Opening Remarks: Build Peace 2023
This year marks the special occasion of being able to celebrate 10 years of the Build Peace conference. Since its outset, the conference has been a gathering place and a community for people taking action and asking questions at the intersection of peacebuilding and cultural/technical innovation. And, everyone arrives here in their own way.
Personally, I arrived after a curious google search of three things I felt passion for, “peacebuilding, technology, poetry.” Although I really didn’t expect any results, I found the 2015 conference hosted in Cyprus. I have looked forward to it every year since. Our hope is that you’ll be able to share with each other your stories this year. Why peacebuilding? Why technology? Why arts? Why now?
The 2023 conference is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. Why here, why now?
Kenya has been a leader in tech and innovation in East Africa. In fact, about a decade ago, the term “Silicon Savannah” was coined to describe Kenya’s growing tech scene. Technologies developed and utilized in Kenya have played a critical role in peacebuilding. For example, Ushahidi, a tool some of you might have used in your peacebuilding work, was created in Kenya. The Umati project, also based in Kenya, compiled the largest database of hate speech from a single country. Sisi Ni Amani showed how SMS technology can help prevent violence in elections, and the use of M-Pesa has facilitated cash transfer programs in remote, conflict-prone areas. However, it’s also important to recognize the challenges, such as the adverse working conditions faced by content moderators working for major tech platforms in Kenya.
On the peacebuilding front, Kenya has had its share of challenges, including violent conflicts during elections, long-standing cross-border disputes, and terrorist attacks in the past decade. Despite these challenges, Kenya has also served as a hub for peace, hosting talks and agreements to resolve conflicts in neighboring countries, and continuing traditional peace processes.
So, by bringing the Build Peace Conference to Kenya, we’re reflecting on both the technological advancements and the peacebuilding efforts in the region. These developments have had both positive and negative impacts, even as traditional peace processes carry on. Over the next few days, we’ll look back on the past 10 years of work in this area, considering the region and its people. We invite you all to do the same, reflecting on your own locations, your work, and the communities you engage with, as we prepare to move forward into the future.
This Year’s Slogan
Every year, we have a tradition of setting a conference slogan together to describe the intention or spirit of our engagement. Some of my favorites have been:
2014 — “be tough on ideas, but gentle on people”
2016 — “revolution starts at home, preferably in the bathroom mirror”
2018 — “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.”
This year, we propose this: Let’s “walk backwards into the future,” together.
Walking backwards into the future speaks to the need to look to our past to navigate a future that is largely unknown. To not only be aware of history and the paths it puts us on, but also to take its lessons and gifts forward. It comes from a line in the book by John Paul Lederach, the Moral Imagination, but it is an idea rooted in cultures around the world. We can’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been. And where have we been? When we look back, do we see the same things? Will our paths converge?
On the flight over, I was doing my typical practice of watching trashy movies while catching up on work, but my neighbor had more sophisticated taste, watching some kind of documentary about people in Papua New Guinea. I glanced over to see a man dressed in traditional garb with traditional piercings and the subtitle as he said, “I don’t want our culture to disappear.”
“I don’t want our culture to disappear” — Has this not been the cry both for extreme violence and for radical peacebuilding? Or the counter when power is in the equation (when isn’t it?) — “I want our culture to preside.” When relations or structures of oppression that have previously been hidden (to some) become visible, hasn’t it been the question that determines whether the injustice is corrected, or whether we simply erect new ideological edifices that disguises it in new ways?
The theme this year is about identities, and history is central to it. We come with diverse personal and professional identities, and maybe one important common one. The one that gets us in this same room.
Our respective fields and this shared one (“digital peacebuilding?”) also have histories — Movements and action building peace rooted in resistance, creativity, power, and people. Can we keep our eyes on this, undeterred by present pressure to sanitize, abstract, depoliticize — in short, to be experts? Everyone is an expert here in their own experiences. Walking backwards into the future together asks us to be curious about those experiences.
So this is the encouragement — take this time away from the daily grinds to reflect on our past, acknowledging that it holds valuable insights and wisdom crucial for making informed decisions and strategies as we step into the unknown future together.
