This post is part of our special coverage Caucasus Conflict Voices. Last week, on 8 July, a half-day conference, Blogs and Bullets: Evaluating the Impact of New Media on Conflict was held at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. Co-sponsored by George Washington University's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, the first and last of three panels included Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation to the U.S. Secretary of State, Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices co-founder and Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Marc Lynch, Director of the Institute of Middle East Studies at George Washington University, Colin Rule, Director of Online Dispute Resolution at eBay, and Adam Conner from Facebook. Also present on the second panel were bloggers and journalists such as Global Voices’ Mialy Andriamananjar and Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices Caucasus Region Editor Onnik Krikorian, Raed Jarrar, Nasseem Tarawnah, and Golnaz Esfandiari. The panels were followed up by a private experts working group also involving Berkman and Global Voices’ Jillian York and representatives from the World Bank and the U.S. Department of State among others. In a USIP report (draft) released at the conference, a team of scholars from GWU, in cooperation with scholars from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and from Morningside Analytics, take a fresh theoretical, and empirical approach to answering this question.The report critically assesses both the “cyberutopian” and “cyberskeptic” perspectives, and proposes a new framework for assessing the role of new media in contentious politics. Although largely centering on the use of new and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter in countries such as Iran, the conference also examined their use in other areas in Madagascar and also in the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Indeed, as noted by Andriamananjar's Windows on the new World of SipaKV, the three examples also had much in common as well as some differences. Onnik Krikorian […] reminded me that international community intervention do not always result in positive outcomes and two videobloggers are still in jail in Azerbaijan, despite efforts by Hillary Clinton, Amnesty International, etc.. to free them. […] Many similarities may be drawn between the Iranian Revolution and the Malagasy use of twitter and facebook during “our” crisis, few twitterers finally (a couple hundred Iranian twitterers only!?), many retweets, many twitterers based abroad, many spreading false rumors, difficulty in self correcting the rapidfire rumors in realtime, difficulty in asserting who holds the majority of opinion based on online content especially in countries with exceedingly low internet penetration rate: whose opinion are you really reading? The majority is probably silent and has no access to internet. […] As discussed during the event, social media are but tools and its landscape reflects the society at large. Occurrences of false identities, personal attacks etc… merely reflect the bigger malaise of our Malagasy society. As it related to the Caucasus, however, Star-Tides noted the possibility for the positive use of new and social media tools such as Facebook. […] An interesting insight that was shared by all was the need for trust to be established between users before interacting on a public space like Facebook. Golnaz Esfandiari, of Iran, talked of the danger that Iranians returning from abroad can be detained at Iranian airports, asked for their Facebook passwords, and interrogated about the friends they have made. Onnik Krikorian, of Armenia, noted that although security issues can be a problem, platforms like Facebook can also open up channels for interaction that don’t exist elsewhere. He enthusiastically related how Facebook had changed his life in the past eighteen months, enabling him to befriend and interact with Azeri’s, something almost impossible through human, political, or media channels. The same theme was also picked up by Global Chaos who commented on Facebook's offering in the area of conflict resolution and transformation, http://peace.facebook.com. Facebook has come up with a “Peace” initiative, tracking the number of “friend” connections between people from different conflicting sides: geographic, religious, and political. For example, they currently indicate the “geographic” connections between Israel and Palestine, Albania and Serbia, India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey.