Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding

Globalizations ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20 Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding Oliver P. Richmond & Ioannis Tellidis To cite this article: Oliver P. Richmond & Ioannis Tellidis (2020): Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1712169 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1712169 Published online: 23 Jan 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rglo20 GLOBALIZATIONS https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1712169 Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding Oliver P. Richmonda,b,c and Ioannis Tellidisb a Department of Politics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; bCollege of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Republic of Korea; cSchool of Law and Government, DCU, Dublin, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding, with the United Nations’ efforts central among them, is currently responding to a shift from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ approaches in international relations. This is affecting intervention, peacebuilding and development. This article analyses the potential that these new digital forms of international relations offer for the reform of peacebuilding – namely, the enhancement of critical agency across networks and scales, the expansion of claims for rights and the mitigation of obstacles posed by sovereignty, locality and territoriality. The article also addresses the parallel limitations of digital technologies, as well as the risk of co-optation by historical and analogue power structures, existing modi operandi and agendas of the United Nations, and other international actors. We conclude that though aspects of emerging digital approaches to peacebuilding are promising, they cannot yet bypass or resolve older, analogue conflict dynamics revolving around the state, territorialism, and state formation. Peacebuilding; statebuilding; digital technologies; critical agency Introduction In the aftermath of 9/11, the international system of peacebuilding and statebuilding, which rests on the principles of liberal order and is designed to deal with the contradictions of territorial sovereignty, borders, inequality, and power, faced a crisis that it has still not been able to address. Despite the approval (explicit or otherwise) of the statebuilding project in Afghanistan by allies and antagonists of the US, following the war with the Taleban as a response to the attacks, the international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding has failed to produce the peace, stability and security (local, national and international) that it envisaged, and not only in Afghanistan. The examples of Iraq and Libya, where security and neoliberal interests trumped human security rhetoric, are prominent examples – and two of the main reasons behind the international stalemate regarding the type of action needed in Syria, for example. Reflecting the lessons that should have been learnt from Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen are further examples that manifest the inability of liberal institutions to act decisively against great power interests, so undermining liberal peacebuilding. In Haiti, where a cholera outbreak was introduced by Nepalese blue-helmets, and in a growing number of conflict-affected countries United Nations (UN) peacekeeping troops (Anderlini, 2017) may be doing harm as well as good, if not ‘more harm than good’ (Essa, 2017). CONTACT Oliver P. Richmond oliver.richmond@manchester.ac.uk © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS The evolution of UN peacebuilding has so far spanned various forms of peacekeeping and mediation, peace agreement implementation after war, and the liberal redesign of the state and civil society to be nested in a progressive regional and international environment (as was hoped for the Balkans), all grounded in territorial sovereignty, the modern state, and connected to often contradictory forces of human rights and democracy, geopolitics, global governance and capital (Diehl & Balas, 2014). This article identifies a substantive shift from this unstable ‘analogue’ version, however, to a more digital version of peace in International Relations (IR) (Castells, 2000; Chandler, 2017; Duffield, 2018; Owen, 2015; Richmond, 2019) and examines what this means for peacebuilding. Analogue international relations were marked by sovereign, territorial states, fixed citizenship, and a multilateral system of intervention in order to maintain a homeostatic international order as it emerged in the twentieth century. It offered tools like mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and statebuilding in liberal and later, neoliberal guise. It focused on state level and international institutions or processes. Digital international relations offers substantively changed international, state, and social conditions, because technology, networks, mobility and the enhanced flow of information and materials, alters hierarchy, time and territorial space (as been long noted, by the likes of HG Wells for example) (Wells quoted in Bell, 2018). Its new technologies enhance critical agency in some ways, and either expands the potential for rights and justice or facilitates neoliberal rationalities (Owen, 2015). There have been limited responses to these shifts by policy makers.1 However, the implications of digital IR/international relations for peace and peacebuilding have not been fully considered by international actors, except perhaps as an augmentation of existing policies and theories about the nature of peace, the good state, human rights, intervention and the liberal international system. This article begins by outlining the main aspects and limitations of analogue formulations of peacebuilding and compares them to the emerging digital dynamics of peace in international relations. Secondly, it outlines the promise and limitations of digital IR and digital peace, and then concludes by discussing the subsequent dilemmas – and risks – for the current track of peacebuilding, or its radical reform. Analogue peacebuilding Analogue IR was marked by several phases of conflict and responses in mainstream thinking: the geopolitical phase, responded to by state balancing; the liberal international phase, responded to by strengthening liberal peace, global governance and international law; the post-colonial phase, to which the response was self-determination, development and the expansion of human rights; the neoliberal and geo-economic phase, to which the response was limited forms of statebuilding and globalization (Barbara, 2008). The core unit of analogue IR is the state, territorially conceived and bounded, and closely connected to a subservient but stratified nation. It operates in face to face mode, in real time according to a geopolitical