Articles by Jake Lynch
We found 130 results.
Peace Journalism Training for Journalists in Afghanistan
Jake Lynch and Matt Freear | MDPI-Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Apr 2024
18 Mar 2024 – A Contribution to the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism-PVE Project’ in the New Afghanistan
→ read full articleConflict Transformation for Ukraine and Russia
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jun 2022
All three sources of generative force (Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence) need to be explored – with problems diagnosed, prognoses made from present trends if allowed to continue, and appropriate therapies devised – if conflict is to be not merely resolved, but transformed.
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Deon and Telos: How Journalisms Are Evolving Their Ethical Approaches
Jake Lynch | MDPI – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jun 2022
13 Aug 2021 – This article belongs to the Special Issue, Beyond Fake News and Fact-Checking: The Political, Social and Technological Consequences of the Battle Against Misinformation and Disinformation.
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(Italiano) Le mancate iniziative di pace in Ucraina
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis –TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 May 2022
Perché si parla così poco di pace per l’Ucraina? La comunità mondiale è davvero disposta a starsene seduta sulle mani mentre il paese viene distrutto? Non abbiamo alternative che raddoppiare il nostro patrocinio, nonostante i contraccolpi. Per la pace ci vuole tempo, mentre invece un consulto di fretta è un consulto di guerra. Ma può darsi che non abbiamo ere ed ere, perciò dobbiamo elaborare come fare una differenza.
→ read full articlePaths Not Taken: Peace Initiatives That Would Have Helped Avoid the Mess We’re in Now
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 May 2022
Why is there so little talk of peace for Ukraine? Is the world community really prepared to sit on its hands as the country is destroyed? We have no alternative but to redouble our advocacy, despite the knock-backs. Peace takes time, whereas a counsel of haste is a counsel of war. But we may not have ages and ages, so we need to work out how to make a difference.
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(Italiano) Negazionismi duplici
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis –TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 May 2022
Man mano che la dipendenza da idrocarburi tende al ribasso e le logiche estrattive si indeboliscono, diventerà meno attraente acconsentire alle monarchie repressive del Golfo – e potremmo anche osservare l’ulteriore indebolimento del sostegno degli Stati Uniti al sionismo, che è stata la sua base principale dal 1947. Sia per alimentare pianeta, e per portare la pace in Palestina, dobbiamo essere pronti con visioni alternative.
→ read full articleDual Denialisms
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Apr 2022
As hydrocarbon addiction turns downward, and extractivist logics weaken, it will become less attractive to cosy up to repressive Gulf monarchies – and we may also observe the further weakening of US support for Zionism, which has been its main foundation since 1947. Both for powering the planet, and for bringing peace to Palestine, we must be ready with alternative visions.
→ read full article(Italiano) Industria delle armi: la coda che agita il cane
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis –TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Feb 2022
24 Febbraio 2022 – Il militarismo è una minaccia negli sforzi di costruzione di un sistema mondiale più pacifico. Ed è spinto dalla forza gravitazionale, che distorce le risposte sia politiche sia mediatiche, del complesso militar-industriale. Opporvisi comporta aver qualcos’altro da proporre, da mettere al suo posto, come fonte di sicurezza come pure di prosperità.
→ read full articleArms Industry–The Tail Wagging the Dog
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Feb 2022
Militarism is a menace, in efforts to build a more peaceful world system, and it is propelled by the gravitational force, which distorts political and media responses alike, of the military-industrial complex. To oppose it entails having something else to propose, to put in its place, as a source of security and prosperity alike.
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(Italiano) Notizie sul clima e azioni del pubblico
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis –TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Nov 2021
Paradosso. Il periodo in cui l’interesse pubblico globale per il cambiamento climatico è aumentato più rapidamente – grosso modo, nei 5 anni dopo il 2013 – è anche quello in cui sono stati eletti a funzioni pubbliche partiti politici in paesi chiave per emissioni di anidride carbonica il cui scopo fondamentale comporta ignorare, negare o addirittura non tenere in minimo conto le prove del riscaldamento globale mentre i loro membri e clienti continuano a far soldi con le industrie estrattive.
→ read full articleHow News about Climate and Environment Can Prompt and Enable Audience Action
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Nov 2021
One could add a roll-call of similar offenders, including Donald Trump (elected 2016), who infamously claimed climate change was a hoax; Jair Bolsonaro, who green-lit the destruction of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest; and India’s Narendra Modi, prime mover in a last-minute démarche to weaken the COP26 agreement on phasing out coal.
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(Italiano) Contronarrazione della questione palestinese: s’inverte la marea della rappresentazione
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis - TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Jul 2021
16 Luglio 2021 – Stavolta era diverso. Le proteste per il minacciato sfratto forzoso di residenti palestinesi da Gerusalemme-Est da parte di Israele, seguite dall’assalto di polizia armata al complesso della moschea Al-Aqsa; dal lancio di razzi da Hamas a Gaza e dal più recente attacco militare alla Striscia [di Gaza]
→ read full article“Narrative Breakthrough”: Is the Tide Turning on the Representation of the Palestinian Struggle?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Jul 2021
If media contribute to agenda-setting and the framing of issues in public discourse, then patterns of media representation constitute a significant arena in their own right. The most fundamental distinction in the Peace Journalism model is whether a conflict is reported in a “violence-oriented” manner, in “restricted space and time”, as a series of big bangs – or, on the other hand, “peace and conflict-oriented”, investigating “the formation of the conflict”, with “causes and solutions looked for everywhere, also in history and culture”.
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(Italiano) Attacchi giuridici israeliani e diritti palestinesi
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis - TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 May 2021
12 Maggio 2021 – I sostenitori dei diritti palestinesi hanno finora rintuzzato bene i tentativi di zittire la propria attività e sopprimere le proprie azioni solidali, con quattro importanti vittorie legali in altrettante distinte giurisdizioni ottenute durante l’ultimo anno.
→ read full articleThe Global Fightback against Israeli Lawfare Attacks on Advocacy for Palestinian Rights
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 May 2021
Supporters of Palestinian rights have been fighting back successfully against efforts to silence their advocacy and suppress their solidarity actions, with major legal victories in four separate jurisdictions over the last year.
→ read full article(Italiano) Perché la “rottura” della Gran Bretagna sarebbe un bene sotto tutti gli aspetti
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Feb 2021
I piani escogitati per accelerare la deregolamentazione della finanza, stanno isolando i bancari e gli speculatori dalle conseguenze del rischio. Le proposte per un rogo dei diritti dei lavoratori vengono bocciate per adesso, ma nessun osservatore informato ritiene che queste rimarranno fuori dall’agenda a lungo. I pesticidi che uccidono le api, illegali secondo l’Unione Europea, sono appena stati approvati per l’utilizzo nelle colture inglesi. Che cosa si dovrebbe fare?
→ read full articleWhy Britain Breaking Up Would Be Good for All Concerned
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Feb 2021
As Noam Chomsky said of Trump – the continual rows, outrage and insults distract attention to the front of stage, while behind the scenes the beneficiaries rub their hands and count the proceeds. Plans are being hatched for the further deregulation of finance, insulating bankers and speculators against the consequences of risk. And bee-killing pesticides, outlawed by the EU, have already been approved for use on British fields. What is to be done?
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(Italiano) Prevenzione dell’estremismo violento o aiuto allo sviluppo dei media?
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Oct 2020
Nel far sì che le tematiche di giustizia trovino il loro spazio nelle sfere pubbliche, i media indipendenti che fanno Giornalismo di Pace possono costruire fiducia in comunità che possono proteggerli dalle asserzioni di combattere e distruggere. Possono suggerire al pubblico permettendogli di considerare e avvalorare risposte nonviolente ai conflitti.
→ read full articlePreventing Violent Extremism or Media Development Aid?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Oct 2020
The War on Terrorism was built on foundations of intellectual dishonesty. At worst, it was a pretext for continued military spending and deployment, iterated with a ferocity that waxed in precisely inverse proportion to the rapidly emerging evidence of its inefficacy in preventing terrorism. Its lineal descendants – initiatives to “counter” or “prevent violent extremism” have, likewise tended to grind remorselessly on, including in the fields of information and communication, despite having no evidential basis for expectation of success, even on their own terms.
→ read full articleBeyond Nation States: Time for Europe to Step Up?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jul 2020
The unholy alliance, between Little Englander mythology and parasitical profiteering, should be recognised in Brussels as the strategic enemy it always was, to be weakened by all necessary means.
→ read full article(Norwegian-Norsk) Rettssaken mot Julian Assange: hvorfor er han viktig for vår framtid?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Jun 2020
I 2006 opprettet den australske redaktøren Julian Assange WikiLeaks for å publisere hemmeligstemplet materiale og lekkasje fra varslere. Den 18. desember 2018 trykket Klassekampen et utfyllende intervju med Julian Assanges far John Shipton om USAs utleveringskrav og den henlagte voldtektssaken i Sverige. Assange risikerer 175 års fengsel i USA, og professor Jake Lynch forklarer hvorfor Assanges framtid er viktig for oss alle.
→ read full articleWhere Truth Lies–How the Tories Get Away with Incompetence and Worse with Unwitting Aid from BBC News
Prof. Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Jun 2020
When journalists uncover an important truth, they should report it – guided by the professional ethic boiled down in a famous quote from the war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn: “Limit yourself to what you see and hear. Do not invent and do not suppress”. Only the truth is “filtered”, to use the word of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
→ read full articleSave the BBC – But for What?
