Anthropological Perspectives on Theorising Media and Conflict

Introduction Anthropological Perspectives on Theorising Media and Conflict Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka The relationship between media and conflict is highly elusive and complex. Conflict dynamics in one of the largest island states, where media have been contributing decisively to a feeling of national belonging (Anderson 1983), illustrate this. In 1999, the outbreak of the Moluccan conflict in Eastern Indonesia destroyed the existing media landscape, in which journalists and media workers collaborated irrespective of their religious affiliation. The conflict was mainly fought along religious lines and triggered the re-emergence of a totally different media landscape: a broad range of media – from newspapers, to the internet, to radio and graffiti – was now divided along religious lines, fuelling religious hatred and propelling the conflict to new levels. Such escalation and years of violence in turn made Moluccan people wake up and promote the transformation of society to peace through, among other things, social media, newspapers, theatre performances and poetry. Thus, media became a tool to provoke peace and to resist social injustices underlying the physical violence in Maluku. It was only through long-term ethnographic research that this intimate relationship between media, conflict and societal transformation revealed itself (see also Bräuchler, this volume). This example reminds us that asking about the impact or effect of media on conflict and violence – a question that continues to preoccupy media scholars, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists – is in fact a ‘methodological error’ that tries to build ‘discussion about human values around a mathematical metaphor’ (Smith 1978: 129–30). "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 4 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka Instead of looking at media and conflict as two separate spheres or at unidirectional causality, this edited volume brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively look at the interpenetration and the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict. In doing so, it cannot possibly cover all variations of conflict and media. Instead, it puts forward the notion of mediation to focus upon wider media-related processes and practices in everyday contexts and of conflicts as social processes and culturally constructed. While the analyses in this book are embedded in a broader discourse on conflict as an inherent part and a central organising principle of social life, they mainly focus on conflicts involving extraordinary forms of violence that have become part of the everyday. In seven parts, the authors theorise on central aspects of the relationship between media and conflict: (I) key debates and anthropological approaches, (II) witnessing and (III) experiencing conflict, (IV) language and (V) sites of conflict, as well as (VI) cross-border conflict and (VII) conflict transformation. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume contributes to the consolidation of media and conflict as a distinct area of scholarship. No matter whether through war propaganda, news media and embedded journalists, pictures and videos of drones and gun cameras, media activism and citizen journalism, social media use or video games, we are all becoming increasingly entangled in violent conflicts worldwide (e.g. Karmasin et al. 2013: xi; Mortensen 2015: 2; Seib 2013: 7). Scholars are grappling with the variety and increasing mediation of conflict experiences and the extents of conflict immersion in people’s everyday mediated life. In a recent literature survey on media and conflict, for instance, Schoemaker and Stremlau (2014) found that a majority of studies display Western biases, normative assumptions and unsubstantiated claims about the so-called ‘impact of media’ in conflict situations. This is characteristic of research that aims to identify the effect or the impact of media, rather than looking into the complex relationship between media and, in our case, conflict. Moreover, there are only limited efforts in media and conflict studies to correlate, for instance, media framing results with on-the-ground research findings (Vladisavljević 2015: 1). In her chapter in this volume, Nicole Stremlau criticises how technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, attempt to connect the unconnected in developing regions and in conflict situations. These internet giants, she notes, focus on what international, industry-led interventions can do to regulate inflammatory (dis) information and media communication rather than looking into local agency and the lived reality of conflicts. "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 5 With its cross-cultural and context-sensitive approach, its ethnographic methods and ground-up theorising, anthropologically informed media research is well placed to make a strong contribution to the advancement of research into media and conflict (see Sumera, Marshall, Mollerup, Kummels, Pype, Oldenburg, and Bräuchler, this volume). The same goes for qualitative media and communication studies that emphasise contextualisation and critical theorising (see Sumiala, Tikka and Valaskivi, Meis, Markham, Livio, Adriaans, and Soberon, Smets and Biltereyst, this volume). This book thus goes beyond the search for media effects and also sets a counterpoint to the predominance of quantitative studies that frequently fail to take into account people’s lived experiences in the understanding of conflict dynamics (Bräuchler 2015: 209). To explore these lived experiences of people in relation to media practices in a range of contexts requires knowledge of and training in relevant methods and methodologies, such as ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and qualitative interviewing (Bräuchler 2018b; Carayannis 2018). However, this is something some disciplines in this field of research are lacking. They tend to look into violence, conflict and media by building on media content and quantitative data sets, generated through statistics, modelling or geographic information systems, to pin down the effects of media on conflict occurrence and dynamics (see e.g. a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research, a flagship journal of peace and conflict studies, on ‘Communication, Technology, and Political Conflict’; Weidmann 2015). While some projects dedicated to the study of conflict in an increasingly mediated world, such as the journal Media, War & Conflict (Hoskins, Richards and Seib 2008), do promote a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in exploring the relationship between media and conflict, anthropologically informed and ethnographically grounded research is still under-represented. Nevertheless, a growing number of anthropologists have begun to study media in conflict and post-conflict contexts – working on topics such as news reporting (e.g. Arno 2009; Pedelty 1995), war (e.g. Bräuchler 2013; Stroeken 2012), digital activism (e.g. Barassi 2015), social protest and political change (e.g. Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Postill 2018), media use in diasporic networks (e.g. Bernal 2014), video-making (e.g. Kummels 2017), radio propaganda (e.g. Li 2007), conflict transformation (e.g. Bräuchler 2011) or spiritual and religious struggles (e.g. Pype 2012) – but so far they have done so in relative isolation from one another. This volume helps to overcome this fragmentation of the field by bringing together, in a synergetic effort, media "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 6 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka anthropologists and media and communication scholars researching the multiple ways in which different kinds of media and conflict interpenetrate in a number of regional settings. In doing so, this book sets the field’s theoretical and empirical agenda for students, scholars, activists and civil society groups alike. In this introductory chapter, we continue outlining the specifics of our approach to theorise on media and conflict. To do so, it is necessary to reconsider two established anthropological fields of research: the anthropology of media and the anthropology of conflict. We argue that considerable societal and media-related transformation processes and changes have brought these research fields closer together, even suggesting an inevitable and synergetic merging on a conceptual level. Thus, we outline in a first section how to approach media and conflict from an anthropological perspective. In a second section, we develop the various aspects of how the volume’s chapters and an anthropological approach contribute to the theorising of media and conflict. Whereas references to the individual contributions are included throughout, a brief outline of the book’s structure concludes the chapter. Approaching Media and Conflict from an Anthropological Perspective We promote an anthropologically informed, non-media-centric and contextualised approach to conflict and media that accentuates: (a) the deconstruction of deterministic notions of media effects and of simplistic categorisations of media-conflict relations; (b) a focus on the lived realities of conflicts through cross-cultural comparison and ethnographic methodology; and (c) the co-constitution of media and conflict and therefore the necessary linking of conceptual approaches that have been shaping the anthropology of conflict and media. Beyond Media Effects In the late 1970s and the 1980s, media studies experienced an ethnographic turn. Inspired by anthropology and particularly cultural studies, scholars started to research media as embedded in everyday contexts, not as something set apart from it. They began to challenge and deconstruct prevailing communication models and ‘the power of the media texts that shape attitudes and ideas’ of a passive, homogeneous audience (Askew 2002: 5). This new wave of media scholars promoted ideas of an active audience or audiences who interpret, attribute "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 7 and produce heterogeneous meanings (e.g. Morley 1980, 1992) in relation to wider social, cultural and political settings, fields and practices, including power hierarchies or gender relations (Dracklé 2005: 189–90). Longstanding perceptions of boundaries between media production and media reception started to dissolve (Ginsburg, AbuLughod and Larkin 2002b: 1). Such developments have been pushed further by interactive digital media technologies, internet platforms and particularly social media, where media users are – or can be – audience and producer at the same time (e.g. Bruns 2008; Sumiala and Tikka 2011). Despite this turn, questions about media effects and the impact of media use and coverage still seem to preoccupy scholars who are looking, for instance, at the role of media in conflict and postconflict scenarios (Schoemaker and Stremlau 2014: 185; Zeitzoff 2017: 1971), the effects that media coverage has on terrorist attacks (Asal and Hoffmann 2016) or the impact of information wars (Allagui and Akdenizli 2019). However, as, for instance, Igreja’s (2015) ethnography on violence glorifying films in conflict zones in Mozambique, and Straus’ (2007) study on the relationship between hate radio and violence during the Rwandan Civil War illustrate, one has to be very careful in identifying a causal relationship between media content and violent actions (see also Oldenburg, this volume). Both authors challenge linear media approaches and argue for a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of violence, and the culturally and historically situated experiences and interpretations of people exposed to it. Igreja questions simplifying notions of the negative effects film violence has on young viewers in post-war and conflict settings by analysing the ambivalent responses of local residents. He argues that film violence can ‘enhance ongoing processes of self-assertion among young people in unpredictable ways’, leading to either the incitement or containment of violence, ‘while stimulating the consciousness of existing … languages and mechanisms of mediation’ (Igreja 2015: 678, 679). Straus, in turn, counters the prevailing scholarly opinions that radio broadcasts ‘were a primary determinant of genocide’ (2007: 609) by sparking extreme violence, thus invoking the image of passive listeners with little or no agency (2007: 615). Rather, he found that Rwandan radio did not trigger the violence, but ‘emboldened hard-liners [and not the general audience] and reinforced face-to-face mobilization, which helped those who advocated violence [in particular elites] assert dominance and carry out the genocide’ (Straus 2007: 631). Both studies emphasize the need to go beyond simplistic frameworks and look into the ‘less obvious and more tense and negotiated process of social "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 8 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka change’ (Igreja 2015: 689) and the ‘complex issues of agency, context, institutions, and history’ (Straus 2007: 632) – something contributions to this volume do. Stremlau, for example, puts forward the importance of considering regional and national political ideologies as well as their historical and sociocultural contextualisation for understanding the complex relationship of media and conflict at the Horn of Africa. Such complexities render it futile, or at least limiting the research perspective, to ask about the effects or impact of media on conflict or war (see also Couldry and Hepp 2013). We aim for a non-media-centric, non-media-deterministic approach – a constitutive quality of media anthropology (e.g. Peterson 2003) – that focuses on the contexts of both conflict and media. The challenge here is to avoid media-centrism (e.g. Moores 2018) – even when most contributions to this book take media as a window to look at certain conflict and peace dynamics – in order to ensure a proper contextualisation of our media perspectives on conflicts. We counter, for example, views that reduce digital media platforms to ‘archives of [decontextualised] online behavior’ that ‘have opened up unrivaled amounts of data that are now available for analysis’ (Gohdes 2018: 100), neglecting the lived experience of people involved in producing, communicating, receiving, digesting, interpreting or manipulating those ‘data’. A non-media-centric approach to mediated conflict makes it possible to deconstruct normative views of technology that either celebrate media as a democratising and liberating force (Schoemaker and Stremlau 2014: 