Bottom-up civic diplomacy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: digital storytelling by non-state actors

This article examines how non-state digital actors enact bottom-up civic diplomacy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through short-form social media storytelling. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 106 top-performing Instagram and TikTok videos produced by Builders of the Middle East between October 2023 and April 2025, the study investigates how mediation, recognition, and non-violent internal critique are organised within platformed conflict communication. The findings show that civic-diplomatic engagement does not primarily emerge through symmetrical dialogue, explicit reconciliation advocacy, or formal peacebuilding discourse. Instead, it is structured through concentrated narrative authority, uneven perspective distribution, testimonial visibility, and calibrated intra-community dissent. Mediation is enacted through the selective organisation and translation of perspectives; recognition through the public narration of lived experience, suffering, and minority presence; and internal critique through forms of dissent that remain embedded within communal belonging while resisting polarising rhetoric. The article develops the concept of peacebuilding influencers to capture this configuration of platform-mediated civic-diplomatic agency, in which personalised visibility, narrative authority, selective recognition, and calibrated dissent sustain fragile forms of relational engagement under conditions of polarisation, asymmetrical voice positioning, and diplomatic impasse.