Prof. Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Apr 2020
Among the most significant challenges of political reporting today is the rise of the so-called ‘alt-right’, led by demagogues who specialise in evidence-averse rabble-rousing, notably on issues of race and immigration. A classic BBC kerfuffle followed the call by President Trump last year for members of the so-called ‘squad’ – four left-wing Democratic Congresswomen of colour – to “go back to the places from which they came”. Three of the four were born in the USA. But it was clearly not Trump’s intention to appeal for Rashida Tlaib to return from Washington to Detroit, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Bronx.
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Making a Difference: 20 Years of Conflict-Resolving Media
Jake Lynch | The Peace Journalist – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Feb 2020
“In my reportage, taking from the course, I always stay focused on stating facts, the truth and let the voice of the people dominate the narrative as opposed to political parties or ‘elite sources’ as you call them. These sources tend to have vested interests that I avoid. I focus on people’s stories, the human-interest ones. Solutions are not what I intentionally work towards, but they can be inevitable outcome of any such endeavour and I hope for that”.
→ read full article
Oxford Campaign to Defend Julian Assange
Jake Lynch | LRC Oxfordshire – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Dec 2019
Campaign to Defend Julian Assange Conference, 7 Nov 2019
→ read full articleThe Trials of Julian Assange–and Why He Is Vital to Our Future
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Nov 2019
Why are the UK authorities so keen to collude in the persecution of Julian Assange? For British officialdom to prostrate itself before the demands of its Washington ally is far from novel, of course. When America says ‘jump’, the British establishment reflex is to ask ‘how high?’ and ‘into what country?’ Inconveniently, WikiLeaks’ most eye-catching revelations include a picture of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which British troops were heavily involved, fundamentally at odds with ministers’ optimistic presentation of ‘our side’ as the ‘goodies’. [Watch Video]
→ read full articlePeace Journalism for the Koreas Negotiations
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Aug 2019
What can the Peace Journalism playbook contribute? How can readers and audiences be prompted and equipped to consider and value nonviolent responses to the still-unresolved conflict on the Korean peninsula, with all its potential dangers? Look past slogans from both ‘sides’ to focus on the goals of the conflict parties, for one.
→ read full articleBrexit and the Dilemma of UK Labour
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Jun 2019
There might once have been a Brexit capable of meeting its criteria and concerns, and of bringing Britain together. That was destroyed by May’s disastrous ‘red lines’, and the Tories appear intent on moving in Farage’s direction by embracing a no-deal exit from the EU. In response to that, Corbyn will have to work out how to combine the campaigning appeal of Labour’s pitch to transform Britain, and using the country’s EU membership as a springboard to fight inequality and injustice.
→ read full articleOn Western Civilisation
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Oct 2018
One of the best-known quotes about Western civilisation is the exchange attributed to the Mahatma Gandhi. What did he think of it? he was asked. The great man’s reply – “that would be a good idea” – has passed into legend. An equally famous aperçu from the US writer and political candidate Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man (sic) to understand something”, he wrote, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
→ read full articleWhy I’ve Written an Historical Novel
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Aug 2018
Myth and mysticism are resurgent. Brexit will enable Britons to “take back control”. Corporate tax cuts will lead to “jobs and growth”. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has a “clean bill of health”. Global warming is a “Chinese conspiracy”. None of these claims withstands more than a minute’s informed scrutiny, but that doesn’t dispel them because, as Trump’s lawyer, the former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told NBC’s Meet The Press recently, “truth isn’t truth”.
→ read full articlePeace Journalism in Lebanon
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Apr 2018
Inaugural Conference, Association of Media Educators of Lebanon, Lebanese American University, Beirut 7-11 Dec 2017 — Lebanon is a country in acute need of Peace Journalism. In a general sense, there is a hunger among both journalists and their readers and audiences for ways to engage with social and political issues in the public sphere that do not exacerbate the tensions inherent in a diverse society, still coming to terms with the legacy of a vicious civil war.
→ read full articleBrexit and Its Discontents
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Feb 2018
To the extent that grievances over inequalities in Britain drove the Leave vote, they were shooting at the wrong target. The UK cost of living crisis is due not to ‘Brussels’ but the actions of governments the British have elected to power in Westminster. The long-cherished vision of the Brexitollahs is for power to tilt still further in favour of employers and the wealthy.
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(Italiano) È ora di sfidare il sistema bellico
Jake Lynch | Centro Studi Sereno Regis – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Nov 2017
Si sono osservate dinamiche che conducessero a una grandiosa cospirazione putativa, che coinvolgesse vari soggetti di vari settori – industria, militare, politica e media – attivi a tramare in segreto per sospingerci alla guerra, a prescindere dalle conseguenze, al fine di far soldi? Qui è dove attingiamo ai concetti forniti dalla sociologia per definire la portata dell’attività politica non nelle parole e negli atti di attori identificabili – l’aspetto ‘comportamentale’ – bensì in quanto forza generativa immagazzinata in e attivata da sistemi e strutture.
