Book Review: Revisiting Peace Journalism in the Kenyan News Landscape OliveraCecilia ArreguiRevisiting Peace Journalism in the Kenyan News LandscapeRoutledge, 2025. 129 pp. ISBN 9781032867052
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: From modest beginnings in the 1990s to undergoing epistemological development over the last decade, peace journalism has assumed the depth and richness that many of us hoped it would.We have witnessed its application beyond warfare and conflict reporting to the study of climate crisis news, and media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers, contentious political discourses, and racial-structural inequalities.Cecilia Arregui Olivera's book continues this trend by testing the shifting notions of peace journalism in the coverage of election-related violence and terrorism, "two of the most sensitive and conflict-ridden issues" Kenya has been "dealing with in its recent history" (p.3).In focusing on journalism in a non-Western country, the book also becomes another important contribution to fast-growing peace journalism scholarship in/about the Global South.An outcome of Olivera's PhD thesis completed at the Aarhus University, this book offers to redefine peace journalism as "a concept in motion" that "occurs in the constant negotiation between specificities of a given context and a shared essence that revolves around values of peace, non-violence, and reconciliation" (p.3).The strength of her book lies in its qualitative inter-modal multi-methods approach: textual analysis of feature articles from Kenyan legacy outlets and mainstream newspapers from the US and the UK; 35 in-depth interviews with Kenyan journalists, foreign correspondents, editors and op-ed writers; and, to top it off, participant observations.Given the overwhelming focus of existing peace journalism research on analysing the content of news output, the interviews and participant observations serve as a supplementary approach to fulfilling the promise this book makes: redefining peace journalism.The book is divided into five chapters, including brief introduction and conclusion chapters.The theoretical and empirical crux of the book lies in chapters 2, 3 and 4.After briefly explaining the plan of the book in the introduction chapter, Olivera takes the readers directly into the theoretical underpinnings of peace journalism.It is refreshing to see that, given it is her first book, Olivera does not shy away from criticizing the 1397589M WC0010.
Source: Media War & Conflict
Author: Ayesha Jehangir
Institution: UNSW Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417456691