Lightning Talk: Opportunities and Shortcomings in Conflict and Reconciliation Monitoring

Описание: This session was part of the 2021 Emerging Technologies in Peacebuilding and Prevention Virtual Practitioners Workshop hosted by the NYU Center on International Cooperation on December 1-2, 2021.

In this session, we will be describing the potential and pitfalls of several computational methods we have developed to monitor the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in the South Caucasus (2020) across the Web. In collaboration with the UNDP mission in Georgia, we have developed a series of “conflict and reconciliation analytics” for social media and Web data in minority languages (Azerbaijani, Armenian). These include: digital methods for capturing “information silos” (i.e., communication gaps) between Azerbaijani and Armenian-speaking users across several social media platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, VK, Telegram); analyzing consensus and controversy in Wikipedia articles on war-related topics in both languages; and natural language processing techniques for measuring the extent to which language groups share the same information diets. We will describe the potential and pitfalls of these methods in informing conflict monitors and mediators on how to use social media and the Web for risk assessment in conflict regions and conflict mediation off the ground.

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Speakers & Moderators

Emillie de Keulenaar, UN DPPA Innovation Cell / University of Groningen