Broadcasting4peace – different approaches to community media in Nepal

Hamro Team Promo

  The growing impact of ICT and the new media has broadened conceptual scope of the notion of community from ethnic origins or geographical location to virtual communities and groups of common interest. Therefore, as Carpentier et al. (2002, p. 455) points out, the very concept of community media has become somehow vague and elusive. Community media, by definition should be "promoting the participation of this community" (Carpentier et al. 2002, p.457). The relation between the community [Read more...]

Bearing witness through citizen journalism

Truth and peace go hand in hand. For reconciliation to be successful the truth about past atrocities must be brought to light. It is only then that people, no matter which side they stood on during a conflict, can find a common narrative upon which they can build a common future after it. What happens when the evidence of atrocities is concealed though? Destroyed? History is written by the victors; the saying goes. With the help of ICTs these pieces of evidence can be captured, preserved, and [Read more...]

Presenting Parlio – A social media tool for reconciliation?

Wael Ghonim, face of the Arab Spring in 2010, founded the project Parlio in Silicon Valley, offering an alternative information portal to Facebook, which meanwhile is dominated by pussy-cat videos and selfies-in-bathroom-posts. Ghonim, who experienced hate and defamation through the internet, decided to create this platform for a civilized dialogue and profound exchange. But why did Facebook fail to be a democratic tool and broad information resource? I remember that until 2010 Facebook [Read more...]

Building community cohesion through ICT in Northern Ireland

  Are the reconciliation initiatives working in democratic western societies? The answer to that question isn't as simple as it may seem. Without the obvious restrictions concerning freedom of speech there seems to be no problem in engaging communities, even societies in peace-building actions. However, it may be argued that as a result of that freedom and democratic stablity, the civic mobilisation, especially of younger generation, is declining (Dahlgren, p.23). From another point of [Read more...]

Gaming for peace

This summer I attended a conference on entrepreneurship in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. Nolan Bushnell, „the father“ of the video game console Atari and the former mentor of Steve Jobs, was one of the speakers. He was talking about how video games stimulate cognitive processes and how we can learn from video games for the real life. But besides getting smarter through playing games, Bushnell also stressed their educational value. Applying a correct design, video games can make learning attractive and [Read more...]

Radioactive – Community radio in the reconciliation process

Radio remains one of the most accessible and used forms to communicate and disseminate information in sub-Saharan Africa. This is particularly true among many isolated communities that do not have the means to operate landlines or computers. “Radio [also] speaks the language known by the majority of the population, for an oral language is not simply the product of illiteracy,” Kivikuru explains further (2005, p.326). At the same time, the usage of another communication tool surges, mobile [Read more...]

New Media – Old Conflicts: overcoming “ethnic incompatibility” in the South Caucasus. Armenia-Azerbaijan

South Caucasus is an ethnic melting pot, with a rich cultural heritage on the one hand, and a long history of ethnical, religious and territorial conflicts on the other. The resolution of the USSR has been followed by the intense quest for economic and political independence of the new republics - Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, but also by re-emergence and often brutal escalation of older conflicts between the three countries and their internal entities. Many of them, such as the one over the [Read more...]