187) or promote overly technical notions of media and conflict alliances such as media war, cyberwar, hacktivism, cyberattacks, cybersecurity or cybercrime (e.g. Ghosh and Turrini 2010; Jordan and Taylor 2004) (for a critique, see also Stremlau, this volume). What has become known as the ‘first war in cyberspace’ in April–May 2007 in Estonia feeds into this (Landler and Markoff 2007).1 Waves of denial-of-service attacks that ‘brought down the Websites of the Estonian President, Parliament, a series of government agencies, the news media, [and] the two largest banks’ (Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009: 1168) triggered a response by the Estonian government that blocked all international web traffic, ‘effectively shutting off the “most wired country in Europe” from the rest of the world’ (Richards 2009). Incidents like this and publicly mediated concerns over the use of the internet by terrorist and extremist groups feed well into security policies of well-armed states, such as the United States and Singapore, as well as into global risks models developed by international organisations (e.g. Conway 2006; World Economic Forum 2019). As various case studies in this volume show, it is not easy to "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 9 categorise online conflicts due to the ambivalent nature of the internet (see also Bräuchler 2007). A non-media-centric approach helps to avoid and deconstruct overly reifying and constraining conflict categories and, instead, look at conflict realities as embedded social practices and actions (see also Arno 2009; Smets 2017). The expansion of contemporary warfare into cyberspace and onto digital platforms does get scholarly attention, but ethnographic research that follows a particular conflict for an extended period of time is still the exception (e.g. Bräuchler 2013). The field is still dominated by political scientists, international relations and communication scholars who tend to focus on state security and so-called ‘cyber security’ (e.g. Karatzogianni 2009; Latham 2003). Given current technological developments, anthropologists working on conflict issues need to join hands with media anthropologists even more in order to grasp the complexity of how media technologies, sensory perceptions and social life are interrelated (e.g. Robben 2016). It is obvious that people engage with media in different ways and under changing conditions. Some people access and use specific media technologies; some do not, for various reasons. Media involve people as objects of and content for media coverage or in other ‘arenas of circulation’ (Slevin 2000: 81). But media also connect people; they provide new, sometimes alternative, ways to communicate and interact. To explore this diversity of media engagements, it is necessary to look into people’s lived realities, in our case the realities of conflict. The Lived Realities of Conflict Most books on the subject of media and conflict look at one type of media (e.g. news media or the internet – see Arno 2009; Karatzogianni 2009), at a specific aspect of media (e.g. media power or media rituals – see Couldry and Curran 2003a; Grimes et al. 2011), at a certain kind of conflict (e.g. religious conflicts or terror – see Marsden and Savigny 2009a; Veer and Munshi 2004) or at a particular region or country (e.g. Indonesia or Rwanda – see Bräuchler 2013; Thompson 2007). Others limit their research focus to specific aspects of the interlinkage of media and conflict by discussing, for instance, war and conflict coverage (e.g. Pedelty 1995; Vladisavljević 2015) or religion and news media (Marsden and Savigny 2009b). The contributions to this book deal with different kinds and forms of media technologies and conflicts in various world regions, and examine multiple aspects of media engagements and practices in relation to conflictual situations and events. This allows for the theorisation of the relationship between "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 10 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka media and conflict beyond the particular type of media, conflict and locality. Moreover, the volume considers media’s role in transitional phases from conflict to peace. Beyond simply juxtaposing media and conflict, this book examines the lived sociocultural realities of conflict and conflict transformation, of which media have become integral parts. We are therefore sceptical of the notion of ‘mediatisation of conflicts’ in the sense of looking at ‘how the media do things with conflicts’ (Cottle 2006: 9, emphasis in original). Such unidirectional, causal relations are only part of the story and do not sufficiently capture the complex relationship between media and conflicts. We would instead like to put more emphasis on how media are co-constitutive of conflicts (see also Cottle 2006: 187). Referring to the interlinkage of media communication and conflict as a social and cultural process, Karmasin et al. highlight that ‘war has been an important factor in the evolution of new forms of social communication, and at the same time new means of communication have altered the relationship between war and the mass media’ (2013: ix). New media technologies, formats and practices change the lived realities of conflicts, conflict participants and conflict observers. But conflicts also do things to media as they change the way in which media are defined, used, adopted, adapted, manipulated, integrated or excluded. Conflicts can emerge on and through media, for example, through the construction or enforcement of group boundaries along ethnic or religious lines (e.g. Nakamura and Chow-White 2012). But as media have become integral parts of our (conflictual) lives, this renders any neat analytical distinction between media and conflict-related activities impossible and rather counterproductive. Looking into the lived realities of conflicts requires careful contextualisation, anthropologically informed theorising and ethnographic methods. While ethnography investigates everyday sociocultural processes and practices through participant observation and other qualitative methods, anthropology connects ethnographic material through comparison and contextualisation to a wider set of questions on the human condition (Howell 2018; Sanjek 2010). While this volume is predominantly grounded in empirical ethnographic and anthropological research, it is also interdisciplinary, including and applying theoretical approaches from media, communication and audiovisual studies, such as the phenomenology of conflict reporting and the aesthetics of media (discourses). It approaches the relationships between media and conflict from a participant’s perspective – experiencing and witnessing conflict – as well as from a more removed, analytical perspective (key debates as well as sites and scales of conflict). Thus, it "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 11 provides a situated, multiscalar perspective to the empirical study of media and conflict. In addition, this volume takes the notion of media practices (Bräuchler and Postill 2010; Couldry 2010) to new terrain, namely to theorise the elusive relationship between media and conflict by decentring media. These practices must be tracked in both their continuities and changes over time in specific sites and scales of