aspirations to the contrary, peacetech practices are more likely at this stage to replicate traditional peacebuilding practices than transcend them. This means that power imbalances lamented by decades of peacebuilding literature are not fixed by the availability of new ICTs, even though the technological affordances for such transformative potentials do exist. This thesis analyses some of the reasons why these are currently not actualised and proposes some ways forward for practitioners and policy makers