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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bock, Joseph G., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nonviolence.

Violence--Prevention.

Violence.

Social media.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2012]

System Details:

text file

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:

I Theory and Methodology 15

1 Toward an Applied Theory of Violence Prevention 17

2 Reporting and Warning about Deadly Possibilities 37

II Violence Prevention on the Ground 55

3 Organizing against Ethnoreligious Violence in Ahmedabad 57

4 Interrupting Gang Violence in Chicago 81

5 Counteracting Ethnoreligious Violence in Sri Lanka 91

6 Crowdsourcing during Post-election Violence in Kenya 105

7 Circumventing Tribal Violence in East Africa 127

8 Comparing the Approaches 135

9 How to Intervene Effectively 147

10 What to Do When Violence Prevention Is Unlikely to Work 161

III Resource Allocation Considerations and Recommendations 177

11 Concerns about Misallocation of Resources 179

12 Future Directions and Recommendations 189

Conclusion 203.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

9780262017626

0262017628

0262305550

9780262305556

OCLC:

801409227

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.