We have thus far extensively reviewed the drivers and wider effects of election violence with a special focus on how it’s experienced in the U.S. A deep understanding of the research on election violence highlights possible prevention and mitigation strategies. For instance, understanding that toxic polarization is characterized by the dehumanization of “the other” highlights the critical importance of community initiatives fostering dialogue and mutual trust across political divides. Or, understanding the ways that women experience election violence differently than men enables the creation of strategies better equipped to protect female candidates and ensure their political participation.
Yet, our understanding of how to prevent election violence is also informed by those currently engaged in that work. These practitioners—working to address underlying grievances; counter hate speech, misinformation, and other polarizing messages in their communities; or prevent the outbreak of violence through other activities—have a wealth of knowledge. They have strong evidence for what works. Therefore, to address the question of what can be done to prevent election violence, we invited our friends and colleagues at Search for Common Ground (Search) to contribute their on-the-ground expertise. Below, they share a global perspective from frontline peacebuilders who work to prevent election violence outside the U.S., while also highlighting ongoing efforts to do much of the same work in the U.S.
Mexico, Kenya, and Pakistan: Lessons on Election Violence
Written by Milkee Bekele, Global Policy Fellow, Search for Common Ground
In the past five years, the world has seen the tides of governance change, ushering in a reconceptualization of how we understand peace, technology, and political violence. My efforts to uncover these myriad challenges led me to interview frontline peacebuilders in Mexico, Kenya, and Pakistan to better understand the link between peacebuilding and election violence. Experience from the general elections in Kenya (2022), Mexico (2024), and Pakistan (2024) can inform peacebuilding approaches to the upcoming November elections in the United States and beyond. Building on my conversation with peacebuilders, I will explore how social media, governance transparency, and electoral legitimacy impact civilians’ engagement through election processes and inform Search for Common Ground’s (Search’s) election violence mitigation efforts in Kenya and Pakistan.
Political discourse on social media provides a window into civic engagement with the maintenance of democracy throughout election cycles. Social media can be a space that encourages essentialization and polarized narratives that can ignite election violence, as noted by peacebuilders in Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan. Political candidates in all three countries used social media to spread misinformation about the election process and attack civil society and journalists covering the election. In Pakistan, peacebuilders noted that social media has been a tool to exacerbate offline polarizing sentiments by spreading fake news online. While social media can be a tool for increasing divisiveness, it also has been used to build peace by reducing tensions and amplifying the voices of civil society and local communities. For instance, during the 2022 elections, university students in Kenya took on roles as digital peacebuilders, by directly addressing hate speech and polarization occurring in their social media circles. Additionally, Kenyans used social media to report on incidents of violence and electoral conflict within their communities. The use of media to report and map hate speech, disinformation and misinformation, and other polarizing messages can encourage robust political participation and ensure civil society’s amplification of an inclusive political discourse.
Civic trust in political candidates, electoral processes, and the facilitation of political discourse by media platforms is crucial for discrediting divisive rhetoric in communities and ensuring that collective outcomes are guaranteed. Elections can encourage conflict, but violence does not need to be the outcome. Peacebuilding strategies like denouncing polarizing sentiments can promote equitable participation in political processes. For example, in Kenya, Search collaborated with human rights collectives and civil society organizations to establish the Early Warning and Early Response (EWER) system to empower local communities to combat immediate threats to peaceful election processes. The EWER system provides local actors with expertise to conduct community observation, social media listening, and conflict trend analysis; identify triggers of election violence; and share information between civil society organizations, communities, and political authorities.
Restrictions on political reporting during an election cycle limits the transparency of the electoral process and can lead to disillusionment and a lack of trust in institutions among local communities. For example, in Mexico, the suppression of free media has forced many journalists to use pseudonyms as a means of protecting themselves and their families. Transparency also reaffirms civil society’s trust in and collaboration with political actors, which can enhance social cohesion. In Pakistan, the government’s decision to suspend cell phone services in response to militant attacks on political offices spurred widespread public dissatisfaction. In these crises, restrictions imposed on voter’s ability to share information impacts civic perception on the integrity and intentions of electoral institutions. Once public doubts on the integrity of elections arise, social divisions become more salient and can be exploited to result in election violence. To prevent social division in Kenya, Search trained and deployed peacebuilders to defuse local tensions in communities throughout the country. Additionally, Search collaborated with civil society, administrative bodies, and judiciary and human rights commissions to ensure that political actors are contributing to policy frameworks that encourage multipartial approaches to election processes.
