Peace journalism: A proposition for conceptual and methodological improvements

Abstract

The peace journalism (PJ) field now has an appreciable amount of published material to show for its first decade of serious operation, in research, teaching and training alike. It amounts to a serious project to reform professional education programmes in journalism. But so far, the proposed remedies are more individual projects than coordinated and organized reforms; they are scattered geographically and do not have a global scope. This article discusses the need for a joint approach together with universities, colleges, training institutes and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and inter-governmental organizations, if PJ is to contribute to establishing journalism as an important factor in international norm-setting and to raise the profession’s ethical standards with regard to violent conflicts. To enable this, further conceptual development is also necessary. A combination of Johan Galtung’s PJ approach, with insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA), offers a way of managing the demand for contextual reflexivity that has been raised in the debate about PJ. CDA offers an opportunity to address war and peace issues in a more comprehensive manner, integrating analysis of the propaganda discourses during peacetime, underestimated by Galtung in his model.