PeaceVoice – New media strengthens the traditional

ICTs in general 1 Minute

From Bill Warters blog comes news of a website that elicits short submissions on peace and gets them published in the traditional media in the US.

PeaceVoice gets Peace Professionals, including members of academia and the non-profit sector to submit short op-eds, which it then promotes amongst traditional media and also publishes abstracts online.

PeaceVoice is a project of the Oregon Peace Institute and …is devoted to changing U.S. national conversation about the possibilities of peace and the inadvisability of war.

We are creating a library of previously unpublished articles written by peace professionals and offering them on a daily basis as op-eds to editors of newspapers and online news organizations. Essentially, we are free literary agents to busy peace professionals. We believe that by presenting academically informed opinions that promote peace and nonviolent conflict resolution, we give the public one of the best, and most seriously absent, inoculants against war.

The site introduces the term public peace intellectuals and there’s a link to an interesting presentation there that doubles as a style guide for those who wish to contribute to the site and to op-eds in general.

This is a great example of how new media can play a role in promoting vital critiques and points of view that would not otherwise have made it on to traditional media outlets.

The content on PeaceVoice is US-centric, but there’s no reason why this model can’t work in other countries where there is some free press left that’s able and willing to publish content that critiques the status quo.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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