rationality, mitigated by balance of power mechanisms. It has a historical presence, and a social order which responds to political authority in various ways. Such states represent a home, but are connected through tenuous human, military, political, and economic relations with other states (Gellner, 2006; Hobsbawm, 1990; Tilly, 1990). Sometimes other states are perceived as kin states. The nature of states, of governance, of power and legitimacy, and balancing have been key debates within the analogue framework of IR, which are limited to the possibilities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies and rationalities. The physical environment is not seen as an agent within such theorizing, though the resources GLOBALIZATIONS 3 the territory of a state offers do signify potential and constraints. A hierarchy of states exists, perhaps slightly mitigated by international organizations, but this hierarchy has been relatively unchanging over the time that it has been measured in the Human Development Index, for example. Thus, analogue forms of peace through political, military and economic balancing are heavily weighted towards the global north and the west, both in material and theoretical terms. Acute lines of division, caused by geographic features, by historical patterns of war, or by economic and social inequality or difference shape the cartography of analogue forms of IR, which in turn shape its negative forms of peace. Analogue forms of international relations pertained in a world of huge distances, inequalities, and obstacles to critical agency and expanding claims for rights. Slow, face-to-face, elitist diplomacy and institutions, operated according to long-standing social stratifications, in which the industrial west and certain socio-economic classes dominated. This allowed the stratified international order to maintain its legitimacy as well as allowing capital to search for profit, either in the colonial order or under the conditions2 of war in the peripheries in a more recent, industrial and neoliberal order. The analogue system of IR protected long-standing hierarchies (Mazower, 2012). After World War II peace emerged from a liberal overlay of normativity that domesticated the worst attributes of geopolitics and geo-economics by focusing on democracy, human rights, and trade, followed quickly by the emergence of development and humanitarian strategies, associated with a further development of the liberal peace (Doyle, 1983, pp. 207–208; Rist, 2003). However, analogue forms of multilateralism were slow and cumbersome, ultimately unwieldy. Diplomacy, mediation, and peacekeeping, development and humanitarianism ironed out the flaws of the geopolitical and post-colonial international system to the degree that it was able to maintain a ragged legitimacy during the latter half of the twentieth century, but such tools were not able to support the advanced and expanded rights claims that have emerge with decolonization and since the collapse of the USSR. Geopolitical and geo-economic rationality prospered in an analogue system of international relations, driving peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development towards becoming conservative systems of intervention, producing negative, liberal or neoliberal forms of peace as can be seen in the cases spanning Cambodia to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Timor Leste in the 1990s (Richmond & Franks, 2008). This system was undermined by the legacy of the War on Terror and the Afghanistan and Iraq statebuilding engagements of the 2000s. Its culmination was an ‘interventionary order’, in which intervention was designed to protect state security and capital accumulation, along with the more secondary features of democracy and human rights via an enabling state, supported by donors, regional actors such as the European Union (EU), International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and the UN system. Authoritarian forms of peacebuilding outcomes have been its eventual result (Lewis, Heathershaw, & Megoran, 2018). The above makes evident that, all too often, liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding structures focused mainly on the viability of the post-conflict state and the interests of major powers (global and regional) at the expense of the everyday needs of the individuals and communities they claim to assist, ignoring for the most part transnational networks and relations that both fed conflicts and supported peacemaking at the societal level. Bosnian politics are still divided and deadlocked twenty years after the Dayton Agreements; the Cyprus peace process is in a continuous stalemate; the Northern Ireland peace process is only superficially a ‘success-story’; security and development are provided in Cambodia mainly through authoritarianism and a extractive or subsistence economy; finally, in many other cases, similar complaints are voiced about the absence of a peace dividend, of the state’s public goods, and the (social and political) distance of international organizations, despite their presence in those countries (Richmond, 2014, p. 9). Similarly, although studies have 4 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS shown that peacekeeping is fairly effective in reducing the likelihood of war’s recurrence (Fortna, 2008; Goldstein, 2011), this often represents an admission that only the worst can be dealt with. Post-colonial and post-structural critiques of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm have stressed the importance of local involvement in the design and implementation of peace efforts, of justice, gender and environmental questions, something that the UN seemed to have taken into account since the mid-2000s when the term ‘local ownership’ was borrowed from development studies (Von Billerbeck, 2017), and when gender mainstreaming and questions of sustainability were on the international agenda. Nevertheless, as Donais has argued (2012, p. 139), the diversity of cleavages present in local post-conflict societies makes use of such terms problematic. Security imperatives are dealt with by military actors, trained elsewhere with little connection to the conflict-affected country. Rebuilding the state and implementing a peace agreement is often western donor-driven, conceived of in bureaucratic terms and imposed according to institutional imperatives rather than local needs (Krause & Jütersonke, 2005, p. 459). This denies the granting of extensive control to local actors because it claims they lack the technical knowledge related to post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding processes and because it deems local populations illiberal. The end result is that, when the UN (2015a, p. 6) seeks to reaffirm that it ‘acts as a voice for the unheard, seeking their views and ensuring their full participation’, many recognize this as mostly rhetoric due to a lack of political will