→ read full articleTime to Challenge the War System
Prof. Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Nov 2017
Are these observations leading to a putative grand conspiracy involving individuals in different domains–industry, military, politics and media–scheming in secret to propel us into war in order to make money? This is where we reach for the concepts furnished by social science to locate political agency not in the words and deeds of identifiable actors but instead as a generative force that is stored in, and activated from, systems and structures.
→ read full articleWhat Is Peace Journalism?
Prof. Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Aug 2017
Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices – about what to report, and how to report it – that create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.
→ read full articleBugger the Journalism: The Slow Death of Critical Thinking in Australia
Jake Lynch – New Matilda,
7 Nov 2016
The Australian Research Council’s latest funding round is rich on gadgets, but a wasteland to social justice projects and big ideas. My designated Field of Research is Journalism Studies. And yet, of 630 funded projects, the number in Journalism Studies is… zero. Yes, that’s right: the square root of naff all.
→ read full articlePlease Help Us Save the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney
Prof. Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Mar 2016
CPACS has a long and distinguished record of bringing the perspectives of Peace with Justice to bear on the University’s research, teaching and community outreach. We honour the tradition of speaking truth to power on vital issues where the mainstream of Australian politics and media would rather look the other way.
→ read full articleOpen Letter to University of Sydney to Reject Calls to Punish Palestine-Justice Supporters
Jake Lynch, Sydney Staff for BDS – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Apr 2015
Calls are principally focussed on having Associate Professor Jake Lynch and Dr Nick Riemer dismissed from the university. In Lynch’s case, this is the demand explicitly being made by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students. We call on you, Dr Spence, not to allow yourself to be made the agent of the Israel lobby’s persecution of those committed to a just peace in the Middle East.
→ read full articlePlease Help Us Save the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies
Jake Lynch, Australians for BDS – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Oct 2014
I am writing to ask you, who stood with us over our support for the Academic Boycott of Israel, to now write to the University of Sydney to help save the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in its present form.
→ read full articleTime for BDS to Oppose Israeli War Crimes
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jul 2014
16 Jul 2014 – I have spent the last year defending my right, through Australia’s Federal Court, not to take part in fellowship schemes that link the University of Sydney, where I direct the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and two institutions from Israel. This week, Judge Alan Robertson dismissed the case against me and awarded costs.
→ read full articleWhat’s Really at Stake in the Sydney University BDS Affair?
Jake Lynch – New Matilda,
9 Jun 2014
People in Israel should realise that in the 21st century the world will not keep tolerating the Israeli occupation. This is realised by many in Israel and the responses include using the courts of other countries to close down political action intended to signal a refusal to tolerate the occupation, such as BDS.
→ read full article(Italiano) Il Giornalismo di Pace indica la strada dalla Terra Santa al BDS
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 May 2014
‘Stone Cold Justice’, come spesso fa un articolo di Giornalismo di Pace, termina con un punto interrogativo. Israele può essere forte in questo momento, osserva John, ma cosa succederà quando l’attuale giovane generazione di palestinesi – in molti casi brutalizzati e traumatizzati – diventeranno adulti?
→ read full articleFree Speech and BDS Case: Applicants Wanting to Run!
Jake Lynch, Australians for BDS – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 May 2014
At the Australian Federal Court, four of the five applicants to have me found guilty of racial discrimination applied to pull out of the action. That would leave only Shurat HaDin, the right-wing Israeli law centre. But I still need your help in meeting my legal bills, which are well into six figures.
→ read full articleAnzac Day: A Fitting Codicil to a Century of War
Jake Lynch – New Matilda,
28 Apr 2014
Military spending and mythology in Australia have taken on a life of their own. Perhaps we can use 2014 and 2015 to switch our critical faculties back on, and use our freedom and democracy to loosen the grip of the military-industrial complex and our deference to warmongers across the Pacific. That would be a fitting codicil to a century of war.
→ read full articlePeace Journalism from the Holy Land Points the Way to BDS
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Apr 2014
It calls for journalism to offer backgrounds and contexts of conflict, not just the familiar series of big bangs; a wide range of voices rather than merely a leader on each ‘side’; supply readers and audiences with the means to challenge dominant accounts, and therefore resist propaganda; highlight peace initiatives, however small, which are always underway in any conflict, perhaps in out-of-the-way places; and show images of peace as well as those of war.
→ read full articleVictory in Sight for Defend Free Speech and Support BDS
Jake Lynch, Australians for BDS - TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Mar 2014
Tomorrow (March 25th, 2014) is scheduled as a full day in the Australian Federal Court as I defend myself against the application to have my stance on the academic boycott of Israel declared illegal. The court proceedings have been going well up to now, but the case is a complicated one, and the legal bills are rolling in. If you haven’t contributed yet, now would be a good time to do it. Thank you!
→ read full articleLegal Fund for Academic Boycott of Israel
Jake Lynch, Australians for BDS – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Mar 2014
UPDATE March 17, 2014 – Associate Professor Jake Lynch, Director of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies [and TMS advisor], has been taken to the Federal Court of Australia due to his support of the Palestinian call for academic boycott of Israel. The court case is now entering a crucial phase. Over 250 of you have made a donation to the legal fund so far. Please make your donation here—however small. Thank you!
