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2021
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Introduction
Media, Conflict, and Peace-Building

Innocent Chiluwa

1 Introduction
The media not only play vital roles in the mediation of conflicts and wars, they
also are involved in discursive practices and cultural politics that predict the
possibilities of social transformation and peace-building (Ivie 2016). The study
of these roles in the context of local and global conflicts and peace-building
efforts becomes more crucial in terms of how the professional practices of
a journalist are defined. According to Carpentier and Terzis (2005), a journalist
has the responsibility to adopt a particular model of war or peace reporting,
such as those proposed by Galtung (1998) (i.e., peace-oriented journalism,
which is generally perceived as people- and solution-oriented, or conflict/war
journalism, which is violence-oriented, and tends towards propaganda). Citing
Galtung (2000; Galtung and Fischer 2013), Nijenhuis (2014) argues that the
media in the practice of war journalism are capable of exacerbating the
conflict by:
focusing on violence, highlighting the differences between groups, and presenting
conflict as a zero-sum game, while ignoring the broad range of causes and outcomes
of conflict . . . Audiences reading war journalism are served a simplified black and white
image, which makes them more likely to support violent “solutions” to the conflict. (65)

This suggests that the media, unfortunately, appears to prefer war journalism to
peace journalism, and what is eminently perceived as “news” is when violent
conflict is involved (Shinar 2013). To explain this phenomenon, Griffin (2010),
notes that this is due to the fact that reports or images associated with violent
conflicts reflect matters of life and death and generally attract more intense
public attention and potentially influence public opinion. However, Galtung
(1987) advocates peace journalism, where journalists take a non-violent per-
spective when reporting conflict. This will involve taking a proactive approach,
framing stories in a way that focuses on peace, minimizing cultural differences,
promoting conflict resolution, and espousing the culture of peace and recon-
ciliation (Gouse et al. 2019, 437).

1
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2 Innocent Chiluwa

Contributions to this book apply theories and approaches in linguistics

(mainly discourse analysis and pragmatics) to examine and analyze media
and online political discourses that exemplify conflict and peace journalism.
While some of the chapters examine the implications and consequences of
some particular worrisome representations of past conflicts and wars in their
cultural and historical contexts, some others raise the alarm about possible
future conflicts within the purview of war reporting. The keyword in most of
the contributions, and especially in Parts I and II of the book, is “representa-
tion” or “framing,” which highlight particular evaluations and perspectives
about persons and events in the conflict stories.
Part III of this book comprises critical analyses of journalism peace efforts
and practical examples of the roles of media in the search for a peaceful
resolution to some major ethnic and global conflicts. In the next subsections
of this introductory chapter, I examine conceptual and theoretical issues on
discourse and representation. I then go on to explain the logic of media
representation, highlighting empirical studies about media construction of
particular conflict situations, as well as roles played by the media in the practice
of peace journalism. I conclude with a summary of each of the chapters.

2 “Discourse” as Used in This Book

In the context of this book, “discourse” is simply defined as language use in the
news – particularly highlighting language choices, which, according to Fowler
(1991), are far from being neutral. In other words, the choice of one word over
another by a journalist or the use of a particular grammatical structure rather
than other available options is significant – especially because of their power
not only to shape public opinion about a topic in the news but also to mobilize
mass actions.
Because journalists often function as mediators between political actors and
the public, they have the ability to “process,” “select,” or “sort systematically”
what should be considered as news (Fowler 1991). This suggests that news is
not simply a value-free accurate report of what happened. Hence, in manipu-
lating the news, a journalist produces a new media reality – ultimately to
achieve the purpose of the report. This way, the journalist becomes not only
a news-maker, but also a meaning-maker (Broersma 2008).
In terms of theory, the approach to discourse analysis in this book draws from
the post-structuralist position that the knowledge of the world should not be
treated as objective truth. This means that discourse (or language use) con-
structs the social world in meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 1985); and because
meaning cannot be fixed, discourse is constantly being transformed, and
different discourses are always representing particular ways of talking about
and understanding the social world (cited in Jorgensen and Phillips 2002, 5).
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Introduction 3

