Interpreting Peace Journalism in East Africa: Individual, Organizational, and Professional Influences

Abstract

Despite rising scholarly attention to peace journalism content and theory in recent decades, journalists’ perceptions of peace journalism are less well understood. This relative disparity matters to the extent that journalists’ understanding of peace journalism has some bearing on the content that is produced and the progress made toward the larger normative goal of more peaceful societies. The following thesis contributes to this end by examining the social conditions that shape journalists’ interpretation of peace journalism. Using a hierarchy-of-influences perspective and data collected from 20 semi-structured interviews with journalists in East Africa, the study explores how journalists interpret peace journalism as a model for professional practice and how these perceptions are shaped by individual and professional-structural dynamics. The study finds that journalists’ interest in peace journalism may correspond to particular types of shared experiences, such as conflict experience or role conceptions, and that professional-structural influences, such as professional precarity, correspond to distinct understandings of peace journalism.