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Abstract
The role of media has been immensely increasing in shaping and reshaping the nature of conflicts especially from the second half of the last century. The advent of 24/7 news coverage, advancement in satellite communication, rise of war reporting and peace journalism, and ever increasing role of media in shaping up social, cultural, political and diplomatic discourse has made it an important player in various types of conflicts. Media's role in conflict resolution is largely dependent upon organizational interests and ideology. This study proposes a Media-Conflict Resolution Model (MCR) that describes the media role in conflict resolution process as (1) an escalation agent, (2) a de-escalation agent and (3) as a mirror, and relates it to media relations with the conflicting parties and consequently the media position/stance either as watchdog, lapdog or neutral. Moreover, this model also discusses influence of global media on local media regarding conflict resolution and prevention.
Key Words: Media and conflict resolution, Media as mirror, Media as an escalation agent, Media as a de-escalation agent, Media-Conflict Resolution Model (MCR)
Introduction
Media Role in Conflict Resolution
The progression into the twentieth century has witnessed the increase in the number of conflicts around the globe as well as the rapid advancement in the field of mass media. The conflicts either internal/intrastate or interstate can take two forms i.e. violent and non- violent. Biddle (2004) and Thompson (1989) make a distinction between two forms of conflicts i.e. high intensity conflict (HIC), which refers to wars between the states (interstate violence) and low intensity conflict (LIC), which refers to limited scale violence between regular forces and irregular forces (pp. 2-5). Manoff (1997) claims that in the last Century quite a few severe armed conflicts have been reported and during which millions people have been killed, got wounded, crippled, and mutilated....Ours is the age of "ammunition affluence" (para. 1 & 3). Moreover, since the beginning of the cold war, the internal conflicts were higher than the interstate and following the end of the war the number of violent interstate conflicts went up sharply and new conflicts are emerging at the global level (Hewitt, 2008: 21).
Media have also achieved phenomenal growth around the world, especially during the last half of the twentieth century. Advancements...