According to Suurmond (2005), the way we talk (or write) does not neutrally
reflect the world of identities and relations, but rather plays an active role in
creating and changing them. Therefore, the struggle between what we claim to
know about the world, also represents a discourse struggle – the struggle
between different discourses showing different ways of understanding aspects
of the world and constructing different realities and identities for speakers (see
Jorgensen and Phillips 2002, 6).
Although linguistic and discourse analytic approaches have not been
popular in studying conflict, especially in the context of media, certain
definitions of conflict have always associated conflict with talk or human
conversations. For instance, interpersonal and group conflicts have been
viewed as any type of verbal or nonverbal opposition, ranging from disagree-
ment to disputes, mostly in social interaction (Kakava 2001). Thus, the
understanding of discourse as social interaction and the analysis of the
structural properties of conflict talk become a matter of theory and method
in discourse analysis – where studies of conflict have shown that opinions,
roles, identities, and ideologies, for example, are constructed and supported
through conflict talk (see Billig 1989; Kakava 2001). Individuals’ utterances
follow different patterns and discourse analysis provides the framework for
the analysis of these patterns, whether in social or cultural discourse, political
discourse or institutional discourse, and these have their huge implications
for conflict as well as for the peaceful co-existence of people in a society
(Kakava 2001).
Going by the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, I will agree with
Suurmond (2005) that discourse analysis is not just another method of data
analysis, rather it is a whole package of philosophical views on the role of
language in human social life, integrating theoretical paradigms, methodo-
logical tools, and specific research techniques, although with its own weak-
nesses and strengths. “Among the strengths of qualitative and critical
approaches (of discourse analysis) are the rich and informative results, the
emphasis on dynamics instead of statics, and the primacy of the subject
matter instead of the method” (19); hence, discourse analysis may be applied
as a methodology for the study of national identities, for example – which is
one of the potential causes of conflict. Such critical analysis can provide
insights on how cultural or religious tensions may cause conflict through the
analysis of the manner in which people speak about others or construct
“other(s)” (21). The chapters in this collection, by adopting the various
methods of analysis in the contemporary discourse research schools (e.g.,
Frame Analysis, Narrative Analysis, Conversation Analysis, Critical
Discourse Analysis) and applying the same to media discourse, contributes
to insights to the significant place of discourse analysis both in theory and
practice.
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4 Innocent Chiluwa

3 Conceptualization of Discourse and Representation

In linguistics or discourse analysis, representation refers to the use of language
in a text (written or spoken) to assign meaning to persons or groups and their
social practices – to events, to social and ecological conditions, and to objects
(Fairclough 1989; van Dijk 2002; Wenden 2005). As highlighted above, this
definition is influenced by the social constructionist view of the role of lan-
guage in social life, which posits that meaning is not embedded in reality but is
construed and constructed through linguistic representation.
Since discourse is a form of social action that plays a part in reproducing the
social world – including knowledge, identities and social relations, different
social understandings of the world lead to different social actions, and it
becomes clear that social construction of knowledge and truth has social
consequences (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002). Fairclough (1989) has also argued
that discourse is a social practice and, as one of other social practices, plays
a fundamental role in constructing the social world. The relation between
discourse and society is dialectical, whereby one influences the other and
vice versa.
Although representations vary depending on the perspective from which
they are constructed, Wenden (2005) argues that there is still the “politics of
representation,” which is a discursive struggle for the “preferred” way of
constructing reality, either by groups, politicians, or the news media. For
instance, while the Iraq war was constructed in Canadian media as the “war
on Iraq” (Härmänmaa 2014), various Arab media outlets framed it as an
“invasion” or “occupation,” and North American media referred to it as “oper-
ation free Iraqi” (Kellner 2004) or the “war on terror” (Barrett 2007) (see
Chiluwa and Chiluwa 2020). Thus, representations comprising the production
of versions of reality are often reflected in the choice of vocabulary and
grammatical processes that are used to express individual or group opinions
and evaluations. In other words, discourse or language use in everyday life, as
in the media, is always reflective of different representations of life, expressing
viewpoints and perspectives that may have huge implications for social secur-
ity and peace.

