2019/10/01

Peace journalism - Wikipedia

Peace journalism - Wikipedia



Peace journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peace journalism has been developed from research that indicates that often news about conflict has a value bias toward violence. It also includes practical methods for correcting this bias by producing journalism in both the mainstream and alternative media, and working with journalists, media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict.
This concept was proposed by Johan Galtung[1] Other terms for this broad definition of peace journalism include conflict solution journalism, conflict sensitive journalism,[2] constructive conflict coverage, and reporting the world.[3]
War journalism is journalism about conflict that has a value bias towards violence and violent groups. This usually leads audiences to overvalue violent responses to conflict and ignore non-violent alternatives. This is understood to be the result of well documented news reporting conventions. These conventions focus only on physical effects of conflict (for example ignoring psychological impacts) and elite positions (which may or may not represent the actual parties and their goals). It is also biased toward reporting only the differences between parties, (rather than similarities, previous agreements, and progress on common issues) the here and now (ignoring causes and outcomes), and zero sums (assuming that one side's needs can only be met by the other side's compromise or defeat).[4]
Peace journalism aims to correct for these biases. Its operational definition is "to allow opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict".[5] This involves picking up calls for, and articulations of, non-violence policies from whatever quarter, and allowing them into the public sphere.

Origins[edit]

Used with permission of Assoc Prof. Jake Lynch
Peace journalism workshop in Mindanao, the Philippines
Peace journalism follows a long history of news publication, originating in non-sectarian Christian peace movements and societies of the early 19th century, which published periodicals.[6] Sectarian organizations also created publications focused on peace as part of their proselytizing in the 19th century, as did utopian communities of the period. From the 20th century, a prominent example of sectarian journalism focused on peace was Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker.[7]
Besides being an element in the histories of pacifism and the social movement press, peace journalism is a set of journalism practices that emerged in the 1970s. Norwegian sociologist, peace researcher and practitioner Johan Galtung proposed the idea of peace journalism for journalists to follow to show how a value bias towards violence can be avoided when covering war and conflict.[8] Christian organizations such as The World Council of Churches and The World Association for Christian Communication also practice peace journalism.
Peace journalism aims to shed light on structural and cultural causes of violence, as they impact upon the lives of people in a conflict arena as part of the explanation for violence. It aims to frame conflicts as consisting of many parties and pursuing many goals rather than a simple dichotomy. An explicit aim of peace journalism is to promote peace initiatives from whatever quarter and to allow the reader to distinguish between stated positions and real goals.

Necessity[edit]

Peace journalism came about through research arguing there's something wrong with typical conflict reporting. Research and practice in peace journalism outlines a number of reasons for the existence and dominance of war journalism in conflict news.[9]

Other interests[edit]

Firstly, the notion that media elites always act to preserve their favored status quo, and their own commercial and political interests, is given relatively little weight. Shared characteristics of the socio-economic class, which heavily influences the production of journalism, are important. For example, their shared ideological pressures, perceptions, attitudes, and values form the basis of a "dominant reading" of facts that are selected to appear in news. These can then act to fix and naturalize meaning and hide the actual creation of meaning.[10]
However, even in the presence of powerful elite media interests against war, war journalism often dominates conflict discourse. Lynch and McGoldrick show examples from Britain, Ireland, Georgia, and Iraq, where war journalism dominated coverage despite key influential media interests against war.[11]

Journalistic objectivity[edit]

Used with permission of Assoc Prof. Jake Lynch
Peace journalist Jake Lynch covering protests against joint US-Australia military exercises in Australia.
Therefore, not only political and economic, but also social and cultural factors have contributed to the dominance of war journalism in conflict reporting. With the growth of mass media, especially from the 19th century, news advertising became the most important source of media revenue.
Whole audiences needed to be engaged across communities and regions to maximize advertising revenue. This led to "Journalistic objectivity as an industry standard…a set of conventions allowing the news to be presented as all things to all people".[12] And in modern journalism, especially with the emergence of 24 hour news cycles, speed is of the essence in responding to breaking stories. It is not possible for reporters to decide "from first principals" every time how they will report each and every story that presents itself.[13] It follows that convention governs much of journalism.
The rise of journalistic objectivity was part of a larger movement within western academia to a more empirical "just report the facts” epistemology and research paradigm. By the 1890s it was focused on the ideal of “objectivity”.[14] And although it came into fashion around the same period, Journalistic Objectivity must be distinguished from the Scientific Objectivity. For example the experimental sciences uses as "best practice":
  1. Inter-laboratory replication;
  2. Random assignment of subjects to conditions;
  3. Efforts to ensure that human subjects and experimenters are ignorant of the expectations (hypotheses)of the research: to avoid the Observer-expectancy effect
  4. The Subject-expectancy effect;
  5. Anonymous peer review, a form of peer review, to promote open and systematic exploration of meaning without subjective, "political" bias;
  6. Careful analysis to ensure that research subjects are adequately representative of the general population, that is not overly atypical when compared to the average population.
While it is arguable whether these experimental science safe guards provide “true objectivity”, in the absence of these safeguards, journalism around conflict relies on three conventions to maintain its own form of "objectivity" ( also see journalistic objectivity), and is therefore distinct from Scientific Objectivity.

Conventions[edit]

Firstly, to sell audiences to advertisers, reporting must appeal to as broad an audience as possible and therefore focuses on “facts” that are the least controversial. Conflict processes are often controversial, so coverage of them risks alienating potential consumers, who may be sensitive to the exposure of structural or cultural predisposing factors.[15]
Secondly, a bias in favor of official sources means that, while it may appear uncontroversial, as there is only one official representative for the government on any given issue[16] and since only the official government is usually allowed to wield legal, sanctioned force within its territory[17] coverage will tend to privilege violent responses to conflict over non-violent, social-psychological, context-informed responses.[18]
Journalists Annabel McGoldrick and Jake Lynch argue that non-critical reporting of official sources is often rewarded by those sources. Through "information transactions", these same official sources allow uncritical journalists privileged access to information in the future.[19]
Thirdly and lastly, 'dualism' biasses journalistic objectivity towards violence: "A decision to tell a story in that [bipolar] way can slip past, unnoticed, without drawing attention to itself because of its close resemblance, in shape and structure, to so much of the story-telling we already take for granted".[20]

Gatekeeping[edit]

These conventions also form “gates” by which “gatekeepers” in journalism include or exclude various aspects of reality in final publication.[21]
In this way, proponents of peace journalism argue that in the media meaning occurs according to: “a set of rules and relations established before the reality or the experience under discussion actually occurred”.[22] In war journalism the objectivity conventions serve this purpose, but are shadowy and unacknowledged.[23] “Gatekeeping” is therefore likely to be secretive and haphazard. This means they distort, and also fix, meaning in conflict coverage and obfuscate the production of meaning[clarification needed].[24]
A recent example demonstrates how peace journalism evaluative criteria might be applied to show how much conventional conflict reporting is biased in favor of violence and violent groups. The example is the coverage leading up to the September 2009 meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and US President Barack Obama.
Reporting was highly reactive and focused on the visible effects of the conflict, such as announcements and public disagreements between official spokespeople that appeared to disrupt peace efforts.[25]


