From Scylla to Charybdis? The Risks and Opportunities of Digital Peacebuilding

With digital peacebuilding, its epistemology and methodology are moving into new terrains before the problems of the older analogue order have been settled. Digital peacebuilding is emerging to respond to the conflict risks of the new digital international. It is a flimsy development at that, while the old order is still conflict prone, even if it is more settled within the liberal international architecture than it once was. The anticipation and excitement the Arab Spring generated (particularly in the case of Egypt) about bottom-up processes of democratization, which were in turn aided and facilitated by digital technologies, dissipated quickly as the old international order machinated the undermining of these dynamics and instead favored the establishment of a dictatorship. The liberal system exihibits an inability to keep up with the digital change that is occurring at the local level. The local’s attempt to identify ways to use said technologies in order to (re)claim agency in the way that peace, security, and quotidianity are shaped and established is met with significant resistance by the old analogue, hierarchical, geopolitical, and territorial international order.