4 Media and Representations of Conflict

Much of everyday conversations and public opinion about conflict or war is
inspired by the mass media. Speakers and writers often refer to the television or
the newspaper as their source of information and authority of knowledge or
opinions about ethnic or national conflicts (van Dijk 2008). News reports and
images of war are widely presumed to influence public opinion, perceptions
and attitudes, potentially reinforcing or eroding public support for war policy,
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Introduction 5

which is why governments and political interest groups are interested in the
content of the news, including photographs of particular conflicts (Griffin
2010). In many cases, governments have therefore worked hard to control,
limit or delay some particular content from production and circulation. “Such
efforts are aimed not only at shielding particular images from public view but at
promoting and facilitating the distribution of preferred types of images (or
news) and establishing an approved universe of imagery as accepted public
record” (Griffin 2010, 8).
Much of the literature on the representation of war and conflict in the media
has documented “a long-standing preference for war” by journalists who
manipulated their reports in favor of a certain ideology of war (Shinar 2013, 1).
Citing the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which was of an ethnic and
religious nature, Shinar (2013) argues that “nationalist propaganda dissemin-
ated by major media channels sponsored by the Milosevic regime in Serbia,
enhanced violent attitudes and behaviours on the part of civilians against rival
minorities” (1). This suggests media messages didn’t further peaceful solutions
to the conflict, but rather may have inspired hatred and division. This was an
unfortunate instance of how media channels contributed to the destruction of
Yugoslavia, and to an increase in extreme nationalism and division between
groups who had hitherto lived alongside each other in a peaceful manner.
Puddephatt (2006) notes that “It was a frightening example of how a society
can disintegrate, how fear can be exploited by the power of media in the hands
of those unscrupulous enough to wield it as a weapon” (2). In a similar case,
Croatian journalists drew on global discourses of violence to justify and
legitimize war crimes in the coverage of the war in Serbia, Croatia, and
Bosnia (Erjavec and Volcic 2007; Kurspahic 2003, cited in Shinar, 2013). In
Africa, the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s was attributable significantly to
hate speech disseminated by the media (Viljoen 2005). Commenting on the
genocide, Yanagizawa-Drott (2014) concludes that “access to such broadcasts
served to increase organized and civilian violence; that they caused approxi-
mately 10% of the participation in genocidal violence.” In all of these cases, the
media presented the conflicts as irresolvable, making war inevitable. In the
Yugoslavian case, “war was neither inevitable nor the only means of resolving
the conflicts that lay behind the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the local media
played an important role in preparing the ground for war, by ensuring public
opinion was mobilised behind the different participants. Media campaigns
between rival media outlets prefigured the war itself” (Puddephatt, 2006, 8).
As regards the Vietnam War, Cihankova (2014) blames the American media for
“inconsistency” in their accounts of the conflict. Newspapers reported state-
ments from government officials, not minding to what extent they were lied to,
and correspondents were witnessing a different course of events than what they
were told by the government.
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6 Innocent Chiluwa

Public perceptions of war or conflict are often the reflections of media

framing and representations of the conflicts. Saramifar (2019) argues that
framing political actors in a particular way, either through photographs or
news content, generally persuades viewers or the general public to align with
propagated narratives and frames. In the case of the Iran–Iraq war, viewers
remained committed to the rigid categories created in the news, such as
martyrdom and sacrifice being the common frames of dying in the war.
Unfortunately, living with certain ideological and sometimes dangerous
perceptions of conflict/war may be far-reaching: people who have lived
through conflicts may continue to relive the horrors of war, as well as remain
in fear of resurgences. For instance, Abdulbaqi and Ariemu (2017) fear that
reports of the herder–farmer conflict in Nigeria by the Nigerian media are
typical of war journalism, which is likely to spur greater conflict. The study
argues that the choice of words in the representation of the conflict is “divisive,
stereotypic and conflict inciting” (78). Therefore, rather than mending division
in the society, the media may be perpetuating it.
However, in spite of war journalism, there is also peace journalism that
proposes a more positive outcome of media roles in the mediation of conflict
and peace-building.

