Blogs and Bullets: Evaluating the Impact of New Media on Conflict

The Center of Innovation for Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding at the U.S. Institute of Peace and George Washington University's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication hosted a public event exploring the role of new media in contested politics around the world. From Iran to Kenya to Colombia, the impact of new and social media on movements for political and social change has been the subject of much discussion, and controversy.

• Watch video coverage of the event by C-SPAN
• Read the 'Blogs & Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics' report

In a USIP report (draft) released at the conference, a team of scholars from GWU, in cooperation with scholars from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and from Morningside Analytics, take a fresh theoretical, and empirical approach to answering this question.The report critically assesseses both the “cyberutopian” and “cyberskeptic” perspectives, and proposes a new framework for assessing the role of new media in contentious politics. 

This event explored these themes in three panels. In the first morning panel, Alec Ross of the U.S. State Department, Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman, and GWU’s Marc Lynch engaged in a discussion of these topics moderated by USIP’s Sheldon Himelfarb. The second morning panel featured bloggers and citizen journalists from around the world to offer a ground-view perspective. The final panel brought together tech firms like eBay and Facebook to explore their perspectives on new media and conflict.