Make your peace. Virtually.

ICTs in general 1 Minute
Make your peace
Make your peace

We all experience conflict – at work, in the family, the playground, our relationships. We’ve all over-reacted, or behaved in a way we later regretted and wished we could make redress for. Make Your Peace is your chance to do just that. It’s a special campaign from Peace Direct marking the UN’s International Day of Peace, 21 September, to help you do something positive and practical about conflict in your life.

Peace Direct has come up with a beautifully designed website aimed at capturing the spirit of the UN International Day of Peace, falling on 21 September 2008.

You can send an e-card, write a tribute and donate to various peacebuilding initiatives around the world.

What’s interesting is that peace on this site means a lot more things than just complex, violent ethno-political conflict. For example, stories include persons trying to make peace with themselves, going through bitter divorce proceedings, making peace with parents and other family members.

Stories of peacemaking
Stories of peacemaking

This is a great idea.

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.

Published