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Blogs & Bullets

part of the Centers of Innovation

Understanding Online Discourse as a Cause of Conflict and Means of Dialogue

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Upcoming Event: Groundtruth: New Media, Technology and the Syria Crisis 
This event, scheduled for October 2, 2012, provides analysis and insight into the influence of new media in the Syrian crisis, specifically on three types of actors: activists on the ground, journalists and media-makers who are reporting on the crisis, and policy-makers around the world.

PeaceWorks Report: Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring 
In this report, a team of scholars from George Washington University and American University analyze the role of social media in the Arab Spring protests of 2011–12. The authors utilize a unique dataset from bit.ly, the URL shortener commonly associated with Twitter and used by other digital media such as Facebook. With these data, the authors are able to test empirically the claims of “cyberoptimists” and “cyberskeptics” about the role of new media in bringing down autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and in spurring protests in other parts of the Arab World, such as Bahrain.

Event: Sifting Fact from Fiction: The Role of Social Media in Conflict 
This Blogs & Bullets meeting, held in September 2011, brought together the companies that sift through and sell this data with the activists that create it and the policy-makers who use it. The event looked at the cutting-edge of technologies for analysis with experts from around the world in an effort to expand our ability to harness these new platforms for conflict management and peacebuilding. 

 

Partners

  • George Washington University
  • Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
  • Morningside Analytics

Through this initiative, the Center of Innovation for Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding explores ways to utilize quantitative and analytical tools to map online discourse and content in USIP’s priority conflict areas.

As part of this initiative, the Center has put on major conferences that have brought together a wide range of leading academic and industry experts.  It has produced two papers that laid out an influential framework for analyzing the impact of new media on politics and which took stock of the existing literature, methods, and data. 

These conferences and reports have significantly advanced a broad, collective, and collaborative effort to develop policy-relevant and academically rigorous approaches to urgent questions about the impact of new media on conflict and peace.  

2012 Events and Publications

  • PeaceWorks: Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring
    In this report, a team of scholars from George Washington University and American University analyze the role of social media in the Arab Spring protests of 2011–12. The authors utilize a unique dataset from bit.ly, the URL shortener commonly associated with Twitter and used by other digital media such as Facebook. With these data, the authors are able to test empirically the claims of “cyberoptimists” and “cyberskeptics” about the role of new media in bringing down autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and in spurring protests in other parts of the Arab World, such as Bahrain.

2011 Events and Publications

2010 Events and Publications

2009 Events and Publications