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Maria Sipka's Column

“Friends Without Borders” is Catalyzing Friending in Conflict Zones to Create World Peace

By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, can we decrease world conflict in the short and long term? Yes.

Some interesting phenomena unfolded recently during a peace research innovation across eight countries in conflict or post-conflict transition. These countries (India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Greece, Turkey, Albania and Serbia) identified friending patterns on the social networking site Facebook.

The results are astounding! Take a look for yourself and see real-time results published on Facebook’s Peace on Facebook page, of friend connections created each day between people of different countries, religions, and political affiliations.

It’s interesting to compare the level of friending in relation to the Facebook populations in these paired countries:
Israel + Palestine: High level of Facebook populations and high level of cross-conflict friending. Great peace-building potential!
Greece + Turkey: High level of Facebook populations and very low level of cross-conflict friending. A great deal of effort will need to be invested to build connections here.
Albania + Serbia (post-conflict transition): High level of Facebook populations and very high level of cross-conflict friending. Fantastic level of connections.
India + Pakistan: Very low level of Facebook population and very low level of cross-conflict friending. Great effort to cultivate friending and hard work on peace-building here.

Social development advisor Jane Chesher has been awarded a UNESCO “Power of Peace” initiative grant to catalyze a powerful global outreach campaign to foster cross-conflict friendships among youth 14-25 years in each region. The initiative is titled Friends Without Borders.

Partnering with Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab and Facebook, the project’s goal is to promote peace, respect, trust and empowerment between youth from opposing countries in the four geographic conflicts shown on the info graphic below using social networking, film and story.

Since the launch of peace.facebook.com in August 2010, the volume of friend connections made each day in the conflict countries has doubled. Today there are over 100,000 new friend connections made every day across the conflicts.

The Friends Without Borders movement will scale up and empower the connections by creating a safe and fun online space to expand the network through peer influence, trust and respect for the “other.” Facebook analytics will be used to track the impact of the campaign, along with traffic data provided by promotional ads and links, including partner outreach.

If you would like to learn more about the Friends Without Borders initiative and become involved you can contact Jane through her website.

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