Came across this post on LirneAsia on the cost of war and the effects of conflict on investments in ICT.
It appears that the sad deterioration of the political environment in Sri Lanka offers a natural experiment in assessing how the qualitative and sudden deterioration (as opposed to gradual decline) of the political environment effects investment in ICTs.
Prof. Samarajiva’s point at the end of the post is self-explanatory in that a rise in levels of violence is reciprocally and inevitably a dramatic decrease in the levels of investment in, inter alia, ICT in Sri Lanka.
The essence of what ICT4Peace as a theory and practice in particular seeks to address is, through the strategic use of ICT, to help bring about measures that help stop our descent into a vortex of violent conflict from which there may well be no easy return. The ideas that ICT4Peace seeks to generate, through research and most importantly, the application of research into practice in support of iterative learning frameworks, is to help stakeholders in a peace process – politicians, leaders of guerrilla movements and other non-state actors, civil society stakeholders, academics, business leaders, diaspora and the grassroots – engage in dialogues, through ICT, that may otherwise not have been possible, given the biased and highly politicised nature of most mainstream communications media in Sri Lanka.
Put another way, the threat of increased conflict in a sense gives a sense of immediacy to projects and ideas that help, above all, the people to communicate their aspirations for peace to the political leaders of today. Such networks exist – the Peoples Forums is a case in point.
While the investment climate may well take a cautious stand in light of recent developments, I’d argue that the need has never been greater for a closer look at how ICTs can help bring about a modicum of peace to help Sri Lanka from spiralling towards all-out war.
Filed under: ICTs and other stuff , ICT4Peace - Research, ICTs and other stuff
Look at how far India has gone with it’s ICT policies. I guess we can but only look on in envy and thing what might have been…….