→ read full articleFighting Fund for Academic Boycott of Israel
(Jake Lynch) Australians for BDS – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Mar 2014
February 2014 – Associate Professor Jake Lynch, Director of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies [and TMS advisor/peace journalist], has been taken to the Federal Court of Australia by the Israel Law Centre, due to his support of the Palestinian call for academic boycott of Israel. We call on our supporters to MAKE A DONATION to support Jake Lynch’s fight for our democratic rights.
→ read full articleTaking Me to Court Won’t Stop BDS
Jake Lynch, New Matilda – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Dec 2013
The More Informed People Are About Israel-Palestine, the More Likely They Are to Sympathise With the Palestinians – This week in Australia’s Federal Court I am defending my right not to participate in institutional arrangements with Israeli higher education, in response to the call by Palestinian civil society for an academic and cultural boycott.
→ read full articleBoycott Movement under Attack in Australia
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Nov 2013
The right of academics in Australia to join the boycott of Israel is under threat from an Israeli law centre that has filed suit against me under anti-discrimination laws… A legal victory will present a great opportunity to spread the boycott campaign among Australian academics. My hunch is that there is a large potential constituency, silenced up to now by fear. Our job is to dispel that fear.
→ read full articleWhat ‘Impartial’ Means At the Oz
Jake Lynch, New Matilda - TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Dec 2012
Journalist Christian Kerr recently filed a series of critical articles in The Australian about me over my support for an academic boycott of Israel, and then boasted to friends about using the paper to further his own views on the subject.
→ read full articleWhy I Boycott Israel
Jake Lynch, New Matilda - TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Dec 2012
Sydney University academic Jake Lynch has come under fire this week [13 Dec 2012] for his stance on Israel. Today he argues his case: Palestinians and dissenting Israelis need international support to achieve justice.
→ read full articlePeace Journalism in Mexico
Jake Lynch, New Matilda – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jul 2012
There’s a concentration on arrests of alleged “kingpins” of the drug cartels, and on the death and destruction they leave in their wake as they scrabble for control of key smuggling routes. There is much less space for exploring why some people join the gangs in the first place, and what could be done — and is being done — to offer them a route to a better future.
→ read full articleSri Lanka: International Governments Must Take the Lead in Investigating War Crimes
Jake Lynch – The Conversation,
19 Mar 2012
There is a growing danger that the political leaders responsible for the greatest single atrocity of recent years will suffer no consequences. Journalists, not governments, have taken a lead in raising the issue to the international agenda of command responsibility for violations of humanitarian law in Sri Lanka.
→ read full articleWhat Did The Gaza Flotilla Achieve?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Jul 2011
The Isreali navy prevented Freedom Flotilla activists from delivering aid supplies to the Gaza Strip – but the mission has had an unexpected impact on political debate here, writes Jake Lynch.
→ read full articleNews Goo Episode 1
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Mar 2011
In the launch edition of News Goo, Jake Lynch interviews Julian Burnside QC, and the journalist, author and film-maker John Pilger, about the investigative journalism of WikiLeaks.
→ read full articleHas The Pro-Israel Lobby Subverted Australian Democracy?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Feb 2011
So, was there an elaborate plot, involving the active connivance of pro-Israel groups, the US embassy, the mining industry and the Right faction of the ALP, and kept successfully secret, to bring Rudd down and install Gillard in his place? To pose the question in those terms is to stretch credulity, but of course there is a way to answer it, which resonates with abundant life experience, and is encapsulated in another question: cui bono? (Or perhaps we could simply say: Go Figure).
→ read full articlePressure for an Independent Umpire in Sri Lanka
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Nov 2010
James Bourne spoke to the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project coordinator, Professor Jake Lynch, about the political situation in Sri Lanka- and how sport can be used as an effective tool of persuasion.
→ read full articlePeace Research and Peace Activism
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Oct 2010
“When peace research was launched as an academic field… the idea from the beginning was that this should be an applied social science with a value commitment: peace by peaceful means”. So writes Johan Galtung, in Searching for Peace, of the founding of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), in 1959.
→ read full articleBeyond Dualism: Reporting Conflicts in the Post-Electoral Mediascape
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Oct 2010
To ‘hear both sides’ is, of course, the surest way to avoid allegations of bias – but it elevates, to the status of convention, a way of reporting that divides the world around us into dyads: home and abroad (‘boat people’); humanity against nature (Pakistan floods); us and them (‘the Taliban’); Left against Right.
→ read full articlePuncturing Pomposity
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Sep 2010
Proposition: the pomposity of self-satisfied elites serves to normalise the unthinkable. Edward Herman, writing about Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’, says: “This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done’.”
