What Does Peace Journalism Mean to Journalists in East Africa?

This story originally appeared on Global Voices on October 29, 2025. 

Against the backdrop of several protracted conflicts worldwide — such as South Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others — conflict reporting is top of mind for media professionals and peacekeepers alike. After all, journalism has long been celebrated for its ability to reveal hidden truths, hold power to account, and tell stories in the public interest. Despite these promises, however, existing research on the role of news during conflict paints a less encouraging picture. The lion’s share of work demonstrates that such reporting tends to be inflammatory and overly sensational, at times resulting in increased cynicism and negative sentiments toward marginalized groups.

Some have proposed peace journalism as an alternative reporting approach. Developed by Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung, peace journalism focuses on structural causes of conflict, multiparty interactions, and opportunities for peacemaking through careful attention to word choice and broad framing narratives. Of course, such emphases are not typically communicated uniformly through journalism education nor necessarily picked up on the job.

Instead, principles of peace journalism are often delivered to media professionals through specialized trainings or workshops, many of which are hosted in and across East Africa. But what do journalists who attend these trainings get out of them, and what are the implications of this for conflict reporting?

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What peace journalism means to peace journalists in East Africa

Regarding what peace journalism means to peace journalists in East Africa, the quick answer is: It depends. An interview-based study of practitioners who attended peace journalism trainings in Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda revealed that journalists tended to understand peace journalism in one of two ways: the reporting focused either on communities impacted by conflict or on policies to address that conflict. These perceptions varied based on the precarity of one’s professional position. For example, entry-level journalists or reporters working in remote areas with relatively few resources were likelier to emphasize aspects of peace journalism concerned with victims of violence and reconciliation framing. In contrast, more established media professionals and those working in larger, well-resourced organizations tended to focus on policy recommendations for elite audiences, including third-party interventions.

Perceptions of peace journalism

What do these different perceptions of peace journalism mean for conflict reporting and peacekeeping?

First, it is worth acknowledging that peace journalism comprises more than a dozen popularly recognized practices, and varied interpretations should be acknowledged and perhaps expected. Stories with policy solutions and community impact both contribute to peace journalism storytelling, and one is not necessarily superior to the other. Instead, these different understandings underscore the need for training and guidelines that take journalists’ professional constraints into consideration.

The most suitable or effective conflict reporting workshops, for instance, should tailor content for the type of positions media professionals occupy, acknowledging the different realities of such work. This might entail, for example, peace journalism workshops focused on editing for supervisors who primarily oversee the work of others, whereas journalists in the field would benefit from more tangible peace journalism tools, such as safety guides or interview training. Such considerations can be expanded to include journalists’ social and cultural identities, where certain practices may take on new meaning or challenges for women or within certain religious environments.

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Implications for peacekeeping more broadly

With respect to implications for peacekeeping more broadly, variability in journalists’ understandings of peace journalism underscores a fundamental truth in peace studies and conflict response: Journalism is just one piece of the puzzle.

Actors from many sectors must be committed to non-violence and justice on the long road to lasting and transformational peace. Some have critiqued peace journalism based on the misunderstanding that news media can, or should, bear responsibility for addressing conflict alone. The fluidity in journalists’ understandings of and engagement with peace journalism thus serves as a reminder that we shouldn’t essentialize peace journalism as a silver bullet solution that can bring about peace or end conflicts alone.

Journalism’s first responsibility in any society is to inform — not to engage in complex political negotiations or develop peace plans — even while the ways that media professionals report on these topics can certainly shape how audiences perceive their value and viability.

To this point, the diversity in perceptions and experiences that journalists bring to conflict reporting should not be viewed an obstacle to comprehensive or ethical peace journalism. Rather, such perspectives can be harnessed to report stories from a variety of angles and vantage points, which together aid peacekeeping forces, public officials, and multilateral organizations in imagining creative solutions toward conflict resolutions.

Taken to the extreme, for as many journalists as there are reporting on a given conflict, just as many unique stories and frames can be produced in service of avoiding the common traps of conventional war journalism. In fact, very few conflicts have been solved with single, silver-bullet solutions, so this diversity of perceptions and understandings may very well be key to solving what feel like otherwise intractable conflicts around the world.

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