Coverage was oriented to elites with little mention of non-official peace efforts by individuals and groups such as the Hand in Hand network of schools, the Israeli/Palestinian The Parents Circle Families Forum, Peace Now, Breaking the Silence, Physicians for Human Rights, Machsom Watch, and Checkpoint Watch, Hanan Ashrawi (non-violent activist for human rights, founder of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council).[26][27]

Also ignored were programmes that promote cultural exchange, for example (the Israeli-Palestinian Aussie Rules football team The Peace Team), see here for official 2011 team details) which played in the 2008 and 2011 AFL International Cups. Another is the current programme of Palestinian children's visits to the Old Yishuv Court Museum in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Events demonstrating non-violent responses to the conflict were also ignored, a new example being the March 12, 2011, Conference on Civil Disobedience in the West Bank marking the centenary of International Women's Day.[28] Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis lists further organizations working for peace in the region, whose activities are generally excluded from news on the Conflict.
Reporting leading up to the September 2009 meeting between Netanyahu, Abbas and Obama focused almost solely on highly divisive issues, such as Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the diplomatic/official status of Jerusalem. Coverage was also oriented towards differences, with a focus on the here and now. Potential benefits in physical, economic, and social security of peaceful relations were ignored, and “progress” towards peace was portrayed as having to come with one or more parties compromising and surrendering their positions on key issues, which is of course a zero sum orientation.[29] Coverage generally ignored the background or context of positions. Positions were presented as unchangeable on any peaceful settlement, rather than the public "face" of unmet needs that often drive violent conflicts. Because of distrust between parties these needs are often not honestly expressed publicly.[30]
Thus a pattern of war journalism emerges, largely stemming from the objectivity conventions applied to conflict reporting. Peace journalism argues that this is likely to have important and consistent effects on the way audiences understand a conflict.
In war journalism, violence is typically presented as only its own cause, ignoring the possibility of structural or psychological causes. Since violence is assumed to have no cause or explanation (such as the deprived needs of parties), conventional conflict reporting may leave viewers to conclude that the only “natural” or reasonable response to violence is more violence.[31] That “more violence—‘the only language they understand'—is an appropriate remedy”, and that non-violent responses are irrelevant or 'unrealistic'.[15]
This focus on only physical violent behavior is an example of what leading Conflict Analyst and Peace Researcher, Johan Galtung identifies as a major flaw in responses to inter-communal conflict: the “Conservative Fallacy”.[32]
This bias towards prioritizing violent actors with coverage is then expected by violent groups, through what is called a Feedback Loop.[33] Parties to a conflict often try to use the media to advance their position, rather than being passive subjects, unaware of being observed, as assumed in sciences where humans are not the subjects. Journalist, and journalism Associate Professor, Jake Lynch notes that "it is not the influence of news on public opinion as such, but assumptions by parties to conflict about its likely or possible influence, that condition their behaviour".[34]
In this way war journalism is an example of the role of power in representation and of the media trying to fix meaning, in this case about violence and its causes, for “it to become naturalized so that is the only meaning it can possibly carry…where you cannot see that anybody ever produced it."[35]
Thus, war journalism is understood as reporting on conflict in a way which imposes an artificially confined closed space, and closed time, with causes and exits existing only in the conflict arena.[36] Peace journalism can then be understood as journalism that avoids this outside imposition, which more objectively assesses the possibility of conflicts taking place in open space, and open time with any number of causes and exits.

Effects[edit]

The Salvadoran Civil War, largely a peasant revolution, took place 1980–92. The USA supported the right-wing government. During the war 75,000 people were killed, 8,000 more went missing and another million exiled. On 17 March 1980, the village of Ingenio Colima was attacked by paramilitaries who murdered all its occupants. At the time, the country’s media gave a biased account of what took place. The intention today – in the face of open hostility from today’s political leaders is to investigate and clarify what happened and to contribute to a national process of truth and reconciliation.[37]
The emotional effects of war journalism also make it more difficult for audiences to be aware of this biased presentation of conflict. War journalism takes advantage of the emotional “high” humans can get from fear through evolutionary psychological mechanisms.[38] In a similar way, war journalism appeals to "lower order" needs for security and belonging.[39] The pre-frontal cortex, governing working memory, rational attentive functioning, and complex thought is inhibited by activation of the brain’s fear centre, the limbic system.[40]
Audiences are thus deprived of cognitive resources with which to recognize the role of fear in encouraging war journalism consumption. This cognitive deprivation also further fixes meaning and increases the role of “automatically activated attitudes” which according to cognitive psychology: "guide attention toward attitude-consistent information, provide a template with which to interpret ambiguous information, and…guide behaviour in a relatively spontaneous fashion".[41] Therefore viewers are primed to pay more attention to future information, which is consistent with the automatically activated attitudes formed by war journalism. Research into the ever present framing[clarification needed] in the media supports this conclusion: “Certainly people can recall their own facts, forge linkages not made explicitly in the text, or retrieve from memory a causal explanation or cure that is completely absent from the text. In essence, this is just what professors encourage their students to do habitually. But Zaller (1992), Kahneman and Tversky (1984), and Iyengar (1991), among others, suggest that on most matters of social or political interest, people are not generally so well-informed and cognitively active, and that framing therefore heavily influences their responses to communications”.[42]
Research shows that war journalism can have negative emotional impacts on audience members. These include feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, compounded by increased anxiety, mood disturbance, sadness and a sense of disconnection with physical and social environments. Research by Galtung and Ruge (1965) finds negativity bias in foreign news. This has also been confirmed more recently by Nohrstedt and Ottosen (2008).[43] This can affect reactions towards the conflict itself, and an audience’s general psychological wellbeing, which biasses their view of the world as excessively chaotic and may cause serious anxiety and emotional difficulties, and a sense of disempowerment and disconnection.[44] Vicarious trauma can increase these negative effects, where "even ‘normal’, intelligent, educated individuals can become highly suggestible towards violent acts in formerly unexpected contexts".[45]
These negative emotional states may discourage audience members from criticism and challenge of the biassed information presented through war journalism. These public concerns may appear to be "someone else’s problem" and best left to "experts", who alone have the necessary knowledge, time, and emotional endurance. These negative emotional responses may also discourage creative engagement with the conflict and conflict parties. This is especially troubling considering the critical role of creativity in conflict resolution and peacebuilding.[46]

Feedback loop[edit]