5 Media and Peace Discourses

Some studies (e.g., Puddephatt 2006) have argued that for a sustained media
involvement in peace processes, the constitutional rights of the media/press
must be respected by various governments and law enforcement agencies. Such
a media environment must be empowering, being built on the recognition that
the freedom of expression and the right to receive and exchange opinions, as
well as ideas and information, are among the virtues of true democracy
(Puddephatt 2006). The media have long been regarded as having a particular
role to play in guaranteeing the individual right to free expression, as it is
through the media that this individual right takes public form. Therefore, “in
any peace negotiations, the role of the media should form a part of the
agreement – all parties should be asked to agree to respect the independence
of the media and to refrain from either using media for propaganda purposes or
to resist from any attempt to intimidate, threaten or abuse media independence”
(9). Puddephatt (2006) further identifies a fundamental limitation in the discus-
sion of media roles in “peace journalism,” which arises from the confusion on
the different roles of the mass media in conflict situations. For instance:
In addition to the representation of the groups they are reporting on – in this case parties
to the conflict – journalists also present their own views and interests. In this respect the
media itself becomes an actor in the conflict, for example when it takes an editorial
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Introduction 7

position or when the media focus on certain issues or aspects of the conflict leads to the
exclusion of others. The idea that the journalist sits outside of the events they are
covering, whatever their perspective on “peace journalism” is misleading. The media,
in this sense, are themselves actors or agents in the conflict and their behaviour will have
an effect on the way the conflict develops. Policy makers therefore need to focus on the
media’s role in constituting the public sphere of society – how that can be fostered and
nurtured in such a way as to allow non-violent resolution of conflict. (10)

Puddephatt’s position clearly highlights the precarious position of the journalist

both as a professional and as an individual member of the society who has the
right to subjective construction of reality, even in peace mediation. This brings
to the fore the importance of the choices a journalist makes (including language
choices), such as the choice of what to report and what not to report. This choice
can either promote violence or contribute to mitigating it. Hence, Lynch (2015)
defines peace journalism as “whenever editors and reporters make choices
about what stories to report and how to report them – which create opportun-
ities for the audience to consider and to value nonviolent responses to conflict”
(193). And it is not just about the pursuit of violent conflict, rather it is for
readers and audience to “consider the value of non-violent responses – it
situates peace journalism in the realm of professional journalism, committed
to factual reporting” (193).
Ahlsen (2013) adds that besides trying to explain the causes of conflicts,
peace journalists “give voice to all perspectives – including nongovernmental
organisations and people from all parts of civil society. They report on different
efforts made to resolve the conflict, look closely at all sides, and choose their
words carefully. In return, they are able to produce a more comprehensive
report, and contribute to a more developed democracy where well-informed
citizens can make well thought out decisions – that could possibly bring about
peace” (4). Similarly, Gouse et al. (2019) view a “peace journalist” as someone
that “proactively reports on the causes of and solutions to a conflict, giving
voice to all parties through responsible, empathetic journalism” (436).
Literature abounds with scholarly research on peace journalism. Gouse et al.
(2019) chronicle scholarly articles that investigate the attributes of peace and
war journalism in newspaper, television and radio reports. Results suggest that
most peace journalism studies examine media in the frontline – within direct
violence as it is happening – and assess conflict most often by using the war/
peace indicator of elite-oriented versus people-oriented. Mandelzis (2007)
explores the positive impact of three Israeli newspapers in the aftermath of
the Oslo accord of 1993 – how they “demonstrated a dramatic change in
attitude and terminology: The familiar war discourse was rapidly being
replaced by peace representations and peace images” (1). In a similar study,
Gavriely-Nuri (2010) applies a cultural approach to Critical Discourse
Analysis (CCDA) to analyze the Israeli political peace discourse and finds
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8 Innocent Chiluwa

