The New Digital Age

CHAPTER 7

The Future of

Reconstruction

It’s now eminently clear how technology can be used to turn societies upside down and even tear them apart, but what about putting them back together? Reconstruction after a conflict or a natural disaster is a long and arduous process, hardly something a flash mob or viral video campaign can carry out. But while communication technologies alone can’t rebuild broken societies, political, economic and security efforts can all be enhanced and accelerated because of technology. Tools that we use for casual entertainment today will find new purpose in the future in postcrisis countries, and populations in need will find more information and more power at their fingertips. Reconstruction efforts will become more innovative, more inclusive and more efficient over time, as old models and methods are either updated or discarded. Technology cannot thwart disaster or halt a civil war, but it can make the process of putting the pieces back together less painful.

Just as future conflicts will see the addition of a virtual front, so too will reconstruction efforts. We will still see cranes and bulldozers restoring roads, rebuilding bridges and resurrecting destroyed buildings, but we will also see an immediate and simultaneous focus on key functions that in the past have often come later in the process. Getting communications up and running, for example, will enable the rebuilding of the physical infrastructure and the economic and governance infrastructure at the same time. Here we will outline how we envision the approach future reconstruction planners will take to a postcrisis society, discuss the wave of new participants that connectivity will spur to action and offer a few ideas for innovative policies that can put societies on a faster path toward recovery.

Communications First

For societies emerging from a man-made or natural disaster, reconstruction is a daunting task. From rebuilding roads and buildings to reconnecting the population to the services it needs, these challenges require immense resources, different types of technical expertise and, of course, patience. Modern technology can aid these processes significantly if employed in the right ways, and we believe that successful reconstruction efforts in the future will rely heavily on communication technologies and fast telecommunications networks.

There will be a reconstruction prototype: a flexible and segmentary set of adaptable practices and models that can be tailored to fit particular postcrisis environments. Technology companies use prototypes and “beta” models to allow room for trial and error—the underlying philosophy being that early-stage feedback for an imperfect product ultimately yields a better result in the end. (Hence the tech entrepreneur’s favorite aphorism: Fail early, fail often.) A prototype-like approach to reconstruction efforts will take some time to develop, but ultimately it will better serve the communities in need.

The main component of a reconstruction prototype—and what distinguishes it from, say, more traditional reconstruction efforts—is a communications-first, or mobile-first, mentality. The restoration and upgrading of communication networks have already become the new cement in modern reconstruction efforts. Looking ahead, upgrading broken societies to the fastest and most modern version of telecommunications infrastructure will be the top priority of all reconstruction actors, not least because the success of their own work will depend on it. Even in the last decade we’ve witnessed such a shift.

As recently as the early 2000s, post-conflict reconstruction wasn’t so much about telecommunications revival as it was telecommunications installation. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had any semblance of a mobile network prior to regime change. The Taliban government violently opposed almost every form of consumer technology (although it had a small GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] network limited to government officials) and Saddam Hussein banned mobile phones entirely in his totalitarian state. Once those regimes fell, the populations were left with virtually no infrastructure or modern devices; combatants in the ensuing conflicts were the only ones with some form of portable communications (typically radios).

When American civilian reconstruction teams entered Iraq in 2003, they found themselves in a telecommunications desert, and initial efforts to use satellite phones floundered as they discovered that the phones worked only if both users stood outside—needless to say, an inconvenient feature for a war zone.¹ As a quick fix, the allies’ Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) gave MTC-Vodafone, a regional telecom company, a contract to install cell towers and establish services in the south of the country, while another telecom, MCI, got the nod in Baghdad. According to one former senior CPA official we spoke with, the towers were put up all over the country literally overnight, with officials and U.N. staff receiving thousands of mobile phones to distribute to important local political players. (Oddly enough, all the phones sported a “917” area code, sharing that distinction with New York’s five boroughs.) These efforts jump-started a moribund telecommunications industry in Iraq by building the physical infrastructure required, and within a few years, the sector was booming.

In Afghanistan, where the U.N. established a mobile network soon after the fall of the Taliban (with free service as an incentive for users), the mobile market has grown significantly in the past decade, thanks largely to the Afghan government’s decision to issue licenses to private mobile operators. By 2011, there were four major operators in Afghanistan, claiming some 15 million subscribers among them. The reconstruction teams who arrived in Iraq and Afghanistan found a blank canvas: poor infrastructure, no subscribers and dubious commercial prospects. Given the rate of mobile adoption around the world and how the telecommunications industry is expanding, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever encounter a similar blank slate again.

In Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the primary communications task was not installation but widespread restoration of a badly damaged telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the devastation throughout the country, getting its communications networks up and running was a relatively fast process. The mobile infrastructure was badly damaged by the earthquake and aftershocks, but due to quick thinking and cooperation between local telecoms and the U.S. military, the carriers were able to restore functionality within only a few days. Ten days after the earthquake, the two largest mobile phone operators, Digicel and Voilà, reported that they were able to operate at 70 to 80 percent of their pre-earthquake capacity.

Jared, who was then with the State Department, remembers reaching out to the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia shortly after the Haitian earthquake for a debriefing on lessons learned after the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries in Southeast Asia. The message was clear: Get the towers up, get them running and overrule the people who think that telecommunications are secondary to emergency rescue. Fast networks aren’t secondary; they’re complementary.

Because the vast majority of cell towers in Haiti, even prior to the earthquake, relied on generators instead of electricity for power, maintaining coverage was often more a question of fuel than infrastructure. Donated cell towers had to be guarded lest desperate people try to steal their fuel. Still, the ability to maintain service despite the destruction and chaos proved vital in coordinating and sending aid organizations to areas and people who needed help most, as well as providing a way for friends and family to contact each other within and beyond Haiti. Some of the first images to come out of the country after the disaster were indeed taken and sent by Haitians using their mobile phones. Everyone involved in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake recognized how crucial working communications were in the midst of widespread physical destruction and human suffering.

The uprisings in the Arab world that began in 2010 represent another recent example of the advantages of a communications-first perspective. Vodafone’s speedy restoration of service in Egypt just before Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president foreshadows a more agile and shrewd telecom sector. Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao told us, “We had people sleeping in the network centers in order to make sure that we could be the first to offer service once the shutdown ended. We had food and water; we’d rented rooms in nearby hotels and we protected our premises, to make sure nobody could come and [disable] the network.” As a result of its efforts, Vodafone was the first operator to resume service—an important “first” for a company trying to reach a large Egyptian market that suddenly had a lot to talk about. Colao described a smart and empathetic strategy on the part of Vodafone to demonstrate value to its Egyptian customers: “We gave credit to our Egyptian customers so that they could call people at home, as a giveaway.” Vodafone also shaped the traffic load (that is, freed up space on the network for Egyptian users), “so that when the network came back up, we could make sure the first people using it could [make] twenty euros’ worth of calls to let relatives know [they were] safe.”

Today’s reliance on telecommunications is a reflection of how important this technology has become in even the poorest societies. In most cases today, when we talk about restoring the network, we’re specifically talking about voice and text services—not Internet connectivity. This will change in the next decade, as people everywhere begin to rely more on data services than on voice communications. After a crisis, the pressures to restore Internet connectivity will dwarf what we see today with voice and text, both for the sake of the population and because a fast data network will help reconstruction actors achieve their goals. If necessary, aid organizations will deploy portable 4G towers meshed together into a low-bandwidth ISP. Data can hop from a mobile device to the nearest tower, then from tower to tower until it reaches a fiber-optic cable connecting to the broader Internet. Browsing speeds will be slow, but such portable deployments will provide enough connectivity to accelerate rebuilding.