or a lack of perceived common interests (Weiss, 2016). Furthermore, new actors, each with their own interests, agendas and strategies (Richmond & Tellidis, 2014) have fragmented the – already parochial and bureaucratically dysfunctional (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004) – institutional infrastructure further and have led to a gridlock (Hale, Held, & Young, 2013). Acharya argues that Trump’s presidency, Brexit and the ascendance of neo-fascist and other far-right parties in Europe points to the fact that ‘the current challenge to the liberal order is as much, if not more, from within as it is from without’ (2017, p. 272). This has led scholars to argue that a reduction of Western intervention would be more beneficial than the misnomer it carries (Suhrke, 2011, p. 246). Analogue notions of peacebuilding operate within the parameters and material structures of the Westphalian state system. They are heavily territorialized and centralized, operating in ‘western industrial time’, but are modified and mitigated by the norms of the liberal international system: namely human rights, democracy, and development, embodied in the capacities of the UN, though strictly limited by the power of dominant states (such as key Security Council members). This whole system is determined by the scale, hierarchy, and time frame denoted by territoriality and the state, as Elden (2013) has outlined. Interventionary processes designed to create peace have become preoccupied with the state model they apply and processes they use, as well as its adoption of both by local populations: effectively pointing to the recent interest in norm transfer, local ownership and the ‘local turn’. This shift from a quasi-trusteeship approach to local ownership has created problems for peacebuilding’s normative legitimacy, when understood as an amalgamation of subaltern claims (either at the state or social level) about global justice. The contradictions of peacebuilding now seem too powerful for its legitimacy to survive at both the international and the local scales without major modification. Towards digital peacebuilding The liberal peacebuilding/neoliberal statebuilding model of the last quarter of a century has lost social legitimacy among conflict-affected societies, to greater or lesser degrees, partly in parallel with the apparent decline of the status, political will, and reach of the United States (US), European GLOBALIZATIONS 5 Union (EU), and the United Kingdom (UK). Such approaches have lost traction with recipient political leaders (whom it often challenges) and who can choose from the ‘new’ (and not so selective) donors (Tardy, 2012; Waltz & Ramachandran, 2010). The liberal peace/neoliberal state model has lost its post-Cold War appeal even though many civil society actors still aspire to human security, human rights, democracy, and general prosperity. Furthermore, overcoming major political, social and economic inequality across local and international scales has been ignored by peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development praxis for much of the last three decades. This is not to say that there is not wide local to global scale concern with what the new requirements for a positive peace, state, and international system may be. A new ‘race’ is on to define its peace architecture (United Nations, 2013) and its progressive elements are mainly being preserved and carried forward via the ‘legacy’ institutions related to the UN Secretariat, agencies, and global civil society, as well as some remaining donors. Yet, their approaches remained grounded in analogue epistemological frameworks. The lack of access for peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian communities has become a major issue for the late twentieth-century peace system. Its ‘bunkerised’ (Duffield, 2010) compounds and secure and somewhat sanitized transport linkages indicate the pressure this system is under. One would have expected policy actors to try to build higher levels of consent, consensus and political will, as well as to connect more closely with local or networked systems of legitimate authority as a result. Some efforts have been made, drawing on concepts ranging from human security, capacity building to local ownership. Despite the signals offered by the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 and the ‘Sustaining Peace’ agenda (United Nations, 2016a, 2016b, 2018), there has now arisen what appears to be a retrogressive dynamic: the advancement of rights has been turned back across the world, which has undermined attempts to build a more sustainable, positive and hybrid peace and the expected gains that were to be made from a more cosmopolitan international society, furthered by a global civil society (Keane, 1988, p. 21). The peacebuilding methods of the UN, EU, IFIs, International Non-governmental Organizations (INGOs), and their various programmes for security, peace and development have been significant for many of the world’s conflict-affected citizens as in Bosnia, Timor, Northern Ireland or Colombia, but equally ‘peace’ has become a difficult concept for many people who have been subject to its processes, as with the Israel-Palestine conflict. This raises the problem of the relationship of intervention with peacebuilding: can intervention, in its attendant military, political, economic, and social dimensions be more effective if it is related to producing a higher quality peace, through new forms of governmentality that transcend the liberal governmentality of the peacebuilding era (e.g. digital governmentality)? Or does efficacy and thus legitimacy rest on limited, pragmatic goals for peace? Much of the policy documentation that has emerged over the last quarter of a century has been progressive in tone, but it has simultaneously emphasized the growing gap between intentions and outcomes. The realities on the ground span authoritarianism as with the Hun Sen regime in Cambodia, invasion and civil war as in Iraq, and softer but ineffective quasi-liberal and trusteeship-oriented regimes as in Bosnia. Statebuilding is a contemporary form of counter-insurgency in some subtle ways (Richmond, 2014; Woodward, 2017, p. 48), which holds back claims for expanded rights in any peace process. While international policy points to the need to expand rights and improve human security over the last decade or so, there have emerged some increasingly plausible responses to these problems. One possibility that seems to be emerging mirrors the US-led agenda for a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) of the 1990s, in which western military strategy was adjusted to take account of the shift from old fashioned state-centric to ‘new wars’ (with civil, transnational, criminal, and ethnic dimensions) (Gray, 2004). The RMA also incorporated new technology and new ways of thinking about security (DerDerian, 2001). Similarly, a potential