Communication, revolutions and conflict resolution : ICTs as instruments of the democratization process

Abstract

When thinking about communication in the field of conflicts, peace building and peace enforcing, the shared awareness is that any further development in the field of communication technologies, particularly for the societies that are in the condition to use these new media effectively, will have many and relevant implications compared to past discoveries. The media revolutions that are affecting our daily interaction with the external world have implications on all the fields related to the study on the human being. From anthropology and psychology, to social studies, politic sciences and economy studies, many theories are dealing with the spread of technological tools as a means for a new type of communications. Therefore, also the Conflict Resolution and the Peace studies have been recently involved in this topic. The hypothesis underlying the thesis is that populations involved in conflicts, and specifically people of developing countries, can strengthen their social and political expectations and make them effective, thanks to the contribution of these new technological media, specifically if considered with their three attributes of communication, information, and participation (CIP). This disse1iation will be focused on these three elements, and from the result of the analysis on the relation between these elements and the conflict resolution's field, several projects will be presented in the effort to frame where and how these media have been included. Two main guidelines will follow the presentation of this dissertation, two movements that have been distinguished between bottom-up and top-down directions of the participatory inclusion of civil societies in the decision-making processes. The implications about the ICTs in the broad field of Conflict Resolutions (CR) are many and these are often related to the different branches on which CR's studies are divided. One of these 'branches' is the Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). This field has been developed in recent years on disputes that can be quickly resolved through the web. Compared to the uses of ICTs on broader and more meaningful levels, ODR is however a start from which analyze the relations between these new media and the CR field. Considering a dispute between two individuals, an exemplificative case is the one offered by eBay, which allows users to overcome issues related to payments and shipping of objects without involving instruments other than virtual spaces. This example has been studied by Colin Rule, former director for the Online Dispute Resolution at eBay and PayPal, now CEO at Modria.com, an online website that follows the classical steps of Conflict Resolution (diagnosis, negotiation, mediation, and arbitration) to resolve web-based disputes. [...]