ICT4Peace is the belief, supported by a growing body of practitioners globally, that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) including mobile phones help in all aspects of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Much is made of ICTs exacerbating violent conflict and war, including the increasing threat of cyberwar, hate speech online and use of mobile communications for acts of terrorism. However, the practice and theory of ICT4Peace respectively confirms and suggests that these same technologies, as well as alternatives, can be leveraged to strengthen human dignity and peace. This finds clear expression in Paragraph 36 of the Tunis Declaration of the UN’s World Summit of Information Society, where it is noted,
“We value the potential of ICTs to promote peace and to prevent conflict which, inter alia, negatively affects achieving development goals. ICTs can be used for identifying conflict situations through early-warning systems preventing conflicts, promoting their peaceful resolution, supporting humanitarian action, including protection of civilians in armed conflicts, facilitating peacekeeping missions, and assisting post conflict peace-building and reconstruction.”
The ICT4Peace Foundation was established in 2005 to raise awareness about the Tunis Commitment and promote its practical realisation in all stages of crisis management. The Foundation looks at the role of ICT in crisis management, covering aspects of early warning and conflict prevention, peace mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding as well as natural disaster management and humanitarian operations of the international community. In October 2006, the ICT4Peace Foundation was invited to a partnership with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) as the focal point for overseeing and promoting the spirit of Paragraph 36 of the WSIS Tunis Declaration.
The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict, published as part of the UN ICT Task Force Series, was commissioned and edited by the Foundation in 2005. The book looks at very practical ideas around the world where ICTs are used to strengthen peace, during violent conflict as well as post-war. This publication is of enduring importance, since it clearly recommends a number of examples from many countries, and over a diverse range of conflicts, where ICTs were leveraged to strengthen peace, reconciliation and human dignity.
With the Chief Information Officer at the Office of Information and Communications Technology at the UN Secretariat in New York, the Foundation in 2007 embarked on a process to strengthen crisis information management. The crisis information strategy (CiM) strategy co-developed by the UN CITO and the ICT4peace Foundation is based on the recognition that the UN – its member states and constituent agencies – have significant experience in crisis response. Yet, no single agency or department in the UN has the capacity or mandate to address these crises. This makes it vital that staff at all levels of the UN use tools and systems, produce, disseminate and archive output in a manner that can be scaled up or rapidly focused to deal with any type of crisis. The CiM strategy will help the UN deal with all stages of a crisis lifecycle more efficiently and effectively, complementing parallel initiatives to significantly revamp the UN system’s knowledge management architecture as well as its ICT foundations. The strategy goes on to capture the crisis lifecycle in a manner that transcends the agency or department centric definitions at the UN. It suggests that crises today require information to be shared within and between agencies of the UN and its partners, and that interoperability of CIM systems is critical in this regard.
Complementing this high-level policy shaping work with the UN are actions to support other actors, including the military, to use ICTs to more effectively predict, react to and recover from crises, using information harvested from, inter alia, citizens on the ground, NGOs, governments, international stakeholders and international financial institutions. This is in turn to suggest the vital need for the crisis response lifecycle to embrace developments in ICTs such as the growing sophistication and reach of mobile handsets. The ICT4Peace Foundation, in the fulfilment of its mandate, works with the Cairo Regional Center for Training on Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa (CCCPA), the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra and L'Ecole de Maintien de la Paix (EMP) based in Bamako, Mali on training courses for peacekeepers in the region, including those from the African Union and Middle-East. For example, a course conducted in 2008 at the CCCPA coincided with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India allowing real time, hand on exercises in citizen generated, online information gathering, analysis, visualization and reporting using Web 2.0 tools as well as social networking platforms, based on an actual, evolving ground situation. For many participants, this was their first experience of leveraging tools and services on the web to inform policies and responses regarding a sudden onset disaster.
A number of other examples, anchored to The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict, are included in the Foundation’s ICT4Peace Inventory wiki (http://inventory.ict4peace.org), which is updated regularly with new developments.
Beyond the hype, ICT4Peace is a body of theory and practice, still evolving, that attempts to create, strengthen and sustain the most difficult yet vital ingredient in peacebuilding.
Hope.
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