Peace journalism analysis suggests that typical news on conflict, with its value bias towards violence and violent groups, has important effects on the parties to conflict. Firstly, peace journalism proponents argue that the bias in favour of publicity for violence and violent actors, "plays into" the interests of violent actors to intimidate and disrupt the peace process.[47] This is an important example of the Feedback Loop effect: "it is not the influence of news on public opinion as such, but assumptions by parties to conflict about its likely or possible influence, that condition their behaviour".[34] This bias also weakens and punishes, with less publicity, non-violent groups affected by a conflict, for their lack of violence. Nohrstedt and Ottosen (2002) note: "if traditional media themselves are unable to transmit alternative perspectives and voice the danger is that those […] that feel marginalised will turn to terror in order to make a difference in the media agenda".[48]
The most visible actions of a group, of which one is not a member, are often considered representative of that group’s behaviour (an effect called the “availability heuristic”).[49] Therefore war journalism's over-selection of violent, as opposed to non-violent, responses to conflict may actually foster a misperception of excessive threat between parties. This is then generally exaggerated by other inter-group social-cognitive biases within war journalism. These include biases towards: seeing an outgroup as more homogeneous (with less internal variety) than it really is, ignoring the variety of attitudes towards the conflict;[50] seeing ambiguous situations, or negative group behavior, as playing out internal, and stable, group characteristics rather than external, and variable, circumstances,[51] favourable ingroup/outgroup comparison to increase collective self esteem;[52] and members of groups who perceive themselves to be under threat to be more pressured internally to conform with and reinforce dominant group norms;[53] premature and immediate resistance to ideas on positive responses to violence offered by members of outgroups.[54]
Indeed Dr. Louis Kriesberg, a sociologist at Syracuse University, and expert on conflict resolution points out that: "conventional thinking among partisans in a fight generally attributes destructive persistence in a conflict to the enemy's character, asserting that the enemy is aggressive by nature, has evil leaders, or adheres to a hostile ideology".[55] And Professor of World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, Marc Gopin, agrees with the importance of psychological factors in escalating conflict: "being hated normally generates deep injury and corresponding anger in most recipients is what I call a "conflict dance" of action/reaction".[56]
A peace journalism perspective also highlights another effect of typical conflict journalism on the groups engaged in a conflict: war journalism's common focus on the human drama and tragedy of violence. Hamber and Lewis (1997) note war journalism "often involves painting doomsday scenarios of victims who are irreparably damaged and for whom there appears to be no solution and no future".[57] This creates an increased impediment for the victims of unreported crimes. And the positive experiences of those who have embarked upon a process of recovery is often ignored in war journalism.[58] For example in Israel/Palestine, victims of suicide bombing, house demolition, land and house theft, are often portrayed as defenceless, disempowered victims with no prospect of healing or positive response to their predicament.[59]
Effective non-violent bridge building between communities such as the Hand in Hand Arab/Jewish school network in Israel, are routinely ignored in war journalism coverage. Non-violent initiatives illustrate what can be possible through peaceful responses to conflict but this information is artificially "filtered out" through the coverage biases of war journalism.[60] Parties are therefore presented with a biassed picture of the entire conflict, favouring violent responses to the conflict. Parties are led to believe that that violence is the only way their needs can be met, thereby reinforcing and escalating cycles of dangerous retaliation between groups. Peace journalism would also charge that this pattern of conventional conflict reporting submerges the emotional cost of violent conflict and therefore makes the psychological aspects of cycles of revenge subtle, and so more difficult to prevent.[61]
All of this missed information could represent a crucial movement away from violence, as the only option for threatened groups towards peace. But only if they are not hidden by journalistic assumptions that they are irrelevant, and should not be reported. This is of special concern, given that the collective trauma suffered by a population, and the fear that this generates, can lead to a reduced capacity for decision making and action.[62]

Response[edit]

In response to war journalism’s value bias in favour of violence, peace journalism promises two key benefits: for those concerned with objectivity in journalism, it aims to avoid and counteract the persistent bias of valuing violence and violent parties. Secondly, as all journalism must in some way appeal to the values of their audiences, for those who value the promotion of peace and social justice over violence, it provides a practical methodology.[63]
The 'fixation of meaning'[clarification needed] in war journalism is often hidden by the “scattered opposition facts” that often occur in its coverage. However these
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TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE » (1) WHAT IS PEACE JOURNALISM?

TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE » (1) WHAT IS PEACE JOURNALISM?



(1) WHAT IS PEACE JOURNALISM?

