FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

September 21, 2022

CONTACT

Nick Zuroski | (202) 822-2047 | nick@allianceforpeacebuilding.org

Washington, D.C., USA. –  To honor this year’s International Day of Peace, the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), the leading nonpartisan global peacebuilding network of 165+ members working in 181 countries to end violent conflict and build sustainable peace, challenges the media and all sectors to practice solutions journalism that “focuses on what the news misses most often: how people are trying to solve problems and build peace and what we can learn from their successes or failures.”

While conflict exists everywhere, we do not have to accept that violent conflict is inevitable. It is time to move beyond crisis messaging to show that building peace is possible and connects us all. The media must also inject hope, agency, dignity, and resiliency into its coverage of global violent conflict and violence (including in the United States), rather than revert to only crisis messaging.  Everywhere around the world, there are positive stories of peacebuilding in action. Find them and report on them!

While ending violent conflict is one of the greatest and most urgent challenges of our times, the media must examine how it can avoid communicating about conflict in a way that perpetuates it, as well as burns people out due to fear and perceived inability to solve the world’s problems. 

Brain science and narrative research shows that hope and solutions-based messaging is more effective than fear-based messaging when communicating about social change. Fear-based messaging triggers the “downstairs” half of the brain—the amygdala—causing people to “go into a mode where they preserve their ‘security’ (supposedly) often to the exclusion of empathy and openness to others.” However, the “upstairs” of the brain—which is triggered by confidence, hope, abundance, and joy—increases empathy and openness to other people and complex problems. AfP’s new peace framing and narrative research, produced in partnership with PartnersGlobal, Humanity United, and The FrameWorks Institute, finds that communication strategies emphasizing our interconnectedness and the ongoing, active nature of peace increase both public support and understanding of peacebuilding.

The media and international community often revert to fear-based messaging when discussing challenges to global peace and security—showing images of the Earth on fire when discussing climate change or opening reports with language like “We are facing hunger on an unprecedented scale, food prices have never been higher, and millions of lives and livelihoods are hanging in the balance.” According to award-winning investigative journalist Amanda Ripley, the lack of “hope, agency, and dignity” in journalism is preventing us from making progress on these complex challenges. Hope, agency, and dignity must accompany fear and outrage so that problems feel solvable, and we do not simply fall into despair. In Ripley’s words: “Every story I’ve ever done…there are flickers of dignity, agency, and hope.”

The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), named the “number one influencer and change agent” among peacebuilding institutions worldwide, is an award-winning nonprofit and nonpartisan network of 165+ organizations working in 181 countries to prevent and reduce violent conflict and build sustainable peace. AfP cultivates a network to strengthen and advance the peacebuilding field, enabling peacebuilding organizations to achieve greater impact—tackling issues too large for any one organization to address alone.