→ read full articleCommunicating Positive Peace in Australia
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Jul 2010
The brightly coloured ute stood out in the traffic crawling through the historic Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. As we drew closer, we could pick out the design, lovingly spray-painted on the side: the all too recognisable face of Osama bin Laden, and the single word, ‘damai’, meaning, of course, ‘peace’.
→ read full articleThe World’s First Demonstration for Peace Journalism?
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Jun 2010
The theme of the demo is ‘Give Peace a Chance’. It is – as far as we know – a world first, being a demonstration in favour of peace journalism. In our book of the same name, Annabel McGoldrick and I define peace journalism in these terms: “Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices – of what stories to report, and how to report them – that create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict”. Such choices are subjugated, in most media, most of the time, by journalistic conventions: conventions that grow out of the economic and political interests of the news industry. This is why, as Richard Keeble argues, “We need to move away from the concept of the audience as a passive consumer of a professional product to seeing the audience as producers of their own (written or visual) media”.
→ read full articleCommunicating Peace: Organiser’s Introduction to IPRA Sydney 2010
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Jun 2010
Sydney plays host, from July 6-10, to the biennial global conference of IPRA, the International Peace Research Association. The keynote speaker is Johan Galtung. Delegates can register for the whole conference or for one day.
→ read full articleCensorship in a Slingshot
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Jun 2010
Israel’s attacks on humanitarian workers heading for Gaza have been called piracy, murder, ‘state terrorism’, even an act of war against the countries whose flags the boats were flying. On the other side has been a massive and cynical campaign of misinformation and misdirection, aimed at muddying the waters and deflecting responsibility.
→ read full articleConflict and Fragility
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 May 2010
When you give aid in a context of armed conflict, you become part of that context and also therefore part of the conflict. The aphorism is from Do No Harm, by Mary B Anderson, the book-length account of an approach to development and humanitarian fieldwork that attempts to identify and foster local capacities and resources for peace.
→ read full articleSecurity for Australia in the ‘Asia Pacific Century’ (Part 2)
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 May 2010
Let’s cup our ear to some echoes from the past. Andrew Alexander, a journalist on the right- of-centre Daily Mail newspaper in the UK, recounted how his research for a book about the origins of the Cold War confounded his presuppositions: there had, in reality, been “no Soviet military threat”, and wrong-headed western assessments that one existed were responsible for “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time, and certainly the most perilous”.
→ read full articleSecurity for Australia in the ‘Asia Pacific Century’ (Part 1)
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 May 2010
It looked like a raised middle finger. A stark, mocking figure 1 – the number of votes garnered when Australia put itself forward a couple of years ago for membership of the United Nations Security Council. Even Iran found thirty-two supporters when it stood for election in the same round. Australia, apparently, was friendless. So why did the international community shun Kevin Rudd’s ambitions for greater recognition on the world stage?
→ read full articleUnited Nations World Press Freedom Day
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 May 2010
Not a column this week but a podcast, by the UN, to mark World Press Freedom Day, with fellow guests Jenny Manrique, a Colombian journalist, and Brendan O’Malley, journalist and author of UNESCO’s 2010 Education Under Attack report.
→ read full articleApartheid Is Alive and Well
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Apr 2010
There is a place where indigenous blacks are still being shunted off their land into reservations; where work is rewarded not with wages but with ration cards, to spend in white-owned supermarkets; where public services are lavished on the already wealthy but denied to the poorest unless they agree to hand over their birthright.
→ read full articleBlatant Victimisation
Jake Lynch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Apr 2010
Australia is often a good place to observe the workings of political agency. There is a blatancy here, in the connection between cause and consequence, and the alacrity with which sectional interests exploit procedures, that is both appalling and, in a perverse kind of a way, simultaneously appealing. Political parties and business lobbies seem to feel little compulsion to concealment: there is not the sense of layers of subtlety having to be peeled back to reveal what is ‘really going on’, that one might encounter in Washington, say, or London, Paris, Delhi or Jakarta.
