{"id":258994,"date":"2024-04-22T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258994"},"modified":"2024-04-08T14:17:58","modified_gmt":"2024-04-08T13:17:58","slug":"peace-journalism-training-for-journalists-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/peace-journalism-training-for-journalists-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Peace Journalism Training for Journalists in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Contribution to the <\/em>Preventing Violent Extremism-PVE Project in the New Afghanistan<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n

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18 Mar 2024 <\/em>– This article presents and discusses results from an exercise in comparative content analysis of news articles about issues of conflict produced by Afghan journalists before and after participating in an internationally sponsored training and mentorship programme in Peace Journalism. The programme was part of a Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) project, intended to create community resources for resilience, in the information sphere, towards conflict issues contributing to recruitment by non-state armed groups such as Islamic State\u2013Khorasan Province (IS\u2013KP). Peace Journalism is familiar as the basis for media development aid in contexts of conflict; however, its use in an intervention aimed specifically at PVE is relatively new. The results showed that the programme was effective, it is argued, in terms of benefits transferred to and applied by participating journalists. A sample of articles after the training showed a markedly higher Peace Journalism quotient than a baseline sample of articles by the same journalists before it. This suggested that the training and mentorship had successfully stimulated and enabled journalistic agency, taking account of constraints imposed by media structures and wider political and social contexts. The latter have become steadily more onerous under the Islamic Emirate (Taliban) government, in power since August 2021, according to international monitoring organisations. Implications are considered, in light of the findings, for future media development aid to Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

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  1. Introduction<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Peace Journalism (PJ) model, originally proposed by Johan Galtung as a set of ideational distinctions in news representations of conflict, has served as the organising principle for both scholarly research and practical application. Much of the latter has come through media development aid, often taking the form of professional training courses for editors and reporters. The effectiveness of such schemes depends on activating and galvanising journalistic agency to change the content of reporting. The extent of this activity can be gauged from grey literature such as The Peace Journalist, published biannually by the Global Peace Journalism Center at Park University, Missouri. Lynch and Tiripelli<\/a> (2022<\/a>) found 55 reports of such interventions, in 33 countries, in the magazine\u2019s first 19 editions, from April 2012.<\/p>\n

    From the early days of such interventions, however, trainers were reporting such risks as \u201ccreating cycles of empowerment and disempowerment\u201d (Lloyd 2003, p. 118<\/a>), as trainees, enthused with new ideas, returned afterwards to the same office settings, with the same constraints. Adebayo found that journalist participants in a PJ workshop in Nigeria wanted to \u201cset a positive developmental agenda for public discourse\u201d, but found themselves \u201cact[ing] as muffled drums because of the overbearing influence of media owners and draconian government policies\u201d (Adebayo 2016, p. 375<\/a>). An early scholarly critique complained that PJ exponents tended to adopt \u201can overly individualistic and voluntaristic perspective\u201d (Hanitzsch 2008, p. 75<\/a>), giving rise to exaggerated assessments of the extent of change in news practices that could be brought about through such means.<\/p>\n

    Reporting of conflict issues by Afghan media, from the time of the abortive US-sponsored peace talks with the then insurgent Taliban in September 2020, was found (Lynch and Freear 2023<\/a>) to display a predominant pattern of War Journalism, and little or no Peace Journalism, on the distinctions in the Galtung model. In the same study, Afghan journalists were interviewed (n = 16), and asked whether, how, and to what extent this pattern of reporting matched their own aspirations for their journalism. \u201cThe dominant pattern of coverage did not align with their own notions of how the conflict and the issues in the peace negotiations should be reported\u2026 Afghan journalists interviewed for this study wanted to do more Peace Journalism\u201d, the researchers found.<\/p>\n

    Such receptiveness to the tenets of PJ is not untypical among journalists in non-Western settings, Hussain writes. However, \u201cthe main obstacles to Peace Journalism in the non-Western world are lack of media freedom, threats to life and security, unfavourable socio-cultural conditions and lack of resources for journalists\u201d (Hussain 2022, p. 116<\/a>). Aside from the direct obstacles brought about by political and security considerations, the constraint on reporting by Afghan media most often identified by the interview subjects was \u201ca lack of suitable training, particularly in Peace Journalism\u201d (ibid.)<\/p>\n

    In response to these findings, over a period of five months in 2023, a journalist training programme was devised and implemented, in several stages:<\/p>\n