Why and When to Use Media for Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

From the civil society-led network Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, this issue paper describes media’s impact on peacebuilding and examines why and when to use media for conflict prevention and peacebuilding. It has a companion toolkit, The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Conflict’s Awareness Raising Toolkit, which covers how to use the media for building peace. (Though the website suggests logging in, one may choose toolkit from the top menu bar to access the document, available without a login password.)

The document describes the media's orientation toward conflict as a focus on immediacy; drama; simplicity; and ethnocentrism. What do not receive media focus, according to the authors, are long-term processes; moderate people participating in dialogue; complex opinions or explanations, root causes, multi-sided conflicts; and the beliefs, myths, and symbols of the 'other', as well as their suffering from 'our' brutality. Possible functions of the media in conflict prevention include: depicting people with the same types of problems; sharing interests and positions; condemning violence to build common ground and empathy.


The document describes the media's potential roles as the following:

• information provider and interpreter;
• watchdog;
• gatekeeper, setting agendas for its audience and providing balanced views;
• policymaker;
• diplomat;
• peace promoter; and
• bridge builder.

Because media production, as stated here, is a business that sells news, entertainment, and information, the authors point to the possibility of using social marketing to popularise peace promotion, making it a more marketable journalistic strategy. "The first step in assessing the wisdom of using the media for conflict prevention and peacebuilding in a region is to determine the specific goals of local conflict prevention and peacebuilding experts so that those goals can be ‘packaged’ as tangible and realistic products to sell."


The product, as stated in the document, is a new behaviour that is both attractive to and in the interest of the consumer. Products might include building physical spaces, such as a mediation centre, or providing services. Specific product-related goals and knowing the audience for the products is suggested as the basis for knowing when and where to use media. "The media can be used successfully only when peacebuilding organizations have done the hard work to narrow down their goals and ... audiences."

The document analyses the power and limitations of media, particularly regarding cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioural changes:


1. The media can increase cognitive change by supplying people with information, thus helping to set the public agenda and frame the scope of public discussion through providing and limiting the range of ideas from which to choose. Messages can be crafted through: peace (conflict-sensitive) journalism; facilitating dialogue between the parties, citizens, and the government; and amplifying the
voice of different stakeholders in a conflict in a way that fosters analysis of both differences and common ground (so-called "megaphone diplomacy"). Peace journalism which advocates for conflict transformation through constructive discourse proactively constructs the problems of conflicting group objectives and needs within their cultural and historic context in order to enhance dialogue rather than escalate conflict.

2. Media can, through well-crafted messages, prompt liking or disliking, favouring or rejecting ideas and behaviours, resulting in attitudinal change. "Marketing and advertising represent an entire industry that specializes in creating attitudes....This is where the billboards, posters, leaflets, and also audio, video and print advertisements are used to gain maximum impact.... Entertainment programming has been known to have the highest appeal to the widest number of audiences. For this reason, in many cases the attractive mass appeal format of radio drama or soap-operas is used to deliver a message about conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Other appealing formats such as music, theater and entertainment in information programming were found to be successful."

3. As stated here, the media's impact on behaviours is more complex and indirect, most often working through attitudes and opinion change to affect behaviours/actions. "Media do not have the ability to execute the peacebuilding effort on their own. Legal, political, economic and other social institutions must assist in transforming the conflict. In the absence of an integrated effort, media cannot manage structural and cultural violence. The media must be understood as an integral and important segment of peace development[;]...behavioral change is most likely to be achieved through a congruence between the repetition of a peace message via different media channels and an environment which creates space for people to thoughtfully consider change. "

According to the authors, conflicts result in trauma that impacts people's thinking, increasing the activity of the limbic system governing the emotions and fear responses, while reducing the activity of the neocortex, responsible for rational brain function. Thus, while the facts-and-figures logic of peace building may not have impact, media audiences may be emotionally affected by powerful stories told in first-person narratives by people directly involved. Also, entertainment through movies, TV, and radio shows, and commercials using music, lighting, and focused messages, may reach conflict-affected people.


The authors speak for the need of a critical mass, the cooperation of many, to institute and maintain peace, while conflict can begin with only a few, as in the case of Al Qaida's actions to escalate violence. Media are a means to reach a critical mass of people, whereas mediation and negotiation, dialogue and training, and arts-based processes impact lower numbers of people, though the possibility of change is increased by the intensity of these processes, while media audiences function as passive consumers. The document concludes that constructive change in a conflict is challenging and requires media's positive contribution along with other methods and means, all of which merit a more careful assessment.