Media and Transitions to Democracy – Journalistic Practices in Communicating Conflicts: the Arab Spring
This project aims to investigate the ambivalent role of media as both a force for democratisation and an engine for divisions and polarisation in troubled and uncertain paths of change toward democracy.
- Project status
- Ongoing
- Programmes
- Sustainable Development 2018 Programme
- Departments
- International
The project investigates media's crucial role in supporting a peaceful and stable change towards a democratic rule and in helping to pacify or exacerbate inherent conflicts. The research is also concerned with heritage, as it aims to provide a sophisticated understanding of contexts and legacies of media regimes (inherited structures of media and their cultural and political significance) and how they impact and shape the journalistic practice, the communication and political spheres. By exploring the ambivalent role of media, the research team seeks to depict a major, yet under-researched carrier of violence in transitional societies, namely the media’s influence in legitimising violence by promoting ‘othering’ and exclusion of opponents.
Principal Investigator: Dr Fatima el Issawi, University of Essex