peace journalism logo
A) by Jake Lynch
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.
If readers and audiences are furnished with such opportunities, but still decide they prefer war to peace, there is nothing more journalism can do about it, while remaining journalism. On the other hand, there is no matching commitment to ensuring a fair hearing for violent responses, if only because they seldom struggle for a place on the news agenda.
How come? To report is to choose. ‘We just report the facts’, journalists say, but ‘the facts’ is a category of practically infinite size. Even in these days of media profusion, that category has to be shrunk to fit into the news. The journalist is a ‘gatekeeper’, allowing some aspects of reality through, to emerge, blinking, into the public eye; and keeping the rest in the dark.
Neither is this a random process. The bits left out are always, or usually, the same bits, or the same sorts of bits. News generally prefers official sources to anyone from the ‘grassroots’; event to process; and a two-sided battle for supremacy as the basic conflict model.
These preferences, or biases, hardened into industry conventions as journalism began to be sold as a mass-produced commodity in consumer societies, and faced pressure to present itself as all-things-to-all-people, capable of being marketed to potential readers, listeners and viewers of all political views and none.
Quoting officials – a category topped by the political leader of one’s own country – is a choice and a preference, but one with a built-in alibi. It was not our ‘fault’ that this person became head of government: s/he just ‘is’. ‘Indexing’, or the familiar journalistic habit of restricting the extent of debate to differences between government and official opposition – ‘elite discord’ – has the same effect, of camouflaging choices as facts.
What about event and process? News that dwells on, say, the details of death and destruction wrought by a bomb, avoids controversy. The device has, indisputably, gone off. There are well-attested casualty figures, from trustworthy sources such as hospitals and the police. What is automatically more controversial is to probe why the bombers did it, what was the process leading up to it, what were their grievances and motivations.
As to dualism, well, when I was a reporter at the BBC, we all realised that a successful career could be based on the following formula: ‘on the one hand… on the other hand… in the end, only time will tell’. To have ‘balance’, to ‘hear both sides’, is a reliable way to insulate oneself against complaints of one-sidedness, or bias.
War Journalism and Its Antidote
There are deep-seated reasons, then, why these are the dominant conventions in journalism, but, taken together, they mean that its framing of public debates over conflict issues is generally on the side of violent responses. It merits the description, ‘war journalism’.
How come? Take the dualism first. If you start to think about a conflict as a tug-of-war between two great adversaries, then any change in their relationship – any movement – can only take place along a single axis. Just as, in tug-of-war, one side gaining a metre means the other side losing a metre, so any new development, in a conflict thus conceived, immediately begs to be assessed in a zero-sum game. Anything that is not, unequivocally, winning, risks being reported as losing. It brings a readymade incentive to step up efforts for victory, or escalate. People involved in conflict ‘talk tough’ – and often ‘act tough’ – as they play to a gallery the media have created.
Remove acts of political violence from context and you leave only further violence as a possible response. This is why there is so little news about peace initiatives – if no underlying causes are visible, there is nothing to ‘fix’. Only in this form of reporting does it make any sense to view ‘terrorism’, for example, as something on which it is possible or sensible to wage ‘war’.
And if you wait, to report on either underlying causes or peace initiatives, until it suits political leaders to discuss or engage with them, you might wait a long time. Stirrings of peace almost invariably begin at lower levels. There is, furthermore, a lever in the hands of governments that no one else has – the ‘legitimate’ use of military force. For all these reasons, the primacy of official sources, coupled with the enduring national orientation of most media, is bound to skew the representation of conflicts in favour of a pronounced receptiveness to the advocacy of violence.
Hence, peace journalism, as a remedial strategy and an attempt to supplement the news conventions to give peace a chance.
Peace Journalism:
  1. Explores the backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation, presenting causes and options on every side (not just ‘both sides’);
  2. Gives voice to the views of all rival parties, from all levels;
  3. Offers creative ideas for conflict resolution, development, peacemaking and peacekeeping;
  4. Exposes lies, cover-up attempts and culprits on all sides, and reveals excesses committed by, and suffering inflicted on, peoples of all parties;
  5. Pays attention to peace stories and post-war developments.
Reality and Representation
Peace journalism is more realistic, in the sense of fidelity to a reality that already exists, independently of our knowledge or representation of it. To report violence without background or context is to misrepresent it, since any conflict is, at root, a relationship, of parties setting and pursuing incompatible goals. To omit any discussion of them is a distortion.
At the same time, it acknowledges that there is no one correct version of this reality that everyone will agree upon. We understand the world around us by taking messages and images – including those served up by the news – and slotting them into codes we develop through our lives and carry in our heads. Meaning is not created solely at the point of production, or encoding; no act of representation is complete until it has been received, or decoded. Decoding is something we often do automatically, since so much of what we read, hear and see is familiar. This is what propaganda relies on – establish Saddam Hussein as a ‘bad man’, or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a ‘threat’, and it forms a prism, through which all the reality, both subsequent and previous, tends to be viewed.
Journalism is often easy prey for such efforts because it does not generally encourage us to reflect on the choices it is making, for reasons discussed above. The famous US ‘anchor-man’, Walter Cronkite, signed off CBS Evening News every night with the catchphrase, “that’s the way it is”. How it came to be that way would be an interesting conversation, but it is not one in which news is generally keen to engage.
Communications students will recognise the last few paragraphs as a potted version of reception theory. In writing this introduction, I’ve resisted academic sources, because, yes folks, the clichés are true, media scholars often do dress in black (which we won’t hold against them) and chew polysyllables for breakfast (which we might). However it’s worth quoting one famous aphorism coined by a clever and original researcher, Gaye Tuchman: “the acceptance of representational conventions as facticity makes reality vulnerable to manipulation”.
So peace journalism is in favour of truth, as any must be. Of course reporters should report, as truthfully as they can, the facts they encounter; only ask, as well, how they have come to meet these particular facts, and how the facts have come to meet them. If it’s always the same facts, or the same sorts of facts, adopt a policy of seeking out important stories, and important bits of stories, which would otherwise slip out of the news, and devise ways to put them back in. And try to let the rest of us in on the process. Peace journalism is that which abounds in cues and clues to prompt and equip us to ‘negotiate’ our own readings, to open up multiple meanings, to inspect propaganda and other self-serving representations on the outside.
Can journalists actually do this, and do they? Latterly, researchers have set out to gauge the amount of peace journalism that is going on. There is probably no one piece of reporting that exhibits all five of the characteristics listed above, whilst also avoiding demonizing language, labeling and so forth. But distinctions do exist, and they have been measured. Reporting in The Philippines, especially by the country’s main newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is interesting in providing an effective counter to attempts by the country’s government to import the ‘war on terrorism’ ideology and apply it to a long-running insurgency. The paper I used to work for, the Independent of London, does a lot of peace journalism.
Then of course there are proliferating independent media, now building, through web-based platforms, on traditions long nurtured by alternative newspapers and community radio stations. There is some peace journalism, so there could be more.
________________
Associate Professor Jake Lynch chairs the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. His debut novel, Blood on the Stone: An Oxford Detective Story of the 17th Century, is published by Unbound Books. Jake has spent 20 years developing and researching Peace Journalism, in theory and practice. He is the author of seven books and over 50 refereed articles and book chapters. His work in this field was recognised with the award of the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, by the Schengen Peace Foundation. He served for two years as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association, having organised its biennial global conference in Sydney, in 2010. Before taking up an academic post, Jake enjoyed a 17-year career in journalism, with spells as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, for Sky News, and the Sydney Correspondent for the Independent newspaper, culminating in a role as an on-screen presenter for BBC World Television News. Lynch is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and advisor for TRANSCEND Media Service. He is the co-author, with Annabel McGoldrick, of Peace Journalism (Hawthorn Press, 2005), and Debates in Peace Journalism, Sydney University Press and TRANSCEND University Press. He also co-authored with Johan Galtung and Annabel McGoldrick ‘Reporting Conflict: An Introduction to Peace Journalism,’ which TMS editor Antonio C. S. Rosa translated to Portuguese. His most recent book of scholarly research is, A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict (Taylor & Francis, 2014).
**************************************
B) by Dietrich Fischer
Johan Galtung is often asked to define peace journalism. In the most concise way, he says, it is to ask two questions (in addition to the usual questions like how many bombs were dropped, how many buildings destroyed, who is winning, etc.):
“What is the conflict about, and what could be the solutions?”
If George W. Bush were asked, “What is the conflict with Iraq about?”, he would probably reply, “It is a struggle between good and evil.” “Would you like to expand on that?” “No.” “What is the solution?” “To crush evil!” “Would you like to expand on that?” “No.” If he were asked this twenty times, and quoted each time, he could not get away with it forever. Bush is being under-quoted.
In the 18th century, we had “disease journalists” who reported in detail how epidemics were spreading and how people suffered, but little was known about cures and little reported. Today we have “health journalists” who write about current research on new cures for diseases, and healthy lifestyles that help prevent disease.
The time has come for “peace journalists” to write not only about war, but also about its causes, prevention, and ways to restore peace. They need not invent solutions to conflicts themselves–in the same way as health journalists need not invent cures for diseases themselves; they ask specialists.
Similarly, peace journalists can ask various peace organizations and mediators about their ideas for preventing or ending a violent conflict, and report about it. Health pages in newspapers are very popular, and it can be anticipated that the same will be true for reporting about peace proposals, once they become available.
People thirst for peace. All we ask is “Give peace a page.”
__________________
Dietrich Fischer (1941-2015) from Münsingen, Switzerland, got a Licentiate in Mathematics from the University of Bern 1968 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University 1976. Fischer was a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security at Princeton University 1986-88, has taught mathematics, computer science, economics and peace studies at various universities, and been a consultant to the United Nations. He was co-founder, with Johan Galtung, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment in 1993.
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Peace Journalism in Theory and Practice



Peace Journalism in Theory and Practice




Peace Journalism in Theory and PracticeSILVIA DE MICHELIS, DEC 23 2018, 1581 VIEWS

Kewei SHANG


Peace Journalism: An Evolving Concept

Peace journalism, as the name suggests, is a form of journalism committed to exploring root causes of conflict in order to “create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict” (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 6). Its history can be tracked back to 1965, when Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge analysed what makes foreign news newsworthy (Galtung and Ruge, 1965). Jake Lynch and Johan Galtung (Lynch and Galtung, 2010) further developed the notion of peace journalism and argued that the media (war reporting, in particular) predominantly exhibit biases towards violence and rest on the conceptual belief that ‘conflict’ equals ‘war’. Within the field of peace journalism (Lynch and Galtung, 2010; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005), this view was considered problematic because it prevents conflict to be considered as an opportunity for the search of a new harmony between the parties involved, via a process that does not have to necessarily develop into a war. In fact, as Johan Galtung’s theory of nonviolence and conflict resolution (Galtung, 1969) suggests, a conflict is a clash of incompatible interests amongst the parties that can be transcended in order to reach a further and deeper agreement.