revolution in peacebuilding affairs seeks 6 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS to compensate for the current lack of direct and indirect access for the UN, various internationals, donors, leading states, INGOs, in the world’s conflict, emergency, revolutionary, and development areas. It also seems to compensate for the weakening of the legitimacy of the liberal peace/neoliberal state models and a loss of political will at the international level for new missions. It must also combat new types of political conflict emerging in the digital era, including the use of new technologies to fight wars, target civilians, suppress rights (cultural, economic and social as well as human rights): the exploitation of networks to support authoritarian regimes (such as using internet blackouts as part of the military’s strategy to target and weaken opposition groups) (Gohdes, 2015); prevent the enhancement of extractive economies, and the heightening nationalist or populist politics (Owen, 2015). Many of these emerging problems relate to a rationality in which digital international relations mirrors older geopolitics, leading to digital governmentality (drawing on surveillance capitalism) (Zuboff, 2019, pp. 8–9). There is little or no coherent or plausible peacemaking response available from the UN, donors, NGOs, or national militaries as yet. In other words, violence in digital international relations may well be able to supersede the current, solely analogue capacity to make peace. However, we can begin to piece together potential digital peacemaking strategies currently available in the digital terrain of international relations. These include ‘big data’ in order to gather very large amounts of data at high speed from many sources, which may be useful at times of crises and disasters (Imran, Meier, & Boersma, 2018, p. 20). This helps identify danger spots and their dynamics (early warning), as well as support networking via various forms of media in order to respond to them (a widely noted recent occurrence in the ‘Arab Spring’) (Imran et al., 2018; Karlsrud, 2014). This is connected to the use of newish technology for surveillance, from satellites to drones (as used in a number of occurrences, as in 2015 to track the crashed Malaysian Airliner and Boko Haram). Such large volumes of descriptive data tend to undermine the political and ethical claims being ascribed to peacemaking or peacebuilding, however, pushing its practices towards problem-solving rather than emancipation (Pugh, 2004). Drones and various forms of unmanned vehicles are already being used to engage in various ways (delivering supplies or expertise; for surveillance; pamphlet dropping; democratization; rule of law; gender mainstreaming; DDR; in-a-box kits – such as those RAND developed a few years ago for statebuilding3) in trouble spots, humanitarian emergencies, as well as in remote communities requiring support (hints of this development are to be found from Afghanistan to Nigeria today). ‘Jumping’ over broken infrastructures to reach victims has been made easier. More offensive forms of intervention may also be automated and connected to such new types of ‘integrated missions’, as with the military uses of drones and other technologies (DerDerian, 2001). Such approaches probably require a mixture of military, political, humanitarian, and technological coordination and support in a relatively centralized manner. There are interesting possibilities in such emergent circumstances, but also there are great (Orwellian style) dangers in them. There has been a tendency to see progressive potential in them (via the expansion of global civil society, resistance, and human rights for example), but new digital forms of governmentality can also be used to restrain the goals of peacebuilding. These strategies are on the brink of being brought together by donors, leading core states and their militaries, humanitarians, peacebuilders, and internationals into a more coordinated digital ‘revolution’. This contributes to older conceptions of peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as to a new and more locally as well as globally legitimate basis for peace.4 This development raises a number of issues and problems. Primarily it fails to learn the lessons of the last thirty years that rights, material needs, and root causes, have to be dealt with in GLOBALIZATIONS 7 ethical ways that are acceptable to conflict-affected societies. This requires structural reform rather than merely the digital finessing of analogue forms of peacebuilding. Furthermore, there are multiple sites of legitimate authority engaged with overlapping constituencies. Under networked approaches to sovereignty, legitimacy is networked, scalar, and mobile, rather than territorially fixed to centralized institutions. Instead of building legitimacy, this revolution builds more efficient interventions and technological forms of territorial and centralized neo-trusteeship, effectively producing digital forms of governmentality of limited substance for those interested in positive, hybrid, and everyday forms of peace connected to expanded rights and understandings of global justice. On the other hand, this revolution in peacebuilding affairs could represent a new, technological turn that can be used to build a better security and peace framework, while remaining connected with areas such as human rights, gender equality, post-conflict justice, and others. However, as with liberal peacebuilding this development also represents opportunities for linkages with fluctuating foreign policy, strategic, economic, or ideological objectives on the part of hegemonic actors involved in peacebuilding. Even if the technological turn bypasses older conceptions of sovereignty, or reinvigorates liberal peacebuilding, it still will not easily navigate the problem of local consent, the global ethics of peace, justice, and sustainability, the rise of networks, the existence of multiple sites of legitimate authority, and the need to engage with hybrid forms of peace which are emerging from international to local scale encounters. There are likely to be two main perspectives on this: a practical evaluation of how to achieve renewed and improved ‘rights of intervention’ to support the expanded rights of conflict-affected communities for policymakers, donors, western militaries, the UN, and humanitarians; and, secondly, a normative/theoretical evaluation of the pros and cons for academics, peace actors, and internationals, possibly pointing towards issues of global justice. However, restoring and improving the international right of intervention (for example, further building on R2P) seems implausible, and practical constraints risk undermining peace. Whereas the revolution in military affairs in the 1990s led to US-derived counter-insurgency doctrines and UK military interest in ‘stabilisation’ missions in places such as Afghanistan