2026 Peace, Conflict & Justice Conference

Welcome to Digital Faultlines: Peace, Conflict and Justice in the Digital Age happening at the Campbell Conference Facility at 1 Devonshire Pl on February 6, 2026 from 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time). Join us for a day filled with insightful discussions and networking opportunities. This conference aims to bring together experts and students passionate about topics related to peace, conflict, and justice. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn, connect, and be inspired! Mark your calendars and be part of this impactful event.

The 2026 Peace, Conflict & Justice Conference critically examines the transformative role of digital technology and digital media in shaping memory, justice, and collective identity. This year’s theme explores how digital spaces can serve as both sites of resistance, justice, and political possibility, but also as tools of repression that exacerbate deep-rooted inequalities and grievances.

The conference offers an opportunity for students and scholars to engage in critical discourse on pressing social and political issues. Participants are invited to consider how the digital sphere mediates our understanding of past and present conflict to set the vision for the future. In this conference, we examine how digital platforms are used to preserve cultural identity and history, contest violence operating at the peripheries of society, and reimagine transitional justice processes. The digital sphere emerges both as an archive of the past and a lifeline for the present; a space where identities are preserved, power dynamics are negotiated, and justice is pursued.

This forum explores how Palestinians have used digital platforms to share information, mobilize communities, and maintain connections across fragmented spatial boundaries. We explore how digital spaces and digital media document erasure, engage with international audiences, and construct a sense of cultural identity that transcends physical borders. These networks create transnational ties between Palestinians in the homeland and diaspora, helping sustain community cohesion despite geographic and political barriers. At the same time, this forum interrogates how the very same digital infrastructures are used as instruments of surveillance, propaganda, and control. From targeted content moderation and censorship to propaganda and data surveillance, states and institutions have leveraged technology to limit Palestinian’s digital activism and shape global narratives about conflict.

This forum examines how the digital turn in technology has transformed migration politics and border governance in North America, transforming both the management of mobility and experiences of displacement. Drawing on recent scholarship on digital border violence and digital surveillance regimes in North American borderlines, this forum investigates how technologies that operate under the guise of efficiency and collective security reproduce and intensify harm. Digital infrastructures now mediate access to asylum and mobility through tools such as biometric databases, predictive analytics, and AI-driven monitoring systems that exacerbate indirect and direct forms of violence, including prolonged asylum wait times, deportation harassment, and abandonment in remote areas. At the same time, the growing border surveillance industry centred around the expansion of AI and data extraction has turned migration control into a site of commodification and profit, deepening the interconnections between safety and security, technology, and capital. By foregrounding our discussion on violence and power dynamics instead of geography itself, this forum situates digital migration governance as a key site of contestation. Participants are invited to analyze how activists, refugees, and border authorities interact through technological systems, the malleability of their identities as facilitated by digital means, and questions about who is pushed to the peripheries and who profits from the control of movement.

In societies scarred by prolonged injustice, transitional justice frameworks offer pathways to recognize past atrocities, achieve justice, and foster collective healing. This forum examines how digital technologies have reshaped transitional justice practices, offering both opportunities and introducing risks for victims, communities, and institutions. Digital tools have increasingly been used to document and preserve cultural memory, including archives, testimonies, photographs, and in participatory research methods such as photovoice. These recent innovations allow researchers, civil society, and communities to collect, store, and disseminate evidence of past atrocities, facilitate participatory engagement, and strengthen the visibility of survivors’ voices. However, the integration of digital technologies into this sphere introduces two contrasting dynamics. For one, digital tools have the potential to redirect power toward survivors and communities affected by conflict and going through transitional post-conflict periods by facilitating participatory data collection, amplifying marginalized voices, and creating platforms for collective memory and advocacy. At the same time, this reliance on digital platforms can create new vulnerabilities. Digitized materials may be accessed by unauthorized parties, subject to censorship or misrepresentation. Furthermore, communities that lack reliable digital infrastructure or digital literacy skills risk exclusion and the misuse and exploitation of sensitive data by state and non-state actors. An overemphasis on quantitative digital documentation can also obscure local, context-specific practices of memory and justice. This serves as a reminder to recentre discussions around people instead of the numbers quantifying human experience. By considering these dual perspectives, this forum encourages critical discussions on how digital tools simultaneously enable and constrain agency, participation, and justice.

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Host or Publisher Peace, Conflict and Justice Student Society