Peace Journalism

Measured against the enormous expenditure that at the latest since World War I has been invested in optimizing propaganda strategies, military media management and psychological warfare, efforts to utiliize the media as instruments for constructive conflict management and securing the peace seem rather modest. Of course there is a vast quantity of literature that critically illuminates the functionalization of the media for purposes of war propaganda – not only by dictatorial regimes, but also in democratic states – but only toward the end of the Twentieth Century did the question of how the media could be used not as a catalyst for conflict escalation, but instead as a catalyst of conflict de-escalation and of peaceful dispute settlement attract the attention of peace researchers, media scholars and journalists.
The aim of peace journalism that arose in reaction to the Gulf War and the post-Yugoslavian civil wars is to avoid the functionalization of the media for the purposes of war propaganda, to replace it by constructive conflict coverage that helps to implement journalistic quality norms – even against the interests of the ruling elites – and to make advances toward fulfilling the media's peace mandate by drawing on the findings of conflict and peace research instead of reducing conflicts to a struggle between good and evil.
Started in cooperation with the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (2005 - 2008) the present project focuses on audience resonance and effects of constructive conflict coverage and contributes to the theoretical foundations of peace journalism.