Women for Peace: Promoting Dialogue and Peace through Facebook?

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine the ways in which dialogue and peace are promoted and mobilized through a Facebook page in the protracted, ethnopolitical conflict between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. A thematic qualitative text analysis based on the grounded theory approach was conducted on posts and comments that were published on the Facebook page of the Israeli grassroots movement Women Wage Peace (WWP), created by the Jewish and Arab women that participate in this movement. Our findings point to three major mechanisms through which attempts to mobilize peace were performed: building solidarity, maintaining engagement, and calling for action, thus contributing to our understanding of social media as a dialogue-provoking platform that enables users from different gender and ethnopolitical groups in divided and conflicted societies to perform peacebuilding actions. However, the findings indicate that at the same time, the page also constitutes a space for blatant expressions of hostility, hatred, and sexism that convey a backlash against the initiative and activity of WWP.

War or peace tweets? The case of Pakistan

“…Social media content may include hate speech, propaganda, or mere misinformation that may be harmful to peace (See Comninos, 2013). Ron and colleagues (2020) for example, qualitatively analyzed the Facebook page of the Israeli grassroots movement Women Wage Peace (WWP) and while they found attempts to mobilize peace, they also reported blatant expressions of hostility and hatred. Regarding Twitter, the literature suggests the platform has been used for computational propaganda (Woolley and Howard, 2016).…”

“…Lee and Maslog, 2005) and limited systematic academic enquiries have been conducted to explore content in the contemporary digital media environment (i.e. Golovchenko et al, 2018; Reuter and Kaufhold, 2018; Ron et al, 2020). Drawing on previous works, this study therefore, aims to extend peace/war scholarship to examine whether peace/war trends observed in traditional media continue to be noted on digital media platforms, specifically on Twitter.…”

Studying the Potential Connection Between Peace and Human Rights: Content Analysis of Facebook Posts

“…Social networking sites such that, Facebook has played a vital role as well as used as a tool for number of research studies upon the topics of human rights and peace. Women played a crucial role in the peace-making process, as it was analysed by Facebook page on WWP Jewish-Arab movements for peace, where women contribution was an integral part of this movement' (Ron, Suleiman, & Maoz, 2020). While a 'support for compromise in the scenario of Israeli-Palestinian conflict was explored by gender perception on female stereotyping and perception of threat' (David & Maoz, 2015).…”