The question I would like to address in this chapter is: what is the potential role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in conflict resolution and peacebuilding in the context of heritage? In other words, how can heritage institutions and professionals use ICTs to contribute to peacebuilding?

Today almost everybody would agree that new communication tools such as the internet have changed the world. At the end of 2014 almost three billion people had access to the internet, two-thirds of whom were from the developing world, while worldwide mobile phone subscriptions were close to seven billion (International Telecommunication Union 2014): numbers only expected to grow in years to come. The diffusion of mobile phones and the internet have brought dramatic cultural, social, economic and political changes in societies around the world (Mancini and O'Reilly 2013a). Arguably the most dramatic statistic that demonstrates the impact of ICTs on our world is the fact that of all data (information in bytes) ever produced, 90% has been produced in the past two years. In other words: all media, books, emails and so on produced until 2012 amount to only 10% of all data ever created, and in the two years since, nine times as much data has been created through, for example, tweets, instant messages, online video, travel logs and spy data (Center for the Future of Museums 2014).

This does not means that change is always for the better; the role of technology is almost always ambiguous. The internet especially is a technology that, since its creation five decades ago, has often played a dual role. Its development was funded by the US Defence Department with the aim of producing a communications system that would survive a nuclear attack. At the same time, most of the researchers and engineers working on the internet saw it as a tool for collaboration and resource sharing (Isaacson 2014). The debate about the virtues of ICTs continues in the present day. In an frequently debated New Yorker article, Gladwell (2010) compellingly highlights the way that digital tools are mostly ‘good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls’ and do not create activism and democratising movements as claimed by proponents of ICTs. Morozov (2011) goes even further, arguing that everything that is positive about ICTs can just as easily be turned into a negative.