Building peace in modern conflicts : encryption and empowerment

Societies are urbanising, which means that siege, information and economic warfare is targeting a growing number of civilians. In these modern conflicts, UN General Assembly resolution 46/182, which guarantees State sovereignty over aid distribution, has become a political and financial tool for belligerent state actors who may be tempted to hijack the pipelines of humanitarian aid in order to fund their own war effort.

Massive misappropriation of these global common resources by conflict actors weakens any leverage civil society actors in and out of conflict zones may wield in the post-conflict phase. This in turn establishes an unjust peace and perpetuates the cycle of conflict.

This is precisely the issue we aim to tackle.

In February 2011 Mohammed Nabbous started live-streaming events in Benghazi, Libya. Immediately an online community sprung up around his Libya Al Hurra channel. As of this seminal moment, a constellation of other small trusted networks were created. These clusters harnessed peer-to-peer (P2P) online activism during — but independent of — the first UN-Nato led intervention under the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle. These civilian networks vetted newcomers, responded to grass roots demands, fact-checked open source intel and mutually reinforced their actions. Danaïdes.org co-founder, Stephanie Lamy created some of these active networks, coordinated between them and acted as a resource, relationship and information broker.

Because civilians have always been their own first responders, we are developing a tool that will identify and structure these informal networks, as well as support their efforts through innovative secure technologies which foster trust and accountability.

“[…] Civilians have always been their own first responsers.”

Our P2PR2P tool is a private encrypted logistics platform which integrates a multi stakeholder interface. It can…