conflict. Therefore, the study of contemporary conflict and media landscapes requires a multi-sited (Marcus 1995) and a multi-temporal (Bräuchler 2015), or diachronic (Postill 2017), dimension. Nevertheless, as Werbner (2010: 193) emphasises in her reflections on the possible contributions of anthropologists to understanding the dynamics of global terror, ‘our ethnographic mediations still start from the bottom – from the small places where we do our ordinary, quotidian research’. This can turn out to be very challenging – for instance, given the difficulties in terms of access to interlocutors or conflict sites or safety concerns when collecting data – for both research subjects and researchers. Theorising Media and Conflict With legal anthropology being one of the oldest sub-branches of the discipline, anthropologists have identified various means by which local societies cope with conflict in the absence of formal courts beyond the state, from avoidance and arbitration to violence and war (e.g. Bohannan 1967; Elwert, Feuchtwang and Neubert 1999; Moore 1978, 2005). Anthropologists such as Gluckman (1963), Comaroff (1981, together with Roberts) and Elwert (2004) counter the notion of conflict as extraordinary, chaotic and structureless. They conceptualise conflicts as processes that are partly embedded in broader ‘ensembles of moral values, norms and institutional arrangements’ and follow culturally coded patterns (including symbolism, ritual and communication culture; notions of reciprocity, scarcity and identity), but also contain ‘elements of surprise’ (Element von Überraschung) (Elwert 2004: 29). More than two decades ago, Robben and Nordstrom (1995: 10) already emphasised that the ‘everydayness of violence’ does not preclude the uncertainty of violence that is always related to ‘a summoning of fear, terror, and confusion as well as resistance, survival, hope and creativity’. Violence and conflict thus need to be conceptualised in broader ways, including their destructive and their reconstructive potential (1995: 6). Anthropologists have found that conflict is part of everyday life, but the majority agrees that aggression is not innate to human nature – "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 12 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka a view that is linked to the so-called ‘nature versus nurture debate’ about whether human behaviour is genetically or socioculturally determined. In our case, it is about whether human nature is intrinsically violent and malicious, and therefore in need of civilisation (nurture) to be pacified, or whether humanity is nonviolent and good by nature (Kemp 2004: 2–3). Montagu (1994: xii) argues in line with other anthropologists that aggressive behaviour is culturally determined (e.g. Orywal 1996: 15, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 3). Mead (2000: 20) understands conflict and war as societal inventions and cultural constructs just as writing or marriage. It is ‘the social and cultural dimensions of violence … [that give] violence its power and meaning’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 1). This constructedness of war, as Mead (2000: 22) continues, implies that it can be deconstructed and, as Bräuchler (2015: 28) points out, that peace also needs to be interpreted as a construction. Moreover, both ‘peace and war result from complex social dynamics’ (Rubinstein and Foster 1988: 1) and are ‘made sense of discursively and culturally’ (Cottle 2006: 4–5). Anthropological research has thus built ‘a powerful literature of the everyday experiences and suffering of victims of civil wars and state terror and the embedded myths-cum-ideologies used by perpetrators of violence’ (Werbner 2010: 195). In this volume, authors are interested in the ways in which media are part of such social dynamics and get involved in such cultural construction and deconstruction processes – symbolically loaded processes shaped by practices that can be grasped and analysed through ethnographic in-depth research. We understand media as technologies that mediate and modify human communication, interaction and culture. Consequently, the anthropology of media ‘should be seen not simply as an inquiry into communication technologies and their contents but as the study of the broader processes of mediation. Mediation refers to the material frameworks (including human bodies) humans use to enable and constrain communicative action within and across multiple social orders’ (Postill and Peterson in press).2 A focus on mediation facilitates the conceptual merging of (research on) media with (research on) conflict because it decentres media technologies by concentrating on mediation processes and practices rather than on a specific communication medium and its effects, for instance (e.g. Boyer 2012; Bräuchler and Postill 2010). As a conceptual tool, mediation supports attempts to theorise upon wider sociocultural transformation processes that unfold in nonlinear manners (Couldry 2008: 379–81; Mazzarella 2004: 360–61), such as the (continuously modified) co-constitutiveness of conflict and media.3 "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 13 Theorising media as practice makes it possible to focus on: (a) mediation practices in an everyday context; (b) the relationship between media (technologies) and the human body; and (c) the diversity of fields of media production (Postill 2010: 12–16; see also Moores 2018). Such a conceptualisation of media is intrinsically interrelated with ethnographically grounded fieldwork. For Postill, ‘a practice theory approach to media suggests that people use a range of media partly to try to maintain – not always with success – a sense of ontological security in a modern world’ (2010: 18). Media practices should thus also be understood in relation to rituals and other performative practices of social life (e.g. Hughes-Freeland 1998; Luger, Graf and Budka 2019). Given the multitude of sociocultural practices, it seems helpful to identify and investigate the ‘range of practices [that] are oriented to media’ and the ‘role of media-oriented practices in ordering other practices’ (Couldry 2010: 50). Hobart (2010) contends that it is particularly important here to consider the relations between different practices (of social life). Consequently, he argues for the conceptualisation of media practices as ‘media-related practices’ to ‘provide an initial circumscription out of the whole range of identifiable practices in a society at any moment’ (2010: 67). As contributions to this collection indicate, a practice approach and the conduct of ethnographic research are particularly conducive to grasp the subtleties and the intricacies of media-conflict entanglements. They can help to unmask and deconstruct notions of an alleged ‘media logic’ (Altheide 2013), internationally popular patterns of conflict interpretation that are imposed on local settings (Straus 2007; Stremlau, this volume) and an international peace industry that aims to solve local conflicts according to a global blueprint (Bräuchler 2015). In this volume, our focus is on conflict related to violence, one way or the other, thus diverging from the rich literature that has evolved over the last decade on resistance and activist movements, such as the global Occupy movement or the Indignados movement in Spain, and their skilful