in the 2000s in order to support new forms of trusteeship and ‘native administration’ (Woodward, 2017), the revolution in peacebuilding affairs will have to contend with problems of access, political and social legitimacy, claims for historic and distributive justice, and far more intense claims upon the state and the international system from conflict, emergency, or developmentaffected citizens than ever before. It would have to re-engage with an emphasis on global and distributive justice across geography and history (Nagel, 2005; O’Neill, 2000, pp. 115–142; Pogge, 2005; Risse, 2005), via a far more networked, mobile, decentralized, and complex framework, as well as demands for more egalitarian and representative forms of peace, the state, and the international. As Rawls (1993) has argued, any perpetuated inequality or injustice maintained by the state or the international would have to be clearly justified and acceptable to the general population, if indeed exceptions can be made under progressive and hybrid forms of positive peace. The boundaries of sovereignty in a digital, networked, and mobile world, could no longer be used to provide security, or implicitly justify internal and international inequality through constrained human rights, humanitarian or international law, as they are under realist or liberal modes of analysis. 8 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS The contested character of digital peacebuilding The potential and risks of technological innovation (both low and high tech) are increasingly being explored and investigated for the purposes of facilitating, enabling and amplifying peace (Hattotuwa, 2004; Karlsrud, 2014; Mancini, 2013; Morrison, 2016; Sandvik, Jumbert, Karlsrud, & Kaufmann, 2014; Stauffacher, Drake, Currion, & Steinberger, 2005; Tellidis & Kappler, 2016; Welch, Halford, & Weal, 2015). To date, research on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has uncovered potential in the context of humanitarian relief (HICT) (International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2005), mid-term development (ICT4D), crisis prevention and early warning systems (Leaning & Meier, 2009; Stauffacher, Weekes, Gasser, Maclay, & Best, 2011), the monitoring of pre- and post-electoral violence (Bani & Sgueo, 2014, p. 165), and the use of ‘big data’ for peacekeeping (Mac Ginty, 2017). The fact that credible organizations, like the United States Institute of Peace, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were quick to engage in peace-related ICT research has attracted the UN’s attention, which, in a 2015 report, noted the significance of new technologies both to the benefit of its missions as well as to ‘the practical needs of end users on the ground’ (United Nations, 2015a). In addition, NGOs are five times more likely to use new technologies to include more voices and provide alternative narratives across global networks, informed by wide ranging comparative and innovative data and methods, in peacebuilding contexts than international governmental organizations (Gaskell, Larrauri, Rieken, Ali, & Rigterink, 2016, p. 6). And yet, they do not have the same level of resources, capital, and power, that states and elites may have. The newly emerging digital system does offer some potential for a more grounded and, more importantly, relational understanding of the very complex and wide varieties of experiences of violence and expectations for peace (Qin, 2018). It amplifies the concerns and often the rights claims of social actors and groups that may not have been heard in the older framework (Arendt, 1951; Bailliet & Larsen, 2015; DeGooyer, Hunt, Maxwell, & Moyn, 2018, p. 4; Morton, 2007, pp. 96–97). Nevertheless, ICTs are not a panacea for the deficiencies of bureaucratic-led, liberal peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2017; Miklian & Hoelscher, 2018; Morrison, 2016; Tellidis & Kappler, 2016). ICTs can foment (and indeed accelerate) exclusion and authoritarianism as much as they can facilitate inclusion and accountability (Morozov, 2011; Rød & Weidmann, 2015). They are often unregulated or market driven. Similarly, they can instigate or help sustain violence as much as they can be drivers of dialogue and non-violent mobilization (Bailard, 2015; Warren, 2015). Furthermore, ICTs encourage innovative methodologies but access issues also mean they risk creating peacebuilding’s ‘digital subaltern’. As Tellidis and Kappler (2016) have noted, there is a risk that ICTs may be co-opted by international and donor organizations and institutions, so as to manipulate data, disguise or neutralize the real consequences of interventions, and/or be treated as yet another tool for the imposition of externalized peacebuilding, aid and development agendas (Hurwitz, 2014; Muller, 2015, p. 9) connected to hegemonic interests. The assumption that digital international relations is a venue for expanded rights claims through the smooth interconnection between claimants and facilities is further undermined by the probability that without mediation communication reflects existing stereotypes and indeed power relations. As an extension of liberal peacebuilding capacity, it also lacks local legitimacy, as digital IR and digital approaches to peacebuilding offers vertical relationality across power relations from local to global, but those power relations still remain. At the same time, it could well extend the power of key actors in more traditional notions of IR, including key institutions, the military, non-state violent and criminal actors, and extractive capital. Thus, the digital framework may equally GLOBALIZATIONS 9 lead to new forms of digital governmentality which support older power structures associated with the state, capital, identity, or the military. In sum, as with previous versions of peacebuilding, there are three plausible paths for ‘digital peacebuilding’. Firstly, it may support the neo/liberal peace, and states-system that has emerged, placing security, trade, and technology slightly but significantly over expanded rights and critical understandings of peace and emancipation. Secondly, it may extend the dynamics that lead to war and violence even further, as is evident in the voluntary and non-binding character of cyber-norms initiated by the UN (Tikk, 2018). Thirdly, it may connect with expanded social claims for rights and global justice. The third version, its methods and potential, which are the most difficult, are the subject of the next section of this article. It takes the neoliberal version (a form of digital, neoliberal governmentality) and the extension of the means of violence as the contemporary form of conflict that an emancipatory version of the digital peace must now respond to. Digital peacebuilding and emancipatory forms of peace: potential and risks The digital realm harbours and favours decentralization and, in certain cases, at least, supports