Dedicated leadership by the telecommunications industry will be a feature of the reconstruction prototype, with telecoms leading the way as nationalized entities or coalition partners if they are in the private sector. Today, Bechtel and other engineering corporations are often tasked with rebuilding physical infrastructure through government contracts, but as the world adopts a communications-first outlook, the telecoms will be first in—and, like others, they’ll come to make money. In postcrisis societies, solid networks are needed as soon as possible to coordinate search-and-rescue efforts; engage with the population; preserve the rule of law; organize and facilitate aid-distribution efforts; locate missing people; and help those who have been internally displaced navigate their new environment. Telecom companies will have clear and valid commercial motivations to invest their resources in building and maintaining a modern communications network. If the telecom sector is properly regulated from the beginning, the collective benefit for all parties will be quite high: The companies will earn revenue, the reconstruction actors will have faster and better tools, and the population at large will be able to access service that is reliable, fast and cheap (particularly if the sector is competitive from the outset).

The long-term benefit of a healthy telecommunications sector is that it promotes and facilitates the growth of the economy, even if the stability is slow to return. In general, direct investments in infrastructure, jobs and services offer more to the economy than short-term aid programs, and telecommunications is among the most universally lucrative and sustainable enterprises in the commercial world. Afghanistan’s largest mobile operator, Roshan, is also the country’s biggest investor and taxpayer. Roshan employs thousands in Afghanistan and provides nearly 5 percent of the Afghan government’s overall domestic revenue. This is true despite substandard infrastructure, low incomes and more than a decade of continuous war. In the future, smart actors in reconstruction efforts—governments, multinational organizations and aid groups—will recognize the telecoms’ value immediately and prioritize network building accordingly, rather than considering telecoms to be competitors or afterthoughts.

Because telecommunications is a profitable business (and never more so than after a crisis, when activity levels are unusually high), there will be ample opportunity for local and transnational entrepreneurs to participate. Talented local engineers will use open-source software to build their own platforms and applications to help the nascent economy, or they will collaborate with outside companies or organizations and contribute their skills. Much of the investment in the telecommunications space will be straightforward transactions and efforts to provide helpful services to the population, but there is some risk that the business leaders who emerge will come to constitute a new digital oligarchy. They might be well-connected local businessmen, taking advantage of the post-disaster environment to capture a key industry, or foreign executives looking to expand their empire. Regulation, again, will be key: As with all reconstruction efforts, those in charge will have to be wary of such maneuvers in a chaotic and highly malleable environment, and use their oversight effectively.

Mixed with entrepreneurs and digital oligarchs will be another group of foreign investors, members of the country’s diaspora and others whose interests are personal rather than simply financial. In the future, investors looking to connect with new countries will find that global connectivity produces a much deeper and more multifaceted type of engagement. Real-time news alerts, active social networks and instant language translation will enable investors to feel much closer to the countries they operate in, akin to the deep knowledge possessed by diasporic communities around the world. This will lead to better and longer investments and a more fruitful relationship for both the investors and the societies with which they interact.

Few understand this better than Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom magnate and currently the world’s richest person. Slim is also a part of the fifteen-million-strong Lebanese diaspora—his father emigrated to Mexico from Lebanon in 1902, fleeing the conscription of the Ottoman Empire army. Today, through a variety of companies, Slim maintains business interests around the world (including an 8 percent stake in The New York Times). He described to us how his experience as a child of immigrants has shaped his perspective. “I think that more than feeling just Lebanese, I feel I am part of the world altogether,” he said. “Today, I feel I am a compromise between being Lebanese and relating to the challenges there, but also being a businessman in Latin America and with the responsibility I feel towards countries where I am doing business.”

His experience is not unique, he explained, and in the future he predicted that everyone will become “more global and more local,” with overlapping regional interests born from personal heritage, business opportunities and plain curiosity. He described himself as part of a new group that he calls the “business diaspora,” where, as a transnational businessman, he believes, “We are not going to countries just to put money in and pull it out. We are making business to stay and be part of the development of the country.” You can look at this as something “romantic,” he added, but it’s also smart business: “The reality is that business gets better if you grow the market, the demand, the customers and the possibilities.”

As entry barriers lower for business in an increasingly interconnected world, the experience of being a member of the “business diaspora” will not just be reserved for those with the means to invest large amounts of capital. Imagine, for example, that a computer-science student in Indiana develops a game for a popular social-networking site that suddenly takes off among users in Sri Lanka. The student and aspiring entrepreneur might not even have a passport (much less know anything about Sri Lanka), yet his game becomes highly profitable, whatever the reasons. His curiosity piqued, the student adds Sri Lankan friends on Facebook and Google+, follows local news on Twitter and begins to learn about, and travel to, the country. In short order, he develops a digital kinship with the country, which will last for years to come. Millions of entrepreneurs, apps developers and businessmen will experience something similar in the future, because the markets online will be bigger and more diverse than anyone truly anticipates.

In a reconstruction setting, this outlook is of course encouraging, but even the most organized and well-meaning telecom companies will never supplant the heavy-duty work of governing institutions. There are basic goods and social services that only a government can provide to its population, like security, public-health programs, clean water supplies, transport infrastructure and basic education. Connectivity and telecommunications will improve the efficacy of these functions but only in partnership with institutional actors on the ground, as the following example shows.

With its initial collapse, in 1991, Somalia became the world’s premier failed state. Famines, clan warfare, external aggression, terrorist insurgencies and regional fragmentation have foiled transitional government after transitional government. Over the past several years, the growth of mobile phones in Somalia has been one of the few success stories to emerge amid this anarchy. Even in the absence of security or a functioning government, the telecommunications industry has come to play a critical role in many aspects of society, providing Somalis with jobs, information, security and critical connections to the outside world. In fact, the telecoms are just about the only thing in Somalia that is organized, that transcends clan and tribal dynamics, and that functions across all three regions: South Central Somalia (Mogadishu), Puntland in the northeast and Somaliland in the northwest. Only one commercial bank exists in Somalia (founded in May 2012), and until there were mobile phones, in order to move money Somalis had to rely on informal hawala networks, in which no transaction records are kept. Today, mobile money-transfer services allow hundreds of thousands of Somalis to move money around inside the country and receive remittances from abroad. SMS-based platforms allow subscribers to use e-mail and receive stock tips and weather information.

Foreign NGOs and companies regularly launch mobile-technology pilot projects to improve the prospects for the Somali population in small ways; we’ve seen attempts to build SMS-based job-matching platforms and remote-diagnosis mobile health-care systems, among others. Yet most are unsuccessful in establishing a foothold—unsurprising, given the exceptionally hostile security and business environment. So most of the innovation that comes from Somalia today comes from the Somalis themselves; in this as elsewhere in the developing world, the most creative solutions emerge at the local level, driven by necessity more than anything else.

The absence of government in Somalia has meant that the telecommunications sector is unregulated, which drives down prices because entrepreneurs can step in and build a network if they see an opportunity (and have a sufficient appetite for risk). This is a common pattern when a government stops functioning. In the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, a Bahraini telecom tried to expand into southern Iraq and capitalize on sectarian ties between that area, which is largely Shia, and Bahrain, which has a Shia majority, to win new customers. The occupying military forces, concerned about inflaming sectarian tensions, ultimately blocked the telecom’s venture.