use of a broad variety of media, most prominently digital and social media, and their rich ‘nonviolent’ protest aesthetics in the sense of the predominant abstinence from physical violence (e.g. Postill 2018; Werbner, Webb and Spellman-Poots 2014). As indicated above and as was obvious in the 2009 postpresidential election protests in Iran, it is important here to bear in mind that ‘social media tools can simultaneously support grass-roots political mobilizations as well as government surveillance and human rights violations’ (Coleman 2010: 493). Digital culture is essentially ambiguous (Miller and Horst 2012: "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 14 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka 4); it opens and closes possibilities (for political activism, for instance) at the same time (see also Tufekci 2017). Like Robben and Nordstrom (1995: 2, 6), we want to focus on ‘the experiential dimension of conflict’ and violence’s expression in the everyday, but with a specific focus on their interlinkage with media. Due to their cultural and social embeddedness, conflicts and violence can be attributed multiple meanings by participants, witnesses, observers or interveners (1995: 5), and critical research needs to be explicit about the layers and contexts it is looking at (e.g. Vladisavljević 2015: 1). Tim Markham, for instance, theorises in his chapter about distant witnessing of conflict by deploying a phenomenological approach in reframing journalistic practices – in his case of media practitioners in Beirut – and audience experiences. Such an approach, he argues, demonstrates that objectification (of subjectivities and suffering) is a matter of everyday life rather than a reduction of conflict to a mediated spectacle and that it does not prevent an apprehension of conflict by media producers or audiences. As all the contributions to this volume vividly illustrate, conflict and its resolution can take on very different shapes and scales, depending on the actors involved. Structural Violence, Power and Ritual Many anthropologists have adopted Galtung’s (1969) notion of structural violence – the idea that violence is more than mere physical violence and is ingrained in societal structures, producing and perpetuating inequalities of power and agency (e.g. Farmer 2004; ScheperHughes 2004). Analogously, ‘positive peace’ is more than the absence of violence (as ‘negative peace’); it is the extinction of structural violence (Galtung 1969). Anthropologists engage with both the structures underlying conflicts and the roles and practices of local actors, since agency and creativity are as essential for the construction of conflict and violence as they are for rebuilding peace (e.g. Bräuchler 2015; Nordstrom 1997a, 1997b). Media technologies can be used to both exert or mediate physical violence, through attacks on computer systems or the visualisation of violence, and to contribute to structural violence in terms of media access, literacy and skills or the way in which people are represented – be it conflict parties or others. What has been true for the internet (Bräuchler 2013) is even more so for social media (Zeitzoff 2017): costs of communication are reduced (which does not imply that everybody has access); the speed of dissemination increases tremendously with news and images going viral; they are participative, which is effective for mobilisation; they are creatively "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 15 adopted and adapted; they provide data on conflict, but also for conflict actors; and they are (strategically) used by a broad range of people. Even though social media can give a voice to increasing numbers of people, the challenge remains how to make it heard (Couldry 2015) and be listened to (Dreher, McCallum and Waller 2016). It is a matter of power, perception management and representation, about whose voices are heard on what media – questions that are as relevant today as they were a decade ago (Bräuchler 2005, 2013), despite changes in media and technology infrastructure (Budka 2015). In his chapter, Jonathan Paul Marshall conceptualises trolling as a practice that marks orders and disorders of group allegiance, meaning-making and conflictual communication in what he calls ‘disinformation society’. As he shows through the case study of an Australian media celebrity, trolling has become part of today’s social media experience to frame selected communicative interactions as dismissible, thus contributing decisively to the (dis)ordering of digital communication. Media as such are the results of ‘battles over who has the power to represent the reality of others’ (Couldry and Curran 2003b: 6; see also Doudaki and Carpentier 2017). Media participation alone is not only a matter of mobilisation (Atton 2015: 7), but of skills and resources, including infrastructure, time, prior experience, social and cultural capital and networks (Bräuchler 2018a; Budka 2019). Not everybody has such skills, be it media skills or mediation and negotiation skills. Nordstrom (1997a: 191) therefore suggests that the creative members of a society such as healers, visionaries and performers – or Postill’s (2018: 1) ‘techno-political nerds’ – need to act as multipliers and mobilise the rest. Processes of conflict and peace are often heavily loaded by cultural and religious symbols and rituals, in particular when identity issues are involved. Usually, they are emotionally charged and thus can easily be instrumentalised and manipulated to mobilise people (for war and peace), but also to enable social control. Symbols are often multivocal and can invoke diverse, context-depending associations (Turner 1975). This allows for the instrumentalisation and manipulation of symbols (for war and conflict) and the mobilisation of integrative effects of symbols (for reconciliation and peace). Looking at both ritualised forms of conflict and violence and the role of symbols and rituals in mediated conflict (Grimes 2011: 22–24), the volume’s contributors also address the ritual dimension of media, conflict and conflict resolution. Rik Adriaans analyses in his chapter the ritualisation and deritualisation of conflict-related diasporic media events. He investigates how competing telethon broadcasts of the Armenian diaspora in the United States alter the politics, framing "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 16 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka and scale of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, thus enlisting diasporic Armenians in this conflict through a transnational, humanitarian sphere of media rituals. Katrien Pype discusses in her chapter ritualised speech acts; Ingrid Kummels investigates ritualised, mediated conflicts over diverging land claims; Oren Livio explores communication rituals in a conflict setting; and Lennart Soberon, Kevin Smets and Daniel Biltereyst analyse ritualised, visual remembering. Other contributions address newly emerging ritualised practices in the media, such as hate speech and trolling (Marshall) and ‘off-the-record’ practices in a postgenocide media environment (Oldenburg). Changing Fields As notions of culture and locality were increasingly de-essentialised from the 1980s onwards, anthropologists increasingly turned towards phenomena, processes and dimensions of violence and/or