Information Technology
and International Conflict Resolution

Chip Hauss                                  
Search for Common Ground                   
George Mason University                       
chauss@sfcg.org

Joel Peters
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
jpeters@netvision.net.il

Prepared for presentation at the 2001 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association. San Francisco.

A Techno Preface

It might seem odd to write an optimistic paper about the Internet and politics in a year that has seen a new term introduced into the IT lexicon—the dot-bomb. Most people at this conference have seen the value of their pension funds and/or other investments plummet. USA Today has a monthly column about dot-coms that have folded. According to the wildly popular site, F***ed Company, some of the cutely named companies, boo.com, evoice.com, are webvan.com are no more. Academic and political sites have taken a hit as well. About.com pulled the plug on Hauss’ generic political science site. Promising ventures such as Govworks.com have either disappeared or seen their services slashed by new owners.[i]

The failures should not keep us from seeing that the Internet is still growing by leaps and bounds. That’s true as access to it and use of by businesses, governments, and citizens grows by leaps and bounds, but also as a tool for political activists and analysts. Moore’s law posits that computing power quadruples every 30 months and has held true since Gordon Moore of Intel first stated it a quarter century ago.[ii] That’s not just true of megabytes of RAM or megahertz of chip speed. The whole IT world is changing at breakneck speed despite the dot bombs. Java, MP3, Flash, SMS, streaming video, broadband and more have been introduced in just the last few years. As we move into wireless and other technologies, we will see new possibilities, including the ability of people to meet each other and organize self-generated and controlled affinity groups.

The Political Premise

We don’t need to peer into the future and the new technologies that might be on the horizon to grasp the role that IT can play in international conflict resolution. Start with an example that is not internet or conflict resolution based. In 1989, the Chinese students and their supporters in the Democracy Movement were able to communicate with each other using fax machines with fax-equipped students in the diaspora serving as an intermediary. The 2001 “People Power II” movement in the Philippines succeeded in part because tens of thousands of young people kept in touch with each other by sending inexpensive SMS messages to each other via their cell phones.

By now, dozens of political movements have utilized the Internet to promote their causes. Much, for instance, has been written about the “Zapatista Effect”--how the Zapatista movement exploited the Internet and information technology to mobilize international support in their struggle against the Mexican government. Their  exploitation of the Internet led to the coining of the term “netwar” by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt at RAND.  Similarly, the leaders of the international campaign to ban landmines acknowledge that the Internet was central to their success. The World Wide Web and e-mail allowed what started as a small protest movement in Vermont to transform itself into a highly visible international movement within a matter of months.

 We can also point to a number of examples from the Arab-Israeli conflict to illustrate how the conflict resolution community and peace movements have also begun to realize the potential of the Internet.

The first example is the “Four Mothers” movement which campaigned for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. In many ways the Four Mothers movement cannot be classified as a peace movement in that it's agenda was to end Israel's occupation of south Lebanon due to the cost it was inflicting on the loss of Israeli soldiers lives. The movement was not concerned about making peace with Lebanon nor did it address the cost of Israeli action and occupation on the Lebanese population. Nonetheless the Four Mothers movement web site shows the potential of the Internet in creating dialogue when people cannot meet face-to-face. Discreet meetings between Israelis and Lebanese do take place in the context of track two meetings; however, it is illegal for Lebanese citizens to meet and speak with Israelis. 

When the movement built its first web site, little thought was given to its content or its purpose. Indeed, the site was built by the teenage son of one of the leaders of the movement and one of its links was to a site which was highly critical of Lebanon and spoke about Lebanon's role in promoting international terrorism. When that was pointed out by somebody from Lebanon in a private meeting in London, the leaders quickly turned their site into a vehicle that encouraged communicating their message of peace to the Lebanese people. The efforts of the Four Mothers movement to make contact in cyberspace were given a boost by two articles in the Lebanese press about the movement and their web site. The web site included a visitor's book in which included many entries and emails from people from Lebanon who sought a new era of peaceful relations with Israel. The Internet offered a space for Israelis and Lebanese to develop from of personal exchange and contact, the chance for citizens to overcome physical borders and governmental restrictions.