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In peace journalism studies (Lynch, 2014; Seaga Shaw, Lynch and Hackett, 2011; Keeble, Tulloch and Zollmann, 2010; Lynch & Galtung, 2010; Dente Ross and Tehranian, 2009; Shinar and Kempf, 2007; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005) war journalism is seen as a profession that predominantly reports violence and detaches conflict from its wider context, both in time (that is, it fails to report all the causes that historically might have led to the conflict formation) and space (its geography, namely it fails to report on all the parties that might be affected by the conflict). In this fashion, conflict is portrayed as a zero-sum game, where the narrative “us” vs. “them” is the predominant frame. This situation nurtures the conviction that victory resides in the predominance of one party over the other, and that peace is merely achievable by the work of institutions and treaties only after the war is over. Furthermore, war journalism relies on the overwhelming use of élites as sources of information (i.e. diplomats, policy makers, military officials, etc.), at the expense of the people that are more directly involved in the conflict. Finally, war journalism is considered close to propaganda because of its inclination to expose the lies of ‘the other’, whilst covering or omitting those of its ‘own’ (i.e. that of a particular coalition).

It is for this last reason that in peace journalism studies the analysis of how power operates is paramount. As intended by Foucault power is “the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (1977: 93), which the symbolic production of news nurtures. ‘Strategic situation’ refers to the legitimacy society attributes to the positive or negative meaning that certain social practices (for example, military intervention) retain, which are intensified through the proliferation of images. As a consequence, the information provided by mass media contributes “to inculcate norms into all forms of cultural production, including journalism” (Galtung and Lynch, 2010: 29). Therefore, exposing the interplay of power, and of power relations in conflict scenarios at all levels in society (inter-personal, cultural and structural, as well as globally) is a necessary component within the practice of peace journalism. This is necessary to enable readers to “perceive the tacit inscription of dominant accounts; critique them by cross-referencing with other, perhaps peripheral accounts; bring backgrounds into foreground focus; excavate hidden causes and consequences; and thereby chasten power” (Lynch, 2014: 51).

Galtung and Lynch (Galtung and Lynch, 2010) established four main principles that can serve as main guidance for peace journalism:
Explore the formation of conflicts: who are the parties involved; what are their goals; what is the socio-political and cultural context of the conflict; what are the visible and invisible manifestations of violence;
Avoid the de-humanisation of the parties involved and expose their interests;
Offer nonviolent responses to conflict and alternatives to militarised/violent solutions;
Report nonviolent initiatives that take place at the grassroots level and follow the resolution, reconstruction and reconciliation phases.

This subject is constantly debated, especially in relation to the most frequent critique against peace journalism which considers it as a form of advocacy towards a particular cause: that of peace, in breach of the principle of journalistic objectivity. As a counter-argument to this critique, Christian et al.’s theory of the media proves useful to explain why peace journalism is needed and how it can be operationalised. Within the practice of journalism, they inscribe ‘the social responsibility tradition’, which “retains freedom as the basic principle for organizing public communication, including the media” (Christian, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng and White, 2009: 24), and legitimises the promotion of certain moral givens within the public discourse, such as the protection of air, water and the environment for the future existence of the human race and other living beings. These moral obligations are, in fact, generally accepted within most advanced societies.

Within the field of peace journalism ‘peace’ – intended as an end – and ‘nonviolence’ – intended as a means or practice – are considered as both the organizing principles of news-making and the fundamental moral givens all societies should aim towards, nationally and globally, in line with the view expressed by Christian et al. (ibid.). It is for this reason that peace journalism can be approached as an evolving profession as well as an analytical model for scholarly research of media representations (or mis-representations). It constitutes a medium for exploring the aspects and dynamics of physical, cultural, and structural violence, exploration that is considered vital for the orientation of knowledge and production of actions, which are needed to build more peaceful societies.



Inscribed into news-making are the selectivity and framing of news. In the field of journalism studies “to frame is to select some aspect of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 51). Therefore, according to peace journalism scholars (Lynch, 2014; Seaga Shaw, Lynch and Hackett, 2011; Keeble, Tulloch and Zollmann, 2010; Lynch & Galtung, 2010; Dente Ross and Tehranian, 2009; Shinar and Kempf, 2007; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005), nonviolent initiatives need to be reported to foster peaceful solutions of conflict and de-saturate the collective imaginary from the sustained belief that violence and war are the only viable responses to it. Peace scholar John Lederach states in this regard that: “There are people who have a vision for peace, emerging often from their own experience of conflict and pain” which are often unheard “because they do not represent official power … or because they are written off as biased” (1997: 94).

The traditional conceptualisation of journalism considers the world as a set of ready-made facts, whose building up process and meaning are often ignored, or excessively simplified. Instead, within the field of foreign intervention for example, a critical examination of the dominant interpretation of what journalists observe should be reported in a way that takes into consideration the implementation of nonviolent practices for the solution of conflicts. With regards to war reporting, Paul Mason reports in The Guardian:


We are besieged now by images of the dead in conflict, usually published by people who believe it will either deter killing, expose the perpetrators or illustrate war’s futility and brutality. It is an old illusion […]. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photos, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or heroic (2014: 5).

In Practice: The Case of Libya

Since the start of the 21st century, Western powers have been entrenched in a series of foreign interventions – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya to name but a few – that are politically motivated and considered necessary to pursue the democratic aspirations of the most powerful states that hold a permanent status within the UN Security Council. The politics of foreign interventionism has been hugely debated with regards to Libya, and even more strongly, Syria. For the purpose of this article, I will limit to espouse why the 2011 intervention in Libya can be regarded as an interesting case to further promote peace journalism as an analytical tool for conflict reporting and for questioning the necessity and effectiveness of military force whilst reporting accurately.

In December 2010, turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt gave rise to the Arab Spring that extended across 2011. These events were regarded by Western powers with mixed feelings of excitement – because of their promise to substitute dictatorship with democracy – and fear – because of their unpredictability (Jenkins, 2015). Moreover, after the fiasco in Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan, the international community needed to implement a more refined foreign policy doctrine to regulate cases of gross human rights violations in failed or failing states. To fulfil this, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine (ICISS, 2001), usually abbreviated to R2P, was specifically invoked by UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon (2011) in the context of the civil uprising in Libya. In fact, in the aftermath of the starting of the civil unrest in Libya, UN Security Council approved resolution 1970 (S/RES/1970, 2011) on 26th February 2011, condemning the lethal force used by Gaddafi against protesters in Benghazi. This resolution was followed by resolution 1973 (S/RES/1973, 2011), which authorised “all necessary means” to protect civilians only 20 days later. With the latter resolution, the UN Security Council imposed a no-fly zone over Libya led by NATO. The NATO operation was called ‘Odyssey Dawn’ and the result of it was the bombing and killing of thousands of civilians.

