The present study draws on speech act theory to discuss the constitutive role of the media in influencing and interpreting official apologies in the realm of international conflict resolution. The Sino–US diplomatic impasse after a plane collision over the South China Sea on April 1, 2001 proved to be a useful case study as it revolved around blame attribution/avoidance and demands for/refusal of an official apology. The Chinese requests for a formal US apology and the latter’s expressions of regret were discursive issues of contention and subject to different media interpretations. Results show that the US and Chinese media participated in negotiating an American expression of “apology/regret,” disseminating the message through skillful translation techniques, and metapragmatically interpreting its significance.

This chapter examines the New York Times’ representation of the Elián González custody case in 1999 within the broader context of the conflict between the United States and Cuba. The central question that frames this work is the extent to which the ideas that underpin the conflict can be shown to influence the Times’ coverage of this specific episode – i.e., the extent to which the coverage of an episode can be influential on the broader conflict. The results point to support for the hypotheses that the discourses represented by the New York Times in its coverage of the González case corresponded with the themes of the broader conflict between the United States and Cuba and that American sources represented in the coverage exemplified predictable attitudes about Cuba and Communism.

Mainstream pro-war news media reporting of the 2003 Iraq War was highly sanitized in a way that reduced war coverage to a cinematic spectacle. The picture that was painted by the coalition mainstream media reporters was of a war free of images of suffering, destruction, dissent, and diplomacy, but full of sophisticated US weaponry, chivalrous “heroism” and militarist “humanitarianism.” The US control of news media framing (through censorship and embedding systems) shielded viewers from the “realities” of the battlefield through recourse to maneuvering “avoidance” strategies, such as the “dehistorization,” “depersonalization,” and “decontextualization” of the unfolding conflict. By muting dissenting voices, the pro-war coalition media frames manufactured an “interpretive dominance” that was inextricably structured in hegemony and social control.

Refugee crises around the world, especially the recent European migrant crisis, have highlighted the importance of the work done by volunteers. Drawing on a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach and based on a comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper articles, this chapter examines the construction of the volunteer identity through language use in the press by combining quantitative corpus techniques and qualitative methods. Among other findings, the results indicate a humanitarian discourse in which volunteerism is constructed as a helping activity.

By analyzing news stories of old and more recent regional and global conflicts, the chapters in this book demonstrate how both mainstream and online media can be instrumental to either exacerbating conflicts or contributing to peaceful resolutions of conflicts. Some of the studies in the chapters are based on many years of research into the relationship between the media and conflict by the authors, who are themselves scholars and practitioners of linguistics and media studies. Hence, the research results presented in these chapters are the products of academic studies and funded projects by seasoned academics, professionals, and experts, as well as doctoral students.

Against the backdrop of Brexit and a growing demand for Irish unity, dissident republican organizations have garnered much (negative) media attention in the wake of a spate of recent bombings and attacks, most notably, the killing of innocent journalist Lyra McKee in April 2019. Employing analytical frameworks from the field of Critical Discourse Studies, this chapter investigates the discursive legitimation and representation strategies employed by dissident republican organizations in their press statements released around the time of the killing. Through its analysis, the chapter aims to demonstrate how an investigation of discourse strategies, topics, and micro-linguistic features can provide insights into the framing and justification of (a continuation or resumption of) conflict in a society predicated on a hard-earned peace.

The media not only play vital roles in the mediation of conflicts and wars, they also are involved in discursive practices and cultural politics that predict the possibilities of social transformation and peace-building (Ivie 2016). The study of these roles in the context of local and global conflicts and peace-building efforts becomes more crucial in terms of how the professional practices of a journalist are defined. According to Carpentier and Terzis (2005), a journalist has the responsibility to adopt a particular model of war or peace reporting, such as those proposed by Galtung (1998) (i.e., peace-oriented journalism, which is generally perceived as people- and solution-oriented, or conflict/war journalism, which is violence-oriented, and tends towards propaganda). Citing Galtung (2000; Galtung and Fischer 2013), Nijenhuis (2014) argues that the media in the practice of war journalism are capable of exacerbating the conflict by

No religious tradition or country seems to be unequivocally, inherently free from the threat of extremism. As a result of domestic and international acts of terrorism, much of the world seems occupied with the views and actions of Muslims, calling particular attention to the Salafi sect. Some groups belonging to this sect disseminate and promulgate their views through online periodicals, in order to solidify their ideological base and recruit new members. In particular, this chapter relates secular and non-secular characterizations of √KFR – the Arabic triliteral root referring to disbelievers and states of disbelief – to the characterization espoused in electronic periodicals from al-Qa’ida and Da’esh. Over one thousand tokens of derived lexemes of √KFR are extracted using AntConc from thirty issues, reduced to a taxonomy, and examined through the discursive strategies utilized.

Media discourse about Islamist terrorism can be understood as an important source for the construction of meaning and reality. This chapter aims to explore the different meanings of threat constituted by the media discourse about Islamist terrorism. Additionally, it seeks to shed light on the role of anti-Muslim stereotypes and racism in the discursive construction of meaning and knowledge. Therefore, this study examines the discourse on three terrorist events from the years 2015 and 2016 gathered from four major German newspapers. By applying the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), the findings reveal three interpretive schemes about threats associated with Islamist terrorism and their different references to anti-Muslim stereotypes and racism.

This chapter examines the relation between language and conflict resolution, by focusing on the beginning of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in 1993 as it was represented by the New York Times. It analyzes the front-page articles dedicated to this dialogue and discusses the results in the context of the diplomatic negotiations and the political and social discourses of peace available at the time. The chapter also shows how the diplomatic discourse concealed opposite views of the peace process, and it maps the transfer of dominant discourses of peace from the political and social levels to the media and diplomatic ones. Finally, it discusses the implications of such dynamics for peace achievement.

The chapter engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language used in the media reporting of the most recent prime ministerial elections in Israel, in 2019. It draws on the tradition of Cultural-Historical and Activity Theory to highlight the impact of the wider historical context of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the media reporting of events in the region. It is a comparative study of the BBC’s and Al Jazeera’s reporting of the elections, examining a period from August 2019 (the pre-election period) through to October 2019 (the immediate post-election period). The data collected consists of six and nine online reports by the BBC and Al Jazeera, respectively. An overriding aim is an examination of the impact and the role of the history of the region in reporting on significant events. The work aims to contribute to other studies on the Israel–Palestine conflict which have argued that media is a contested space, and the news is not a neutral product.

This chapter argues that the discursive construction of the herders as terrorists exacerbates suspicion and fear in herder–farmer relations and further destroys the prospect of peace in Nigeria. Applying a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to analyze the representations of the main actors in the conflict, 175 news headlines of seven popular Nigerian broadsheet newspapers were studied. The study reveals that the herdsmen are consistently constructed as terrorists, as violent actions such as unprovoked attacks and killings are attributed to them. However, the farmers are constructed as non-violent and as the victims. Hence, the press explicitly constructs the herder–farmer conflict in terms of the “killer-herdsmen” script with which the herders are generally evaluated.