When the digits don’t add up: Research strategies for post-digital peacebuilding

Abstract

This article develops a post-digital perspective for the study of international peacebuilding and elaborates its merits. Contrary to narratives in policy and practice that tend to fetishize the digital, digital peacebuilding cannot be meaningfully separated from peacebuilding before digitalization. Resisting the call for a “digital turn,” a post-digital lens helps to research, rewrite, and rework the digital while simultaneously staying with and moving beyond digitalization. It aims to demystify the role of digital technologies while enabling critical scrutiny of their impact on contemporary and future peacebuilding. More specifically, the post-digital helps us to (1) establish a critical distance to narratives of fast-paced innovation and progress that fetishize the digital, (2) scrutinize how digitalization compounds contemporary approaches and constellations of peacebuilding, (3) engage with the uneven temporalities of digital peacebuilding and its diverse global manifestations, (4) shed light on its real, embodied, and tangible effects on conflict-affected populations, (5) hold digitalization accountable by unearthing disillusionments and failures, (6) re-adjust our focus on human agency in the development and use of the socio-technical systems that constitute digital peacebuilding, (7) and finally, take a rhizomatic view that is concerned with how power relations make and break digitalized peacebuilding networks.