The extreme laissez-faire business environment in Somalia has produced some of the cheapest local, international and Internet rates in Africa, making mobile usage far more possible for a deeply impoverished population. When members of the Somali diaspora in the United States call their family back home, their relatives will often hang up and call them back. Without a government demanding taxes, charging for licenses or imposing regulatory costs, telecoms can keep costs low to expand their subscriber base while still turning a profit. Somalia’s mobile penetration is much higher than one might expect, hovering somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. The four main telecom operators offer voice and data service across the country, and sixty to seventy miles into neighboring Kenya as well.

Despite these achievements in communications, Somalia remains an exceptionally insecure country, and insurgents have used the country’s connectivity to further this volatility. Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents send threatening calls and messages to African Union peacekeepers. Islamist radicals impose bans on mobile banking platforms and sabotage telecommunications infrastructure. Pirates on the Somali coast use local telecom networks to communicate because they worry their satellite phones can be tracked by international warships. In a February 2012 report, the United Nations Security Council added the head of Somalia’s largest telecom, Hormuud, to its list of individuals subject to a travel ban after identifying him as one of al-Shabaab’s chief financiers. (The report also said the man, Ali Ahmed Nur Jim’ale, set up Hormuud’s mobile money-transfer system in order to facilitate anonymous funding to al-Shabaab.)

Certainly, the situation in Somalia is complex. But should the country emerge from its cocoon of instability anytime soon, the new government will surely find willing partners in the national telecom operators.

Ideally, reconstruction efforts strive not only to re-create what existed before, but to improve on the original and develop practices and institutions that reduce the risk of repeated disasters. The majority of postcrisis societies, while diverse in detail, have the same basic needs, roughly analogous to the basic components of state-building. These include administrative control of territory, a monopoly on the means of violence, sound management of public finances, investment in human capital, ensuring the provision of infrastructure and creating citizenship rights and duties.² Efforts to meet these needs, while heavily dependent on the international community (financially, technically and diplomatically), must be led by the postcrisis state itself. If reconstruction is not seen as homegrown or at least consistent with the political and economic aims of the society, the likelihood of failure increases dramatically.

Technology will help protect property rights, safeguarding virtual records of real assets so that those assets can be quickly reclaimed when stability returns. Investors are not likely to put their money into a country where they feel insecure about the safety and ownership of their property. In post-invasion Iraq, three commissions were created to allow local people and returning exiles to reclaim or receive compensation for property seized during Saddam Hussein’s regime. A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict instability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of protection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, like a fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government. In the emerging reconstruction prototype, virtual institutions will exist in parallel with their physical counterparts and serve as a backup in times of need. Instead of having a physical building for a ministry, where all records are kept and services rendered, that information will be digitized and stored in the cloud, and many government functions will be conducted on online platforms. If a tsunami destroys a city, all ministries will continue to function with some competence virtually while they are reconstituted physically.

Virtual institutions will allow new or shell-shocked governments to maintain much of their effectiveness in the delivery of services, as well as keep those governments an integral part of all reconstruction efforts. Virtual institutions won’t be able to do everything that they might otherwise do, but they will be of enormous help. The department of social services, charged with allocating shelter, still needs physical outposts to interact with the population, but with more data it will be able to allocate beds efficiently and keep track of the resources available, among other things. A virtual military can’t instill the rule of law, but it can ensure that the military and police are paid, which will assuage some fears. While governments will still be somewhat wary of entrusting their data to cloud providers, the peace of mind that backed-up institutions ensure will still be enough to justify their creation.

These institutions will offer a safety net for the population too, guaranteeing that records are preserved, employers can pay salaries, and databases of citizens both in the country and in the diaspora will be maintained. All of this will accelerate local ownership of the reconstruction process and help limit the waste and corruption that typically follow a disaster or conflict. Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure, but virtual institutions will survive.

Governments in exile will be capable of functioning far differently from the Polish, Belgian and French governments that were forced to operate from London during World War II. Given how well virtual institutions will function, future governments will operate remotely with a level of efficiency and reach that is unprecedented. This will be a move born of necessity, because of either a natural disaster or something more prolonged, like civil war. Imagine if Mogadishu suddenly became inoperably hostile for the beleaguered Somali government, perhaps because al-Shabaab insurgents captured the city or because clan warfare rendered the environment uninhabitable. With virtual institutions in place, government officials could relocate temporarily, inside or outside the country, and retain some semblance of control over the civil administration of the state. At a minimum, they could maintain a level of credibility with the population by arranging for salaries to be paid, coordinating with aid organizations and foreign donors, and communicating with the public in a transparent manner. Of course, virtual governance done remotely would never be anything but a last resort (surely, the distance would alter how accountable and credible the government would appear to its citizens), and certain preconditions must be in place for such a system to work, including fast, reliable and secure networks; sophisticated platforms; and a fully connected population. No state would be ready to do this today—Somalia least of all—but if countries can begin building such systems now, they will be ready when they are needed.

The potential for remote virtual governance might well affect political exiles. Whereas public figures living outside their homelands once had to rely on back channels to stay connected—the Ayatollah Khomeini famously relied on audiocassette tapes recorded in Paris and smuggled into Iran to spread his message in the 1970s—there are a range of faster, safer and more effective alternatives today. In the future, political exiles will have the ability to form powerful and competent virtual institutions, and thus entire shadow governments, that could interact with and meet the needs of the population at home.

It’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Thanks to connectivity, exiles will be far less estranged from the population than their predecessors. Acutely attuned to the trends and moods at home, they’ll be able to expand their reach and influence among the population with targeted messaging on simple, popular devices and platforms. Exile leaders won’t need to be concentrated in one place to form a party or movement; the differences between them that matter will be ideological, not geographic. And when these exiles have a coherent platform and vision for the country, they’ll be able to transmit their plans to the population at home without ever stepping foot inside the country, quickly, securely and in so many million copies that the official government will be unable to stop the flow.

To buttress their campaign for public support, exiles will use the virtual institutions they control to win the hearts and minds of the population. Imagine a shadow government that pays and deploys an in-country security force comprising various foreign nationals to protect community strongholds, while providing e-health benefits from Paris (independent hospital administrations, coordinating free vaccination campaigns, extending virtual health-insurance plans, coordinating a network of remote doctors available for diagnostic work) and running online schools and universities from London. This government-in-exile could elect its own parliament, with campaigns and voting taking place entirely online, members drawn from several countries and sessions conducted over live-streaming video channels that can be watched by millions around the world. Even the semblance of a functioning shadow government might be enough to sufficiently sway the population at home to transfer their support from the official government to the one built and operated remotely by the exiles.

The remaining distinguishing feature of a reconstruction prototype will be close engagement with the diaspora communities. Governments-in-exile often draw from the intellectuals in the diaspora, but the role of external communities will not only be political or financial (in the form of remittances). Connectivity means that these groups will be able to work more closely together on a much wider range of issues. The insight and depth of knowledge relevant to reconstruction possessed by members of diaspora communities is invaluable, so with greater access to communication technologies, postcrisis societies will be able to tap into those reserves of human capital in a significant way. We’ve already seen signs of this in some of the world’s recent crises. The Somali diaspora actively used tools like Google Map Maker to identify areas affected by the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, using their local knowledge and connections to compile more accurate reports than outside actors could.

In the future, we will see the creation of diaspora reserve corps, with those living abroad organized by trade: doctors, police officers, construction workers, teachers and so on. States will have an incentive to organize their diaspora communities—assuming those communities are not all political exiles hostile to the state—so that they know who possesses skills that might be required in a country’s time of need.

