Harvard peace, media event reaches hundreds worldwide
Although I’ve taught face-to-face and online in 43 countries, until yesterday, I’ve never communicated with so many around the globe simultaneously. Thanks to Harvard University’s unmatched reach, my colleagues and I visited with 202 participants from roughly 15 countries (Germany, India, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, etc.) about peace and the media.

MPV's Jamil Simon, on media narratives

Our webinar was tasked with answering the daunting question, “How Do Media Find Room for Peace in a World of Non-Stop Conflict?” Our panel, convened by the Program for Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, featured myself and my colleagues at the organization Making Peace Visible (MPV), Jamil Simon and Andrea Muraskin.

Simon, founder and director of MPV (formerly called War Stories Peace Stories) discussed negative media cycles that ignore peace and peacebuilding efforts, and their opposite, positive cycles that tell powerful, dramatic peacebuilding stories. He discussed MPV’s efforts to generate and sustain conversations between media and peacemakers, including MPV’s outstanding podcast (also called Making Peace Visible), its magazine Nuance, and its new educational programming, which I will be leading. Simon said he wants MPV to “motivate journalists to write more about peace, and more carefully about war.”

MPV's Andrea Muraskin, on humanizing the other

His colleague Andrea Muraskin then discussed  lessons about peace and media culled from the  Making Peace Visible podcast that she so adeptly produces. These lessons include humanizing “the other;” finding the drama in peace stories that spotlight “making the impossible possible;” resisting the “hero narrative” and instead focusing on collective work and programming that demonstrate that everyone can participate in peacebuilding;   building trust within communities; and utilizing the power of fiction, with the show Derry Girls as an example.

My presentation introduced peace journalism, and discussed the challenges and opportunities for PJ in a conflicted world. The challenges I presented included hate speech and dehumanizing language, disinformation, “us vs. them” narratives, sensationalism, bias and ”flag waving,”  and political and societal polarization. There are, however, opportunities for journalists even during wartime, I said, including the chance for journalists to spotlight human rights abuses and humanitarian crises, give a voice to the marginalized, tell stories through a trauma sensitive, survivor lens, and to build bridges across boundaries. To illustrate the last point, I discussed projects I’m involved with that team up journalists with their “enemies” from the other side—Indians and Pakistanis, and Moldovans and Transnistrians.

A lively Q&A capped off the session. My favorite question asked how a peace journalist would cover the campus protests in the U.S. Jamil Simon responded that a good start would be to use the “inside” reporting done by student journalists. I agreed, and added that PJ coverage of the protests must be contextual. How many of the protesters are actually violent? Does anti-Semitism drive the protesters, or has this aspect been exaggerated?

I’m grateful to Harvard for this opportunity, and to my MPV colleagues for their excellent presentations. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

UPDATE--The event was recorded, and is posted at https://www.pon.harvard.edu/events/kelman-seminar-media-find-room-for-peace/ .

(L to R)-Simon, Muraskin, Youngblood