The second example is of an email discussion group on regional security issues in the Middle East.  This discussion group was created three years ago after a track-two meeting in Europe involving academics and security experts from all the countries in the region as well as North American and European experts.  The idea was to maintain contact between the participants and to create an on-going dialogue.  The discussion is a closed group and the email is anonymous. All messages are routed via the listserve manager, thereby allowing Israelis to communicate with colleagues from the Gulf, Lebanon and Iran.  The listserv has had limited success due in part to its lack of focus and specific agenda (see section online dialogue and outreach). At times it has engendered discussions when a specific issue such as the future of sanctions against Iraq has been at the forefront of the political agenda.  At a minimum it has kept a line of communication open between meetings.

The next two examples show how the Internet can be used to inform people about issues and offer them a perspective and information that they might not otherwise receive.  The first is the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet (PRRN) which is   maintained by the Interuniversity Consortium for Arab Studies and devoted to the dissemination of ideas and scholarly information in an effort to foster scholarly collaboration, policy research, and innovative thinking on the Palestinian refugee issue.   This collection of related web sites contains articles, information and policy papers about the Palestinian refugees, has become a critical resource for researchers, students and policy makers.  Without doubt the PRRN web site has become a become a major resource tool, increased greatly the knowledge about the Palestinian refugee issue and has contributed immensely to the debate about this issue.  PRRN also run a daily, e-mailed news service (FOFOGNET) which includes articles and news items related to the Palestinian refugee issue.  The service is open and all members are free to post information about the refugee.

The final example is Muna Hamzeh’s diary, which was posted daily on the internet between 4 October and 4 December 2000 from her home in the Dehaishe refugee camp. The diary tells the story of the second Intifada and will be published as a book in September 2001 (Refugees in Our Own Land Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem).  Her postings were a compelling insight into the reality of the daily lives of Palestinians and offered a picture (especially to Israelis) of the suffering, fears of Palestinians. A dairy, a computer and a modem bought this reality on to the screens and into the homes of Israelis, offering them a perspective which they could gain from their own media and brought forth the human dimension of the conflict and the daily reality of life under occupation.

The potential for using the Internet in conflict resolution work has best been summed up by Ishizuka Yoshikazu in his remarks at the end of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s on line forum on conflict prevention (to be discussed below):

The Internet as a tool for helping to prevent conflict can be used for quick and easy exchanges of ideas, education, relaying of information almost instantaneously and for connecting people. I would like to point out though that it is just an inanimate tool that can be used for good or bad just like a knife or fire. It is how it is used that determines its benefit. Many organized crime organizations, terrorist groups and other menaces to peace also use the Internet, though to the detriment of society.[iii]

An Expanded Scope

This paper began life with a limited goal. This October, we are hosting a workshop for scholar-practitioners who work in and on reconciliation in international conflict resolution, and we decided to write it as a resource for the participants.

We expected it to consist primarily of the “lay of the land” section which follows and to be largely descriptive in nature. However, two things happened as we sat down to write that broadened our ambitions and make the prescriptive as well.

First, much to our surprise, we were approached by funders who will allow us to turn the workshop into an ongoing project with, potentially, a much larger audience. We now intend to continue this effort as a multiyear, multidimensional, and multimedia project aimed at helping scholars understand and practitioners shape the way individuals, NGOs, IOs, and states settle disputes. The group that meets with us in October will determine which other steps follow, possibly including a book, a web site, a practitioner’s guide, and other proactive online tools to support the community of practitioner/scholars. That convinced us to turn this into the first draft of a concept paper for the creation of a toolbox of IT based techniques that we can use to facilitate communication and learning amongst ourselves, expand our outreach work—the real core of reconciliation—and train students and colleagues.

Second, we encountered web guru Don Tapscott and his firm, Digital 4Sight.[iv] They argue that businesses and governments must adapt what they call b-webs and g-webs, digitally enabled networks encompassing multiple organizations that deliver services and products better and faster than we are used to today. Those webs, in turn, can give rise to e-democracy through which the webs and information technology in general empower today’s turned off citizens. Their ideas about the use of IT are not new. What we find compelling is the way the Digital 4Sight team place their vision in a system-driven context, focus cooperation, and stress citizen empowerment and social capital in a way that meshes neatly with the work we do on conflict resolution and reconciliation.

In short, this paper is both more ambitious and more incomplete than the one we had initially intended.

International Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation

Before turning to the IT material, it is important that we define what we mean by conflict resolution and reconciliation, since these terms are used in different and sometimes contradictory ways in the literature.

Ideally, conflict resolution is a win/win outcome that satisfies all parties and brings the dispute to a definitive end. Countries or ethnic groups that have been at war achieve what the late Kenneth Boulding called “stable peace.” In his words, “stable peace can almost be measured by the amount of dust on the plans for invasion in the various war offices.”[v]

In that sense, “true” conflict resolution involves more than just stopping the fighting. Another set of steps has to be taken—reconciliation—to rebuild the society and heal the emotional as well as the physical damage.

The importance of reconciliation can best be seen in three negative examples. Cyprus remains divided by its Green Line and still has thousands of peace keepers almost 40 years after the cease fire was introduced. Similarly, despite the major progress made in the Good Friday Agreement or, especially, in the Oslo agreements, no one in his or her right mind could argue that the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or the Israelis and Palestinians are anywhere near stable peace.

Reconciliation requires many things, including physical reconstruction, the provision of some sort of justice and equity, and more. Here, we will be focusing on the importance of what Robert Putnam calls “bridging” social capital, because it is vital to reconciliation and because it is what the international conflict resolution community can best promote using IT. In Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that there are two types of social capital. Bonding brings us closer together with people like us; bridging draws us into contact with people who are different from us. He argues that the Internet has served primarily to foster bonding social capital. The thesis of this paper (to the degree that there is one) is that the Internet and other forms of IT can be used to foster bridging capital as well.

Why an Emphasis on IT in Reconciliation

The lions’ share of reconciliation work is done one person at a time because it involves changing the hearts and minds of people which can only be done on an individual level, something amply demonstrated by the Four Mothers or Muna Hamzeh’s diary. There have been some attempts to mount massive and even official programs along those lines, such as the 17 or so truth and/or reconciliation programs that have been created in the last couple of decades.[vi] A number of organizations, including Search for Common Ground, have found the resources to produce mass media programming that has reached nationwide audiences in a number of countries. Its conflict resolution soap opera, Nashe Malo (Our Neighborhood) is the most widely watched children’s program in Macedonia. It also runs radio news studios that also reach widespread audiences in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Burundi, where relatively few people have access to television. Official peacekeeping and reconstruction agencies such as IFOR and UNMIK have rebuilt television and radio networks with an eye toward using them in their reconciliation efforts.

But cost and other access issues make the use of the traditional mass media beyond the reach of most organizations working in the field. In other words, NGOs in particular have found that they have to rely heavily on the new media because “transaction costs” are so much lower both in terms of developing material and making contact with target populations.

The Lay of the Land

We started this paper on 2 July 2001. We began it as all good (or maybe bad) internauts do and did a couple of general searches. In so doing, we learned one of the most important lessons about conflict resolution that holds for the Internet in general as well. There is too much material that is too poorly organized.

Google turned up 1,040,000 hits in less than a second. Northern Light only found 638,969. But, its results were more telling because it then broke our sites into a number of sub-categories. This time they were international, arbitration and mediation,, negotiation, community mediation,  college and university administration, family and relationships, friends, causes and debates, the Americans with Disability Act, and all others. We subsequently ran this search a few other times and got slightly different sub-categories. Every time we ran it, however, the “all other” category dwarfed the rest with fully five sixths of the hits.

Put simply, there is a vast amount of material on conflict resolution on the internet, more than any human being could hope to assimilate. And, even more worrisome, the “all other” category suggests that it is dispersed, poorly structured, and hard to access.

Portals

Until two or three years ago, the place to start getting guidance on web resources was the Virtual Library. The library is an official arm of the World Wide Web Consortium that has assembled sites of online links and other resources maintained by librarians and other professionals. There is no virtual library site on conflict resolution, though there is one on arbitration and Wayne Selcher’s international relations site includes a very good subsection on the topic. It should also be pointed out that the virtual library sites are of uneven quality, especially the ones that have to cover a large academic discipline, in large part because they are run by volunteers who may not have enough time or by librarians who may not have enough substantive expertise.

When venture capital was still readily available, Internet entrepreneurs turned to creating niche portals instead (NetNoir for African Americans, iVillage for women, etc.). Although it was not developed as a commercial project and lacks the glitz of most of the for-profit niche sites, the overlapping Conflict Resolution Consortium and Conflict Resolution Information Source (CRInfo) serve as a de facto portal.

