Communication for Peace Building

Overview

Communication for peace building is a process undertaken by scholars and practitioners of intercultural communication, who address the ways that groups get along and the ways that they resolve problems when they disagree. Peace building is one of the most important functions of intercultural communication because it addresses both a contemporary conflict and what led up to the conflict and examines how the conflict might be better managed or altogether avoided in the future (Remland, Jones, Foeman & Arévalo, 2015). Peace building is most visible to the public when a conflict ends and when violence either ends or is prevented. However, peace building includes much more than this. A critical element of peace building is preventing a conflict from occurring again and repairing the damage that occurred during the conflict. These behind the scenes elements of peace building work to ensure a lasting peace, in which all participants feel comfortable with the resolution.

Sometimes practitioners work for a long time to ensure peace, this is particularly true in cases where conflicts have occurred over an extended historical period, or were due to firmly held prejudices such as racism or religious intolerance. Working to ensure that these societal problems are addressed can take generations, often including education programs for all ages in a society. Peace builders might also work to ensure that participants of all sides of a conflict begin to identify with, meet with, or at least acknowledge the rights of their former opponents. Oftentimes conflicts occur because one group does not believe another group should have the same rights as its own members. This denial of rights is based on the concept and practice of "dehumanization," or the belief and policy that members of the ostracized group are less human than those of the dominant or challenging group.

During peace building, it is critical to "re-humanize" oppressed groups of people. This humanizing process might include trying to forge friendships between the children of each group, integrating the schools that are attended by each group, or when there has been excessive violence, requiring the dominant group to physically see and atone for the violence that they have committed against their opponents. Scholars such as Broome and Collier (2012) have summarized these actions, enumerating three critical steps in the process of peace building: 1) community engagement, 2) intercultural dialogue, and 3) alliance building. Oftentimes these steps are carried out by mediators, international organizations, rights groups, religious organizations or other groups of individuals who are trusted by all sides of the conflict. Other groups of scholars do not follow this division, but still adhere to the idea of holistically addressing a community's need for peace building.

The conflicts which are addressed and assisted by peace building initiatives are both large and small. Some arise from centuries-long distrust and conflict. Others are comparatively small, such as a disagreement in an office meeting that continues to cause problems and spark conflict in the workplace. While conflicts of different sizes merit different responses, each merits attention, especially when professionals are well-trained in conflict resolution and can help the participants settle their tensions and lead much more productive and satisfactory lives.

The use of communication professionals as peace builders has become even more important as globalization occurs. As the world becomes more interconnected and communication occurs faster, there is a greater potential for misunderstandings. This interconnectivity has occurred due to mobile phones, which allow and encourage reporting from the field. This means that communication is occurring during a conflict, and at times recording the conflict while it is in progress.

The production of new forms of evidence from a conflict, such as a smartphone video of police brutality, have radically changed the ways that conflicts are understood and peace is promoted (Larrauri & Kahl, 2013). In some cases, technology has been used to monitor conflicts, or as a watchdog technology to prevent crimes from occurring because the perpetrators know that they will be recorded and are more likely to be held accountable or their crimes. For example, in Kenya cellular phones are being used to ensure accurate election results. In 2017, a police officer was posted at each polling location and tasked with sending the vote through their phone in real time. This prevented risks such as paper ballots being lost on the way to a counting location, or voters being intimated or blocked from voting. This new process of reporting votes was covered by domestic and international press and is one example of the ways that peace building has occurred through the use of new technologies. The election was more peaceful than in prior years through the advocacy of communications experts, who worked hard to ensure that the public knew about and had faith in the changes being made to ensure a free and fair election.

While this Kenyan example shows the ways that technology is used well for peace building, scholars do warn that there is a risk of doing harm to a peace building process if technology is incorporated without thinking through all of the entailments of the technology and the ways that it could be misused or inspire mistrust (Kahl & Larrauri, 2013). For example, when using a technological solution, schools need to ensure that all groups affected by the conflict have access to the technology and the bandwidth required to connect to the chosen social media and communication platforms. Additionally, communications professionals need to ensure that all groups are able to use the technology in an empowering way. This means that they need to have the same access to the platform's settings and the same access to information. If they do not, then there is a risk that the peace process will breakdown over the development of mistrust.

Further Insights

Often times, conflict is escalated through the process of enclave deliberation and then balkanization. Enclave deliberation occurs when groups of like-minded individuals speak together and in doing so support one another's viewpoints. This process produces an enclave, or a group of like-minded individuals. Problematically, as the enclave speaks more and more among themselves, and less and less with anyone with an opposing viewpoint, they become isolated from information and points of view that might challenge the accepted outcome of "group-think." If this isolation goes on for too long, members of the enclave will begin having trouble identifying with people not in their group. This process is known as balkanization, referring to the hostile fragmentation of a geopolitical area as happened in the Balkans, culminating with World War I.

Isolated groups have difficulty understanding or engaging with groups holding other viewpoints. Such conditions make it particularly difficult for communications professionals who are working in peace building to reach all groups concerned with the peace-building process. Those that have balkanized may be hard to find, unwilling to participate in the process, or think that the process does not need to happen at all. Communications professionals had hoped that new and social media would help to resolve this problem of balkanization by making it easier for different groups to speak to one another, and in some cases this has worked well. For example, in Kenya, cellular phones and social media have been cited as one way in which antagonistic ethnic groups have been brought together in an attempt to prevent future inter-ethnic conflicts. This peace building process works well because many of the members of Kenyan enclaves prefer non-violent solutions, but had been acting violently because they lacked other ways to go about conflict resolution (Martin-Shields, 2013).