Today, several diaspora communities are far more successful than the population living back home (this includes the Iranian, Cuban and Lebanese diasporas, but also smaller groups like the Hmong and Somalis). But only portions of these communities are still connected to their native lands; many have, by choice or as a consequence of time, embraced their adoptive countries for the opportunities, security or quality of life they provide. As connectivity spreads, the gap between diaspora and home communities will shrink, as communication technologies and social media strengthen the bonds of culture, language and perspective that connect these distant groups. And those who leave their country as part of a brain drain will be leaving countries far more connected than today, even if those places are poor, autocratic or short on opportunities. Members of the diaspora, then, will be able to create a knowledge economy in exile that leverages the strong educational institutions, networks and resources of developed countries and channels them back constructively into their home countries.

Opportunism and Exploitation

In the aftermath of every major conflict or natural disaster, new actors flood the space: aid workers, journalists, U.N. officials, consultants, businessmen, speculators and tourists. Some come to offer their services, while others are hoping to exploit the crisis environment for political or economic gain. Many do both, and rather effectively so.³

Even those who don’t seek financial gain have reasons beyond altruism to get involved. A postcrisis country is a great proving ground for nascent NGOs, and a platform for established nonprofit organizations to demonstrate their value to their donors. This rash of new participants—altruists and opportunists alike—can do great good, and tremendous damage. The challenge for reconstruction planners in the future will be finding ways to balance the interests and actions of all these people and groups in a productive manner.

Generally speaking, connectivity encourages and enables altruistic behavior. People have more insight and visibility into the suffering of others, and they have more opportunities to do something about it. Some scoff at the rise of “slacktivism”—slacker activism, or engaging in social activism with little or no effort—but transnational, forward-thinking organizations like Kiva, Kickstarter and Samasource represent a vision of our connected future. Kiva and Kickstarter are both crowd-funding platforms (Kiva focuses on micro-finance, while Kickstarter focuses mostly on creative pursuits), and Samasource outsources “micro-work” from corporations to people in developing countries over simple online platforms. There are other, less quantifiable ways to contribute to a distant cause than donating money, like creating supportive content or increasing public awareness, both increasingly integral parts of the process.

As more people become connected around the world, we’ll see a proliferation of potential donors and activists ready to contribute to the next high-profile crisis. With real-time information about conflicts and disasters around the world increasingly accessible and available, spread evenly across different platforms in different languages, a crisis in one country can reverberate across the world instantly. Not everyone receiving the news will be spurred to action, but enough people will so that the scale of participation will rise dramatically.

Examining the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake once again will give a good indication of what the future holds. The level of destruction near the capital in Haiti, a densely populated and immensely poor country, was overwhelming: homes, hospitals and institutional buildings collapsed; transportation and communications systems were devastated; hundreds of thousands were killed and 1.5 million more made homeless.⁴ Within hours, neighboring governments sent in emergency-services teams, and within days many countries around the world had pledged or already delivered aid.

The response from the humanitarian community was even more robust. Within days of the earthquake, the Red Cross had raised more than $5 million through an innovative “text to donate” campaign in which mobile users could text “HAITI” to a special short code (90999) to donate $10, automatically charged to their phone bill. In all, some $43 million in aid passed through mobile donation platforms, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, which builds the technical infrastructure many NGOs used. Télécoms Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organization that specializes in emergency telecommunications, deployed on the ground in Haiti one day after the earthquake to establish call centers to allow families to reach loved ones. And just five days after the earthquake, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet humanitarian news service set up the Emergency Information Service, the first of its kind, which allowed Haitians free SMS alert messages to help them navigate the disaster’s impact.

Emergency relief efforts turned into longer-term reconstruction projects, and within months there were tens of thousands of NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. It’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of aid organizations working efficiently—with clear objectives and without redundancy—in any one place, let alone a country as small, crowded and devastated as Haiti. As the months dragged on, unsettling reports about inefficient aid distribution began to surface. Warehouses were full of unused pharmaceuticals left to expire because of poor management. Cholera outbreaks in the sprawling informal settlements threatened to wipe out many of the earthquake survivors. The delivery of funding from institutional donors, mostly governments, was delayed and difficult to keep track of; very little of the funding ever reached the Haitians themselves, having been utilized instead by any number of foreign organizations higher up on the chain. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were still in unsanitary tent cities a year after the earthquake, because the government and its NGO partners had not yet found a way to otherwise house them. For all the coverage, the fund-raising, the coordination plans and the good intentions, Haitians were not well served in the post-earthquake environment.

People well qualified to say what transpired in Haiti have examined this fallout with great acumen—including Paul Farmer in his book Haiti After the Earthquake—and the consensus seems to be that this was an unfortunate confluence of factors: extensive devastation meeting bureaucratic inefficiency amid a backdrop of deeply entrenched preexisting challenges. Communication technologies could not have hoped to ameliorate all of Haiti’s woes, but there are many areas where, if correctly and widely utilized, coordinated online platforms can streamline this process so that a future version of the Haitian earthquake will produce more good results and less waste in a faster recovery period. Throughout this section we will present a few of our own ideas, knowing full well that the institutional actors in reconstruction settings—the large NGOs, the foreign government donors and all the rest—may be unwilling to take these steps for fear of failure or loss of influence in the future.

As we look ahead to the next wave of disasters and conflicts that will occur in a more connected age, we can see a pattern emerging. The mixture of more potential donors and impressive online marketing will create an “NGO bubble” within each postcrisis society, and eventually that bubble will burst, ultimately leading to a greater decentralization of aid and a rash of new experiments.

Historically, what has differentiated established aid organizations is less their impact than their brand: catchy logos, poignant advertisements and prominent endorsements go much further toward attracting public donations than detailed reports about logistics, antimalarial bed nets or incremental successes. There is perhaps no better recent example of this than the now infamous Kony 2012 video, produced by the nonprofit organization Invisible Children to generate awareness about a multi-decade-long war in northern Uganda. While the NGO’s mission to end atrocities by a Ugandan militant group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was noble, many who were intimately familiar with the conflict—including many Ugandans—found the video misleading, simplistic and, ultimately, self-serving. Yet the video amassed more than 100 million views in under a week (making it the first viral video to do so), largely thanks to endorsements from prominent celebrities with millions of followers on Twitter. Early criticism of the NGO and its operations—like its 70 percent overhead in “production costs” (basically, salaries)—did little to stem the swelling movement, until it was abruptly ended by a very public and bizarre detention of one of the organization’s cofounders after he exposed himself in public.

As we have already said, we will see a more level playing field for marketing in the digital era. Anyone with a registered NGO or charity (and perhaps not even that) can produce a flashy online platform with high-quality content and cool mobile apps. After all, this is the fastest and easiest way for an individual or group to make its mark. The actual substance of the organization—how robust or competent it is, how it handles finances, how good its programs might or might not be—matters less. Like certain start-up revolutionaries who value style over substance, new participants will find ways to exploit the blind spots of their supporters; in this case, these groups can take advantage of the fact that donors have little real sense of what it’s like on the ground. So when a disaster strikes and NGOs pour into the space, the established ones will find themselves shoulder to shoulder with NGO start-ups, groups that have a strong online presence and starter funds but that are generally untested. Such start-ups will be more targeted in their mission than traditional aid organizations, and they’ll appear equally if not more competent than their established counterparts. They’ll attract attention but they’ll deliver less of what is needed by those they are trying to help; some might be capable but most won’t be, as they will lack the networks, the deep knowledge and the operational skills of professional organizations.

