Digital Nonviolence: a New Research Agenda

The past decades witnessed the rise in the use of nonviolent techniques to empower people and support democratic transitions. Today, waging nonviolent conflict is dramatically changing due to the advent of the Onlife era and the development of AI. We explore and critically discuss the coordinates of a new emerging research agenda: digital nonviolence, presenting a typology of dimensions of digital nonviolence, illustrated with cases from both democratic and non-democratic settings. There are already many cases of the use of internet and social media in struggles of many movements and groups around the world against dictators, corruption and human rights. Further, there is evidence of AI deployed to help whistle-blowers and protesters. Yet, there are also cases in which internet, and especially AI, can help to build here and now an alternative society – a sort of digital constructive programme in Gandhian terms. Within this last category, we analyse one case of digital nonviolent action using AI to build a different reality: the Chatbot on Euthanasia developed by the nonviolent organisation Luca Coscioni in Italy to inform patients and help them to consciously and freely make end-of-life decisions. We unveil the social mechanisms and the policy consequences of such bottom-up initiative relying on an AI tool. Finally, we draw on both our typology and the case study to reflect on the consequences that this new field of digital nonviolence has on the meaning of nonviolence itself, and on its role for the development of democracy in the XXI century. Far from being exclusively a problem that needs to be regulated and tamed, if not criminalized, trustworthy AI has the potential to become a powerful ally of nonviolence, especially in the struggle to democratise democracy.