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Can Video Games Build Peace?

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We know that video games are great entertainment…but can they also help build peace?

Today, forty-four percent of the world’s Internet population play games online, and the industry is experiencing rapid growth in many conflict zones around the world.

In the Middle East, where many of the world’s conflicts are centred, sixty-five percent of mobile Internet users have games on their devices, making it the game industry’s fastest growing region.

Ever played PeaceMaker? In this exciting game, players become the head-of-state in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to try to achieve a resolution. We spoke with Eric Brown from Impact Games (the company behind PeaceMaker) and he said gaming provides many benefits to the peace-building community.

“One story from very early on,” Eric said, “was when we had one group playing it and when they started having a discussion about the real issues they were saying things like ‘Well, when I was the Palestinian president, this is what I did’ and things like that.”

“So, in terms of all those things people like to talk about in games – empowering and making them feel like they are learning through experience, and having that opportunity to explore – they were all really good things to see,” he said.

Also working across conflict divides is Games for Peace, which brings Jewish and Arab youth in Israel together to interact in digital spaces like Minecraft and Team Fortress 2.

Peace Park is another skill-building game where players have to restore peace in a communal park by understanding visitors’ interests. The designers behind this game said they were wary of trying to balance overall goals with a genuinely interesting game.

Nino Nanitashvili from Elva Community Engagement told us that during the development of Peace Park, they actively involved the gaming community to help us design the levels.

Other examples in this emerging space are Peace Superheroes and Search for Common Ground’s Battle for Humanity, which is soon to be released. These games aim to challenge enemy images, shift audience attitudes and encourage positive social behaviours such as civic engagement, conflict management, and tolerance.

Op-ed: Humanitarians and Civilians at Risk: Why Peacebuilders and the World Should Care

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Melanie Greenberg
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Op-ed: Melanie Greenberg is the CEO and President of Alliance for Peacebuilding.

Arguing that the world is currently witnessing the highest level of human suffering since the Second World War, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convened the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul on May 23 in order to take action. Participants from 173 Member States, including 55 Heads of State and Government, pledged to undertake concrete steps to prevent conflict and enhance the protection of civilians in armed conflict. According to a robust body of International Humanitarian Law, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, civilians and noncombatants are to be protected, and the means and methods of warfare restricted. These are bedrock principles of international law, and are considered the most sacrosanct rules protecting innocent civilians during times of war.

The Summit saw a renewed commitment to these principles of International Humanitarian Law, with promises to prevent atrocities, hold violators accountable, assure access for aid to those in need, and incorporate locals, women and youth into local development, outreach and aid projects.

While these commitments provide momentum for positive change, it is still a blatant fact that “countless examples of violations,” remain, according to the ICRC. Military forces in a range of current conflicts have displayed a callous disregard for International Humanitarian Law, increasingly making civilians illegal targets in a broad range of settings – from bombing hospitals, to using illegal weapons like cluster bombs on civilians, and killing aid workers. In Syria, civilians have been routinely targeted, as exemplified by the recent bombing of a hospital in Aleppo that killed 27 people, including children and doctors. According to the Aid Workers Security Database, Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world for NGOs, with aid workers and journalists being killed at an alarming rate, and impunity for the killers. The US and other government forces have repeatedly– mistakenly or intentionally – attacked humanitarian sites; examples include the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015 and the Israeli bombing of UNRWA shelters in Gaza.

By failing to denounce and prevent these acts, world leaders send the message that this violence against humanitarian workers and civilians is acceptable. The World Humanitarian Summit provided an important opportunity for governments to rededicate themselves to the norms of civilian protection and International Humanitarian Law. Though there is still a lack of official censure for clear violations of International Humanitarian Law, this Summit made possible a more hopeful vision for civilian protection on a greater scale moving forward. At the Summit, world leaders addressed war’s toll on civilians and humanitarian workers. The Summit concluded with over 1,500 commitments, ranging from a Grand Bargain about localizing aid funding to increasing the quality of education and helping the most at-risk states handle future development consequences of climate change. The Alliance for Peacebuilding calls on the US and all governments to recognize protecting civilians and aid workers as a priority now and live up to their commitments. The current level of human suffering requires us to live up to the standards that the world put in place after WWII when we said, “never again.” These are not quaint relics of a simpler time – these laws are powerful forces for stopping cycles of violence, and preventing untold misery for innocent civilians. We must not only denounce violations of humanitarian law, but just as importantly, the US should take measures to ensure respect for International Humanitarian Law, including teaching these principles to our armed forces, publicizing the importance of these laws for the general public, and enacting and enforcing clear and effective punishment for violations. If we let these laws continue to wither, they will become obsolete and useless. We must hold officials and organizations accountable for the commitments they made at the Summit, lest they fade into mere rhetoric.

