About

Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Research Fellow at The Disinformation Project and an expert in Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) for peace, human rights, and democratic governance. With over two decades of experience, Sanjana has worked domestically, regionally, and internationally, specializing in social media communications strategy, web-based activism, online advocacy, and grounded social media research. Sanjana is a pioneer in the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka. He founded and edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website from 2006 to June 2020. He also introduced digital security training for human rights activists in 2010 and continues to advise civil society on digital hygiene, surveillance, privacy, and secure communications. Sanjana is an Ashoka, Rotary World Peace, and TED Fellow who completed his doctoral studies at the University of Otago, looking at the intersection of social media, political communication, and violence generation in Sri Lanka and New Zealand. He is also a Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, where he leads research and advocacy on the use of ICTs for peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Sanjana has worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the Balkans to capture, disseminate, and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. He is a global thought leader in the conceptualization and application of ICT for peacebuilding, with significant research and field experience. At InfoShare, he led project development for applications and systems to support peace processes, conflict resolution, and peace negotiations. Sanjana's education history includes a Doctor of Philosophy in Social Media and Politics from the University of Otago, a Master of International Studies in International Relations and Conflict Resolution from The University of Queensland, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and English from Delhi University. He also has experience in various technologies, including Microservices, Spark, Redis, Java, Elastic Search, HDFS, Docker, Jenkins, and GCP. Sanjana has 17.12 years of relevant experience.