About us
and conflict prevention and its application in online settings.
Our ability to make peace with others enables peaceful relationships that are the basis of good reputation and trust, social capital essential to flourishing in a network-driven era.
In the absence of this peacemaking capacity, conflict emerges. Digital information technology enables any conflict to acquire a searchable and persistent online dimension that can be communicated and exposed to a much broader network of people.
A digitally mediated social environment augments both the rewards for peacemaking and the stakes of conflict.
Education for Digital Peace is a derivative initiative of Education for Peace International that brings peace building into our interactions with digital technologies. Through integrating core principles of proactive conflict resolution with cutting-edge research relating to technology, Education for Digital Peace educates on the social implications and requirements of our digital connectivity and designs social architecture that meets the needs of the digital age.
Proactive conflict resolution is a digital literacy because digital technologies have augmented both the rewards for peacemaking and the stakes of conflict.
Education for Digital Peace trains individuals and organizations on the dynamics of peace-building and conflict prevention in digitally mediated social environments. Through stimulating case studies and hands-on multi-media activities, participants develop the perspectives, mindset and skills indispensable to peace building in the digital age.
Education for Digital Peace helps organizations in designing context specific social processes and structures that build unity in diversity, which is an important basis for innovation, efficiency, and excellence. We believe the proactive cultivation of unity is one of the most effective strategies of conflict prevention and resolution.
Connection between people is an organizing feature of a networked society. Thriving in this networked era requires an ability to engage with diversity and to achieve unity amongst highly interconnected, yet distinct, entities.
Digital Youth Peacebuilders Network (Digital YPN) is a program designed for youth that enables them to envision, decide, and act for digital peace. It is an emerging network of youth mobilized as leaders in the effort to create a global culture
of peace in all social spaces, online and offline. Trained in cutting-edge concepts
of peacemaking, conflict transformation, and violence prevention, Digital YPN participants lead their peers in exploring the fundamental ideas, worldviews,
and actions that characterize a culture of peace.
Digital YPN recognizes that peace is both among the highest aspirations of and a necessary condition for an open and free Internet. As incivility, bullying, harmful speech, harassment and extremism pervade the Internet, the program addresses
the increasingly urgent need for online peace building.
Furthermore, Digital YPN educates participants on issues relating to privacy protection and online truth seeking—the lack of which is fueling social conflicts, escalating systemic divisions, and threatening the future of the Internet.
Conflict Free Conflict Resolution (CFCR) is a conflict resolution and prevention
training that enables participants a greater ability to participate and collaborate
in a networked social environment. The program explores the premise that conflict resolution and peace-building can be helpfully thought about and practiced through a focus on building unity in diversity. Courses and training in this program explore ideas about the nature of unity, conflict, and peace, and explore the applications of unity-centered methodologies to inter-personal, organizational, inter-group, global and online contexts.
Leadership for Peace (LFP) is a program for leaders in governmental, NGO, civic and business organizations. The art, science, and skills of leadership are all in a state of change, especially since the rise of digital information technologies. Leaders in various segments of human society find themselves greatly burdened by social, economic, and political problems, and interpersonal and intergroup conflicts, grievances, and rivalries that challenge their efforts to meet the responsibilities of leadership entrusted to them.
The task of leadership is further made difficult because existing models of leadership do not match the intensifying diversity, decentralization, interconnectedness and dynamism characterizing the administration of human affairs in a digital information age. It is increasingly evident that new types of leadership are required if we are to equally match the skills of leadership and governance with the needs and demands of an ever more informed and disaffected citizenry.
The Leadership for Peace (LFP) Program is developed in response to these realities and offers empirically based peace-oriented models for effecting leadership transformation at both individual and institutional levels. Enlightened, progressive, and effective leadership is only possible within a certain type of worldview and institutional culture that is capable of integrating manifold and seemingly conflicting demands of contemporary leadership.
“The Web is for everyone”
— Sir Tim Berners-Lee
To learn more about core principles of proactive conflict resolution, check out Education for Peace.
Some selected resources for cutting-edge research on the social implications of digital information technology
Berkman Centre for Internet & Society
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Media Smarts—Canada’s Centre for Digital & Media Literacy
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Pew Research Centre—Internet, Science and Tech
Education for Digital Peace trains individuals and organizations on the dynamics of peace-building and conflict prevention in digitally mediated social environments. Throughstimulatingcasestudiesandhands-onmulti-mediaactivities,participants develop the perspectives, mindset and skills indispensable to peace building in the digital age.