HADR, SSTR and New Media: Opening Minds, Reaching Out

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I delivered a presentation at “Enhancing Information and Communication: Issues for Policymakers, Ambassadors, and Commanders” organised by National Defence University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC on 17 August 2011.

I’ve not talked about SSTR and HADR issues for a while now, though the work I do with the ICT4Peace Foundation on the UN Crisis Information Management strategy and related issues keep me abreast of developments in this field. Researching for this article, realised how much I had written about it in the past few years, and sadly, how deeply relevant some of that early writing still is.

This presentation dealt with some key concepts and ideas around SSTR and HADR operations today, and was aimed at an audience largely from the US military as well as various arms of the State Department.

Had a superb conversation with the person who headed the State Department’s response to Assange’s Cablegate, and met a few other interesting individuals as well. What struck me, and not for the first time, is how open the US DoD and military is to changing information landscapes and how the adoption of new technologies not just changes the way analysis is done, but also in effect changes the nature of the institutions themselves. On the other hand, folk from USAID are stuck in a groove, and see ICTs as new tools for promoting their hard nosed approaches to development. No engagement here, just appropriation of new tools for old theories of development – so not very progressive.

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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