The Future of Peace Journalism

by Jake Lynch

Peace Journalism has attained traction in journalistic communities where editors and reporters come to feel they would like to contribute, through their professional activities, to the prospects for peace in their society – or at least avoid inadvertently making them worse. Examples include Indonesia in the early 2000s, following the fall of the New Order regime of President Suharto, and the southern Philippines, where people are weary of the blight on their lives and prospects from long-running insurgencies, and where both elite and grassroots peace activism is meeting the demand for change.

But there are many initiatives underway at any one time, chronicled in the biannual publication, The Peace Journalist, published by the Global Peace Journalism Center at Park University, Missouri, and edited by Prof Steven Youngblood – who has introduced PJ to journalistic communities in locations including Uganda and Kenya. Peace Journalism has also grown rapidly in the field of scholarly research, with a large array of books (monographs and edited collections), book chapters, articles and special editions of academic journals (such as the one just out in Peace Review), latterly spreading to other languages than English.

 When it comes to social media, these platforms are neither intrinsically conducive nor otherwise to PJ. The original thesis behind PJ is that the operation of journalistic conventions leads to a dominant form of 'war journalism' when reporting conflicts – not merely war reporting, in the sense of reporting on wars, but a mode of representation that leads readers and audiences to infer that further violence is legitimate, necessary, even inevitable. These conventions arise not from the intrinsic properties of news but from the organisational imperatives of news industries. If you're a daily newspaper, you are likely to concentrate on the events encompassed in the 24-span between editions… however, when reporting conflicts, that can lead to a pattern of big bangs: bombs, bullets and battles. What is missed out is the process(es) that lead up to the events – so readers are deprived of any opportunity to appreciate how these processes could be diverted towards less violent outcomes. 

Now, of course, daily newspapers, while still important, are nowhere near as dominant as they were. And some have used social media to create, and bring to a wide audience, very different forms of representation, enabled by the different organisational imperatives of the media in which they are operating. Brandon Stanton, for example, started with his Facebook-mounted photo blog, Humans of New York, then went on to cover the war in Syria from the viewpoint of families fleeing to seek sanctuary in Europe, in partnership with the UN High Commission for Refugees.

On the other hand, a recent (Sep 2017) report by the International Crisis Group identified the expansion of social media in Myanmar, as repressive laws were lifted after 2011, as a factor in the spread of Buddhist nationalism – which has, in turn, exacerbated the Rohingya crisis. Whether one is operating in mainstream or social media, the need for some critical self-awareness, and some specific agenda to give peace a chance (not to advocate peace, just to give it a chance) is an essential safeguard against unwittingly paving the way to further violence.

There's a mountain of published research on PJ now, which contains a multitude of perspectives on a multitude of contested points and ongoing debates. 

Jake Lynch is chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. He has worked as a correspondent for the Independent and Sky News, and was previously an anchor for BBC world news.