"Deliberative Technologies, Computational Democracy, and Peacebuilding in Polarized Contexts"

Research Workshop and Academic Course

"Deliberative Technologies, Computational Democracy, and Peacebuilding in Polarized Contexts"

24-27 June 2024

Toda Peace Institute and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies presented a workshop and academic course exploring a new class of technology known as "deliberative technology". This offered digital tools for supporting public discussion on policy issues, emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence. Deliberative technologies enable people to listen at scale to each other, add their policy ideas, incentivize finding common ground across polarized publics, and enable synthesizing and ranking on ideas with wide consensus.

For many years, peacebuilding has emphasized participatory methodologies and favored democratic norms. While there is a small literature on the intersection of democracy and peacebuilding, the research and depth of the field of democracy studies could more robustly inform peacebuilding processes. Both the fields of democracy and peacebuilding are concerned with polarization, populism, democratic backsliding, and the global rise of authoritarianism.

This workshop looked at how this new class of technologies can support democratic processes of dialogue and public deliberation at a scale not possible in analog methods.

Learning how to use deliberative technologies is not a simple, technical task. These technologies are distinct from other platforms. Their use requires complex socio-technical processes. A group of stakeholders usually goes through a long process of determining if and how these tools would be helpful in a specific context, designing and experimenting with the technologies to figure out what questions to ask, whom to include in the deliberation, and how to design the process of using and reflecting on digital deliberation. It also requires learning to be aware of risks and analyzing complex factors that can affect how to deploy these tools in different situations.

This workshop was a response to the high interest among peacebuilding organizations to use deliberative technologies and their need to understand more about what is required so that they can write grant proposals and begin to figure out the next steps for testing and using these tools. It incubated ideas for how deliberative technologies can be used, with an understanding that a much longer process with more stakeholders may be needed to use the tools in different cultural contexts. Following the workshop, it is hoped that many groups may develop the outline of their plan at this workshop and then work directly with Pol.is, Remesh, or Kazm to seek funding for accompaniment and further design the usage of these tools.

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