Advocacy is a critical part of communication or peace building. While it might seem that advocates are designed to take sides in a conflict, in a peace-building event, advocates can play many roles, including ensuring that all parties are treated fairly. Sometimes advocates are used for groups that cannot or do not want to represent themselves. This happens when a group is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the setting in which the peace-building process is occurring. It also is used when groups want to ensure adequate legal representation. This is particularly important to groups who have previously been mistreated by the courts and are skeptical that the current peace-building activities will respect their wishes, stay inline with their community's ethics, and ensure a lasting peace. Regardless of how they came to be involved in the event and negotiations, the main goal of the advocate is to ensure that the peace process is a success (Servaes & Malikhao, 2012).

The media also plays a critical role in the peace-building process. It is important for peace builders to pay attention to how the conflict is being framed and addressed, not only by decision makers but also by those that are observing and responding to the conflict. While communications scholars have not yet reached an agreement on how the media should be used or analyzed during peace-building processes, work is underway to create research projects that address these topics. For example, Hoffmann (2014) has argued that scholars should develop a process of communication for peace, which draws from the multiple approaches to communication, as well as aligned disciplines such as political science and sociology, to create a set of best practices in peace building. Similarly, Howard (2015) has argued that it is necessary for journalists to be sensitive to the conflicts that are occurring and the ways that their reporting advances or helps to resolve those conflicts. Focusing on the Rwandan genocide, Howard analyzed the ways that radio was used to intensify the conflict between Rwandans and increase the number of citizens that were killed. This was done through publicizing misinformation and propaganda, as tools of manipulation to inspire more violence.

Howards' case study highlights the risks of using media and indicates that while media such as radio can be powerful tools in the process of building peace, they can also be tools that cause violence and distrust. Similarly, Bickmore (2017) has argued that intercultural communication, when integrated into early educational initiatives can help to prevent or minimize conflicts before they occur. Bickmore identifies groups that are at greater risk of violence, such as those with the least amount of social power and cautions that some educational reforms can make these communities more vulnerable. She therefore supports peace education programs that have different goals for different demographic groups, such as working to stop the prejudice expressed by one group and experienced by another. It is this type of careful differentiation that communications professionals working in communication for peace initiatives strive to achieve. They acknowledge that there can never be a one-size-fits-all approach to building peace. Instead, they apply the broad range of research methods that communications professionals use, from ethnographic interviews to surveys to archival research, to create the most complex and targeted programs possible.

Issues

True communication for peace requires the participation of ordinary citizens. If the public does not believe in the peace-building process, and does not agree to go along with the solutions that have been proposed, then it is likely that conflicts will continue to occur. Therefore, communications professionals are very concerned with the ways that citizens are engaged in peace building. One approach to ensuring engagement is by designing what are known as "bottom-up" solutions (Bau, 2016). These solutions begin at the most local community level and ask citizens to imagine what the best solutions are to their conflict. Then, those solutions are gradually proposed to the local government and then, if necessary, the national government. Or, if the conflict occurs in a workplace, a bottom-up solution would begin with the employees who most directly experienced the conflict, followed by proposed solutions to their managers and other upper management. This bottom-up solution works well because it ensures that the participants who have both the most to lose and the most to gain are the ones who are consulted first.

Bottom-up solutions are the opposite of top-down solutions to conflict. In a top-down solution, it is the highest level of decision-makers that acts first. This might be the president of a country or the CEO of a company. The decision-maker is presumably acting in the best interests of the group but might not understand the roots of the conflict and is therefore unable to make meaningful suggestions about how to build peace. Many communications professionals who are brought in to help on a communication for peace project spend time persuading decision-makers to trust a bottom-up approach. Those who participate in bottom-up decision-making processes may have lower levels of education, literacy, and/or social status than those who traditionally make decisions. However, sometimes even the act of trusting or including these participants can be a critical first step toward building a lasting peace.

Bibliography

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Bickmore, K. (2017). Conflict, peace-building, and education: Rethinking pedagogies in divided societies, Latin America, and around the world. Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers, 2, 268–299.

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Hoffmann, J. (2014). Conceptualising "communication for peace." Peacebuilding, 2(1), 100–117.

Howard, R. (2015). Conflict-Sensitive Journalism: (r)evolution in media peacebuilding. In J. Hoffman & V. Hawkins (Eds.), Communication and Peace (pp. 84–97). New York: Routledge.

Kahl, A., & Larrauri, H. P. (2013). Technology for peacebuilding. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2(3), 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/sta.cv

Martin-Shields, C. (2013). Inter-ethnic Cooperation Revisited: Why mobile phones can help prevent discrete events of violence, using the Kenyan case study. Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 2(3), 58. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/sta.cu

Ortiz dos Santa, Fabioloa. (2023, Mar. 8). The construction of peacebuilding narratives in 'media talk'--a methodological discussion. Journalism & Media, 4(1), pp. 339-363, doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia4010023

Pukallus, S. (2021). Communication in Peacebuilding: Civil Wars, Civility and Safe Spaces. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Remland, M. S., Jones, T. S., Foeman, A., & Arévalo, D. R. (2015). Intercultural communication: A peacebuilding perspective. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Servaes, J., & Malikhao, P. (2012). Advocacy communication for peacebuilding. Development in Practice, 22(2), 229–243.