democratization. Its ontology is based on disruption and networked (as opposed to social) relationality rather than centralization and universalization, which emphasizes the transmission of expert knowledge (Owen, 2015). This has significant implications for the nature, role and future of states, international organizations and, ultimately, their various modi operandi. The external monitoring and prevention of electoral violence in a number of countries is one example where civil society and community actors have assumed the roles and functions of the centralized security agencies of these countries. In Sierra Leone, the efforts of the non-partisan National Election Watch to monitor the procedures of the 2007 presidential election via an SMS rapid-reporting system have been recognized as catalytic not just for the validation of results, but also in promoting a ‘fair and peaceful election environment’ (Schuler, 2008, p. 143) and contributing to ‘the peaceful transition to a new administration’ (Schuler, 2008, 144). In Kenya SMS-based technologies have been used by both grassroots actors, like Sisi ni Amani, as well as government, international and local NGO actors, like Uwiano Platform for Peace, to prevent, monitor and de-escalate violence (Martin-Shields, 2013) during the 2007/2008 elections. The Kenyan case gave birth to the Ushahidi platform which collects crowdsourced data from a variety of media to visualize crises on an online map on a real-time basis. It has been used to coordinate responses in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake in 2010; in Niger’s and Kenya’s elections in 2011 and 2013 respectively; in Somalia’s Afgooye corridor, home to ‘the world’s largest concentration of internally displaced people’ (Beaumont, 2010); in the Philippines during hurricane Haiyan; in Nepal’s earthquake; in monitoring violence in Syria and the Central African Republic; and elsewhere (Hunt & Specht, 2019, p. 2). The value of real-time information (its speed, volume and variety) and the utility of its visualization helps explain the recent surge in academic research of the potential of big data in the context of humanitarianism, peacebuilding and development (Karlsrud, 2014; Read, Taithe, & Mac Ginty, 2016). Technological advances in satellite imaging, image processing capabilities, and surveillance technologies more generally, have a direct impact on some of the UN’s core peace and security missions. Security Council Resolution 1706 was the first that explicitly called for the use of ‘aerial means’ and ‘aerial reconnaissance’ by the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) in an effort to help protect civilian populations (United Nations, 2006). Since then, drones have been used by the UN for the protection 10 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS of refugees and internally displaced populations (IDPs) in Chad in 2009, and in 2013 their use was officially adopted by the organization for the support of its mission in Congo (MONUSCO) (BBC News, 2013). The UN has also used drones in Haiti in 2010 to map disaster-stricken areas as well as to support the International Organization of Migration in its efforts to map sites of IDPs in 2012 (Karlsrud & Rosén, 2013, p. 2). Drone and satellite imagery are also used by the UNDP to support the activities of humanitarian and development actors in Mali, and disaster preparedness and response in the Maldives and Tanzania (UNDP, 2017). Finally, in MONUSCO’s case, drones are not only used in their capacity to respond to violence but also as deterrents (UN News Centre, 2013). In fact, the potential of this technology is such that DPKO’s Expert Panel on Technology and Innovation in Peacekeeping recommended its use as ‘an immediate measure’ (Lute, 2014, p. 55). There are important questions here still unanswered, however. Who owns or leases the technology, and who has access to it and the data it opens up, as well as the nature of the sub-contractual relations it often depends upon are open to question. Indeed, it appears that new dependencies are emerging with the adoption of such technologies, which increasingly resemble older power relations. All of the examples cited above indicate the valuable though politically limited goals of crisis management in humanitarian, emergency or disaster responses, rather than an engagement with the political forces that drive conflict or the emancipatory political claims that emerge from conflict-affected societies through a political settlement inherent in peace processes, peacebuilding, and statebuilding. This means ascribing political progress to digital tools may well be premature even if basic needs and security are being addressed. Other elements of digital potential suffer similar limitations. Citizen journalism critiques and delegitimises official/hegemonic narratives and discourses about particular conflict situations or crises. The broader dissemination of such texts, and their comparative weight across global networks, may well influence international policy but this also depends on the political will for peacebuilding at this level if deeper reforms are to be realistic. Further examples with potential include the creation of platforms that have been developed as a response to the authorities’ mass surveillance schemes (for instance, the Telegram app) as well as the surge in the creation of electronic (or ‘crypto’-) currencies. Blockchain (the technology behind electronic currencies that allows for trustless, transparent, decentralized and unfalsifiable contracts between two parties) is something that has attracted the interest of various UN agencies: the World Food Programme has utilized the technology to authenticate and record food and cash transfers to vulnerable populations in Pakistan and Jordan (World Food Programme, 2018), while the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and the Office of Information and Communication Technologies (UN-OICT) are aiming to implement it to combat child trafficking by providing identities to undocumented children (World Identity Network, 2017). UNICEF recently began recruiting gamers to mine the Ether cryptocurrency in aid of Syrian children (Beaumont, 2018) and announced that it will be accepting donations in Bitcoin and Ether cryptocurrencies, which it will not convert to conventional currency (Lucian, 2019). Others have also suggested that the technology can also help finance the organization’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by doing away with the need to rely on charities, moral imperatives and ethical commitments (Brunnhuber, 2018). Of course, control of a money supply is one of the foundations of sovereignty (along with the control of territory and taxation) so such moves would be controversial in that they undermine the state and presage global governance. Again, at present these offer mostly ameliorative potential rather than supporting an emancipatory peace