Lost in the crowd: re-humanising crowdsourcing in the context of post-digital peacebuilding

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, crowdsourcing as a means for gathering data in peacebuilding and humanitarian emergency contexts, experienced a sharp increase in popularity followed by a critical turn in the late 2010s. What explains this rise then sharp critical turn? I argue that it was an outcome of crowdsourcing becoming institutionalised, and that data collection became an end in itself. This took place against a narrative of crowdsourcing’s ability to create pluriversal spaces of knowledge and action during crises, creating a critical dissonance between what crowdsourcing is, and what it was imagined to be. It was imagined as a collective process, even though crowdsourcing is by design an atomising method of data collection. However, crowdsourcing in conflict settings can be done in a pluriversal, humanising way in peacebuilding, which I will show through discussion of the Everyday Peace Indicators and Una Hakika projects.