This mismatch between the start-ups’ marketing and delivery will infuriate the established players. Start-ups and institutional NGOs will compete for the same resources, and the start-ups will use their digital savvy and knowledge of different online audiences to their advantage to siphon off resources from the older organizations. They’ll depict the large institutional actors as lumbering, inefficient and out of touch, with high overheads, large staffs and impersonal qualities, promising instead to bring donors much closer to the recipients of aid by cutting out the middlemen. For new potential donors looking to contribute, this promise of directness will be a particularly attractive selling point since connectivity ensures that many of them will feel personally involved in the crisis already.

The concerned and altruistic young professional in Seattle with a few dollars to spare will not just “witness” every future disaster but will also be bombarded with ways to help. His inbox, Twitter feed, Facebook profile and search results will be clogged. He’ll be overwhelmed but he will comb through the options and attempt to make a fast but serious judgment call based on what he sees—which group has the best-looking website, the most robust social-media presence, the highest-profile supporters. No expert, how is he to decide which organization is the right one to donate to? He’ll have to rely on the trust he feels for a certain group, and in this, organizations with strong marketing skills that can pitch to him (or his profile) directly will have the edge.

There is a real risk of the traditional NGOs being crowded out by these start-up organizations. Some start-ups will be genuinely helpful, but not all will be genuine. Opportunists will take advantage of the new possibilities for direct marketing and the lower bar to entry. When those groups are eventually held to account, it will weaken donor trust (and probably generate momentum to expose more fraudulent participants). There will also be an oversupply of vanity projects from known celebrities and business leaders, whose high-wattage campaigns will only further distract attention from the real work needed to be done on the ground. In all, the result of turning “doing good” into a marketing competition means more players but less real help, as established organizations are pushed aside.

Intervention, as we’ve said before, requires expertise. Coordinating aid, enabling government oversight and setting realistic expectations all become harder as the field becomes more crowded. Technology can help with this. The government could keep a centralized database of all NGO actors and then register, monitor and rank each one on an online platform with the help of the public. There already are monitoring and rating systems for NGOs—Charity Navigator, One World Trust’s civil-society organizations (CSO) database, and NGO Ratings—but these have mostly been NGOs themselves, even if they are helping to impose accountability, and beyond shining a spotlight on bad practices, they have no real enforcement abilities. Imagine an AAA-rating system for NGOs, where data about organizations’ activities, finances and management, along with reviews from the local community and aid recipients, is used to generate a ranking that can help guide donors and their investments. The ratings would have real-world implications, including NGOs’ losing eligibility for government funding if they fall below a certain score, or facing additional government scrutiny and processes. Without an integrated, transparent rating-and-monitoring system, governments and donors will come under a deluge of appeals from different aid organizations and they will have limited means to discern the legitimate and competent ones.

In the end, like all bubbles, this one will burst, as processes become delayed and institutional donors lose faith in reconstruction efforts. When the dust settles, those organizations left standing will be well-positioned NGOs with a targeted focus, strong donor loyalty and the ability to demonstrate a history of efficient and transparent operations. Some will be established aid groups and others will be new, but they will share certain characteristics that make them well suited for reconstruction work in the digital age. They will run solid programs with data-generating results, and pair their efforts on the ground with savvy digital marketing that both showcases their work and allows for responsive feedback from donors and aid recipients alike. The appearance of accountability and transparency will count for a lot.

The trend toward more direct engagement between donors and recipients on the ground will survive as well. NGOs will adopt new methods that aim to satisfy the desire to provide more intimate relationships, and in doing so they will accelerate another long-term trend visible today: the decentralization of aid distribution. By this we mean the move away from several key nodes (a few large, institutional NGOs) to networks of smaller conduits. Rather than donating to the main office of the Red Cross or Save the Children, increasingly, informed and involved donors will seek out special and specific programs that speak to them directly, or they will take their donations to smaller start-up NGOs that promise equivalent services. Smart, established NGOs will astutely reshape their function to serve more as aggregators than top-down directors, reimagining their role as one of linking donors directly to the people they fund—providing the right personal “experience,” such as connecting doctors in a developed country with those in a country affected by an earthquake—while still retaining complete programmatic control. (To be sure, not all donors will seek such intimate knowledge of the organizations and individuals they support. For them, it will be easy enough to “opt out” of such engagement.)

And we cannot discount the role that individuals in countries suffering disasters or conflict will play in the newly digital aid ecosystem. Connectivity will influence how one of the biggest and most common problems that postcrisis societies face—internally displaced persons (IDPs)—will be helped. Little can be done by outsiders to prevent the conditions that lead to internal displacement within a country—war, famine, natural disaster. But mobile phones will change the future for their victims. Most dislocated people will own handsets, and if they do not (or if they have to leave them behind), relief organizations will distribute phones to them. Refugee camps will be wired with 4G hot spots that allow callers to communicate with each other easily and inexpensively, and with mobile phones, the registration of IDPs will never be easier.

Most IDPs and refugees say that among their greatest challenges is lack of information. They never know how long they’ll be in one place, when food will arrive or how to get some, where they can find firewood, water and health services, and what the security threats are. With registration and specialized platforms to address these concerns, IDPs will be able to receive alerts, navigate their new environment, and receive supplies and benefits from international aid organizations on the scene. Facial-recognition software will be heavily used to find lost or missing persons. With speech-recognition technology, illiterate users will be able to speak the names of relatives and the database will report if they are in the camp system. Online platforms and mobile phones will allow refugee camps to classify and organize their members according to their skills, backgrounds and interests. In today’s refugee camps, there are large numbers of people with relevant and needed skills (doctors, teachers, soccer coaches) whose participation is only leveraged in an ad hoc manner, mobilized slowly through word-of-mouth networks throughout the camps. IDPs in the future should have access to a skills-tracker app, through which they can submit their skills or search a database for what they need, leaving no skill unused or willing participant excluded.

Widespread use of mobile phones will present new opportunities for people looking to shake up the existing model of aid distribution. A few enterprising individuals with a bit of technical know-how will be able to build an open platform where potential aid recipients like themselves can list their needs and personal information, send it to the cloud and then wait for individual donors to select them and send aid directly. This is not unlike the platform that Kiva uses for micro-finance funding, except that it would be broader in scope, more personal in nature and focused on donations instead of loans. (Naturally, a platform like this would encounter a series of mechanical and legal issues that would need to be addressed before it functioned correctly.)

Now imagine if this platform partnered with a bigger organization that could promote it to a much wider audience around the world while providing some measure of verification to assuage skeptical users. In the West, a mother could take a break from watching her child’s soccer game to explore a live global map (interactive and constantly updated) on her iPad, displaying who needed what and where. She would be able to independently decide whom to fund on the basis of individuals’ stories or perceived need levels. Using mobile money-transfer systems already available, that mother could transfer cash or mobile credit to the recipients directly, as quickly and casually as sending a text message.

The challenge with this type of platform is that the onus of marketing falls directly on the aid recipients themselves. Life is hard enough in a refugee camp without having to worry if one’s online profile is sufficiently need-worthy, and the stark competition for resources that such a platform would cause recipients is distasteful in and of itself. There is also the risk of donors who lack good judgment or familiarity with the situation on the ground disproportionately supporting people who have the best marketing campaigns (or who have gamed the system) instead of those who need it most. The consequence of going around established aid organizations is the loss of those groups’ ability to discern levels of need and distribute their resources appropriately. With those controls gone, the free-for-all of direct donations would almost certainly lead to a less equitable division of those resources. An analysis of peer-to-peer lending through Kiva’s website conducted by researchers in Singapore reported that lenders tend to discriminate in favor of attractive, lighter-skinned and less obese borrowers.