conflict that transcend the local through multi-sited ethnography (e.g. Nordstrom 1997a, 2004). This brings us back to our methodological reflections. As Appadurai has argued, ‘globalization, as a specific way in which states, markets, and ideas about trade and governance have come to be organized, exacerbates the conditions of large-scale violence because it produces a potential collision course between the logics of uncertainty and incompleteness, each of which has its own form and force’ (2006: 8–9). While being aware of the translocal, transnational and global embeddedness of certain conflicts (e.g. Juris and Khasnabish 2013), anthropologists still conduct research from the ground up, adding local perspectives to national and international interventionist approaches to conflict that often ignore the messiness and cultural specificity of conflict dynamics and the existence of local means to resolve conflicts. As the volume’s chapters show (see in particular those by Oldenburg, Kummels, Pype and Livio), neither conflict dynamics nor the turn towards peace can be understood without taking local culture, local conflict and conflict resolution traditions, and local conceptualisation of conflict, violence, peace, trauma, justice and truth into account (see also Bräuchler 2018c; Bräuchler and Naucke 2017). Kummels, for example, investigates in her chapter the role of digital media and communication in an agrarian conflict between villages in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and how ‘ethnic influencers’ – some of them in the U.S. diaspora – shape this conflict with the support of social media platforms. She reminds us that even though digital media technologies contribute to the transnationalisation of conflicts, these new, mediated conflicts, or ‘media wars’, are also deeply embedded in local (conflict) "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 17 culture and cannot be disconnected from earlier conflict phases when nondigital media were utilised, in her case historical maps to which people still refer today. At first glance, and in particular given the emergence of social media, one might be tempted to suggest that media allow for a ‘safer’ approach to conflict and violence than previous ‘fieldwork under fire’ (Nordstrom and Robben 1995). Theoretically, we could research violence from afar, via media, and thus avoid the chaos, the ‘bewilderment’, the ‘disorientation’, the ‘existential shock’ that hits us, when we physically emerge in conflict zones and warscapes, where the boundaries between life and death have become erratic (1995: 13). However, the ‘powerful roles of mediated visual imagery during wartime’ (Parry 2010: 417), the virality and the participatory character of social media, and the immediacy with which we can experience conflict and violence via a broad range of media challenge such simplistic assumptions, as various contributions to this volume illustrate. Given the media saturation of conflict and peacescapes, boundaries between a safe home for the conduct of research (or witnessing) and the places where violence takes place dissolve (see e.g. Markham, Meis, Mollerup, and Sumiala, Tikka and Valaskivi, this volume). Witnessing acquires yet another significance, with fieldworkers not only observing or witnessing conflict and violence on the ground, but also observing or witnessing what people on the ground do with media. In her chapter, Nina Grønlykke Mollerup conceptualises media as place-making in the context of the Egyptian uprising (2011–13). As communicative processes across space, media open up places to other places by enabling ‘a presence’ of elements of one place in others. And this, she argues, happens when people sensorily experience mediated conflict and violence, in her case through online videos. Media and conflict are thus also co-constitutive of places. Image, Sound and Peace De Franco (2012: 2) argues that the element of visibility and visuality alters everything; it modifies perceptions and behaviours, from sport to war. But visual media technologies do not only bring conflicts into people’s home via the news; social media – particularly in connection with mobile digital devices such as smartphones – make users increasingly vulnerable to tracking, monitoring and surveillance by state governments or corporations (e.g. Fuchs 2014). Embedded photojournalists give the viewer the impression that they are directly following what happens on the ground, often not taking into account how these "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 18 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka journalists have staged, selected or maybe even reworked the pictures (Alper 2013: 1237). And social media can absorb users into conflict dynamics, through the sharing and circulation of journalistic and amateur content, as some chapters illustrate. Johanna Sumiala, Minttu Tikka and Katja Valaskivi, for instance, analyse the dynamics of digital witnessing in the context of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015 in Paris. They identify several media-oriented practices that are co-constitutive of digital witnessing, such as taking videos and pictures as well as sharing, remediating and engaging with these visual materials. These digital practices contributed decisively to the shaping of the attacks as a violent media event by anchoring people, for example, as (amateur) witnesses (see also Meis on mobile phone videos in the Syrian conflict, and Mollerup on digital videos in the Egyptian uprising). Moreover, conflict imageries are circulated to raise international awareness about conflicts, but they are also strategically selected and manipulated in order to make a stronger case and further mobilise for a specific cause, up to a point where the reality of conflict becomes, in fact, invisible. Taking such critique to the extreme, Baudrillard argued in 1995 that the Gulf War did not really take place and only existed as ‘the simulacra of modern mediated warfare’ (Alper 2013: 1239). The growing importance of digital videos and live streaming reminds us that it is not only the visualisation of violence on people’s mobile devices but also sounds that impact the witnessing experience. Seib, for instance, mentions Edward R. Murrow, an American journalist who was reporting from the rooftops of London during air raids in the Second World War, thus bringing ‘the sounds of war’ into people’s homes and affecting how they looked at the war and government policies (Seib 2013: 8). Sound, much less than imagery, cannot be escaped, as Matthew Sumera vividly shows in his chapter on the relationship between sounds and conflict. He not only explores the meanings and purposes of different types of sounds in contexts of war, but also their materiality and impact on people and their bodily experiences in conflict situations and in engaging with war films and video games. In doing so, he builds on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘chronotopes’ to theorise on the processual nature of sound by combining the temporal and spatial qualities of media sounds. Despite clear indications of the power of media for peacebuilding (e.g. Acayo and Mnjama 2004; Howard et al. 2005; Kahl and Puig Larrauri 2013; and Bräuchler, this volume), media research has so far clearly focused more on conflict with some of the major