The operation in Libya is a very interesting case study for observing the role journalism plays in conflict reporting as well as the role that peace journalism can play in contributing to reinforce a type of narrative that doesn’t promote military actions with humanitarian purposes. In fact, the official document that established the R2P doctrine acknowledges the role that the media play in heightening public awareness over conflicts worldwide. The phrasing of the document specifies, indeed:


The media have a particularly important role in conflict prevention, in particular in alerting policy makers – and the public opinion that influences them – to the catastrophic consequences that so often flow from no action being taken. More immediate and more graphic stories will always tend to take precedence, but there is much more that can and should be done to […] prod decision makers into appropriate action (ICISS, 2011: 26).

However, the R2P report further states:


Proper conduct of an appropriate public information campaign is not only critical to maintaining public support for an intervention but also to maintaining the cohesion of the coalition (ICISS, 2001: 64).

In so doing, the ICISS report entrusts public information – the media, which should rest on the principle of objectivity and impartiality – with a supportive mandate directed at benefitting the coalition that reflects the UN Security Council composition, a political body acting through military actions and, therefore, a directly involved part of the conflict. It’s in the opinion of who writes that the apparent irreconcilability between the paradigms through which the media should operate – objectivity and impartiality – and the wording of the ICISS designates public information with propagandistic features. Moreover, being military means so predominantly used by the international community in cases of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the narrative produced by the media will necessarily be supportive of the paradigm ‘peace through violent means’. In this configuration, little space is left to the production of narratives at the mainstream level that reinforce a discourse oriented at the search for ‘peace through nonviolent means’.

Public information is instrumental to the cohesion of the coalition. As it can be inferred from the above quotation, the report actually confirms what Hoskins and O’Loughlin advocate, that is: “[M]edia are becoming part of the practices of warfare to the point that the conduct of war cannot be understood unless one carefully accounts for the role of media in it” (2010: 4). Hoskins and O’Loughlin further stress that: “Media enable a perpetual connectivity that appears to be the key modulator of insecurity and security today, amplifying our awareness of distant conflicts or close-to-home threats, yet containing these insecurities in comforting packages. This connectivity is the principal mechanism through which media is weaponized (emphasis mine)” (ibid: 2). This semantic and conceptual operation embodies what I would call the “weaponisation of peace”.



The reaction of the UK, the US, and France to the Libyan uprising was far more radical, harsh, and fast against Gaddafi than against Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak of Egypt, who stepped down after three weeks from the eruption of the protest, and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country after a month from the beginning of the revolution in Tunisia. Simon Jenkins, a journalist from The Guardian, wrote:


Of all the uprisings, that which most attracted British attention was Libya against Colonel Gaddafi. But he had been Tony Blair’s “good friend” and apple in the eye of British oil companies and the London School of Economics. One whose side should Britain sit, that of an “Arab Spring” rebellion or on that of its ally? There was no context. A separatist revolt in Libya […] offered David Cameron his Blair moment, a chance for a heroic intervention. (2015: 152)

By looking at media reports of that time, what turned useful to facilitate and legitimise the military response against Gaddafi was the daily reports of the violence inflicted on the population only by the dictator, alongside the portrayal of the rebels as a democratic promise in the after-Gaddafi era (See The Guardian, 2011; Daily Telegraph, 2011; New York Times, 2011; Washington Post, 2011; Le Figaro, 2011; Liberation, 2011; Transcend Media Service, 2011). On 3 August 2011, two months before Gaddafi was killed, Jenkins wrote about NATO’s intervention:


Britain’s half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco. As it reaches six months’ duration, every sensibly pessimistic forecast had tuned out true and every jingoistic boat false (2015: 155).

On a contrary note, on 23 August 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared:


I said at that time that this action was necessary, legal and right – and I still believe that today. It was necessary because Gaddafi was going to slaughter his own people – and that massacre of thousands of innocent people was averted. Legal, because we secured a resolution from the United Nations, and have always acted according to that resolution. And right, because the Libyan people deserve to shape their own future (Stratton, 2011).

Cameron’s declaration is conflicting with what was widely reported towards the end of the intervention (see The Guardian, 2011; New York Times, 2011), when the media acknowledged that the Libyan rebels were a disunited and violent force that indiscriminately targeted mostly black Africans with torture and killing. Also, by this time, there had been many accusations (Hehir, 2018; 2012; Heinze and Steele, 2013; Chomsky, 2011; O’Connell, 2011) that NATO not only surpassed the limits set by the UN Resolution 1973, causing deep divisions amongst the permanent members of the UN Security Council, but that the invocation of the R2P had been very selective. Finally, the media’s depiction of Libyans as ‘objects’ to be saved; the underreporting of the African Union’s voice; and the demonization of the peace negotiations led by the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chávez, were dominant narratives in Western mainstream news (Transcend Media Service, 2011; IPS News, 2011).

Prior to Cameron’s declarations, Paul Scott (2011) published on Transcend Media Service – a peace journalism platform:


Who owns Odyssey Dawn? If not the Libyan people that will be a disaster. Here at the end of March 2011 with democratic revolutions rocking North Africa and the Middle East, Operation Odyssey Dawn raises a host of questions. The most troubling aspect is that African and Middle Eastern states are viewed by policymakers as objects rather than subjects of international law. […] [T]opical discussions on, for example, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, humanitarian intervention, and other peacemaking developments in Africa are either uninformed or inadequately analysed. More often than not, they do so with a voice reminiscent of the British Colonial Office in the eighteen century – paternalistic and unaware.

Immediately after the start of Odyssey Dawn, Jonathan Freedland (2011) reported in The Guardian:


Iraq poisoned the notion of “liberal interventionism” […] Most have not turned sour on the principle that underpinned that ideal: that in a global, interdependent world we have a “responsibility to protect” each other. It is how that principle has been, and can be, implemented in practice […] In the case of Libya, the principle stands as clear as it ever did. […] Above all, they need to think of nonviolent forms of intervention that might follow the immediate work of massacre prevention. Former foreign secretary David Miliband suggests this in Libya’s case: a combination of arms embargoes, cuts in the supply of African mercenaries, logistical help for the opposition and the emergence of a democratic Egypt, acting as a model to the region – taken together it would amount to a “big squeeze” to push Gaddafi out. It won’t happen immediately […]. But, as Miliband says, “stalemate is better than slaughter”.

Miliband’s proposal was rejected on the base of political rivalry, and the effectiveness of what he proposed could certainly be debated. However, Freedland’s article (ibid.) reminds of the interventions previous to Libya and calls for the need to establish the applicability of a new expertise to interventionism: i.e. nonviolence. In fact, as he concludes: “These are questions which those who advocate this intervention, and interventionism in general, need to answer. Otherwise, too many will conclude their idea is admirable in theory – but dangerous in practice” (ibid.).

Conclusion

As the scholarship on peace journalism and the reports from acclaimed journalists briefly exposed here demonstrate, a shift in practice would be very much needed. Peace journalism is an interesting tool for exploring the relationship between communication, media corporations, and war. For this reason, I believe it is vital that both practitioners and academics conduct a critical examination of what the role of media in conflict is and should be. This would help direct the global collective imaginary to consider conflict as an opportunity for progress and mutual cooperation rather than an occasion for mutual destruction. Furthermore, deeper studies of how nonviolence can be applied to conflict will enable non-military solutions to be more thoroughly applied to conflict scenarios.