→ read full articleTHE ‘MISSING’ AFGHANS
Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, with additional research by Indra Adnan,
17 Mar 2010
A cricketing joke from the 1980s saw Mark Waugh, the Australian batsman, nicknamed ‘Afghan’. Struggling to emerge from the shadows of brother Steve, he was always in danger of being overlooked: ‘the forgotten Waugh’. The war in Afghanistan is a canvas on to which powerful intervening nations project their own preoccupations; one that goes through […]
→ read full articleFEMINISE THE REPORTING OF AFGHANISTAN
Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, with additional research by Indra Adnan - TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Mar 2010
For much of the last decade, the war in Afghanistan was obscured, in the media of troop-contributing countries, by news from Iraq, to the extent that it became, once again, “the forgotten war”. Those assessments came on the basis of reporting in 2006, since when Afghanistan has grown in salience, but the vast majority of […]
→ read full articleTHE ‘WAR ON TERRORISM’ AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTEXT
Jake Lynch,
27 Feb 2010
George W Bush explicitly likened his so-called “war on terrorism” to the generational challenge posed by the Cold War, but it never convinced to anything like the same extent. In December, 2001, shortly after the ‘9/11’ attacks, three respected institutions – the Pew Research Centre, Princeton Survey Research Associates and the International Herald Tribune newspaper […]
→ read full articleCAPITALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A REVIEW OF CIVILISING GLOBALISATION
Jake Lynch,
20 Feb 2010
“Globalisation, like the idea of God, is known to us all, even if we do not believe in it or understand it”. So says David Kinley, Professor of Human Rights Law at Sydney University. Readers of his book will certainly emerge with a deeper understanding of the processes shaping our interdependent world; whether they believe […]
→ read full articleBETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE
Jake Lynch,
5 Feb 2010
“If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds”. The words are from […]
→ read full articlePEACE AND JUSTICE
Jake Lynch,
24 Jan 2010
“Peace is not the absence of war”, Martin Luther King told us: “it is the presence of justice”. King’s legacy transmitted itself directly into the mantra of African-American activists, outraged over the beating, by LA police officers, of the black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991: “No justice, no peace”, they chanted. It’s an important answer […]
→ read full articleCULTURE-JAMMING
Jake Lynch,
3 Jan 2010
Public space is shrinking. Shopping malls cover it over on the ground; even publicly owned TV channels accept advertising. The shirt of your favourite sports team is incomplete without at least one corporate logo, often many more. Media of all kinds have become ever more explicitly geared to selling; a function that has infected and […]
→ read full articleABOUT THIS COLUMN: PART TWO
Jake Lynch,
22 Dec 2009
Jake Lynch began writing this regular column for TMS in November 2008. Since then it has gained many new followers around the world, some of whom are kind enough to send appreciative messages! In three instalments – last week, here and also next week – he explains the rationale behind it, some of its underpinning […]
→ read full articleABOUT THIS COLUMN: PART THREE
Jake Lynch,
22 Dec 2009
Jake Lynch began writing this regular column for TMS in November 2008. Since then it has gained many new followers around the world, some of whom are kind enough to send appreciative messages! In three weekly instalments, culminating in this one, he has been explaining the rationale behind it, some of its underpinning ideas and […]
→ read full articleABOUT THIS COLUMN: PART ONE
Jake Lynch,
19 Dec 2009
Jake Lynch began writing this regular column for TMS in November 2008. Since then it has gained many new followers around the world, some of whom are kind enough to send appreciative messages! Here, and over the following two weeks, he explains the rationale behind it, some of its underpinning ideas and the range of […]
→ read full articleAGENCY AND INTERVENTION
Jake Lynch, with additional research by Emily Parsons-Lord,
11 Dec 2009
Drug money from trading across the Sahara desert is funding insurgents and ‘terrorists’. So said the UN Office on Drugs and Crime this week, invoking an alarming vision of West African cocaine meeting heroin coming through East Africa, with the proceeds being used by “terrorists and anti-government forces… to fund their operations, purchase equipment and […]
→ read full article“MESSAGE TO MR NOBODY: MAKE WAY FOR THE TOURISTS”
Jake Lynch,
27 Nov 2009
With the Jerusalem Centre for WomenSo now, it’s a game of chicken. Stop expanding settlements on our land, then we’ll talk to you: the message to Israel from Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, backed – for once – by the White House. Start talking to us and we’ll stop expanding settlements, says Israeli president Shimon Peres, […]
→ read full articleSRI LANKA: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Jake Lynch,
22 Nov 2009
The news that the Government of Sri Lanka is to close the internment camps where thousands of Tamils were illegally detained, following the end of the country’s civil war against the Tamil Tiger rebels six months ago, is testimony to the effect of international pressure. The European Union backed the call by Judge Navi Pillay, […]
→ read full articleBACK TO BASICS FOR PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE
Jake Lynch and Majd Beltaji,
15 Nov 2009
The decision by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas not to seek re-election in January, and the vote at the UN General Assembly paving the way for the Security Council to consider the Goldstone Report, should, between them, prove a turning point in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Even the patient Mr Abbas has now apparently given […]
→ read full articleTIME TO STAND UP FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SRI LANKA – AT LAST
Jake Lynch,
30 Oct 2009
Here in Australia, ‘Sri Lanka Week’ has shrunk to a long weekend. The trade and investment shindig in Melbourne’s Docklands was scheduled to take place back in June, but was called off amid outrage over the Sri Lankan army’s pounding of Tamil areas and UN estimates of 20,000 deaths. It was back on, from Friday […]