Twenty two organizations and individuals came together to start CRInfo after the Consortium had demonstrated a growing interest in the field. Their goal was to:

• Use the World Wide Web to improve the flow of information and ideas among practitioners
• Open the field up to new participants
• Coordinate the growing use of the Web by individuals and organizations in the conflict resolution field

Both are maintained at the University of Colorado and were initially funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The older Consortium started as an informational site whose staff and partners in other organizations would use the site as a repository of links and other material on conflict resolution resources on the World Wide Web. The Conflict Resolution Information Source has reformatted more than 5,000 of the consortium’s pages into a searchable system or “supersite” with six resource catalogs— information on web based resources, print-based literature, conflict resolution organizations, programs, events, and scholars. It is also the only site on the web that streams news on breaking events on conflict resolution. It also will develop links to other sites that have information-rich, user-friendly material for sub-fields such as higher education or conflict resolution theory. Finally, the site can be customized to fit the specific needs of individuals or organizations.

From either version, users can get basic information on key conflicts, organizations working in the field, educational institutions, and job opportunities. For beginners, the sites also have an “encyclopedia” of conflict resolution and an FAQ file.

But as good as these two sites are (or, for that matter any portal can be), they have their limits. First, without only about 5,000 pages of information, the two sites only scratch the surface and do not have a search engine that spiders the entire web. Second, they have some worrisome important biases, most notably the rather shallow coverage of non-American sites and issues.

Other “Big” Sites

The idea of win/win conflict resolution gained its first major support in the United States, most notably in the work of Roger Fisher, William Ury, and their colleagues. Application of conflict resolution and cooperative problem solving theory have also extended the farthest in communities and organizations there as well.

However, conflict resolution is now a truly international field, and the best material on international conflict resolution is found on a number of “big” sites located outside the United States that do not, however, quite measure up to portal status. They do, however, fill in many of the gaps in the CRInfo and virtual library’s otherwise excellent sets of links and other materials.

The most extensive of these is INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity), a joint project of the United Nations University and the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland which specializes in ethnic conflict. Like CRInfo, the INCORE site is a data base which can be searched along by country or topic. It also has a listing of the world’s major peace agreements, including the full text of many of them. Finally, its Ethnic Conflict Research Digest provides summaries of published work in the field.

Similarly, the major sites on international relations in general now include substantial sections on conflict resolution. From our experience, the best of these is at Switzerland’s ISN (International Relations and Security Network). This site is not as ambitious as INCORE’s and largely consists of annotated lists to other web sites. Not surprisingly, it covers European material the best.

ISN has joined with SIPRI to launch FIRST, (Facts on International Relations and Security Trends). It provides data on individual countries on a number of indicators of conflict resolution and other core political characteristics.

There are also sites that focus on a continent or similar large region. The European Platform for Conflict Resolution and Transformation is a coalition of European NGOs which maintains a site with a lot of information and links to all of its member organizations. Similarly, The Japan Center for Preventive Diplomacy and the Japan Institute of International Affairs have a site with links to all NGOs and IOs working on conflict resolution in Asia. The Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Capetown does much the same for Africa. The Centre is an independent institute created to deal with the transition from apartheid. Since 1994, it has expanded its activities to include other trouble spots on the continent.

Organizations

At this point, almost every major conflict resolution NGO has a web site. Some do little more than showcase the organization’s work—after all most of them need to find clients and projects and appeal to potential funders. Some of them do much more and explore in some detail the organization’s work and/or provide links to other on line resources.

Typical of the good sites is Search for Common Ground’s. It has headline-like summaries and more detailed information on Search’s projects. Unlike many other organizations, it also provides contact information for staff members and a list of available jobs both in Washington and in the field.  It has a list of the organization’s major funders. Its production group and also has begun putting audio and video material on the site for users with up to date software and enough bandwidth.

Search for Common Ground represents one end of the field’s professional spectrum in that it typically on projects that last for years and are most often funded by foundations, governments, or international organizations. On the other end of the continuum are groups that resemble American physicians who work with patients on a fee-for-service basis. They are more likely to be brought in to provide a few days’ training or medicate a particular dispute and are also to include private sectors corporations among their clients.

One of the oldest, largest, and most respected of those groups with a good web site is CDR Associates of Boulder, Colorado. Since it was founded in 1978, CDR has worked with over 1,500 client groups in the United States and abroad. On the international front, it has trained people in conflict resolution and taken on a number of other short-term projects in such  places as South Africa, Israel/Palestine, and Eastern Europe.

Analysis or the Lack Thereof

One of the glaring weaknesses of conflict resolution on the Web is the lack of systematic assessments of ongoing work. CRInfo points to some evaluative research, but a “conflict resolution best practices” search turns up precious little. Thus, the largest data base of analytical articles is maintained by the Conflict Resolution Resource Center, but the vast majority of them deal with American and often non-political cases. The rare analytic papers one finds on the web come without any vetting as to their accuracy or other value.

