About the Peace Media Clearinghouse
The clearinghouse provides a central site where educators, students, organizations, and the community of practitioners working in the conflict management field can access multimedia materials that support conflict analysis and prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation.
These resources can aid professionals in training and educational settings as well as in various communities around the world. For example, these media can be used to highlight examples of peacemaking around the world, as tools to apply conflict analysis frameworks, or to enhance the understanding of conflict regions. The materials in the database range from free online videos to feature length radio programs and films about conflict zones. It also includes a variety of other multimedia like computer games, poster campaigns, and theater. The system allows users to search by media type, subject area, and country. The clearinghouse items are drawn from conflict related-media from around the world, and have been developed by a wide range of talent from non-governmental organizations, academia, and the private sector. Some were developed with a peacemaking goal in mind, while others are simply explorations of conflicts and related issues. They can be useful to those trying to understand or manage conflict.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of work in this area. The clearinghouse includes a section for "teaching guides" that have been developed to show people how to use the films in a training context. Additionally, we hope that increased dialogue on how to create and use multimedia will also allow for a distillation of lessons learned and development of best practices so as to advance the professionalism of this new field.
The Future of the Clearinghouse
This site is the beta version of the clearinghouse. In addition to the database that we have up and running, the new version of the site will include:
- Access to best practices and lessons learned in the use of conflict-related multimedia.
- Access to project resources, such as training opportunities, funds, and prizes/competitions.
A critical component of the site will be to foster discussion and experience-sharing on the implementation of these media resources in conflict management. It aims to encourage and enable user involvement in the following ways:
- To support direct interaction within and between practitioners and content developers.
- To collect suggestions on further materials (multimedia, best practice documents, etc.).
- To achieve evaluative feedback (comments and rankings) on materials in the database. This feedback serves as a source of information for other users and helps in quality control.
- To have key multi-media producers serve as site contributors/co-sponsors.
- To support user profiles, in order to highlight the user-centered character of the site, and to encourage direct user interaction.
Tell us what you think of these plans. We would greatly appreciate your feedback.
The clearinghouse was developed as a joint project of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) and Georgetown University's Conflict Resolution Program. Contributors from USIP include Sheldon Himelfarb, A. Heather Coyne, Christopher Neu, and Anand Varghese. Contributors from Georgetown University include Craig Zelizer, Sarah Bessell, Radina Ivanova, and Immanuel Wolff.