The technology of nonviolence
Subtitle: social media and violence prevention
By: Joseph G. Bock ; foreword by John Paul Lederach
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780262017626
Subjects: Nonviolence; Violence; Prevention; Social media
Description: "Tunisian and Egyptian protestors famously made use of social media to rally supporters and disseminate information as the "Arab Spring" began to unfold in 2010. Less well known, but with just as much potential to bring about social change, are ongoing local efforts to use social media and other forms of technology to prevent deadly outbreaks of violence. In "The Technology of Nonviolence," Joseph Bock describes and documents technology-enhanced efforts to stop violence before it happens in Africa, Asia, and the United States. Once peacekeeping was the purview of international observers, but today local citizens take violence prevention into their own hands. These local approaches often involve technology--including the use of digital mapping, crowdsourcing, and mathematical pattern recognition to identify likely locations of violence--but, as Bock shows, technological advances are of little value unless they are used by a trained cadre of community organizers." --Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Towards an applied theory of violence prevention; title: Reporting and warning about deadly possibilities; title: Organizing against ethnoreligious violence in Ahmedabad; title: Overcoming gang violence in Chicago; title: Counteracting ethnoreligious violence in Sri Lanka; title: Crowdsourcing during post-election violence in Kenya; title: Foisting tribal violence in East Africa; title: Comparing the approaches; title: How to intervene effectively; title: What to do when violence prevention is unlikely to work; title: Concerns about misallocation of resources; title: Future directions and recommendations.