This paper was written by Krystel Tabet, Mira El Mawla, Claudia Meier, Helena Puig Larrauri and Rita Costa Cots of Build Up and was commissioned by the Berghof Foundation and the Plattform Zivile Konfliktbearbeitung / Platform Peaceful Conflict Transformation.

This paper fills a gap in existing literature and practice where intersectional feminist approaches to technology meet intersectional feminist approaches to peacebuilding. Scholars and practitioners have explored how an intersectional feminist perspective delivers more impactful peacebuilding. They have also explored how an intersectional feminist perspective on digital technology mitigates bias and harm. This explorative study investigates how these two perspectives intersect in digital peacebuilding. In other words, we explore how a theoretical framework that seeks to analyze how different aspects of social and political identities create unique but often overlapping forms of discrimination can amplify the opportunities and reduce the risks of digital peacebuilding.

“An intersectional feminist lens refers to an (analytical and practice-oriented) perspective that makes power asymmetries and imbalances of power visible and points to multiple and overlapping forms of oppression due to race, income, age, religion, ability and other factors.”

Digital approaches to intersectional feminist peacebuilding 

How can the design and implementation of digital peacebuilding contribute to the strategic goal of adding an intersectional feminist lens to peacebuilding? Ideally, this can happen in four broad categories:

1. Building better relationships of trust – Digital communication tools can contribute to a shared community identity and social cohesion. Peacebuilders can use this to build trust that cuts across identities and experiences of marginalization. Digital means can provide a platform for those who might not otherwise speak up in a process, allow for side conversations with those who need to build trust towards a process, and offer anonymous ways to express how marginalization plays out in a situation.
2. Broadening participation and ownership – Digital technologies can offer new and different ways to increase opportunities for participation by people facing overlapping forms of discrimination. To overcome some of the barriers present in the offline space, digital messaging platforms can give people online access to join discussions, cutting across class, mobility and social status lines, opening up processes and helping to hold leaders accountable. Critically, digital means can also support adequate participation by people previously marginalized in process design – not only during implementation.
3. Ensuring better safety and security – Digital means can address identified intersectional concerns related to online or offline harassment or intimidation in a targeted way. Peacebuilders can use them to carve out anonymous safe spaces online to accompany both online and offline processes, to surface content that might have stayed invisible, and to expand subtle ways of reaching people facing marginalization.  
4. Challenging existing power and oppression – Digital technology makes organizing easier, and in so doing can shift the balance of power. Peacebuilders can collaborate with the activists emerging through new forms of digital organizing to equalize offline power dynamics. Furthermore, social media in particular can build larger constituencies of peace activists, coalescing on intersectional and international allyship among people facing the same forms of oppression in a way that transcends borders and other dividing forces.