recent handbooks on peacebuilding having no section or entry on media (e.g. Mac Ginty 2013; Richmond, Pogodda and Ramović 2016; Webel and "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 19 Galtung 2007). Also, broadcasting companies and journalists seem to find it more rewarding to cover conflict than peace. As pointed out by Grimes, ‘most of the pictures chosen for World Press Photo awards, for example, are embroiled in conflict, not nestled in the warm bed of peace’ (2011: 21). Aiming towards a change in focus or at least a more balanced look at media’s role in both conflict and peacebuilding, this volume also includes a section on transitions to peace in the aftermath of conflict. Soberon, Smets and Biltereyst explore in their chapter the contribution of films to transnational discourses of remembrance. In doing so, they conceptualise film as a locus of storing and communicating traumatic histories that is part of broader, collective practices of remembering trauma. Filmic representations and narratives, particularly those that counter dominant Western accounts of war and conflict, thus enable conversations on how to interact with (post)conflict reconciliation. Silke Oldenburg discusses in her chapter the relationship between media and collective identity formation in post-genocide Rwanda by looking into journalists’ everyday practices. She concludes that Rwanda’s historical legacy, the authoritarian political situation and the lack of a debating culture resulted in an ‘off-therecord’ media culture that is shaped by, and at the same time shapes, practices of avoidance. Birgit Bräuchler examines in her chapter how media in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia, facilitated the transition from conflict to peace. Through a context-oriented, integrative and agencyoriented approach, she illustrates how society and media are interdependent and how media and conflict are co-constitutive. These are first steps into a field slowly gaining in prominence and in need of future research. Media Convergence and Changing Power Constellations Media allow for another kind of immersion into conflict and other ways to participate, follow and observe different types of conflict. Moreover, the requirements of conflict and peace change the way in which media are used, as, for example, war photography, hate radio, trauma healing performances and the utilisation of drones or digital networks show (e.g. Moeller 1989; Steel 2015; Thompson 2007; Waterson 2010). In the Israel–Palestine conflict, for instance, state, military and grassroots activists have been using various media and communication channels provided by the internet to construct and disseminate their own narratives about current and past events, thus altering ‘the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands’ (Kuntsman and Stein 2010). Livio investigates in his chapter the use of "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 20 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka Twitter for cross-national dialogue between left-wing Israeli activists and representatives of Hamas during the Gaza War in 2014. As he shows, such interactions follow distinct cultural and linguistic patterns and contribute to the (re)construction of group boundaries and internal sociality rather than to reconciliatory dialogue. Such ambivalence of media use in conflict prevents easy categorisations, as outlined above. Due to the broad range of (often highly interlinked) media that are deeply ingrained in contemporary war and peacescapes, we are invited to change our notions of conflict and peace and what their lived realities look like. As Kaempf puts it, ‘a new heteropolar mediascape has emerged as a result of the multiplication and simultaneous diversification of structurally different media actors’ (2013: 602). In our understanding, there is no hierarchy of media technologies – they are all part of a broader, multifaceted communication culture. The convergence and hybridisation of media technologies and media forms (Chadwick 2013; Jenkins 2008) have become an inherent part of our media environments and practices, and thus of the way we communicate and interact with each other in an increasingly digital world (Madianou and Miller 2012). In contemporary protest movements and recent prominent uprisings, such as the Arab Spring, different media forms, formats and channels have been strategically complementing and reinforcing each other (Aday et al. 2012: 14). This is equally true for the conflictual environments analysed in this volume, such as by Kummels on agrarian conflicts in Mexico, Sumera on the role of sound in conflicts and Pype on digital protest culture in the Congolese diaspora. Pype explores the politics of insults, the culture of violent text and the discursive practices of conflict genres in the Congolese online sphere. By discussing digital protest practices of the political opposition movement in the Congolese diaspora, she emphasises the importance of cultural and historical contextualisation of communicative phenomena as well as the spatial work of media in generating conflict (see also Mollerup, this volume). Going beyond notions of hierarchised media (structures) also implies the need to deconstruct existing power hierarchies. In particular digital and social media, where boundaries between producer and audience are frequently dissolving, challenge existing power structures as various chapters illustrate. The Syrian conflict, for example, has been described as ‘the most socially mediated civil conflict in history’, alluding to the fact that most of what ‘the outside world knows – or thinks it knows – about [the war] … has come from videos, analysis, and commentary circulated through social networks’ (Lynch, Freelon and Aday 2014: 5). According to Lynch et al., activists were hoping that it would trigger ‘international outrage, delegitimize the regime, bear witness "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 21 and document the atrocities for future crimes justice’ (2014: 6), hopes that were hardly fulfilled. They also highlight that the extensive use of social media led to polarisation and extremism, further fuelling the violence and undermining the efforts of nonviolent activists (2014: 6). In her contribution, Mareike Meis underlines this ambivalence of media practices. She analyses mobile phone videos and their escalating and de-escalating effect in the Syrian conflict as perceived by Syrian refugees in Germany by discussing the strategic selection of video material, aesthetics and discourse practices – practices that contribute to the blurring of boundaries between allegedly authentic first-hand videos and fabricated material. The Syrian case thus prominently challenges the ‘illusion of unmediated information flows’ (Lynch, Freelon and Aday 2014: 5), but also of the egalitarian and empowering nature of social media. As outlined earlier, access, skills and networking are of the utmost importance for strategic media use. In Meis’ case, those being part of key video production and circulation circles were at the forefront of shaping outside perceptions of the war. What Lynch et al. have called ‘key curation hubs’ are those influential networks of activists who generate particular narratives about the conflict through their media usage; it is important to note that these hubs