Introduction
This special issue of Kujenga Amani focuses on the impacts and implications of social media and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on conflict dynamics, democracy and peacebuilding in Africa. It also delves into technological innovation and adaptation, digital activism, and Africa–centred policy and regulatory approaches to technology (especially AI), and how this policy environment supports or constrains democratic transitions and peacebuilding interventions.
The issue further explores how attendant social media applications, through algorithms, could be potentially threatening to the information environment in Africa through digitizing gossip, famously known as fake news, misinformation, and disinformation (information disorders). The latter erodes public trust and impacts human solidarity and agency; doing so fuels peace and security challenges. Finally, as opposed to the over-emphasis on the negative implication of the adoption and adaptation of social media technologies, it also addresses the salience of context or geographical locality in addressing the theoretical concern of duality in social media analysis by unmasking the “tech for good side” of things. In the latter, social media could act as a powerful tool for social activism, civic mobilisation, public education, conflict prevention, humanitarian support, and digital activism within the “tech for good mantra” and the “do no harm” approaches to digital peacebuilding in Africa, both online and offline.
Contributions to this special issue are by former APN and Next Gen fellows focusing on media technology infrastructure, media information literacy/social media literacy, legislation and regulation of artificial intelligence, and digital peacebuilding in Africa, including indigenous/innovative digital peacebuilding approaches.
The first essay, Exploiting Pan-African Digital Peacebuilding Infrastructures in Kenya: The Case of Maskani, by Fredrick Ogenga focuses on how Pan-African digital peacebuilding infrastructures in Kenya are being developed and applied using the case of Maskani or Homeplatform. Maskani is an indigenous digital peacebuilding online/offline interface that addresses online polarization and related violence, around elections in Kenya. The second essay by Admire Mire, on Social Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Southern Africa, argues that social media is an open-ended technology which allows state and non-state actors to harness it for good and/or nefarious purposes. This is followed by John Sokfa’s contribution, titled, An Intricate Landscape: Reframing Social Media in Peacebuilding in Nigeria, that explores how global technologies can be adapted for local realities in the context of social media and the peacebuilding frontier in Nigeria in order to move beyond the theoretical focus on duality captured by the double edged nature of social media in conflict dynamics, while the fourth essay by Elizabeth Khaemba, on Framing of Gen Z Protests against the 2024 Finance Bill in Kenya: A Linguistic Assessment of TIK TOK, explores the role of linguistics, particularly its centrality to digital activism and digital democratization in Kenya. This is followed by another contribution by Fredrick Ogenga, on Digital Repression? Unmasking the Salience of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Democratic Transitions and Peacebuilding in Africa, which examines the question of digital repression in Africa by exploring the need for stronger digital forces, and promoting social media and digital literacy in ways that promote democratic transitions and peacebuilding in Africa. The sixth and last essay in the special issue is by Job Mwaura, on Rethinking Artificial Intelligence Ethics for Peacebuilding Through African Epistemologies, which addresses the ethical challenges that could come with advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He compares Western and African decolonial epistemologies and explores how the latter can contribute to the emergence of AI systems that are more context-aware, culturally inclusive, and aligned with peacebuilding in Africa.
Collectively, the essays explore the trends, opportunities, and emerging challenges for stakeholders and citizens, as the continent grapples with seeking and building innovative ways and inventions that can enable Africans use digital media technologies, including AI, for advancing democracy, human security, and peacebuilding.
