Comparative Politics | Development & Migration | Technology & Media
I published a new DIE-GDI Briefing Paper today on how digital tools can be used by donors, and refugees themselves, to manage and support safe resettlement processes. Feel free to share, and expect the German-language version in the next week or so!
Unfortunately the last few months have been fairly low output in terms of blog posts. This can be credited to resettling after returning from Samoa, getting back to work with the tech community in D.C, and of course getting a dissertation written. I have had the chance to get myself on a few panels this month and next to discuss my research, though. I’ll be joined by some awesome people too, so hopefully if you’re in D.C. you can come out and join us!
October 15: Brownbag lunch panel at the OpenGovHub hosted by the Social Innovation Lab, FrontlineSMS, and Ushahidi.
Later in November: Dissertation proposal defense at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (exact date TBD). Open to the public!
Hopefully you can make it out to one or more of these, I think they’ll be really interesting!
For those who were curious about what I discussed with USAID’s Office on Conflict Management and Mitigation on September 4, wonder no more. TechChange’s video guru got me on camera to record the presentation – hopefully it’s useful (or leads to some good arguments at least).
I just had a new post go up on the TechChange blog – I haven’t written for them in a while, so it feels good to be writing for them again!
Here’s a brief intro, and you can read the rest here:
“In recent years, mobile phones have drawn tremendous interest from the conflict management community. Given the successful, high profile uses of mobile phone-based violence prevention in Kenya in voting during 2010 and 2013, what can the global peacebuilding community learn from Kenya’s application of mobile technology to promote peace in other conflict areas around the world? What are the social and political factors that explain why mobile phones can have a positive effect on conflict prevention efforts in general?…”
Nancy Ngo, one of the TechChange staff members helped get it written, so a big thanks to her for getting it up!
One thing I’m working on in my doctoral research is understanding why crowdsourcing works in conflict management and resolution…or should at least logically work based on the various theories of conflict management and resolution developed and refined over the last 40 or so years. In this post, I’m going to use Kenyan election violence as the tangible example, and propose using the term “crowdsharing” instead of “crowdsourcing” since we’re talking about a process through which a local population shares and responds to information laterally. This is going to be a math-y one, but bear with me.