A nonviolent approach to conflict might be harder, but nonetheless more efficient for the preservation of the human race if we consider that the current advancement on military technology would cause a higher and indiscriminate destructiveness. In my opinion, peace journalism is a valid attempt for stripping war journalism of its predominant focus on violence and from its deeply embedded bias that considers militarism as the most effective remedy to conflict. It can be said that the main challenge peace journalism responds to is attributing to nonviolence the legitimisation and authority it deserves.

References

Chomsky, N., (2011) ‘The skeleton in the closet: the responsibility to protect in history’ in Cunliffe, P., (ed.) Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect. Interrogating Theory and Practice, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 11-18.

Christian, C. G., Glasser, T., L., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K., White, R., A. (2009) Normative Theories of The Media. Journalism in Democratic Societies, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Dente Ross, S., Tehranian, M., (eds.) (2009) Peace Journalism in Times of War in Peace & Policy, Vol. 13.

Entman, R. M. (1993) “Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm” in Journal of Communication, Vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 51-58.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, Tavistock: London.

Freedland, J., ‘Though the risks are real, the case for interventionism remains strong’ in The Guardian, 23 March 2011.

Galtung, J., (1969) ‘Violence, peace and peace research’ in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 6., no 3, pp. 167-191.

Galtung, J., Lynch, J., (2010) Reporting Conflict: New Directions in Peace Journalism, St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press.

Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. (1965) ‘The structure of foreign news: the presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers’ in Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, no 1, pp. 64-90.

Hehir, A., (2018) Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heihir, A., (2012) The Responsibility to Protect. Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heinze, E. A., Steele, B. J., (2013) ‘The (D)evolution of a norm: R2P, the Bosnia generation and humanitarian intervention in Libya’ in Hehir, A., Murray, R., (eds.) (2013) Libya. The responsibility to Protect and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 130-161.

HM The Queen in right of Canada (2001) The Responsibility to Protect. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty Report (ICISS), Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre.

Hoskins, A., O’Loughlin, B., (2010) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

Jenkins, S., (2015) Mission Accomplished. The Crisis of International Intervention, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Keeble, R., L., Tulloch, J., Zollmann, F. (eds.) (2010), Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Lederach, J. P. (1997) Building Peace – Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press.

Lynch, J. (2014) A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict, New York: Routledge.

Lynch, J. & McGoldrick, A. (2005), Peace Journalism, Stroud, UK: Hawthorn Press.

Mason, P. ‘The closer I get to conflict the more I think showing gruesome images can never deter war’ in The Guardian, 24 November 2014.

O’Connell, M., E., (2011) ‘Responsibility to peace: a critique of R2P’ in Cunliffe, P., (ed.) Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect. Interrogating Theory and Practice, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 71-83.

Scott, P., ‘Odyssey Dawn and the need for Athena’ in Transcend Media Service, 4 April 2011.

Seaga Shaw, I., Lynch, J., Hackett, R. A., (eds.) (2011) Expanding Peace Journalism. Comparative and Critical Approaches, Sydney: Sydney University Press.

Shinar, D., Kempf, W., (eds.) (2007) Peace Journalism: The State of the Art, Berlin: Verlag Irena Regener.

Stratton, A., ‘Cameron looks to release cash for rebels – and steers clear of triumphalism’ in The Guardian, 23 August 2011.










ABOUT THE AUTHOR ( SILVIA DE MICHELIS):

Silvia De Michelis is a PhD student in Peace Studies and International Development, University of Bradford, UK.

EDITORIAL CREDIT(S):

Xolisile Ntuli, Fernanda de Castro Brandao Martins, and Marianna Karakoulaki.TAGS: CONFLICT REPORTING, JOURNALISM, NON-VIOLENCE, PEACE JOURNALISM, WAR JOURNALISM


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Forty Years of Constructing Development: How China Adopted GDP MeasurementJOAN VAN HEIJSTER, DEC 21 2018, 545 VIEWS

Image by itsiames verma


Exactly forty years ago in 1978, Chinese policymakers introduced the famous opening up and reform policy which was the fundamental starting point for ‘the rise of China’. Within these forty years China has become a major international player, both in political and economic terms. To understand China’s experience from 1978 onwards scholars and the media have been making use of macroeconomic statistics. China’s impressive economic development has come to be defined almost exclusively through the lens of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth figures. The GDP indicator inherently shapes the image we have of China. It is the world’s second largest economy in terms of GDP, and about to overtake the US as the sole leader by 2030 (Scott & Sam, 2016). GDP figures not only give the country allure and status in the global political economy, but they also give rise to debates within International Relations about China’s ‘peaceful rise’ (Buzan, 2010; Yue, 2008; Ikenberry, 2008). Additionally, the indicator gained enormous political and social significance for governance by the Chinese Communist Party, most prominently through the use of official GDP-targets. It is almost unthinkable to talk about China’s economic development without making reference to the measure of GDP.



The ubiquity of the measure makes it easy to forget that it did not always exist. Especially in the Chinese case, measuring the economy in terms of GDP is only a relatively recent phenomenon: China’s first official measure of GDP was produced in 1985. Moreover, China was the last major holdout to adopting GDP measurement and its concomitant internationally harmonized framework for national accounts, the System of National Accounts (SNA), which it officially adopted in 1993. The Chinese statistical system has gone through major reforms and improvements since it started to include GDP measurement in its official work. With the forty-year anniversary of the reform and opening up policy, it is time to shed light on the measure that has fundamentally shaped our image of China’s rise. Tracing how China adopted GDP measurement in the early reform period (1978-1993) tells us more about how GDP has shaped China’s current powerful status.

Putting on the Spectacles of GDP – China and International Organizations

The spectacles of GDP were taken up first by Chinese policymakers themselves. Deng Xiaoping stated already in 1978, early on in the opening up and reform period, China’s development goals in terms of GDP. For him, achieving a $1.000 GNP per capita by the year 2000 was China’s primary goal which could be achieved starting with the opening up and reform policy (Deng, 1979). At this time GDP had not even been officially measured by the Chinese statisticians. Nevertheless, it already set ground in China’s politics.

The actual measurement of GDP figures came somewhat later, with the first official GDP measurement in 1985 (World Bank, 1992: 17). The move of the opening up and reform policy contributed to the adoption of GDP measurement in China. The new policies encouraged China’s policymakers, economists and statisticians to look abroad and study foreign concepts, ideas and tools that could help China develop (Gewirtz, 2017: 52, 54, 56, 62). Among others, experts also considered new ways of measuring the Chinese economy and developing its statistical system. They undertook effort to study the GDP indicator. Especially the interactions between Chinese experts and international organizations contributed to an increase in knowledge about the GDP indicator from the Chinese side. The State Statistical Bureau (SSB) reached out to the UN Statistical Office to learn more about alternative statistical practices and methodology. Additionally, they visited international conferences to gather knowledge about international statistical practices (World Bank, 1983: Annex A: 4.14). Furthermore, China’s membership of the World Bank in 1980 spurred knowledge exchange about macroeconomic measurements, specifically GDP. The World Bank report of the first mission of the World Bank in China describes in a detailed fashion how GDP figures could be derived from the Chinese statistical measure of national income, Net Material Product (NMP) (World Bank, 1983: 220-263). Based on the knowledge taken up in these interactions, China’s statisticians made the first official GDP estimate in 1985. This estimate was merely derived from China’s communist measure of national income, the NMP. To come to an estimation of GDP, statisticians had to overcome conceptual differences between the indicators and added 13% of the NMP aggregate to the NMP figure to account for the service sector (World Bank, 1992: 17). Thereby, the first official estimate of Chinese GDP was made.

