Abstract
Can ICTs make the world more peaceful? Introduction and Background: A more peaceful world represents conditions of dignity, equity, civility, and tolerance of diversity that have become elusive due to intractable ethnic conflicts in LMICs. Thousands have been displaced, Lost lives, livelihoods, and social fabrics. The question is how are the bourgeoning and pervasive ICTs contributing to more peaceful conditions? In this thesis, I demonstrate that the flexibility of ICTs enables them to contribute to making the world more peaceful by being embedded in social structures where they draw on social resources for building counter networks to violence-causing systems. The thesis demonstrates how social capital can be interwoven with SMS platforms in mitigating ethnic violence. Main Results: the thesis provides a four-step process for building an ICT-enabled peace network with the capability of countering violence endorsing networks like gunrunning, livestock theft, gender-based violence, and exclusionary cartelism. The process includes building content, enrolling stakeholders, integrating ICTs, and evolving the network. The thesis provides a framework for measuring the peace outcomes like justice, equity, and business liberty, that can be applied in designing peace programs. The dissertation also offers the principles and dimensions of program scaling. Wider Implications: I believe that the results presented in the thesis will be of interest to the broad ICT4D community, especially Information systems Researchers and Peacebuilding practitioners. The methodology presented will also appeal to the general theoretical IS community.
List of papers
Paper 1. Mukoya, F. and Mukherjee, A. (2019), “ICT enabled peace network: Case study of conflict early warning system in Kenya.” 15th IFIP WG 9.4 International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, ICT4D 2019 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, May 1–3, 2019. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18400-1_11. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18400-1_11 |
Paper 2. Mukoya, F. (2020) “ICTs as Enablers of Resilient Social Capital for Ethnic Peace.” COMPASS '20, June 15–17, 2020, Ecuador. Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 978-1-4503-7129-2/20/06 The article is not available in DUO due to publisher restrictions. The published version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3378393.3402266 |
Paper 3. Mukherjee, A. and Mukoya, F. (2022). “Building and Scaling ICT Enabled Peace Networks: Lessons from Kenya (Under review at Information Technology & People). To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Paper 4. Mukoya, F. and Mukherjee, A.(2020), “The Role of Social Capital in Mediating ICTEnabled Peace Building Efforts: A Case Study from Kenya.” IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2020 Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. K. Bandi et al. (Eds.): IFIPJWC 2020, IFIP AICT 601, pp. 326–340, 2020. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64697-4_24 |
Paper 5. Mukoya, F. and Sahay, S (2022). Mitigating Violence Against Women and Girls In Kenya: The Role of ICT-Mediated Social Capital — (Under review at the Journal of Human Security). To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |