Conflict, like most of our social lives, has increasingly moved online and mediators and peacebuilders have reacted to this new world by partnering with platforms to remove harmful content and actors from their ecosystems. This is important work, but it can feel endless as each day brings a new set of harms to address. As Maria Ressa noted in an address to UNESCO in 2023, content moderation can feel like cleaning a glass of water from a dirty river and then dumping the clean water back into the river, rather than dealing with the factory polluting the water upstream.

Inter-communal conflict, insecurity, insurgency and state-instigated violence are common in Nigeria. Today, social media plays many roles in these phenomena, influencing and instigating violent conflict even as it presents opportunities to those seeking to bring about peace.

Gold mining in Burkina Faso sparks a range of conflicts, some of which escalate into extreme violence. The frequent clashes between artisanal miners and industrial companies often result in the loss of human lives. A GIS (geographic information systems) app introduced by the Ouagadougou-based organisation G-AiD has helped encourage dialogue and prevent and mitigate conflicts.

Technology holds particular promise as a means to reach the goal of inclusion in mediation and peace processes. Digital tools are able to address concrete barriers that otherwise hinder participation, such as geographic distance, language needs, limited access to information, low literacy, and siloed networks. Minimising these barriers, while also addressing political obstacles or objections, peacemakers can use technology to create inclusive processes that offer more equitable access and paths of participation to marginalised or otherwise excluded groups.

The United Nations Secretary-General has called these ‘dangerous times’, stressing the importance of building trust across actors and agendas, including where the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and cyberspace are concerned. The latter is particularly important given our dependency on ICTs, their vulnerability to exploitation, and growing evidence of their use by parties directly and indirectly involved in all kinds of conflicts.

Digital technologies play an increasingly significant role in armed conflict. In response, conflict parties and mediators have begun integrating digital technologies into negotiation processes. A number of ‘social media peace agreements’ have been brokered, as well as a number of clauses covering digital technologies in broader peace agreements. These early agreements demonstrate the utility and possibility of negotiating restraint in the online space.

A volume on innovations in mediation would be amiss without a section addressing the potential and risks of digital technologies. Technology and innovation are entwined, both because technological advances are the result of innovative industry, and because technological advances very often catalyse the need for innovation in processes and practices. Digital technologies in turn are now inextricable from mediation, being intrinsic too to how wars are being fought and peace needs to be made.

The conflict in Yemen has garnered international attention primarily for its regional dimensions and the humanitarian crisis it has caused. The early UN-led peace efforts, in successive rounds of shuttle diplomacy and mediation, focused almost exclusively on reaching agreements on the political and military arrangements needed to stop the conflict and start a political process. The economic dimensions, by contrast, were largely overlooked.

In the ‘golden age’ of mediation, immediately after the end of the Cold War, peace agreements aimed to provide definitive answers to the questions which led societies down the road to violence and civil war. ‘Comprehensive peace agreements’ sought not only to stop the immediate fighting but to revise the fundamental nature of the state and society to make the resurgence of violence impossible.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 precipitated a devasting war and Europe’s most profound security crisis since the Second World War. It also triggered a major shock to the global economy, with dramatic rises in the prices of energy, food and fertilisers. The determined response by Ukraine and its Western backers created military dynamics that rendered a negotiated solution a distant prospect. Yet in the first few months of the war an ambitious mediation facilitated by the UN and Türkiye produced parallel agreements known as the ‘Black Sea Grain Initiative’.