→ read full articleARGUMENTS AGAINST THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: AND A PATHWAY TO PEACE
Jake Lynch,
24 Oct 2009
1) The insurgency against the US-led troops in Afghanistan is mutating into a general insurrection The Bradford peace professor Paul Rogers draws attention to an attack on US forces at two outposts in Kamdish district of Nuristan province, near the border with Pakistan, sited to allow the Americans to crack down on the trickle of […]
→ read full articleA WELL-FOUNDED FEAR OF PERSECUTION
Jake Lynch,
16 Oct 2009
“The toilets are only less than five metres from my tent and the smell was strong when the emptying of the toilet pits is not carried out in time, which is always the case. When there is water shortage, which is frequent, concern about how one is going to use the toilet becomes the most […]
→ read full articleBOOK REVIEW OF ‘VIRTUOUS WAR: MAPPING THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-MEDIA-ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK’
Jake Lynch,
9 Oct 2009
By James Der Derian, New York and London: Routledge, 2009, ISBN 978-0-415-77239-6, Second Edition.Are we gaming our way into war? Two years before Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision to cross the border with Kuwait, in 1990, US intelligence discovered that Iraq was running simulations of the invasion using a computer program purchased from an American software […]
→ read full articleUPDATES AND PROGRESS
Jake Lynch,
3 Oct 2009
The Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney came about after a campaign by students and staff to have peace taught within its hallowed sandstone walls. After all, they reasoned, just about every other conceivable subject was taught there, so why not peace? The authorities of the day acceded, with the […]
→ read full articleMORE ON MENDES, PILGER AND “PALESTINIAN LAND”
Jake Lynch,
19 Sep 2009
Philip Mendes protests, in his statement to TMS, that he himself is a supporter of a “two-state solution” and that, by comparison, John Pilger is “a hardline extremist [whose] public writings all suggest a position favouring the dissolution of the existing State of Israel, and its replacement by an Arab state of Greater Palestine”. This […]
→ read full articleFREE SPEECH AND THE PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY
Jake Lynch,
11 Sep 2009
Have you ever had the feeling that the walls closing in? So narrow has political debate become here in Australia, over the Israel/Palestine conflict, that attempts to remind Australians of basic facts, well accepted in the global community, are falling foul of censorship – silenced by the swish of a bureaucrat’s pen. Journalists at public […]
→ read full articleWHO’S BEING NAÏVE IN AFGHANISTAN?
Jake Lynch,
7 Sep 2009
A famous scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mafia movie, The Godfather, sees Diane Keaton, as Kay, remonstrate with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone about his career plans as he is groomed to take over the family business from his Don, the imperishable Marlon Brando. Michael: My father’s no different than any other powerful man. Any […]
→ read full articleSRI LANKA: RELIABLE ACCOUNTS
Jake Lynch,
28 Aug 2009
The conversation, in Sinhala, is casual, punctuated by laughter as well as the background noise of heavy weapons. Two young men, naked except for a strip of cloth covering their eyes, their hands bound behind their backs, are made to sit. Each has his back to the soldier who is about to become his executioner. […]
→ read full articleTHE EMIRE STRIKES BACK
Jake Lynch,
20 Aug 2009
News managers at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have struck back in response to my complaint, filed six weeks ago and reported on TMS, over their coverage of Australia’s Defence White Paper, which provides for a continuing rise in spending on the military at three percent above the rate of inflation. As expected, they’ve come out […]
→ read full articleWHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND
Jake Lynch,
8 Aug 2009
The Times of London was at it again this week. “Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead”, the paper said, “and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb”. Forget previous indications that the program had stalled: “Tehran had halted the […]
→ read full articlePEACE JOURNALISM FOR JOURNALISTS
Jake Lynch,
2 Aug 2009
Peace journalism has emerged, since the mid-1990s, as a new, trans-disciplinary field, of interest to professional journalists, in both developed and developing countries, and to civil society activists, university researchers and others interested in the conflict-media nexus. It offers both a set of practical plans and options for editors and reporters, and a basis for […]
→ read full articleA DARK DAWN: THE NEW NUCLEAR AGE IS WITH US
Jake Lynch,
17 Jul 2009
Friends of the Earth, the UK-based environmental advocacy group, greeted the British government’s plan, announced this week, for deep cuts in the emission of greenhouse gases, with something approaching jubilation. A press release quoted Executive Director Andy Atkins: “Today’s announcements are a significant step towards the creation of a safe, clean and low-carbon future”. Environment […]
→ read full articleIS AUSTRALIA PARTLY TO BLAME FOR ISRAELI LAWLESSNESS?
Jake Lynch,
12 Jul 2009
Days after the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was greeted in Israel and thanked for having been "alone in sticking by us" during Operation Cast Lead, the attack on the Gaza Strip in December and January, the Jewish state added piracy to its list of recent crimes against international law. The two developments are connected, […]
→ read full articleJAKE’S COMPLAINT TO THE AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION (ABC)
Jake Lynch,
3 Jul 2009
Peace journalism is a way for news organizations in general, and broadcasters in particular, to fulfill their obligations and practise their values and aspirations in stories about conflict. In Johan Galtung’s words, “peace journalism makes audible and visible the subjugated aspects of reality”. News conventions mean that important stories, and bits of stories, are always […]
→ read full article