As peacebuilders, we need to substantively champion International Humanitarian Law, making the case that by ignoring these laws, we not only extend human suffering to levels unseen since WWII, but we also ensure continuing cycles of violence.

Cover Photo: Arnold Felfer/UN

Is the World Becoming More Dangerous?

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Rising death tolls in Syria, brutal massacres in Sudan, horrific sexual violence in the DRC, these are all news headlines we are familiar with. Reports from conflict zones paint a grim picture and you could be forgiven for thinking that our world is a worse place to live in than ever before. But is the world really become more dangerous and deadly?

The truth is no, it’s not.

Professor Joshua Goldstein wrote the book Winning the War on War, and he believes peace in the 21st century is possible.

“If you look at what’s happened to war, just over the course of my lifetime, it’s been dramatic that we have fewer wars, smaller wars and we have better tools for dealing with conflicts without resort to war,” Professor Goldstein said.

“We have made a lot of progress already, and I am not one to say ‘this is my plan for world peace’, and, ‘everybody’s going to be in harmony with each other and all our problems will disappear’, but I am one to say that we have made a lot of progress in managing conflicts, learning how to reduce the size, and number, and location and spread of wars,” he explained. “If we keep that going, if we learn what’s working, we could reduce that close to zero. Maybe we will never have 100% peaceful world, but we could get to 95%, 98% – that would be great.”

Professor Steven Pinker has also been following the trends and he agrees that we are making progress. His research shows that while the world has had rough few recent years, overall battle-related deaths in armed conflicts are trending downwards. “Not only have the numbers come way, way down, since the 1990s, but whole categories of war seem to be either gone or obsolescent. Wars between two great powers, wars between rich countries, wars in Western Europe – the kind of wars that were omnipresent through human history for hundreds and hundreds of years, all of a sudden went to zero.” So, what has to continue to keep war on the decline? Researchers suggest several key factors:

  • Continue an increase in human security (that means reducing poverty and supporting development)
  • Increasing women’s engagement in economic and political life internationally, and
  • Confronting beliefs that legitimize violence as a tool of conflict resolution

Professor Pinker says this last factor is key. “The ideal that human flourishing is the greatest good has to crowd out other ideologies,” he said. “Religious ideologies, nationalist ideologies, dreams of national or ethnic glory, rectifying past injustices, all the kinds of motives that have lead countries to expand their territory, expand their ideology and to justify it by thinking ‘well, this is more important than whether people get killed in their 20s or live to a ripe old age’.” Interviews: Courtesy of One Earth Future

Eight-year-old tells his story to actor Orlando Bloom in Ukraine

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When actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Orlando Bloom visited schools in conflict-hit regions of eastern Ukraine recently, he was moved by 8-year-old Maxim’s story. We were too.

8-year-old Shares War Horror with Orlando Bloom

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In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, resulting in nearly 8,000 deaths so far, and 2.5 million people displaced. Eight-year-old Maxim lost his father to sniper fire in the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine. His family was forced to flee their home in Luhansk, and move to Slovyansk two years ago.

When actor Orlando Bloom visited the region recently as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, Maxim’s mother told him that her son is still scared of loud noises, and has to go to therapy.

“When the conflict was at its peak. We were hiding and of course my son saw and heard everything as the artillery was right near our house,” she said. “When we came here for a long time he was afraid of thunder, elevators or a trolly bus.”

Maxim is one of 300,000 children who are in immediate need of assistance to continue their education in the region. Since the conflict broke out more than 2 years ago, more than 230,000 children have been forced from their homes and one in five schools in the region have been damaged or destroyed. Bloom visited classrooms hit by shells just three kilometers from the front-line of the conflict to raise awareness of the global education crisis facing children in emergencies like this one.

New findings show that nearly a quarter of the world’s school-aged children – 462 million – now live in countries affected by crisis. In Syria more than 6000 schools are out of use, in North-East Nigeria and Cameroon more than 1,800 schools have been shut due to the crisis there and in the Central African Republic a quarter of schools are not functioning. UNICEF have launched a new program called Education Cannot Wait, to provide continuing education for children like Maxim in emergency situations.

“Education changes lives in emergencies,” said Josephine Bourne, UNICEF’s Global Chief of Education. “Going to school keeps children safe from abuses like trafficking and recruitment into armed groups and is a vital investment in children’s futures and in the future of their communities,” he said. “Education is providing children in eastern Ukraine with the building blocks to rebuild their lives in a safe and supportive environment.”

Cover Photo © UNICEF/Georgiev

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