In my conversations with peacebuilders from Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan, they emphasized that electoral violence against women is a universal issue that can only be mitigated through women’s political participation, even if that doesn’t guarantee women’s personal safety from election violence. It is apparent how online psychological gender-based violence can result in election violence offline and vice versa. During the 2022 elections in Kenya, male candidates used social media to enlarge the political gender gap by discrediting the campaigns of female political candidates. As a result, female candidates in Kenya were much more likely to experience stalking, hacking, doxing, and leaking of their personal information by male voters and social media users. This example showcases the chilling effect of electoral violence on women’s political participation. The inclusion of women in election processes provides opportunities to tackle gender-based violence and fosters a more gender-inclusive narrative around political participation. Maintaining women’s place in the election landscape is about much more than fulfilling gender quotas; it is about ensuring that the link between online and offline violence is severed and that women political officials have policy-making authority. In response to gender-based electoral violence, Search Pakistan established the Pakistan Peace Initiatives (PPI) program to promote dialogue amongst women parliamentarians. The PPI program equipped women parliamentarians with the tools to establish women-led and gender-focused caucuses in national and provincial assemblies throughout Pakistan. Initiatives like the PPI program encourage collaboration between political authorities and civil society to prioritize women’s equal participation in the electoral process. Additionally, policy responses to issues affecting women’s political participation—like gender-based violence—are much more likely to develop, with long-lasting effects on electoral legitimacy because women’s political participation begins on the local level.
My conversations with frontline peacebuilders in Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan provide a microscopic lens into the peacebuilding initiatives and methods that civil society has taken to address the drivers of election violence. Maintaining peaceful and safe elections is a multidimensional issue that requires transparency from political actors, the protection of women from online and offline violence, and the defusing of community tensions through personal and localized methods before these result in violence. Though elections in the U.S. look very different from those in Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan, we witness religious leaders, civil society organizations, and community leaders doing much of the same work, applying violence prevention and peacebuilding strategies to strengthen local communities.
Author Bio
Milkee Bekele is a Global Policy Fellow in the Global Affairs and Partnerships team at Search for Common Ground. As a recent graduate from Macalester College, Milkee’s academic pursuits of international law and conflict studies within the African context have largely been influenced by her upbringing in East Africa. Milkee hopes to draw on these backgrounds to pursue a career in peacebuilding and international human rights law.
Continuing the Conversation
We continued our conversation with Milkee Bekele about her observations on strategies to prevent election violence in Mexico, Kenya, and Pakistan, and how these apply to the U.S.
[PSD] In your conversations with frontline peacebuilders regarding election violence and countering polarization, did anything remind you of what’s happening today in the U.S.?
[MB] Yes, mostly the topic of polarization. Right now, it’s easy to listen to polarizing voices that seem to be in the forefront of how people engage with the media or engage with the election. It’s important to remember that elections are always going to remind us of our differences. But the most polarizing voices are not the voices of the majority. A lot of people in United States aren’t as polarized as the loudest voices who have a platform. Most people have more identities and beliefs in common than they realize. That’s a common occurrence in other countries as well.
In my conversations with these frontline peacebuilders, it was evident that on a local level communities have much more in common than those in positions of power that represent them and who aren’t necessarily discussing the needs and ideas for elections or a common democratic outcome. Encouraging localized community dialogue and promoting messaging that promotes peace and collaboration is an approach that’s worked in Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan, and can work in the U.S., too.
[PSD] What are lessons or insights on preventing election violence and countering polarization that can be applied to the U.S.?
[MB] Disinformation and misinformation are large triggers for election violence in the U.S. Publicizing how easy polarization can cultivate violence is highly crucial in creating peacebuilding architecture. Digital peacebuilders and social media users in Kenya are using their platforms to bring light to election violence. Similar advocacy tools can also be applied to the U.S.
