Adoptability and acceptability of peace journalism among Afghan photojournalists: Lessons for peace journalism training in conflict-affected countries

In this article, I seek to inform Peace Journalism (PJ) education and training in conflict-affected countries in particular. Based on a case study of the professional experiences of Afghan photojournalists, I offer insights into the acceptability and adoptability of PJ practice by journalists from conflict-affected countries. I present six key findings of a larger study on Afghan photojournalists in this article and discuss the lessons they hold for PJ training in conflict-affected countries. In sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I provide some important theoretical, contextual and methodological background. In section 6, I discuss three professional adversities faced by Afghan photojournalists and evaluate the obstacles that implementation of PJ faces as a result of them. In section 7, I describe one professional motivator for Afghan photojournalists and discuss the opportunity it presents for PJ adoption. In Page 18 Journalism Education Volume 6 number 2 section 8, I describe two other constraints faced by Afghan photojournalists related specifically to donor-funded media development in post-2001 Afghanistan and discuss their implications for PJ training. Finally in section 9, while noting the limitations of the current study, I offer two ways forward for PJ training in conflict-affected countries like Afghanistan. Journalism training in conflict-affected countries Training in PJ is often offered as “continuing professional development as a form of donor aid” in conflictaffected countries (Lynch, 2015b, p.194). As such, PJ has a responsibility to engage with the emerging cognizance among scholars that donor-funded journalism training in conflict-affected countries often do not take into account the socio-cultural, political-economic and professional realities of the particular conflictaffected society where they are offered (Betz, 2015, pp. 219-232; Relly et al., 2015, pp. 471-497; Relly and Zanger, 2016, pp.1-23). Though the question of the influence of sociological realities of a country on journalists is not new in academic discussion of PJ1, scholars writing about the rationale for offering PJ training in conflict-affected countries however have maintained2 that PJ is more readily acceptable to journalists in societies “that have experienced the ravages of violent conflict” (Hackett, 2006, p.11). Little to no concrete sociological evidence3 has been offered to support these observations and instead the consensus sometimes has been that this question is “effectively settled” (Lynch, 2015a, p. 25) by content analysis studies that show elements of PJ exist in manifest news content in different countries. More recently, the case for identifying “ideational distinctions, beyond the level of manifest content, in the representation of conflicts and match them to those in the PJ model” (Lynch, 2015b, p. 194) has been made by Nohrstedt & Ottosen (2015, pp. 225-6). The current article is inspired by this proposal but applies it in the context of training journalists in PJ in conflictaffected countries, rather than the representations they produce. PJ and sociological particularities of journalistic profession Sociological studies of journalism have long noted that journalism as a form of cultural production varies according to its socio-cultural context. Studies have been undertaken by both qualitative methods based on participant observation (e.g. Pedelty, 1995) and interviews with journalists (e.g. Rantanen, 2004, pp. 302314) as well as more quantitatively oriented survey and questionnaire-based studies (e.g. Fahmy, 2005) utilizing theoretical frameworks such as the hierarchy of influence model (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014) to understand the sociological particularities of journalistic practice. In the particular context of developing, transitional or conflict-affected countries, journalism has been shown to be affected by the particular history of where it is practiced (e.g. Coman, 2004; Shafer & Freedman, 2003; Skjerdal, 2012) as well as cultural specificities (e.g. Ibrahim, 2003), religious factors (e.g. Pintak, 2014) and national affiliations (e.g. Nossek, 2004). Comparative studies of journalistic self-perception 1 For example, see Tehranian (2002, p. 60); Blasi, 2009, Rodny-Gumede (2016) 2 See the continuity of this argument from Lynch and McGoldrick (2005, p. 223) and McGoldrick (2006, p. 4) to Lynch and Galtung (2010: p. 195) and Hackett (2011, p. 45). 3 Important exceptions are Onadipe and Lord’s study (1999 quoted in McGoldrick, 2006) and Weighton (2015). For a discussion of the latter, see Mitra (2016a, p. 12).