1 – “Peace Radio” and Farmer-Herder Conflicts: Impacts of Media on Peacebuilding from West Africa
Lame Ungwang
ISDC – International Security and Development Center
Abstract: Conflicts between farmers and herders have a long history in West Africa, but have proliferated rapidly over the past couple of decades. While media-based interventions have been employed as a (cost-) effective means to addressing farmer-herder conflicts and promoting peace, the evidence on their efficacy is mixed and limited. Our study adds to this growing literature, studying the efficacy of an intervention that created a a radio drama to promote peace between farmers and herder. Situated within a larger 2-year UN-supported peacebuilding program, our study is set at the border of Sierra Leone and Guinea, which consists of remote communities experiencing high conflict risk. In our study, we ask: What are the impacts of exposure to pro-peace radio programming on farmer-herder attitudes and behaviours towards the out-group? We employ a survey experiment with 1600 participants to address this question, assigning half to listen to a short “peace radio” program during the survey (the “treatment group”); while the other half listen to a neutral “health radio” program (the “control group”). We measure outcomes on intergroup attitudes and employing incentivized games to measure behaviors towards the outgroup. We predict a positive impact of peace radio along these measures for both groups, which may be mediated by past exposure to conflict and violence (or past victimization).
2 – Media Influence and Public Attitudes in Europe: A Cross-National Analysis of the Charlie Hebdo Attack
Mamadou Sacko
University of Orléans
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive cross-national analysis of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris on public attitudes towards immigrants and Muslims. Utilizing a robust array of methodologies, including Fixed-effects model, various matching methods, and advanced machine learning techniques, we explore how attitudes shifted in different European nations post-Charlie Hebdo, revealing a nuanced picture of the regional variations in response to the attack. Additionally, we delve into the role of media in shaping these attitudes, utilizing two natural language processing (NLP) methods: Large Language Models (LLM) and Structural Topic Modeling (STM) on news articles from 5 European countries to understand how immigrants and Muslims were portrayed following the attack. Our findings indicate a general decline in positive attitudes towards immigrants and Muslims in Europe, with distinct patterns emerging in specific countries that correlates with coverage of these groups across the countries. This paper not only sheds light on the societal effects of terror- ism but also highlights the critical role of media narratives in influencing public opinion. The results emphasise the need for a sensitive approach to reportage in the wake of such incidents.
3 – The Impact of Independent Media on Political Mobilization during the Arab Spring
Jean-François Maystadt
Lancaster University, UK
Abstract: Our study focuses on how independent media networks influenced political mobilization during the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We examined two prominent media networks in the Arab world, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, and used data from Arab Barometer surveys to track political mobilization indicators and media networks for Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. To account for potential endogeneity, we used the frequency of lightning strikes and submarine cable seaquake shocks as instrumental variables, highlighting the non-random use of independent media. The results indicate that independent media had a positive and significant impact on political mobilization. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in access to independent media corresponded to an approximately 4 percentage point increase in the probability of participating in protests. At the mean of protests, this corresponds to a rise of about 28%. We discuss how Internet access and the informational aspect of the media seem to explain the results. Our supplementary analyses suggest that these estimates mainly capture the effects of Internet access rather than television. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the driving force behind mobilization is mainly rooted in the informational aspect of the media rather than the ideological content of the news.