Moreover, the emergence of a platform like this assumes that the desire for a closer connection is reciprocated. Aid recipients would have to want to engage in such a connection, and that would strike many who have worked in development as a nonstarter. To be sure, some people in postcrisis countries (as well as developing nations) might embrace the opportunity to directly market themselves if it meant a more reliable source of funding. But the majority will not. Unlike with Kiva, whose recipients are requesting loans, these recipients would be asking for charity—publicly. Pride is a universal human quality, and often when people have little else, they value their pride all the more. It’s hard to imagine that, even if such an open-funding platform were available to them, refugees, IDPs and other recipients would willingly advertise their needs to a global audience. One important function of established aid organizations is the distance they provide between recipients and their funders. So amid all of the changes we have described above—start-up NGOs, micro-targeted programs, decentralized aid—it is worth remembering the reasons certain aspects of the development-and-aid world are as they are, and why they work.

Room for Innovation

If the destruction of institutions and systems caused by upheaval has a silver lining, it’s that it clears the path for new ideas. Innovation exists everywhere, even in the labored and intricate work of reconstruction, and it will be enhanced with a fast network, good leadership and plentiful devices, meaning smart phones and tablets.

We’re already seeing how Internet tools are being refashioned to serve in a postcrisis environment. Ushahidi (the name means “testimony” in Swahili), an open-source crisis-mapping platform that aggregates crowd-sourced data to build a living information map, demonstrated this to great effect after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Using a basic mapping platform, Ushahidi volunteers in the United States built a live crisis map just one hour after the earthquake struck, with a designated short code (4636) for people on the ground to text information to; it was subsequently publicized on national and local Haitian radio stations. Engineers outside Haiti added the data that was collected to an interactive online map that aggregated reports of destruction, needed emergency supplies, trapped people and violence or crime. Many of the text messages were in Creole, so Ushahidi worked with a network of thousands of Haitian-Americans to translate the information, cutting translation time to just ten minutes. Within a few weeks, they’d mapped some 2,500 reports; Carol Waters, Ushahidi-Haiti’s director of communications and partnerships, said that many of those messages simply read, “I’m buried under ruble [sic], but I’m still alive.”

Ushahidi’s quick thinking and quick coding saved lives. In the future, crisis maps like these will become standard and their creation will probably be government-led. By centralizing the information with an official and trusted source, some of the problems that Ushahidi faced (like other NGOs not knowing about the platform) could be avoided. Of course, there is the risk that a government-led project would fall victim to bureaucracy or legal restrictions that would prevent it from keeping up with non-state actors like Ushahidi. But if the response were immediate, there is tremendous potential for a government-led crisis map because it could grow to encompass much more than emergency information. The map could stay active throughout the reconstruction process, and it could serve as a platform through which the government shared and received information about the various reconstruction projects and environments it managed.

For any postcrisis society, citizens could be told where known safe zones (i.e., free of mines or militia) in their neighborhoods were, where the best mobile coverage was or where the largest investments in reconstruction efforts had been made. Citizen reporting on incidents of crime, violence or corruption would keep the government informed. An integrated system of crisis information like this would not only keep the population safer, healthier and more aware, it would also cut some of the waste, corruption and redundancy that reconstruction efforts always generate. Not all postcrisis governments will be interested in such transparency, to be sure, but if the population and the international community were widely aware of the model, there might be sufficient public pressure to adopt it anyway. The delivery of foreign aid could even be made contingent on it. And no doubt there would be many willing non-state partners and volunteers ready to participate in the process.

But the first priority for a postcrisis state is, usually, managing the fragile security environment. Interactive maps can help with that, but they won’t be enough. Those early moments when a conflict ends are the most delicate, because the interim government must demonstrate that it is in control and responsive to the people, or else it risks being chased out by the same population that installed it. In order for daily life to resume, citizens must feel safe enough to reopen businesses, rebuild homes and replant crops, so mitigating the volatility in the environment is vital for building citizen trust in the reconstruction process. Smart uses of technology can help the state reassert the rule of law in important ways.

By virtue of their functionality, mobile phones will become key conduits and valuable assets as the state works to manage the security environment. For countries with a functional military, the question of whether its members will uphold the rule of law—as opposed to defecting, committing criminal acts or seizing power for themselves—will depend less on personal motives than on their faith in the competency of the government. Put simply, for most people in uniform it will come down to whether they receive a paycheck reliably and relatively free of graft; they need to know who is in charge.

Future technology platforms will assist law enforcement in this process by equipping every police and army officer with a specialized handset device that contains several distinct (and highly secure) apps. One app will handle salaries and serve as the interface between officers and the ministry that pays them. In Afghanistan, the telecom Roshan has launched a pilot program to pay Afghan national police officers electronically through a mobile banking platform—a bold move geared toward ending the rampant corruption that cripples the country’s finances. On these specialized phones, another app could require officers to report their daily activities, as they might in a logbook, storing that information in the cloud that commanders could later mine for metrics on efficiency and impact. Other apps could offer training tips or virtual mentors for newly integrated officers—as in the case of Libya, where many of the militia fighters were integrated into the newly created army—and they could provide secure online spaces for anonymous reporting of corruption or other illegal activities by other officers.

Citizen reporting over mobile platforms would strengthen the state’s ability to maintain security, should the two sides choose to work together. Every citizen with a mobile device is a potential witness and investigator, more widely dispersed than any law-enforcement body and ready to document evidence of wrongdoing. In the best cases, citizens will choose to participate in these mobile vigilance activities, out of national sentiment or self-interest, and together with the state they will help build a safer and more honest society. In the worst cases, where large portions of the population distrust the government or favor the ex-combatants (like those who fought the battle against Gadhafi), those citizen-reporting channels could be used to share false information and waste police time.

Citizen engagement will be crucial beyond initial security issues, too. With the right platforms and a government inclined toward transparency, people on the ground will be able to monitor progress, report corruption, share suggestions and become an integral part of the conversations between the government, NGOs and foreign actors—all using mobile phones. We spoke with the Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who remains among the most tech-savvy leaders in Africa, and asked how mobile technology is transforming the way citizens address local challenges. “Where people have needs—economic, security and social—they will turn to their phones,” he said, “because their phones are the only way to protect themselves. People who need immediate help can now get it.” This, he explained, was a game-changer for populations in developing countries and particularly for people emerging from conflict or crisis. Building trust in the government is a crucial task, and by leveraging citizen participation through open platforms, this process can be much quicker and more sustainable: “In Rwanda, we have built a community policing program, where the community passes on information,” Kagame said, stressing that it was made much more efficient by the use of technology.

As crowd-sourcing becomes a defining feature in the future of the rule of law—at least in the aftermath of conflict or disaster—a culture of accountability will slowly emerge. Fears of violence or looting will remain, but societies in the future will have all of their personal possessions and their historical artifacts documented online, so there won’t be a question of what’s missing when security returns. Citizens will be rewarded for sending in photos of thieves (even if they’re police) that show their faces and their loot. The risk of retaliation would be real, but evidence suggests that despite their fear there is almost always a critical mass of people willing to take that risk. And the more people there are willing to report crime, the more the risk to the individual is reduced. Imagine if the ransacking of Iraq’s celebrated Baghdad Museum in 2003 had occurred twenty years later: How long would those thieves have been able to hide their treasures (let alone try to sell them) if their theft had instantly been recorded and broadcast across the country, and other citizens were highly motivated to inform on them?