China’s Agency – Supportive, Not Coercive Adoption of GDP

International organizations certainly played a role regarding the adoption of GDP measurement in China. They were key actors in the socialization process of Chinese statisticians to gain knowledge about GDP measurement. However, the adoption of GDP and concomitant international statistical standards of the SNA were by no means coerced onto China. The World Bank took a different approach on China than it did with other developing countries (Lewis, Webb and Kapur 1993: 15). It supported the pragmatic reform process of the Chinese government and refrained from pushing for a rapid adoption of capitalist free market policies through the implementation of structural adjustment plans. In fact, the Chinese policymakers, even though they relied on loans from international organizations, possessed the agency vis-à-vis IOs to make decisions about statistical development on their own terms. They proved to be able to resist pressures on the issue of statistics. Chinese statisticians, for example, did not accept World Bank calculations with regards to the estimated GDP per capita and negotiated a compromise to set the number around $180-190 GDP per capita instead of the proposed $250 from the World Bank side (Interview 04). Additionally, unlike many other developing countries, China refused to take part in the World Bank’s International Comparison Program (ICP) until 2002 (World Bank, 2018; Wade, 2012: 18). This big international price survey was important for measuring purchasing power parity income (ppp), a key measure used by the World Bank.



Incremental Adoption of International Standards – A Hybrid System and the Legacy of Communist Measurement

The Chinese agency over the adoption of GDP measurement is also reflected in the adoption of the concomitant national accounts framework, SNA. Between 1987 and 1993 China experimented with a mix of two different national account frameworks, the communist Material Product System (MPS) and the Western, UN-developed SNA. In this hybrid system Chinese statisticians tried to produce SNA aggregates, most prominently GDP, while retaining many of the MPS data collection methods. By introducing the hybrid system, China deviated from adopting international standards, but tried to find a local solution and appropriate way of measuring the Chinese economy in transition. While the reasons for choosing this solution lay primarily on the domestic political level, the crucial point is that the agency of the Chinese leadership vis-à-vis IOs was an important factor that allowed China to deviate from international standards – or at least postpone the adoption thereof.

Retaining to the old communist framework MPS in the early reform period is important to highlight, because it sheds light on discussions about GDP measurement in China that we still see today. China’s GDP has been a widely discussed topic in- and outside of academia. Due to a number of statements, i.e. by premier Li Keqiang who called Chinese GDP statistics “man-made” and cases pointing to the manipulation of data, China’s GDP statistics have come under increased criticism. Many in- and outsiders to the Chinese political system have doubts about the trustworthiness of the figures. The core of the debate therefore points at the accuracy and reliability of Chinese GDP figures. Many articles try to deconstruct Chinese GDP figures according to official measurement methods, or compare available numbers with alternative measures of GDP (Holz, 2004; Rawksi, 2001; Wu, 2000; 2007). Others demonstrated the political manipulation of GDP statistics and thereby question China’s GDP figures (Wallace, 2013). The distortion of China’s GDP figures cannot only be understood in light of data falsification practices, but they are also the result of the legacy of the communist MPS. The incremental adoption of the SNA in the early period of measuring GDP has left structural obstacles within the statistical system that still impact GDP figures today. The MPS-framework on which the Chinese statistical system was based did well at collecting information of centrally planned material outputs, but left the service sector unaccounted (Rosen & Bao, 2015: 15). Because the switch from MPS to SNA happened quite incrementally, many MPS data collection methods were kept in place, which created a bias in the system towards measuring output and material production over income and intangibles. Due to this bias, GDP revisions are until today mostly driven by the discrepancies within the Chinese statistical system to accurately measure the service sector. In 2004, 2008 and 2013, GDP was revised up by respectively 16.8%, 4.4% and 3.4% (Rosen & Bao, 2015: 24). Each time the service sector accounted for the largest changes. The MPS legacy that was able to keep its place due to the incremental process of statistical reform in the 1980s and early 1990s therefore still influences our assessment of China’s GDP figures.

From Experiment to Innovation: The Future of GDP Measurement in (and Outside) China

This article argued that not only GDP figures, but also the process of adopting GDP measurement can and does shape our understanding of the Chinese political economy. The legacies of the communist statistical system are still relevant to today’s discussion about distorted GDP figures, while the early adoption of GDP measurement shows that also in adopting statistical standards China has a history of ‘doing things on its own terms’. Statistical measurement of GDP is thereby not different from other issue areas such as RMB internationalization (McNally & Gruin, 2017), financial services (Collins & Gottwald, 2014) or China’s telecommunications sector (Hsueh, 2015). This acknowledges that China’s integration into the world economy happened in pair with a quite distinct institutional and sectoral set-up of China’s political economy (McNally, 2012). The development of the hybrid system and concomitant legacies that are still visible in its statistical system point out the distinct pathway China followed in the case of GDP adoption.

Eventually, and after an experimentalist period, China conformed to the adoption of international standards of GDP measurement in 1993, albeit with the mentioned MPS legacies. However, Chinese policymakers have been experimenting with GDP measurement on the domestic level, although now not holding on to old frameworks, but pushing GDP forward. There have been experiments with the development of alternative conceptions of GDP, such as Green GDP and among others proposed to include the ‘sharing economy’ into the GDP. The core question is whether China’s increased involvement and engagement in international organizations will also imply such innovative proposals on the international level. It remains to be seen whether Chinese policymakers will provide us with a new lens through which we can assess the country’s development for the upcoming forty years.

References:

Buzan, B. (2010). China in International Society: Is ‘Peaceful Rise’ Possible? The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 3, pp. 5-36.

Collins, N. and Gottwald, J-C. (2014). Market Creation by Leninist Means: The Regulation of Financial Services in the People’s Republic of China. Asian Studies Review, 38(4), pp. 620-638.



Deng Xiaoping (1979). China’s Goal is to Achieve Comparative Prosperity by the End of the Century. December 6, 1979. In: Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Volume II: 1975-1982; (1984) Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Available at https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/ 02/25/chinas-goal-is-to-achieve-comparative-prosperity-by-the-end-of-the-century/.

Gewirtz, J. (2017). Unlikely Partners. Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Holz, C. (2004). China’s Statistical System in Transition: Challenges, Data Problems, and Institutional Innovations. Review of Income and Wealth, 50(3), pp. 381-409.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR ( JOAN VAN HEIJSTER):

Joan van Heijster is a PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam. In her project she researches the politics behind the GDP indicator in China and India. The aim of the research is to unpack the (political) choices behind the measurement process of GDP and the practical uses of the indicator in the Chinese and Indian governance system. She has a background in International Relations, with a specific focus on the political economy of China and the BRICS countries. More information can be found on her university profile or on the Fickle Formulas project (funded by ERC Starting Grant) of which Joan’s project is part.

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