project. Decentralization and disruption are not merely aimed at critiquing, removing or reforming oppressive and unjust power structures, however, but also at the settled norms and consensus GLOBALIZATIONS 11 that were once have been taken as leading examples of good practice. The digital dynamic mobilizes civil society and other actors, partly because it is not regulated by formal authorities or the state, but on the other hand it pushes authority towards those that control the networks in use and ascribes normative equality across standpoints. Power relations thus remain unchanged, despite the early promise of decentralization (particularly where hegemony takes control of popular discourse as has recently been the case with the return of nationalism as a global political force). Counter-critique may indeed be used to disrupt peacebuilding even where it has an emancipatory goal. Somewhat problematically, this implies that peacebuilding becomes subject to the same contradiction between new tools to be applied to achieve progress and more regressive or merely ameliorative applications of digital governmentality. It is important to be wary about the risk that digital applications are used to undermine political reforms that are required to bring about a just and emancipatory peace, merely responding superficially to the symptoms of conflict. From a post-colonial epistemological perspective, multiple cyber-threats come from actors (mainly, but not exclusively, non-state) based in countries of the Global South, primarily because in those settings ‘the introduction of technology has often outpaced the establishment of state institutions, legal regulations, and other mechanisms that could manage the new challenges arising from this technology (Schia, 2018, p. 4). Recognizing this, the UN has attempted to strengthen cybersecurity capacity building (United Nations, 2015b) in these countries aiming to protect the advanced economies and societies of the Global North, but also the economic development and socio-political stability that countries of the Global South may reap from digital technology’s advances. However, as benevolent as this sounds, it does not eliminate the risk of imbrication in new systems of domination (Muller, 2015, p. 9). Indeed, as Hurwitz has argued, advanced states may lead their developing partners to focus on threats and risks that are of more concern to the former than to the latter (Hurwitz, 2014, p. 330). ICTs are not a holistic remedy to peacebuilding’s and statebuilding’s problems. They are often difficult to regulate and often dependent upon private sources of capital and technology. For every benign use there exist numerous destructive others so far ungoverned and unregulated. The aforementioned example of the Telegram app and its use by ISIS (and other criminal groups) is one such case where the digital realm may jeopardise peacebuilding or conflict transformation processes and procedures. This risk is magnified when coupled with, perhaps, the biggest risks facing the UN: as the Expert Panel on technology and innovation in Peacekeeping highlighted, peacekeeping missions frequently lack the range of capabilities that other militaries and international organizations consider necessary to operate effectively (Ibid., p. 17). Slow adoption, therefore, means there are a large number of civilians that could have been protected, but were not. Furthermore, ‘digital technologies have intensified the tensions between security and law’ (Aradau, 2017, p. 329): judicial decisions and legal knowledge increasingly rest on anticipated future threats rather than evidence and/or proof of intention. The result of this is the normalization of the legitimacy of threats (perceived, constructed or actual), as well as the technological means that are promoted for countering said threats. Linking development and aid to the promotion and enhancement of digital connectivity without prior recognition of the significance of analogue needs or political and emancipatory claims (for example, electricity, education, rights and legislation) (Schia, 2018), undermines both the development efforts in these countries as well as the security frameworks necessary for all. As has been shown elsewhere, ICTs cannot guarantee political change or economic growth unless overseen by functional institutions and regulatory frameworks (Avgerou, 2003). It could be argued that such administrative capacity, however, may be introduced (where it is lacking) or enhanced (where it exists but is not fully implemented) by peacekeeping and 12 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS peacebuilding missions’ ICT use in reforming, rebuilding and reconnecting society and the state to broader emancipatory goals. This could spur initial growth of the demand for ICT infrastructure, regulation and policy – thus having macro-economic effects on the national economy, rather than simply the local economies around peacekeeping bases (Martin-Shields & Bodanac, 2018). Yet, enormous political will and capital would be required, not to mention expertise, as well as checks and balances. As mentioned above, the use of drones and other surveillance technologies by the UN also raises questions about the data privacy of the non-combatants that are being recorded. As Larauri and Meier (2015, p. 12) have noted, records of this information will most likely outlast the life of the mission, in which case no guarantees can be provided about the extension of ‘do-no-harm’ policies. Furthermore, surveillance technologies are perceived as tools for power and control, thus raising concerns about sovereignty and rights. In other words, digital peacebuilding is still embryonic, lacks emancipatory goals connected to subaltern political claims, and without legal and ethical regulation it risks becoming a form of digital governmentality harnessed by political hegemony. The trade-off between privacy and data quality is also relevant to the evaluation of the usefulness of ‘big data’ (Imran et al., 2018). The way(s) in which data is being gathered and used are of paramount importance, particularly in authoritarian settings where the authorities would be very keen to know the identities of those submitting information about, say, violations of human rights. In Mexico, for instance, crowdsourcing for crime reporting led to drug cartels identifying and lynching participants (Monroy-Hernandez, Kiciman, boyd, & Counts, 2012). Furthermore, the greatest challenge is the sheer volume of information gathered as well as ‘the ability/inability to sift through this information, verify it, confirm it, structure it and present it in a comprehensible manner, real-time’ (Karlsrud, 2014, p. 11). More critically, however, one must not exaggerate the ability of ‘big data’ to generate knowledge and intelligence that ‘were previously impossible’ (Boyd and Crawford 2012, p. 663), particularly in conflict-affected regions where