that the use of the term “peace” fosters the construction of the Israeli speaker’s
positive self-image as peace-seeker together with the delegitimation of rivals;
and also facilitates public acceptance of strategically problematic actions,
primarily the use of military violence, by their presentation as part of the
peace discourse.
It is therefore clear that scholarly conversation on conflict and war cannot be
complete or lead to any significant conclusion without an equal and fruitful
discourse on peace-building and peace processes. In the past, war and conflict
have received more attention in scholarly literature than conflict resolution.
The current volume contributes to scholarly intervention in research on media
efforts towards peace-building and conflict resolution.

6 Summary of Chapters
The current volume is divided into three parts: Part I and Part II examine the
constructions of conflicts in the media and analyze media representations of
specific conflicts. While Part I focuses on the print media of newspapers and
magazines, Part II pays attention to electronic and digital media. Part III, which
is made up of five chapters and the concluding chapter, analyses “media
discourse and conflict resolution.” In this part, the contributors provide in-
depth analyses of media (positive) roles in the processes of peaceful resolution
to a number of regional and global conflicts.
The analyses presented here further shed some light on the useful methodo-
logical synergy between linguistics, media studies and conflict studies. In the
past, media representations of people and situations, for instance racism,
asylum seekers, immigrants, Muslims, and ethnic minorities among others,
have been extensively researched by linguistics and media scholars – applying
methods in corpus linguistics, discourse/linguistic pragmatics and Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see van Dijk 1991; Baker 2010; Baker &
McEnery 2005; Chiluwa 2011; Ahmed and Matthes 2017; Cap 2018). In the
current book, the authors have applied mainly linguistic and discourse analyt-
ical approaches to examine topics on media representations of violence, con-
flict and war. The insights from these studies and the methodological
approaches adopted by the contributors to this book, I believe, will open up
stronger interest and research collaborations among language and media
scholars and researchers.
In chapter 1, Mark Finney and Sarah Fisher examine the New York Times’s
representation of the Elián González custody case of 1999, and argue that
discourses used by the New York Times in its coverage of the González case
corresponded with the themes of the broader conflict between the United
States and Cuba, and that American sources represented in the coverage
exemplified predictable attitudes about Cuba and Communism. By applying
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Introduction 9

a discourse analytical framework, the study shows that conflict trajectories in

democratic societies are influenced by news representations in so much that
news is both influenced by context and also influences public knowledge and
opinion.
In chapter 2, Enis Bicer, Lina Brink, and Alejandra Nieves Camacho explore
the different meanings of Islamist terrorism and terrorist threats in four popular
German newspapers, namely Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and Die
Tageszeitung. The study applying the sociology of knowledge approach to
discourse (SKAD) finds that three interpretive schemes about threats associ-
ated with Islamist terrorism can be found – namely Islam and Muslims repre-
sented as antagonists to the Western “Us,” the erosion of state order and public
security, and risks to the preservation of the current “open society” in countries
that experience Islamist terror attacks. They argue for their different references
to anti-Muslim stereotypes and racism.
In chapter 3, Innocent Chiluwa, Isioma Chiluwa, and Angie O. Igbinoba
apply a combination of CDA and corpus linguistics to investigate the represen-
tations of the herder–farmer conflict in news headlines of seven broadsheet
newspapers in Nigeria. The study argues that the frequent representation of the
herder–farmer conflict as domestic terrorism, and the description of the herds-
men as terrorists, prognosticates more serious violent conflicts in Nigeria. The
study further argues that the whole truth about the conflict is not yet told by
titling news analysis of the situation in favor of one party in the conflict.
Furthermore, due to the prevalence of violence attributed to Muslims following
domestic and international acts of terrorism, much of the world seems occupied
with the views and actions of Muslims, calling particular attention to the Salafi
sect.
In chapter 4, Ahmed Sahlane analyses how the Iraqi war was covered in
Western media through the use of “pragmatic framing and visual rhetoric.” The
study argues that the coalition mainstream media erroneously painted the
picture of the US so-called sophisticated weaponry, chivalrous heroism and
militarist humanitarianism, rather than reporting the true images of suffering,
destruction, dissent and diplomacy. By muting dissenting voices, the pro-war
coalition media frames manufactured an “interpretive dominance that was
inextricably structured in hegemony and social control.”
Chapters 5 to 9 cover accounts and analyses of media representations of
violent conflicts and wars focusing on electronic media and the Internet. In
Chapter 5, Ada Peter and Innocent Chiluwa examine the criticisms of NATO’s
involvement in the Libyan crisis of 2011, concentrating on the textual struc-
tures and discourse strategies in the CNN reports that could have contributed to
the transformation of the so-called “uprising” to a civil war (see also Bouvier
2014). Applying discourse pragmatic methodology, the authors propose new
questions that may inspire arguments on whether semantic, narrative and
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10 Innocent Chiluwa

