Building a peace we don’t know? The power of subjunctive technologies in digital peacebuilding

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much attention has been paid to how digital technologies affect peacebuilding through the production of information, data and evidence. While research has thus documented how digital technologies enable a sincere peacebuilding approach concerned with the hurtful past and present and how the world ‘really’ is, digital technologies can also play a role in enabling a subjunctive sensitivity for future worlds that ‘could’ or ‘should’ be. The article explores how in peacebuilding, subjunctivity is produced through performative uses of digital technology that are primarily non-discursive and non-cognitive. Documenting examples from practitioners engaged inter alia in mediation, dialogues, peacekeeping, and ceasefire monitoring, the article introduces a compilation of subjunctive affordances and demonstrates their powerful effects: shepherding conflict stakeholders along the process, detaching them from hurtful content, reframing their perspectives on the world and envisioning possible futures, as well as unlocking existing social structures and evoking new ones through digital communitas.