W Horizon Foundation Objectives for Peace Communication
Assumptions about the powerful role played by communication in conflict are not new and date back well before the Israeli Palestinian conflict and Rwandan Genocide. What is needed now is for careful time and attention to be given to amass the evidence to prove (or disprove) such claims about the role played by communication (Warshel, 2009).
Despite the absence of assessment and evaluation research (whether verifying the power, or efficacy of peace or conflict communication), the practice of peace communication has proliferated. Donors have continued to fund peace communication projects, and practitioners to run them. These processes have to a great extent occurred due to the continued belief in the ability of communication to manage conflict, or the basic assumption that if specific efforts are being made to manage conflict, these in turn must actually manage conflict. As analogous literature about the impact of communication in other social change domains demonstrates such wishful thinking is unfortunately not the case. Scholarly understanding of the intersections between communication and conflict must be fostered if peace communication is ever to be improved, let alone be established as effective. Assessment and evaluation research about peace communication must be encouraged. Its practice should be carried out on the basis of established evidence and enacted ethically, with careful attention given to the context within which these interventions transpire and the potential impact their desired outcomes could have on the lives of all parties to a given conflict (Warshel, 2009). It is for these reasons precisely that the Horizon Foundation aims to sponsor the assessment and evaluation research necessary to determine the efficacy of peace communication and ethically improve its practice globally.*
Peace Communication
Little is known about what role communication plays in managing political conflict around the world. Research into the use of communication as a mediation device between peoples engaged in political conflict, or peace communication, has lagged far behind the practice (Warshel, 2009). Horizon Foundation hopes to help change this by making peace communication research a priority.
Peace Communication as Practice
As a practice peace communication interventions aim to foster behavioral and, in turn, structural change in an attempt to manage facets of political conflict. Through the use of communication (whether postulated as message, media, ritual, technological artifact, or another conceptual form) these interventions target the behaviors of populations who experience political conflict on the ground. They do so to build peace, for example by procuring cross-group friendships, or to provide the grassroots support necessary to make peace, by producing large-scale public support for peace processes and platforms brainstormed, negotiated and or signed by elites that typically require structural change be made (Warshel, 2009).
Peace communication interventions attempt to achieve such ends in order to manage various facets of political conflict that pertain to ethnopolitical-, civil-, interstate- and multi-state-conflicts worldwide. Historically and more broadly, practitioners of peace communication interventions typically try to alter how individuals construct their group-level identity, reduce intergroup prejudice, foster reconciliation and/or mutual understanding among conflicting groups, teach tolerance, and most optimally, where peacebuilding is concerned, procure intergroup friendships, and in far rarer cases, establish intergroup joint business ventures. Alternatively such efforts have also involved trying to reduce individuals’ aggressive and violent behaviors, or fostering new media technology use on the grounds that their increased uses will build democracy or increase the economic efficiency of ethnopolitical groups who are economically disadvantaged to, in turn, build or make peace. Lastly, peace communication interventions might also include efforts to induce compromise in intergroup political beliefs, whether by raising awareness or giving voice to less commonly expressed narratives, encouraging groups to view the narratives of their partners in conflict as legitimate, and improving individuals’ hope or optimism in favor of making peace (Warshel, 2009).
Whatever their aim, practitioners of peace communication interventions hope that by achieving change in one or more of the aforementioned conflict related outcome goals, some aspect of the context of the given political conflict will be altered. These interventions are channeled through face-to-face interaction, radio, TV, film, Internet, games, puppetry, music, dance, theatre and so forth (Warshel, 2009; Ellis and Warshel, 2010).
Peace Communication Research
Whether Peace Communication actually “works” to help achieve any of the aforementioned outcome goals, and, in turn, manage some aspect of political conflict remains largely unknown. For the most part, only at the turn of this century have a handful of scholars begun to assess and evaluate peace communication interventions. Despite this lack of knowledge, popular and academic claims have, nevertheless, continued to suggest the power of these, or their exact opposite, conflict communication, as having a direct and powerful impact on individual and group-level conflict related behaviors. Peace communication has been argued to directly and effectively manage conflict, and conflict communication, whose claims are more common – to foment it. As an example from among the former, US Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross claimed that the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians failed due to the lack of “people-to-people” projects. People to people projects refer to grassroots peace building and public opinion altering interventions within the Israeli Palestinian peace nomenclature. The majority of these programs use communication as their principle tool to elicit change. From among the reverse examples, countless academic and, in particular, policy claims argued that Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) (and to a lesser extent, Radio Rwanda), caused the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutus (see Warshel, 2009 for a discussion of such claims).
Whether addressing peace or conflict communication and actually making use of evidence, policymakers, as well as scholars have commonly used correlation in place of regression, and content analysis in place of audience reception analyses, ethnographic and/or media effects results to “support” their claims that peace and conflict communication are effective. Thus, in the case of latter example, policymakers and scholars noted a rise in violence occurred at the same time that RTLM broadcasted messages preaching hatred of Tutsis, and therefore, concluded that the latter led to the former. They drew such conclusions without establishing any causal links between the two. They did not establish whether and if Hutus listened to RTLM broadcasts, how they interpreted those, and whether and if at all their interpretation of those broadcasts may have altered their political beliefs, intergroup attitudes and or self-efficacy levels to lead them to adopt violent strategies against Tutsis within or beyond their own communities. Establishing such evidence is essential for providing the assessment and evaluation data necessary to confirm claims about “the power” of media to foment conflict. In the absence of such evidence there is no reason to believe “the media”, rather than a multiplicity of other structural and normative forces cause either violence or peace (Warshel, 2009).
Background Reading
Warshel, Y. (2009). How Do You Convince Children that the “Army”, “Terrorists” and the “Police” Can Live Together Peacefully?: A Peace Communication Assessment Model. Dissertation. La Jolla. University of California at San Diego, 2009.
Ellis D. and Warshel, Y. (2010). The contributions of communication and media studies to peace education. In E. Cairns and G. Salamon. (Eds.) Handbook on Peace Education. Psychology Press, 2010.