pragmatic acts impacted attitudes that might have validated and propagated the
war in Libya.
In chapter 6, Valerie A. Cooper applies quantitative content analysis and
corpus linguistics and CDA to analyze the Voice of America and China Radio
International’s thematic and linguistic deconstruction of North Korea’s threats
of a nuclear strike and subsequent test-firing of missiles in March 2016. The
results show that these government-sponsored media outlets used similar
linguistic techniques to assign or avoid blame in reference to North Korea, as
well as to China and the United States.
In a report written by Alan Cowell entitled “50 years later, troubles still cast
‘huge shadow’ over Northern Ireland,” and published in the New York Times of
October 4, 2018, the author lamented that the constant asymmetric conflicts in
Northern Ireland – “the troubles would not go away.” The author cited a former
civil rights Protestant and peace activist as lamenting that the Troubles “are so
burned into our lives that they are part of our DNA . . . They are with us
every day – especially those of us who were bereaved. It’s a festering sore,
because it’s never been dealt with.” Stephen Goulding (in chapter 7 of this
volume) continues this conversation and reveals how the media supports the
legitimation of conflicts being promoted by “dissident republican organiza-
tions.” Applying discourse analytical methods, the chapter demonstrates how
the investigation of discourse strategies, topics and micro-linguistic features
can provide insights into the framing and justification of the conflict. The study
suggests that the dissident actors devote much of their communication to
threatening the peace and acting as the mouthpiece for the legitimation of
conflict in Northern Ireland.
In chapter 8, Troy E. Spier applies Critical Discourse Analysis to engage
with questions of ideology relating to the question of who a “believer” and an
“unbeliever” is following the Arabic triliteral root word (i.e. √KFR) referring to
disbelievers and states of disbelief. His data were obtained from the publica-
tions of two extremist Muslim online English magazines – Dabiq and Inspire.
The findings of the study show that members of al-Qa’ida and Da’esh do not
strictly consult the religious denotations of the triliteral root. Instead, they
establish the “Self” and the “Other” dichotomy on pseudo-religious grounds
and perpetuate stereotypes and contemporary prejudices that misrepresent
those who adhere to the Islamic faith.
Fiona Chawana and Ufuoma Akpojivi question the feasibility of achiev-
ing social change through violence via the study of the #FeesMustFall
social movement protests of 2015 and 2016 at the University of
Witwatersrand in South Africa. The study shows that the movement used
“systematic violence” to disrupt the state apparatus and also disturbed the
university activity system that had hindered students’ socioeconomic and
cultural development.
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Introduction 11

