After an engaging session at PeaceCon 2024, members of the aidóni team and other peacebulding professionals will develop a guide to help journalists cover conflict-related stories, from wars to fragile peace and social tensions within communities.
By aidóni
Peacebuilding has always been a difficult process, in which success is far from certain. At a time when political and cultural divisions are exacerbated by digital systems of (mis) communication, all over the world, it has become an even more daunting task. In this reality, journalism – or any exchange of information – has an obligation, rarely recognised by those involved in the activity, to contribute as much as possible towards dialogue and the achievement of sustainable peace.
At aidóni, we understand and embrace this responsibility. As a small and young organisation, we wish to offer our contribution to dialogue and mutual understanding through the production of people-focused stories, and the emergence and promotion of discussions that could help overcome conflicts and divisions.
With that in mind, our team organised the workshop ‘(Story)Telling Your Peace: Crafting a collaborative guide on reframing peacebuilding journalism’ – at the same time humble and ambitious – as part of PeaceCon 2024, co-organised by the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the United Stated Institute of Peace, to discuss how peacebuilding could be placed at the heart of the production of good journalism. At the end of the workshop, participants were invited to help us develop, in a collective effort, a useful tool for the present and the future: a guide for reframing peacebuilding journalism.
The guide will be based on the experience and recommendations of participants in the workshop. They are peacebuilding practitioners and experts, as well as journalists and media professionals from different parts of the world who chose to share their field experience and contribute crafting a guide reflecting the diverse voices of people on the ground, with the aidóni team.
“Peacebulding is quite often misunderstood and, as a consequence, badly reported in the media,”, says Méline Laffabry, CEO and founder of aidóni. “We want to contribute to addressing this situation. That’s why our workshop was the start of a process, to produce a guide for journalists. We want to help them report on peacebuilding in the future.”
Obstacles to dialogue
The workshop used the most basic, simplistic, and fairly common situation found in real-life conflicts: two sides, one defending the status quo and the other committed to changing it, and how news stories apparently accurate and even balanced can reveal bias and suspicion that function as obstacles to proper dialogue and peace.
”We split the participants in two groups, each of them working on a news article associated with one of the sides of the conflict. After discussions within the groups, we all gathered and talked about how articles like those could be improved”, explains liana Moridou, Community Engagement Officer at aidóni. The next step then became even more clear, says Yousr Sharawy, aidóni’s Academia Editor. “We all agreed there is much to be done to improve the way the media tend to present different sides in a conflict, and that is why we’re now producing a peacebuilding guide for journalists.”
The internet is flooded with tool-kits for different perspectives and definitions of peace journalism and conflict-sensitive reporting. Our goal is to collaboratively conceptualise our own definitions, and develop the sensitivities to human stories in these multi-layered and complex situations associated with conflict, and its aftermaths.
Everyone involved in this project, from the aidóni team to our friends from other organisations, agrees with two important principles about this guide. First, it must be a permanent work in progress, as new needs and challenges appear in the future, especially with the rise of content produced by artificial intelligence (AI). Also, it must help journalists find better ways of describing complex situations without being too prescriptive and absolute. Each reality is different, and our guide must be flexible enough to assist journalists without limiting their critical thought and individual responsibility.
We see the development of the collaborative guide as an ongoing exercise in learning and engaging with the communities we report on and from. We believe that localizing our principles to fit different contexts is essential, allowing us to learn from one another. This approach avoids relying on rigid, static toolkits that may quickly become outdated.
Top image: displaced people in South Sudan
Read article at Shared Future News:
‘(Story)telling your peace’: a collaborative guide for peacebuilders and journalists
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