In Kenya and Mexico, there are early warning and early response networks in place to counter misinformation or fake news. These networks ensure that there are resources to prevent fake news [and] enhance people’s ability to decipher disinformation, push[ing] people to seek out valid sources of information and unbiased election monitoring services. In these contexts, we have learned that incorrect information feeds on people not knowing what election architecture is in place to ensure inclusive involvement with the election process. Within the U.S. context, fact-checking guides and other similar resources are crucial in preventing election violence. Because polarization can cultivate violence, neutral, fact-checking defuses the possibilities for conflict through a de-polarizing approach that frontline peacebuilders have used in all three countries reviewed.
[PSD] Can you say more about other peacebuilding strategies that you’ve researched?
[MB] I’d like to focus on the idea that people can engage with others that they don’t think share their same identities. A big part of election processes is that there’s a question of national identity in play. People’s participation in elections and how election cycles shape identities can make people feel included or excluded in the political process. National identity and personal identities (background, ethnicity, etc.) are important to how people engage in politics because they exist simultaneously, when one is threatened the other can be threatened as well, whether that’s on a local or national level. Working towards a collectivized message and shared outcome yields to productive engagement with elections because embracing the multiplicity of people’s voices and identities is central to the ability to collectively strive for democracy.
Conflict during elections is inevitable, but violence is not.
There’s lots of ways that people can engage through their different identities with others—that they might have thought that they had nothing in common with—it is this type of collaborative engagement that boosts one’s agency and engagement with elections.
People’s participation in elections is something that they can be proud of. It’s something that ensures they can decrease polarization. In Kenya, after the 2022 elections, the parliament of Kenya adopted the report of the National Dialogue Committee that promoted dialogue and census building. One part of that plan was the development of national dialogue networks. In local communities, they set up community spaces that, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or age, everyone had a say. These types of spaces boost one’s agency and their connection to political processes, especially during an election cycle.
Another great example of working across differences is what interfaith leaders are doing to establish dialogue across communities throughout the U.S. Faith leaders have played a big role in countering polarization. For example, we have faith leaders who gathered in Pennsylvania to call on civic leaders to call out violence and promote peace messaging. We’ve seen interfaith leaders around the world commit to this work. These solutions universalize the fight against divisive messaging that could ignite election violence.
[PSD] Did you also come across similar challenges or problems across these contexts (Kenya, Mexico, and Pakistan, as well as the U.S.)?
[MB] Elections will always amplify tensions in communities. People’s engagement with politics comes back to how they engage with their communities. That’s why it’s important to always have peace messaging as part of elections, to remind people that there’s more to work towards together than they do when they’re not together. This arises in all parts of the world.
Candidates can weaponize what people are saying against each other offline and magnify it using their platforms online. In this moment, we’re at a very heightened time of information sharing and, when it comes to elections, it’s an especially sensitive issue.
Social media platforms can be used by candidates in ways that encourage community dialogue and consensus building, in ways that allow people to use social media to learn more about other communities and how they can work towards finding a shared political outcome. When the focus becomes how we can write the future together, rather than how communities buy access to democracy by paradoxically positioning themselves against another community, it rewrites the possibility for a cohesive and joint future.
[PSD] Where do you see the most opportunities for peacebuilding regarding election violence and countering polarization? What makes you excited to support peacebuilding in this space?
[MB] I think the most exciting thing about peacebuilding is that it gives you the opportunity to highlight the resilience of civil society. Peacebuilding offers a way to put the needs and commonalities of civil society front and center. Elections are a vessel by which that is ensured. When civil society needs are met, political processes become much easier and political outcomes become attainable. That’s the best part about peacebuilding.
In Pakistan, we (Search) have a program where female politicians set up assemblies throughout the country. That’s very important—to center the voices of women in civil society to work across religious and ethnic lines; and (most importantly) differences that arise from gendered social norms that women face the brunt of in Pakistan. That’s hope. Peacebuilding is hope. Peacebuilding provides a way for civil society to work in close cooperation for the betterment of a political outcome. It betters the health of the government, betters the health of the state. Civil society prioritizes the needs of the people and uses peacebuilding mechanisms to ignite a collective desire for a shared political outcome. That’s why peacebuilding gives me hope when it comes to elections.
[PSD] Any last thoughts, things to share?
[MB] Community-led infrastructure will always lead to a healthier society and that’s where peacebuilding thrives.
Photo credit: TOimages – stock.adobe.com