may now play ‘a gatekeeping role as powerful as that of television producers and newspaper editors’ (2014: 3), thus challenging existing and establishing new power structures and dependencies. This is very much in line with critical voices in the growing body of literature on contemporary protest movements that challenge the alleged leaderlessness of movements, such as the Occupy movement, and their claim to give voice to 99 per cent of society, that address issues of representation and discuss the role of gatekeepers, choreographers and leaders in such movements (e.g. Bräuchler 2018a; Gerbaudo 2012; Juris et al. 2012). An anthropology of media and conflict has much to say about everyday situations in which diverse modes of (mediated) communication are entangled with conflicts of various kinds. Through careful theorisation, which considers cross-cultural comparison and contextualisation as well as ethnographic methodology, it contributes to the deconstruction of deterministic notions of media effects on conflicts and thus provides answers to how humans in different times and places use media to create, escalate, de-escalate, manage and end conflicts. It also addresses questions about how the lived sociocultural realities of conflicts shape mediation processes and practices on individual, collective, local and global scales, thus emphasising a contextualised and nonmedia-centric approach. In doing so, an anthropologically informed "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 22 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka approach to media and conflict pays particular attention to how media and conflict are co-constituted in a variety of ways. Outline of the Book This volume is divided into seven parts to indicate the multifacetedness of the elusive relationship between media and conflict and to visualise similarities between individual contributions. The first part includes this introduction and Stremlau’s discussion of the changing role of new media technologies in conflict societies, in which she highlights the challenges media technology projects pose for ‘developing’ regions by looking into international communication infrastructure initiatives, national media policies and community media strategies at the Horn of Africa. The chapters in Part II provide examples of mediated witnessing of conflict: Sumiala, Tikka and Valaskivi analyse the practice of digital witnessing in context of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and Meis looks into the de-/escalation effect of mobile phone videos for the Syrian conflict. The chapters in Part III theorise the experiencing of conflict: Markham reassesses, through a phenomenological approach to mediated conflict, how subjective recognition operates in the everyday lives of conflict journalists and audiences, and Sumera discusses the complex relationship between music, sound, conflict and bodily experience. Part IV looks at the phenomenon of mediated conflict language: Marshall examines how the experience of trolling is embedded within the (dis)orders of digital communication and Livio’s chapter investigates social media as alternative means for dialogue between Israeli activists and Hamas during the 2014 Gaza War. Part V investigates sites of conflict: Mollerup develops an understanding of media as place-making to allow for an analysis of the entanglements of people and things related to media in the context of conflict, in her case the Egyptian uprising, and Kummels explores the interplay of media and conflict relating to longstanding agrarian disputes in Mexico. The chapters in Part VI focus on conflict across borders: Adriaans analyses media rituals in the Armenian diaspora and their relation to eruptions of violence in the homeland, and Pype discusses the politics of insults in the Congolese digital diaspora. The seventh and final part looks at what happens after conflict: Soberon, Smets and Biltereyst develop a theoretical framework to understand the multifaceted relationship between cinema and conflict-related trauma and how visual narratives create a hegemonic remembering of events, Oldenburg explores how media practitioners in post-genocide Rwanda engage in media freedom while "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising Introduction | 23 preventing hate speech, and Bräuchler illustrates the interdependent post-conflict transformation of Moluccan society and media landscape. The book closes with an afterword by John Postill and his critical reflections upon the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Birgit Bräuchler is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne. Her research interests include media anthropology, conflict and peace studies, protest movements, human and cultural rights, anthropology of law and religion; Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Among others, she is author of Cyberidentities at War (transcript, 2005/Berghahn, 2013), The Cultural Dimension of Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), editor of Reconciling Indonesia (Routledge, 2009) and coeditor of Theorising Media and Practice (Berghahn, 2010, with John Postill) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals. Philipp Budka is Lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, and the Visual and Media Anthropology MA programme at the Free University Berlin. His research areas include digital anthropology and ethnography, the anthropology of media and technology as well as visual culture and communication. He is the coeditor of Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance (Vienna University Press, 2019) and his research has been published in journals and books such as Journal des Anthropologues, the Canadian Journal of Communication and Ethnic Media in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2019). Notes 1. For efforts to categorise and classify conflicts on and around the internet, see e.g. Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993); Karatzogianni (2006, 2009). 2. For detailed introductions to the anthropology of media as well as other definitions of this research field, see e.g. Ginsburg (2005); Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin (2002a); Peterson (2003). For critical discussions on media anthropology’s relevance, see e.g. Boyer (2012); Pertierra (2017); Postill and Peterson (2009). 3. In contrast to mediation, the concept of ‘mediatisation’ tends to ascribe a ‘single media-logic’ – mostly determined by Euroamerican stakeholders – to media-related transformation processes, thus neglecting the heterogeneity of these processes (Couldry 2008: 378). For a discussion of the utilisation of these two concepts (in combination with the notion of ‘media practices’) in theorising about social movements, see Mattoni and Treré (2014). For different conceptualisations of media in general, see e.g. Boyer (2012); and Mazzarella (2004). "THEORISING MEDIA AND CONFLICT" Edited by Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BudkaTheorising 24 | Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka References Acayo, C., and N. Mnjama. 2004. ‘The Print Media and Conflict Resolution in Northern Uganda’, African Journal on Conflict Resolution 4(1): 27–43. Aday, S. et al. 2012. New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. 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