INFOCORE - (In)forming conflict prevention, response and resolution: the role of media in violent conflict

Project: Research

Project Details

Description

The Department of European & International Studies at King’s College London is part of an international research team funded by the 7th Framework of the European Union. The goal of the research is to better understand the role of traditional and new media in different conflicts and in attempts at preventing and resolving conflicts. Christoph Meyer acts as Principal Investigator at King's and Leader for a sub-project which looks at the role of NGOs as sources of media coverage and as media-like actors in their own right. King's will also lead on understanding the role of the new media in providing open source intelligence to governmental actors. The other researchers on the team coordinated by researchers at the LMU-Munich are from Athens, Brussels, Jerusalem, London, Madrid, and Skopje (Macedonia).

Lay summary

Anyone who wants to understand how violent conflicts develop and how political action to stop them is feasible, needs to be interested in political communication. How particular communities are portrayed as threatening, how empathy with victims of war crimes is created, and how various actors seek to mobilize public support for peacebuilding or indeed for the use of force. The media, both traditional as well as new or social media, are central to political communication. When do they warn about impending conflicts, promote reconciliation and peace and hold perpetrators of mass atrocities to account? And when do they ignore conflicts until they have escalated, fan inter-ethnic or political hatred, and fall prey to the lies, half-truths and agendas of conflict parties? We aim to provide answers to these questions.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/09/201331/12/2016

Funding

  • EC European Commission: £202,606.00

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