Lost artifacts damage a society’s dignity and the preservation of its culture, but lost weapons constitute a far greater danger to a country’s stability. Weapons and small arms routinely disappear after conflicts and find their way onto the black market (an estimated $1 billion annual business), later appearing in the hands of militias, gangs and armies in other countries. Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips could represent a solution to this challenge. RFID chips or tags contain electronically stored information and can be as small as a grain of rice. They are ever present today, in everything from our phones and passports to the products we buy. (They’re even in our pets: RFID chips embedded under the skin or on an ear are used to help identify lost animals.) If major states signed treaties that required weapons manufacturers to implant unremovable RFID chips in all of their products, it would make the hunt for arms caches and the interdiction of arms shipments much easier. Given that today’s RFID chips can be easily fried in a microwave, the chips of the future will need a shield that protects them against tampering. (We assume there will be a technological cat-and-mouse game between governments who want to track the weapons with RFID chips and arms traffickers who want to deal the weapons off the grid.) When weapons with RFID chips were recovered, it would be possible to trace where they’d been if the chips themselves were designed to store location data. This wouldn’t stop the trafficking of arms but it would put pressure on the larger actors in the arms trade.

States that donate weapons to rebel movements often want to know what happens to those arms. With RFID chips, such investments could be tracked. The Libyan revolutionaries were an unknown quantity to almost everyone, so in the absence of any tracking capability, governments that distributed arms to them had to weigh the benefit of a successful revolution with the possible consequences of those weapons going underground. (In the beginning of 2012, some of the weaponry that Libyan militias used wound up in Mali with disgruntled Tuareg fighters. This, combined with the return of the Tuareg contingent of Gadhafi’s army, led to a violent antigovernment campaign that created the conditions for a military coup.)

Electronically traceable arms distribution will have to overcome hurdles. It will cost money to design weapons that include the RFID; arms manufacturers profit from a large illicit market for their products; and states and arms dealers alike rather enjoy the anonymity of weapons distribution today. It’s hard to imagine any superpower willingly sacrificing its ability to have plausible deniability regarding arms caches or covertly supplied arms for some long-term greater good. Moreover, states might claim that falsely planting another country’s weapons in a conflict zone would point to their involvement and lead to even more conflict. But international pressure might make a difference.

Luckily, there are myriad other ways the RFID technology can be used in the short term in reconstruction efforts. RFID tags can be used to track aid deliveries and other essential supplies, to verify pharmaceuticals and other products as legitimate, and to generally limit waste or graft in large contracting projects. The World Food Program (WFP) has experimented with tracking food deliveries in Somalia, using bar codes and RFID chips to determine which suppliers are honest and deliver food to the target area. This type of tracking system—inexpensive, ubiquitous and reliable—could demonstrably help streamline the serpentine world of aid distribution by enhancing accountability and providing data that can be used to measure success and effectiveness, even in the least-connected places.

• • •

Another innovative use of mobile devices for a post-conflict government involves handling former combatants. Trading in weapons for handsets may become a key feature of any disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) program. Paul Kagame’s government, while controversial in human rights and governance communities, has overseen the demilitarization of tens of thousands of former fighters through the Rwanda Demobilization and Reintegration Project. “We believe that we need to put tools in the hands of ex-combatants to transform their lives,” he explained. In packages handed out to ex-combatants, “We gave them some money, but we also gave them phones so they could see what the possibilities are.” Most ex-combatants coming through the still ongoing program in Rwanda also receive some form of training that will prepare them for reintegration into society. Psychological treatment is an important component as well. We’ve seen these programs in action, and they resemble summer camps, with classrooms, dorms and activities—fitting, since so many of the ex-combatants in Rwanda are practically children. The key is to start them off with hundreds of others who have a shared experience, and then build their confidence that there is a good life on the other side of combat.

Kagame’s words indicate that we are not far away from more countries trying this. In the aftermath of every conflict, the disarmament of former combatants is a top priority. (Disarmament, sometimes referred to as demilitarization or weapons control, is the process of eliminating the military capacities of warring factions, whether they are insurgents, civil enemies or army factions left over from a previous regime.) In a typical DDR program, weapons are transferred from warring parties to peacekeeping forces over a prescribed period of time, often with some form of compensation involved. The longer the conflict, the longer it takes to complete the process. It took years of prolonged fighting between the northern and southern sides in Sudan to produce the state of South Sudan (which we had the opportunity to visit in January 2013), so the urgent need for a comprehensive DDR program was recognized immediately by the new South Sudanese government and the international community. With more than $380 million in aid from the United Nations, China, Japan, Norway and the United States, the Sudanese on both sides of the border agreed to disarm some two hundred thousand former soldiers by 2017. Two neighboring countries, Uganda and Kenya, concerned about the possible spread of combatants-turned-mercenaries and the illegal transport of arms across borders, also pledged their support in order to reinforce regional security—a critical element of the plan. However, there are few regions as unpredictable and conflict prone as the Great Lakes, so pledges must be taken with a grain of salt.

Most post-conflict environments contain armed ex-combatants who find themselves without work, purpose, status or acceptance by society. Unaddressed, these problems can lead former fighters to return to violence—as criminals, militia members or guns for hire—especially if they still have their weapons. As governments seek to create incentives for ex-combatants to turn in their AK-47s, they will find that the prospect of a smart phone might be more than enough to get started. Former fighters need compensation, status and a next step. If they are made to understand that a smart phone represents not just a chance to communicate but also a way to receive benefits and payment, the phone becomes an investment that is worth trading a weapon for.

Each society will offer slightly different packages in this initiative, depending on the culture and the level of technological sophistication, but the essentials of the process have a universal appeal: free top-of-the-line devices, cheap text and voice plans, credit to purchase apps, and data subsidization that allows people to use the Internet and e-mail inexpensively. These smart phones would be of a better quality than much of the population’s and cheaper to use, as well. They could be front-loaded with appealing vocational applications that would provide some momentum for upwardly mobile ex-combatants, like English-language instruction or even basic literacy education. A former child soldier in a South Sudanese refugee camp, who had been forced to leave his family at a young age, could have access to a device that connected him not only to local relatives, but also to potential mentors from the Sudanese diaspora abroad, perhaps young men who had successfully sought asylum in the United States and built wholly new lives for themselves.

Donor nations would likely pay for a program like this in its initial stages, then transfer the cost and control to the state in question. That would allow the government to maintain some leverage over the ex-combatants in its society. There could be software preloaded on the phone that allowed the state to track ex-combatants or monitor their browsing history for some period of time; ex-combatants would risk losing the data plan or the phone if they didn’t follow the rules of the program. A state would be able to institute a three-strike policy tied to the geo-location data on these phones: The first time an ex-combatant failed to check in with his equivalent of a probation officer at a prescribed time, he would receive a short video warning; the second failure would result in the data plan being suspended for some length of time, and the third failure would lead to the cancellation of the data plan and the repossession of the device.

Of course, enforcement would be a challenge, but the state would at least have more leverage than it would from a one-time cash payment. And there are ways to make this program desirable beyond useful apps and status-symbol phones. Ex-combatants will likely rely on pensions or benefits to provide for their families, so integrating those payments into a mobile money system is a smart way to keep the former fighters on the right path.

In order for this arms-for-phones project to work, however, it would need to be tied to a comprehensive and successful program—mobile phones alone would not get thousands of former fighters reintegrated in any sustainable way. As part of the reintegration and accountability programs, some ex-combatants would receive cash or special features for their device in exchange for photographs of arms caches or mass graves. Ex-combatants would have to feel fairly treated and adequately compensated to surrender both their guns and their sense of authority; programs that included counseling and classes in job skills would be important for helping these individuals transition into civilian life.

