How technology and community organizing can combine to help prevent violence, with examples from Chicago to Sri Lanka.
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.
After covering general concepts in violence prevention and describing technological approaches to tracking conflict and cooperation, Bock offers five case studies that range from “low-tech” interventions to prevent ethnic and religious violence in Ahmedebad, India, to an anti-gang initiative in Chicago that uses Second Life to train its “violence interrupters.” There is solid evidence of success, Bock concludes, but there is much to be discovered, developed, and, most important, implemented.

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention (Mit Press)

Politics & Social Sciences

Bock, Joseph G.

Social Sciences

MIT Press]

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention

The MIT Press

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Sharpening Conflict Management: Religious Leadership and the Double-edged Sword

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Praeger

Alexander's Care of the Patient in Surgery

Bock begins with a description of ethnoreligious violence in the world today and then offers a case study about Hindu-Muslim riots in India that illustrates how religion is used to engineer violence by those who gain from it. The way that religion foments violence as compared to how it can be used to prevent it is analyzed in a chapter on the flash-point asymmetry problem. While religion in the direction of hatred seems to be sharp like a sword, it is argued that in some respects it is more like a butterknife in the direction of understanding and tolerance.
The second part of Dr. Bock's analysis identifies ways in which religious leaders seeking to prevent ethnoreligious violence might be more effective. He argues that religious leaders must be prepared to respond assertively to ethnoreligious aggression at early stages, not waiting for violence to erupt. Further, these leaders need to help people discipline their information processing so that they are not influenced by bigoted rumors. They must also cultivate a sense of belonging among their followers and exercise their authority by speaking out on matters of theology. He concludes that there are at least seven ways in which religious leaders have similar influence as their violence promoting counterparts. This is an important resource for scholars, researchers, students, and trainers involved with peace studies, conflict resolution, applied theology, and South Asia and Middle East studies.

The White House Staff and the National Security Assistant: Friendship and Friction at the Water's Edge (Discographies #170) [ The White House Staff and the National Security Assistant: Friendship and Friction at the Water's Edge (Discographies #170) by Bock, Joseph G ( Author ) Hardcover Jun- 1987 ] Hardcover Jun- 11- 1987

The White House Staff and the National Security Assistant: Friendship and Friction at the Water's Edge (Contributions in Political Science)

Politics & Government

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