There are some exceptions. The United States Institute for Peace is one of the few research institutes to make almost all of its working papers and reports available on line. George Mason University’s ICAR publishes the online version of Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies twice a year. Its most recent issue has articles by four of the most respected scholars working in the field. A less ambitious but not less useful resource is the peer-reviewed Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution. Its web site describes the journal as “a resource for students, teachers and practitioners in fields relating to the reduction and elimination of conflict. It desires to be a free, yet valuable, source of information to aid anyone trying to work toward a less violent and more cooperative world.” The current issue, for instance, has articles on Jerusalem, India, and the Corrymeela community in Northern Ireland as well as some theoretical and conceptual pieces.

Training and Education

There is no shortage of programs offering degrees in conflict resolution and related fields. Each of our universities has one. George Mason’s was one of the first. Ben Gurion’s is one of the newest. Dozens of curriculum plans have been created for K-12 students, and there are now a number of summer camps that focus on conflict resolution.

Most of them are well enough known and easy enough to learn about that we are going to ignore “bricks and mortar” education and training programs and concentrate only on electronically available offerings.

Distance learning is one of the hottest topics in education today. However, it is most fully developed in fields that either have a lot of students or that have the potential to generate income for program providers. The University of Phoenix, for instance, only offers a few courses in the field leading to a certificate (not a degree), none of which seem to be available through its online unit.

Still, there are some offerings. Britain’s Bradford University lists four such programs on its web site. Royal Roads University in Vancouver, Canada has created master’s program in conflict resolution, most of which can be done on line with only a few weeks spent on campus. Royal Roads is a new university designed primarily to server mid-career learners and has mostly MA programs in a limited number of fields. Gradschools.com has an incomplete list of programs that are all or partially on line.

Transforming Civil Conflicts is a four week online course organized by the European Network University and Bradford that was first taught in 1999. The course is aimed at professionals and students who are near the end of their degree programs. Its goal is to help people improve the quality of their work. Students typically come from NGOs, international organizations, and national militaries. The curriculum covers conflict resolution theory, the “mapping” or understanding of conflict, and conflict prevention. The course stresses collaborative learning. As it describes the program on its web page, “These are mostly NOT of the type: 'read some articles, write a paper and send it in before Friday.' The assignments aim to stimulate discussion and cooperation between the participants. In addition to individual and group assignments there will be online discussions and exercises.” The next sessions are set for September and November. E Additional courses are being planned. ENU charges a nominal fee which it reduces for students and others who cannot pay the full amount.

Finally, South Africa’s Centre for Conflict Resolution has also made much of its training material available on line.

Online Dialogue and Outreach

Given our interest in reconciliation, the opportunities for online dialogue and other forms of outreach are critical for us. However, like everyone else, conflict resolution specialists are just beginning to tap the potential for online discussion, consensus building, and organization.

That may seem like a harsh statement. After all, Hauss first started using email in conflict resolution work in the mid-1980s in the Beyond War movement, and Peters helped set up a listserve to support a track two initiative involving Israelis and Palestinians in the mid-1990s. The Institute for Global Communications (among others) has maintained news groups on conflict resolution for years.

Nonetheless, most web material on conflict resolution (and everything else) relies on the “push” of ideas out from a site to end users. Despite the ubiquitous use of chat rooms and instant messaging, the net has yet to become a place where people can engage in the kind of deep dialogue that is required in the process of reaching reconciliation.

That said, there are at least two projects that show some promise for doing so. New York-based Web Lab has developed software and protocols for focused discussions. The tested their approach in dialogues on the Clinton impeachment and some episodes of the PBS documentary, P. O. V. and found that restricting dialogue groups to about 30 members and limiting the length of time they existed, they were able to both enhance the “stickiness” (repeated visits and contributions) and achieve a degree of “listening” and agreement building rarely found on line. Similarly, the Walt Whitman Institute at Rutgers University and Yale law school’s Information Society Project have developed a model for civic exchange on line. Civic Exchange has a more elaborate and focused approach to doing political work in a civil manner on line than Web Lab. However, the participating institutions do not seem to have developed the associated software yet.

One useful experiment was just completed. In July 2001, we participated in an on line forum on conflict prevention hosted by the  The Japan Center for Preventive Diplomacy and the Japan Institute of International Affairs on their web site noted earlier. They invited interested parties around the world to participate in a week-long dialogue based on fourteen presentations initially posted on the site.

The week began with initial postings by seven leading practitioners and seven more commentaries by other well-known figures from around the world. Some of the discussions were general, such as the one led by John Marks of Search for Common Ground on the need for extended commitment by NGOs on the ground instead of the “parachuting” short-term interventions many of them engage in. Others were quite specific, including the one led by Karan Sawhny on the future of Kashmir.

For the next seven days, individuals from 33 countries posted comments in “threaded” asynchronous discussion forums. Some made comment on the initial postings, some posed questions, and some responded to the first round of comments.

The conflict prevention dialogue proved to be an interesting and lively exercise, even for those of us who simply lurked in the background. The conveners made no attempt to move the discussions in a way that participants would learn from each other or come closer to reaching a common understanding about the topic(s) at hand. Nonetheless, the tone was universally respectful (unlike most such ventures), and it was clear that many individual participants were changed their individual viewpoints after thinking about the initial articles and subsequent postings.

It is hard to identify common themes from a discussion that covered so much ground in such little time. However, well over half of the participants wanted to see more cooperation among NGOs both in the field and in sharing their analyses of the “best practices and lessons learned” from their work.

The Japanese initiative was largely aimed at people who identified themselves as practitioners in the field. However, the Web Lab model suggests that you could take this approach further and use their kind of limited sized, limited duration dialogues as one way of achieving reconciliation among people who do not agree with each other and might not otherwise come into contact with each other in a more systematic way than, say, the Four Mothers did.

Where We Go From Here

Anyone who has read this far in this paper understands two things. First, it truly is a work in progress. Second, one of the goals of our workshop is to further the use of the Web and IT in general in international conflict resolution.

First and foremost, we plan to develop an online resource for people who straddle the same line we do between the life of the practitioner and the life of the scholar. Although discussion of them would take us beyond the scope of this paper, there are already several projects underway to expand the contact between scholars and practitioners and to develop a protocol of best practices and lessons learned. These are all much more extensively funded than ours and much farther along in their work.

Therefore, we expect that we will focus on the use of information technology as a tool for forging reconciliation in international conflict resolution. We do not want to prejudge what will emerge from our October workshop.

However, a few tentative conclusions have already emerged from our research which we plan to explore in October. In keeping with Tapscott’s language, we would like to establish an NGO-web along the lines of their “value chain.” In that version of their b-webs, a company like Cisco sits at the hub of a large group of companies that it works with and sells to. Cisco itself does not make very many of the products it sells. Rather, it coordinates the work of dozens of other companies. Our group will hardly carry the wealth and clout of Cisco. However, we envision a small group working on line that does much of what Cisco does—gathering and disseminating information, coordinating what is know, and serving as a de facto cheerleader for a much larger network of people, in this case, in the academic and practitioner communities.

1.  While it would be nice to have a full, searchable portal that covers what CRInfo does not, that does not seem to be a high priority. There are enough good sites and enough useful entry points that finding basic information and links is not all that difficult.

2.  What is needed is a more specialized site that taps the potential of IT for scholars and practitioners and overcome the obstacles outlined above. It would be a venue designed to facilitate communication and learning among scholar/practitioners and enable actual reconciliation work on the following levels.

1. Enabling people to “meet” each other and provide feedback and support to each other
2. Creating a repository of analytical work on the best practices and lessons learned
3. Establishing ongoing training and educational programs on line
4. Allowing practitioners to do outreach work that expands support for and participation in international conflict resolution

3.  Critical in this respect are efforts to use online as well as face-to-face projects to enhance the prospects for building the kind of cross-community, bridging social capital suggested by Putnam and others.

[i] This is not the place to debate whether we are going through an end of e-business or not. We would simply point out that most new and immature technologies go through shakeout phases in which silly or ill prepared ventures like webvan.com do not survive. Interested readers should consider the traumas of the automobile industry, especially before Ford launched mass production of the Model T.

[ii] Another topic that we need not go into here--we may be running up against inherent limits of silicon based technology that would undermine Moore’s law until the next technological breakthrough occurs, probably in nanotechnology.

[iii] http://www.dwcw.org/e-symposium/ (accessed 30 July 2001).

[iv] See, in particular, Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy, Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

[v] Kenneth Boulding, “From Unstable to Stable Peace.” In Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman, eds., Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking: Soviet and Western Scholars Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War. (New York/Moscow: Thomas Walker/Novosti, 1988), p. 164.

[vi] The best overview of those commissions is Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. (New York: Routledge, 2001).