access to technology is still a privilege enjoyed by a few (Read et al., 2016). In other words, beyond the ameliorative and basic requirements of emergency and disaster relief, the digital augmentation of peacebuilding assists in expressing subaltern political claims and building a case for them (if it can overcome the problems of technological bias towards the interests of advanced societies and economies), but has little to offer for their implementation. Much of the debate about new technologies, tools, and networks in framing peace thus rests on producing apolitical engagements that do not do justice to subaltern political claims for a peace with rights, justice, and sustainability. They are thus framed by descriptive or resilience thinking in bureaucratic and technocratic modes. Consequently, they actually undermine the emancipatory endeavours of peacebuilding at a political level, even if they facilitate the access and reach of international actors seeking to pacify or respond to crises or the networks of local and civil actors. If anything, the range of digital activities surrounding peacebuilding further accentuate the growing gulf between its emancipatory claims and its limited, therapeutic praxis. Conclusion Digital peacebuilding’s epistemology and methodology are moving towards new terrains before the problems of the older ‘analogue’ order have been settled. As we have argued, however, digital peacebuilding is not a panacea for the old analogue order, though it appears to offer the key potential of enabling a transcendence of the existing barriers to peace (including problems related to positionality, locality, sovereignty, access to resources, technology and networks). Nor do digital approaches GLOBALIZATIONS 13 to peacebuilding empower subaltern emancipatory claims over digital forms of governmentality. Global civil society was seen as a panacea in the conflicts of the 1990s, but from Cambodia to BiH, deadlocked and authoritarian governments have come to power. In the newer digital terrain, and as far as international organizations and state actors are concerned, it is hard to see any progress as yet other than the potential to establish new networks and relationality, simultaneously with the reiteration of older stereotypes and power relations associated with analogue IR. 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 state and international order undermined these dynamics and instead supported the counter-revolutionary re-establishment of authoritarianism (Pogodda, 2016). Similarly, the daily instances of citizen journalism and civic efforts to showcase the barbarities of the Syrian conflict through the use of digital technologies have had little or no effect on the traditional super-power bras de fer, now seven years into the conflict. In Bosnia, Cyprus and Kosovo (Tellidis & Kappler, 2016), everyday attempts to use new technologies to transcend the divides with the ‘Other’ and rebuild alternative realities based on inclusivity have been undermined by the agendas of national and international actors whose preferences rest on the preservation of the status quo (based on the balance of territorial sovereignty and liberal international architecture) as confirmation of their hegemony within the existing hierarchical order. If anything, these examples (among others) manifest the inability of the liberal architecture to keep up with the digital change that is occurring from the local level across transnational and supranational networks. They indicate the limitations of global civil society and its digital version, and point to an alliance between geopolitics, political hegemony and a supporting digital governmentality. Localized and networked attempts to identify ways to use said technologies in order to (re)claim agency and expand rights have been met with significant resistance by the old analogue, hierarchical, geopolitical and territorial international order. It is this old system that the formal authority to build peace still rests with, even though its legitimacy is now informally challenged more than ever by technologically empowered local populations and global civil society. These are in turn also being constrained by emergent forms of digital governmentality which connect older forms of geopolitics with neoliberal statebuilding to push back at any expanded rights discourses. This reaffirms the local and subaltern turn away from the ‘traditional prioritisation of the state and national security’ (Jarvis & Lister, 2016, p. 277) or liberal international architecture, towards the inclusion and representation of ‘all actors at multiple levels, public and private’ (Richmond, 2008, p. 462) in a networked, relational, and multiscalar order. Subaltern political claims, in analogue and digital forms, connect expanded rights with global justice and sustainability, equality and empathy rather than power and interests. Nevertheless, the decentralized but networked and relational character of digital approaches to peace have themselves become subject to digital governmentality. Critics will be quick to point out that any attempt to create a fuller digital framework for peace must continuously be aware of the risks and drawbacks that relying on the digital realm entails, and not least the rapid emergence of digital forms of governmentality (which may well be ‘counter-revolutionary’ in the older sense of the word). Notes 1. See for example, Personal Interviews, Confidential Official Source, UN Secretariat, April 2014 and October 2017. See United Nations Secretary General (2018). 2. For annual data reaching back to the mid-1990s, see http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/humandevelopment-index-hdi. 14 O. P. RICHMOND AND I. TELLIDIS 3. See for example the RAND corporation’s numerous publications on statebuilding. 4. See recent UN reports invoking agendas such as ‘Sustaining Peace’ and the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’. Acknowledgements We are thankful to three anonymous reviewers for their most helpful suggestions and insights. Any errors remain, of course, our own. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributors Oliver P. Richmond is a Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and an International Professor at Dublin City University. His publications include Peace formation and political order in conflict affected societies (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Failed statebuilding (Yale University Press, 2014). He is editor of the Palgrave book series Rethinking peace and conflict studies and co-editor of the journal Peacebuilding. Ioannis Tellidis is Associate Professor of IR in the College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, South Korea, and Associate Editor of the journal Peacebuilding. References Acharya, A. (2017). After liberal hegemony: The advent of a multiplex world order. 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