The technology of nonviolence : social media and violence prevention / Joseph G. Bock ; foreword by John Paul Lederach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bock, Joseph G.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nonviolence.

Violence--Prevention.

Violence.

Social media.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

How technology and community organizing can combine to help prevent violence, with examples from Chicago to Sri Lanka.

"Tunisian and Egyptian protestors famously made use of social media to rally supporters and disseminate information as the "Arab Spring" began to unfold in 2010. Less well known, but with just as much potential to bring about social change, are ongoing local efforts to use social media and other forms of technology to prevent deadly outbreaks of violence. In The Technology of Nonviolence, Joseph Bock describes and documents technology-enhanced efforts to stop violence before it happens in Africa, Asia, and the United States. Once peacekeeping was the purview of international observers, but today local citizens take violence prevention into their own hands. These local approaches often involve technology--including the use of digital mapping, crowdsourcing, and mathematical pattern recognition to identify likely locations of violence--but, as Bock shows, technological advances are of little value unless they are used by a trained cadre of community organizers. After covering general concepts in violence prevention and describing technological approaches to tracking conflict and cooperation, Bock offers five case studies that range from "low-tech" interventions to prevent ethnic and religious violence in Ahmedebad, India, to an anti-gang initiative in Chicago that uses Second Life to train its "violence interrupters." There is solid evidence of success, Bock concludes, but there is much to be discovered, developed, and, most important, implemented."

Contents:

Towards an applied theory of violence prevention

Reporting and warning about deadly possibilities

Organizing against ethnoreligious violence in Ahmedabad

Overcoming gang violence in Chicago

Counteracting ethnoreligious violence in Sri Lanka

Crowdsourcing during post-election violence in Kenya

Foisting tribal violence in East Africa

Comparing the approaches

How to intervene effectively

What to do when violence prevention is unlikely to work

Concerns about misallocation of resources

Future directions and recommendations.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

1-282-13379-9

9786613806376

0-262-30555-0

OCLC:

801409227