In Colombia, a largely successful DDR program to reintegrate former guerrilla fighters into society involved a wide network of support centers for ex-combatants, offering them educational, legal, psychosocial and health services. Unlike many other DDR programs, which are run far away from city centers, the government of Colombia made the bold move of placing many of the reintegration houses in the middle of the city. The government identified a need early on to build confidence in the program, both on the ex-combatant side and within society. Set up much like homes for runaway teens, these houses eventually became part of the community, with neighbors and other locals getting involved. The government used ex-combatants as spokespersons for why Colombians should not turn to violence. They spoke at universities, addressed former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—a forty-eight-year-old Colombian terrorist organization—and conducted community roundtables.

It’s unclear whether communication technologies will help or hinder the reconciliation process for noncombatants. On one hand, the ubiquity of devices during a conflict will help empower citizens to capture evidence they can use to seek justice in the post-conflict environment. On the other hand, with so much violence and suffering caught on digital tape (stored in perpetuity, and shared widely), it’s possible that the social or ethnic divisions that engendered the conflict will solidify when the volume of data is brought to light. The healing process for societies torn apart by civil or ethnic conflict is painful enough, and it requires a certain collective memory loss. With much more evidence, there will be much more to forgive.

In the future, technology will be used to document and record the implementation of various transitional justice processes, including reparations, vetting (like de-Baathification efforts), truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and even trials, making each of them more accessible and transparent. There are good and bad aspects to this shift. The televised trial of Saddam Hussein was cathartic for many Iraqis, but it also gave the late dictator and his supporters a stage on which to perform. Then again, as Nigel Snoad, a former senior U.N. aid worker now at Google, predicted, “Human-rights and justice groups can build a system for people to create memorials and to tell the story of those killed and who disappeared in the conflict.” Using these testimonials and memorials, he said, groups could “bring together stories from both sides, and despite conflicting accounts and occasional online flame wars (character bashing over the Internet through discussion lists and comments), create a space for apologies, truth-telling and an emerging reconciliation.”

The slow, painful mechanics of reconciliation will not be eliminated by Internet technology, nor should they be. Public admissions of guilt, sentencing and punishment, and gestures of forgiveness, are all cathartic for a society recovering from conflict. Today’s models for criminal prosecution at the international level—for crimes against humanity—are slow, bureaucratic and prone to corruption. Dozens of criminals sit in the International Criminal Court (ICC)—more casually referred to as The Hague—for many months before their trials even start. In today’s post-conflict environments, local court systems and indigenous local bodies are frequently preferred over the international institutions that lag behind.

The spread of technology is likely to exacerbate this trend. The sheer volume of digital evidence of crimes and violence will raise expectations that justice must be done, yet the glacial pace displayed by international judicial bodies like the ICC will limit how quickly such bodies adapt to these changes. For example, the ICC is unlikely to ever accept unverified videos captured on a mobile phone as evidence in its highly procedural trials (although organizations like Witness are trying to challenge this), but local judicial systems, with fewer legal constraints and a more flexible attitude, might be more open to developments in digital watermarking that will allow firsthand videos to be effectively authenticated. People will increasingly show their preference for these judicial avenues.

A local setting means that adjudicators, whether they are formal judges, tribal chiefs or community leaders, must have an intimate and expansive knowledge of the society—internal dynamics, main actors, major villains and all the nuances that international or distant bodies struggle to understand. When presented with digital evidence, the need for verification is lower, because the people and places are already familiar. In a postcrisis setting, there is also a distinct pressure from the community to mete out justice quickly. Whether these courts would be more or less fair than their international counterparts is a matter of debate, but they’ll surely move faster.

This trend could be manifested in future truth-and-reconciliation committees, or in temporary judicial structures after a major conflict. After the Rwandan genocide, the country’s new government rejected the South African truth-and-reconciliation model, arguing that reconciliation would take place only when the guilty were punished. But the formal judicial system took too long to process alleged genocidaires; more than a hundred thousand Rwandans sat in jail for several years waiting for their time in court. So a new system of local courts was built, taking inspiration from a grassroots, community-based conflict-resolution process known as “gacaca.” Under gacaca tribunals, the accused were confronted by the community and offered a commuted sentence if they confessed their crimes, shed light on what happened or identified the remains of those they killed. Despite being based in village justice, the gacaca tribunal system was a complex structure, involving different phases for judgment. The first phase was referred to as the cell level; in it the accused were brought before a tribunal of people in the community where the crime was committed. This tribunal determined the severity of the crime—whether the accused should be tried at the sector, district or province level, all three of which deal with appeals. The gacaca system was far from perfect. It came with the full panoply of traditional cultural prejudices, including the exclusion of women as judges and a failure to prosecute crimes committed against women with the same ferocity as those against men. These caveats aside, justice was fast, and the participating community generally felt satisfied with the process. Subsequent postcrisis governments elsewhere in the world have looked at adopting this model given how effective it was at advancing numerous reconciliation goals.

Whether citizens in the future choose to take their digital evidence to The Hague or to local judicial bodies, they will certainly have more opportunities to participate in the transitional justice-and-reconciliation process. They can instantly upload documents, photos and other evidence from a conflict or a former repressive regime to an international cloud-based data bank that will categorize and add the information to the relevant open files, to be used later by courts, journalists and others. Participatory memorials and inclusive feedback loops that allow populations to express their grievances in an organized manner—perhaps communities will use algorithmic argument mapping to aggregate the most prescriptive feedback—will help retain the confidence of groups that, once a conflict is over, might begin to feel neglected. Citizens will be able to watch the justice process unfold in real time, with live-streaming trials of major figures halfway across the world available on their phones, and a wealth of information about each stage of the process at their fingertips. Documenting the crimes (both physical and virtual) of a fallen regime serves a broader purpose beyond prosecution: Once every dirty secret of the former state is published online, no future government will be able to do quite the same things. Political observers always worry about a post-conflict state’s slide back into autocracy and watch keenly for signs of such a return; the full exposure of the former regime’s wrongdoings—how exactly it brutalized dissidents, how it spied on citizens’ online activities, how it hid money out of the country—will help forestall such possibilities.

Among all of the topics we’ve covered, the future of reconstruction is perhaps where the greatest share of optimism belongs. Little can be more devastating to a country and a population than natural disaster or war, or both, and yet we see a clear trend of postcrisis transitions occurring in shorter time periods with more satisfactory results. Unlike many avenues in geopolitics, the world does learn from each reconstruction example what works, what doesn’t and what can be improved upon. Clever applications of communications technology and widespread connectivity will accelerate rebuilding, inform and empower the people, and help forge a better, stronger and more resilient society. All it takes is a bit of creativity, plenty of bandwidth and the will to innovate.

¹ These difficulties were compounded by the fact that the United States set up operational headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, which had been turned into electronically shielded bunkers by the paranoid dictator.

² We take these duties from a list of the ten functions of the state in the book Fixing Failed States, by Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani, the founders of the Institute for State Effectiveness.

³ The journalist Naomi Klein famously called these actors “disaster capitalists” in her provocative book The Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that neo-liberal economics advocates seek to exploit a postcrisis environment to impose free-market ideals, usually to the detriment of the existing economic order. Like psychological shock therapy, this free-market fundamentalism uses the appearance of a “blank slate” to violently reshape the economic environment.

⁴ Estimates on the death toll of the Haitian earthquake vary widely. The Haitian government believes 316,000 people were killed, while a leaked memo from the U.S. government put the figure somewhere between 46,190 and 84,961.