As highlighted above, the media have long been considered as having

significant roles in the process of peace-building, which is founded within the
principles of peace journalism. Part III of this book is focused on specific cases
of media efforts in achieving world peace. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict and
peace negotiations are a well-known intractable case that has almost defied
international peace efforts. In chapter 10, Giuliana Tiripelli carries out
a Critical Discourse Analysis of the New York Times’s coverage of the
Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement in the discursive context of the Oslo
negotiations. The study argues that by promoting a peace focused on separation
instead of investing in commonality, the Declaration of Principles prevented
these transformative discourses from entering the new debate on peace-
building in Israel and Palestine. In a similar study, Jelena Timotijevic (chapter
11) supplies additional theoretical rigor by engaging with discourse analysis as
a form of “history writing.” Drawing from the tradition of cultural-historical
and activity theory, the study offers a critical examination of the language of the
Western actors and media outlets to assess whether such narrative impacts on
prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict.
Another well-known peace process that has engaged the world is the pro-
posal and negotiation to end the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Since the war
began in 2001, ongoing negotiation and the peace movement have made
considerable progress, especially in 2018 when peace talks between the
Taliban and the Afghan government began in earnest. Also, there were (failed)
peace talks between the Pakistani government and the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban
Pakistan) after the 2014 “Operation Zarb-e-Azb” – a joint military offensive
conducted by the Pakistan armed forces against all militant groups in North
Waziristan. This operation wiped out all local and national militant groups in
Waziristan and improved the security situation, as well as reducing terrorist
attacks in Pakistan to a six-year low since 2008.1 In chapter 12, Lubna Shaheen
and Muhammad Tarique analyze news discourses covering the peace talks
between the Pakistan government and the TTP, and the culmination of these
peace talks to the military operation Zarb-e-Azb. The research argues that the
overall stance of the Dawn and The Nation (two popular Pakistani English
newspapers) is condescending, contemptuous and demonizing – thus demoral-
izing the TTP instead of being conciliatory.
In chapter 13, Lutgard Lams applies speech act theory to examine the
constitutive role of the media in influencing and interpreting official apologies
in the realm of international conflict resolution. The study investigates the
Sino–US diplomatic row after a midair plane collision over the South China

1
“Pakistan Launches Offensive against Militants near Afghan Border,” Huffington Post, June 15,
2014. “Militant Attacks Declined after Zarb-E-Azb Operation: Report,” The Nation, June 17,
2015. Archived from the original on June 17, 2015.
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12 Innocent Chiluwa

Sea on April 1, 2001. The study argues that the Chinese requests for a formal
US apology and the latter’s expressions of regret were discursive issues of
contention and subject to different media interpretations. The results show that
the US and Chinese media participated in negotiating an American expression
of “apology/regret,” disseminating the message through skillful translation
techniques, and metapragmatically interpreting its significance.
The study of the construction of conflict and peace-building processes in the
media has not focused much on volunteerism and volunteers as salient actors in
peace-building. Yet, according to UNESCO, the work carried out by volunteers
is very important in peace-building initiatives and dates back as far as the 1920s,
after World War I. Since then, volunteerism has been involved in promoting
social cohesion and reconciliation and helping to develop nation civilian capaci-
ties, all of which make a critical positive difference to peace-building processes
and initiatives. Voluntary movements have been involved in postwar reconstruc-
tion, solidarity and the reconciliation of people from different backgrounds
through collective voluntary engagement as a way of recreating interpersonal
linkages. After World War II, various international networks were set up based
on the renewed realization that sustainable peace relies on solid connections and
trust among people, which can be fostered through concrete joint actions for the
common good.2 In chapter 14, María del Mar Sánchez Ramos applies a corpus-
assisted discourse analytical approach to examine the representation of volunteer
identity in the English and Spanish newspapers. The study finds that “volunteer-
ing is constructed as a helping activity – a more politicized discourse focused on
the volunteer as an activist and actor of social change.”
This volume contributes essentially to our understanding of our past and
present (as well as, possibly, our predictable future) when it comes to how the
media engages in the processes of conflict and conflict resolution. It will
therefore serve as an essential resource for students, scholars and experts in
media and communication studies, conflict and peace studies, international
relations, linguistics and political science.

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