While mediation efforts in violent conflicts often fail, the academic literature on mediation has long ignored both this phenomenon and its consequences. This paper aims to fill this significant knowledge gap by examining the conditions under which the failure of media‐ tion leads to an escalation of civil war. Based on the literature on bargaining, we argue that the degree of negotiability of ...

Attacks on journalists are worthy of particular attention because, first, this profession constitutes a distinct vulnerable group in conflict areas and, second, there are wider implications for human security because of the importance of media reports pertaining to armed violence. We use a methodology for studying attacks on journalists that builds their “security profile” and which could be ap...

Can the media reduce intergroup prejudice and conflict? Despite the high stakes of this question, understanding of the mass media’s role in shaping prejudiced beliefs, norms, and behavior is limited. A yearlong field experiment in Rwanda tested the impact of a radio soap opera featuring messages about reducing intergroup prejudice, violence, and trauma in 2 fictional Rwandan communities. Compar...

Can the media reduce intergroup prejudice and conflict? Despite the high stakes of this question, understanding of the mass media's role in shaping prejudiced beliefs, norms, and behavior is limited. A yearlong field experiment in Rwanda tested the impact of a radio soap opera featuring messages about reducing intergroup prejudice, violence, and trauma in 2 fictional Rwandan communities. Compar...

In this paper, we present our multidisciplinary research on a major problem of journalism, i.e., the media bias problem. Bias in the news media often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as the Iraq war. Bias in news articles is much complex than explicit expression of opinion or sentiments. It is difficult, if not impossible, for r...

This paper describes how people living in armed-conflict environments use social media as a participatory news platform, in lieu of damaged state and media apparatuses. We investigate this by analyzing the microblogging practices of Mexican citizens whose everyday life is affected by the Drug War. We provide a descriptive analysis of the phenomenon, combining content and quantitative Twitter da...

Previous research has shown that redundant information in faces and voices leads to faster emotional categorization compared to incongruent emotional information even when attending to only one modality. The aim of the present study was to test whether these crossmodal effects are predominantly due to a response conflict rather than interference at earlier, e.g. perceptual processing stages. In...

Offsetting complexity of societal dialogue, netizen has dripped down mollifying social contract – which is also redefining new context in international relations (IR) indeed. With emergence of the Internet, especially web 2.0, convenient media structure has been reshaping to meet expectation of public and new dynamics of social relations are also gaining new vibes which sometimes turns into con...

For leaders to generate credibility through audience costs, there must be mechanisms in place that enable citizens to learn about foreign policy failures. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention to variations among democracies in the extent to which the public is able to obtain this sort of information. We argue here that electoral institutions play this role by influencing the ...