The Visualising Peace team has been exploring the relationship between responsible debate and peacebuilding. As part of this a group of students – Tao Yazaki, Zoe Gudino, Finlay Whitton, Anna Pilgrim, Jazmin Smallridge, and Tabitha Stuart – have been running a series of debates using different formats, from competitive to collaborative approaches. We had two aims in doing this: we wanted to give participants the opportunity to discuss the use of social media for peacebuilding in a range of contexts, and we also wanted to examine the dynamics of different models of debate, mindful of their potential for driving conflict as well as promoting dialogue. In debating the role of social media (itself a platform for debate), we hoped to get more people thinking about connections between how we discuss contentious issues and how we visualise and build peace in the wider world.
Taking our cue from the Young Academy of Scotland’s Charter for Responsible Debate (especially principle 9: ‘Seek to identify common ground and shared purpose’), our third event in the series focused on collaborative debate. This format was the most daring of our debating experiments and was crafted to help people work through disagreements towards solutions.
To support participants in this goal, we welcomed trained mediators Hanna Dushkova and Vitalii Diakov (founders of Ukrainians Together) to deliver some skills training based on active listening and emotional intelligence. We then practiced the skills we had been taught via some light-hearted debating prompts, which gave us a chance to become more comfortable with disagreeing constructively and finding common ground despite our different viewpoints. These prompts included questions like: Is there a right way to be a tourist? Which food is better: sweet or savoury?
With a bit of practice under our belts, we were ready to tackle our main topic: the role of social media in peacebuilding. Six conversation-starters were shared around the different discussion groups, designed to nudge participants towards finding solutions (not just discussing problems):
- Would you argue that social media reposting is a powerful tool to share information and that those with influence have responsibility to do that?
- Do you agree that the biggest threat that social media to peace is disinformation?
- Do you think that social media is an excellent platform for peacebuilding with diverse voices?
- Does your group think that social media drives more conflict than traditional media?
- How would you address the tendency of social media algorithms to polarise users and create ‘bubbles’ rather than dialogue?
- Can social media help promote inner peace in any ways?
These conversation-starters were accompanied by short documents providing some contextual information on each topic, to promote informed discussion, with some concrete case studies and further reflective questions. Fifteen minutes was afforded to the group to discuss and build an argument for their prompt; and after this the groups then mixed, with one person staying on their original table and the rest splitting to different groups. The aim here was to keep diversifying viewpoints while building on each other’s thinking so far.
Following a further fifteen minutes of group discussion, the final stage of the collaborative debate was the presenting of proposed solutions. We expected each group to have different suggestions, given to the wide range of participants’ backgrounds and experience; so the sharing of ideas around the room enabled the conversation to keep developing, with participants still expanding on and adding to other people’s solutions.
This style of debate was very ‘hands on’ and involved everyone in attendance contributing to the discussion unlike more formal debating set-ups where a handful of speakers set out their arguments and respond to questions. As a result, participants were required to do more active learning as well as active listening, developing their own views on what could be done to improve both social media and (for) peace.
Below, Visualising Peace student Jazmin Smallridge offers some further reflections on the topic of peace and social media: