The Media's Role in Preventing and Moderating Conflict

By Robert Karl Manoff

Robert Karl Manoff is the Executive Director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media (a partner of the Media Diversity Institute). This essay was extracted from a speech delivered at the Colloquium on Science, Technology, and Government at New York University, April 29, 1996.

This century has been characterized by organized group violence on an extraordinary scale. The figures are slippery, but it is safe to say that the human race has seen fit to engage in something like 250 significant armed conflicts in this century, during which over 110 million people have been killed and many times that number wounded, crippled, and mutilated.

This scale of slaughter is new in human history. Only 19 million people died in the 211 major conflicts of the nineteenth century and 7 million in the eighteen, which was marked by mere 55 significant wars. Indeed, mass violence on a previously unimaginable scale has become universalized, industrialized, and routinised.

We cannot avoid asking ourselves what more can be done to reduce and prevent conflict and the suffering that attends it, but why invoke the media in this context? Because, taken together, mass media technologies, institutions, professionals, norms, and practices constitute a fundamental force shaping the lives of individuals and the fate of peoples and nations. The media constitute a major human resource whose potential to help prevent and moderate social violence begs to be discussed, evaluated, and, where appropriate, mobilized.

Over the past several years, the NYU Center for War, Peace and the News Media has been creating an inventory of media-based initiatives that have already been undertaken to minimize conflict or promote other pro-social ends. We are interested in journalism, and also in soap operas, public affairs programming, sitcoms, advertising, public interest public relations and social marketing. We are also exploring what governments can do to promote the utilization of media resources for preventive purposes, and we are curious about how media professionals can enhance their own understanding of the potential of their medium and the obligations (if any) that derive from them.

While these initiatives represent a largely intuitive response to the challenge posed by conflict, underlying strategies are at work in each case. To work toward understanding such issues, the center has been developing a typology of the roles that the media could potentially play, drawing on conflict management theories of various stripes, negotiating theory in the diplomatic context, and a wide range of other approaches to preventing and managing conflict. Such a typology is starting point for thinking about the question, "What media-based initiatives would it be possible, and appropriate, to undertake in particular conflict situations?"

The media could:

• Promote and help enforce national or international norms regarding human rights,
   the conduct of war, the treatment of minorities, or other issues;

• Relay negotiating signals between parties that have no formal communication or require
   another way to signal;

• Focus the attention of the international community on a developing conflict, and by doing so    bring pressure on the parties to resolve it or on the international community to intervene;

• Establish the transparency of one conflict party to another;

• Engage in confidence building measures;

• Support international peacekeeping operations in countries where they are active and
   in countries contributing military contingents;

• Educate parties and communities involved in conflict and thereby change the information
   environments of disputes, which is critical to the conflict resolution process;

• Identify the underlying interests of each party to a conflict for the other;

• Prevent the circulation of incendiary rumors and counteract them when they surface;

• Identify the core values of disputants, which is often critical to help them understand their
   own priorities and those of their opposite number;

• Identify and explain underlying material and psychological needs of parties to conflict,
   clarifying the structural issues that are perceived to be at stake;

• Frame the issues involved in conflict in such a way that they become more susceptible
   to management;

• Identify resources that may be available to help resolve conflicts or to mobilize outside
   assistance in doing so;

• Establish networks to circulate information concerning conflict prevention and management    activities that have succeeded elsewhere;

• Publicize what should be public and privatize what is best left private in any negotiating    process, although the definitions in each case are likely to be highly contested and should
   not be taken for granted;

• De-objectify and re-humanize conflicting parties to each other and avoid stereotyping;

• Provide an outlet for emotions of parties, the expression of which may be therapeutic in
   and of itself;

• Bring to bear international pressure on media organizations that promote xenophobia, racism,
   or other forms of social hatred;

• Encourage a balance of power among unequal parties where appropriate, or, where the
   claims of parties are not equally just, strengthen the hand of the party with the more
   compelling moral claim;

• Enable the parties to formulate and articulate proposed solutions by serving as a
   non-antagonistic interlocutor;

• Provide early warning of impending conflicts;

• Help leaders who are negotiating maintain credibility with their own constituents;

• Participate in the process of healing, reconciliation, and social reconstruction
   following conflicts;

• Signal the importance of accords that end conflicts by historicising them as important
   public occasions in order to embed the resolution process in shared social memories.

This is a partial account of potential media roles. A fuller account would describe a complex set of activities undertaken by a great variety of actors. Elaborating such a full account will require the combined efforts of media professionals, diplomats, conflict resolvers, and diverse protagonist, among others.