COMMUNICATION, CONFLICT, AND PEACE PROCESSES

Week 1 – Definitions: conflict, violence, peace The first week opens the course by setting the fundamental conceptual coordinates. After a brief presentation of the course and a map of the interdisciplinary field, we enter the core of the analytical grammar that will run through the entire programme: what we mean by conflict, what by violence, what by peace. We start from the classical sociology of conflict – Simmel and Coser – to assert a crucial point: conflict is not a pathology of the social, but one of its constitutive forms, and under certain conditions can even have integrative functions. On this basis, the fundamental distinction between conflict (incompatibility of goals or interests) and violence (use of destructive means to manage conflict) is introduced: conflict is inevitable, violence is not. The heart of the week is devoted to Johan Galtung, founder of peace and conflict studies and an unavoidable reference for the entire course. His tripartition of violence is systematically presented – direct (physical acts), structural (systemic asymmetries producing avoidable suffering), cultural (symbolic systems legitimizing the other two forms) – and discussion focuses on how this framework allows us to think violence well beyond the war event, including economic, political and symbolic dimensions. Hence the crucial distinction between negative peace (absence of direct violence) and positive peace (presence of justice, equity, cooperation), and the ABC conflict triangle: Attitudes, Behaviour, Contradictions.

Week 2 – Social construction of reality and the mediatization of conflict The second week provides the epistemological and theoretical framework that will orient the reading of phenomena studied in subsequent weeks. We start from Berger and Luckmann's constructionist perspective (1966): reality is not a brute datum but a social product layered through communicative processes (externalization, objectivation, internalization). Conflict too is a communicatively constructed object, and media do not merely "represent" it – they contribute to defining its contours, actors and legitimate narratives. From here the key concept of mediatization is introduced, distinguishing it from the more classical notion of "media representation". Media do not mirror conflicts: they constitute them, amplify them, transform them. The media arena becomes one of the terrains on which conflicts unfold and are decided. The concept of diffused war to describe how contemporary war propagates through layered media ecologies – broadcast, web, social, mobile – producing complex and unstable perception regimes. "Diffused" war can no longer be contained in the classical devices of television journalism or the press: it is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, lived in real time by global spectators and continuously recomposed by digital infrastructures. The final discussion focuses on how this framework changes the very way of posing the media/conflict problem, preparing the historical analysis that will open the following week.

Week 3 – History of war journalism: from origins to Vietnam The week historically reconstructs the birth and first major transformations of the modern war correspondent. We start from William Howard Russell of The Times in Crimea (1854), passing through the American Civil War as a laboratory of documentary photography (Brady) and the Spanish-American War of 1898 with Hearst and Pulitzer's yellow journalism and the famous phrase attributed to Hearst on manufacturing the casus belli. The second part is devoted to the great watershed of World War I. It is the moment when propaganda ceased to be artisanal and became a structural function of the modern state. George Creel's Committee on Public Information in the United States (1917) and the British experience of Wellington House show the birth of a systematic apparatus for managing public opinion. The contributions that will theorize this experience are presented: Lasswell, Lippmann and Bernays became the references of a nascent field – research on media and public opinion – that was about to establish itself as an autonomous discipline.

Week 4 – World War II and Vietnam The week covers the two most studied and mythologised moments in twentieth-century war journalism: World War II and Vietnam as the watershed beyond which everything changes. The first part addresses World War II. The German-Soviet war allows us to explore a front often underrepresented in Anglophone studies of war media: the experience of Western correspondents in the Soviet Union – including Henry Cassidy, Alexander Werth, Larry Lesueur, Eve Curie, Margaret Bourke-White – the Soviet system of censorship and management of foreign press, restrictions on access to the front, coverage of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Moscow, the turning point at Stalingrad. The paradox of journalism practiced among ideologically distant allies is discussed: Western correspondents narrated the Soviet Union. Pearl Harbor shifts the focus to the other great juncture of 1941: the Japanese attack of 7 December and the United States' entry into the war as the founding moment of the American "good war". Analysis covers the birth of the Office of War Information, Edward R. Murrow's radio journalism from London, Ernie Pyle's humanizing journalism from the front, Frank Capra's Why We Fight documentary series, and the mythology of the war correspondent as national hero. World War II thus appears as the phase of maximum coincidence between journalism, state propaganda and popular imagination – a bond that would crack only with Vietnam. The second part focuses on the Vietnam rupture. The "first televised war" brought unfiltered combat images into American homes; young critical correspondents emerged such as David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett; iconic images – Eddie Adams' execution photo, Nick Ut's napalm girl, the My Lai massacre – modified public perception of the war.

Week 5 – From "regained control" to the war on terror The week covers the post-Vietnam phase, in which military commands elaborated a strategy of regained control over information, and arrives at the embedded journalism of the war on terror. Falklands 1982: British journalists embarked on Royal Navy ships, total dependence on the military for satellite communications, censorship. Grenada 1983 and Panama 1989: the US effectively excluded the press in the early days. The 1990-91 Gulf War marked the debut of the "live CNN war": the pool system, Schwarzkopf's briefings, smart bomb imagery, but paradoxically very few real combat images. The debate on the CNN effect is introduced here, the idea that real-time TV coverage forces political decision-makers to act. In the second part, the lens shifts to the war on terror: 9/11 as a global media event, the war on terror frame and its media circulation. The invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq in 2003 introduces embedded journalism as a conscious Pentagon strategy to humanize war from the perspective of US troops. The five filters of Manufacturing Consent (Herman and Chomsky) are reread in light of war on terror coverage: the WMD case and the New York Times' 2004 apology as a paradigmatic example. The concept of militainment, the fusion of journalism, video games, Hollywood films and military propaganda as a fully realized form of war mediatization.

Week 6 – Global counter-narratives and intermediate test The week has a twofold objective: to broaden the gaze toward global counter-narratives The first part analyses the emergence of transnational public spheres alternative to Western narrative monopoly. The birth of Al Jazeera in 1996 and its role in covering Afghanistan and Iraq are studied as a case of global counter-narrative that showed war "from the other side". Intermediate test

Week 7 – Politics of images and dangerous speech The week addresses the visual and symbolic dimension of conflict, showing how media representation is never neutral but produces political, ethical and sometimes directly violence-catalysing effects. The first part works on the politics of war images. I twill be presented the notion of differential "grievability" of lives: media frames establish which lives count as lives, which deaths count as losses. Iconic images are analysed – the napalm girl, Aylan Kurdi, photographs from Bucha, Gaza, Mariupol – to highlight asymmetries in visibility regimes and hierarchies of public mourning. The second part introduces the concept of dangerous speech: discourses with a high probability of catalysing mass violence, modelled through five elements (speaker, audience, speech act, context, medium). The model is applied to the paradigmatic case of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda (1993-94): the role of radio in mobilizing the genocide, the language of dehumanization.

Week 8 – The digital turn: movements, OSINT, citizen journalism The week analyses the transformation of communicative practices linked to conflicts in the digital era, avoiding both technological determinism and nostalgia for the golden age of broadcast journalism. The first part opens with the narrative of "Twitter revolutions" and "Facebook revolutions" of 2009-2011 (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt) and its critical deconstruction. Evgeny Morozov, in The Net Delusion (2011), dismantles cyberutopianism and Internet-centrism as systematic analytical errors. Zeynep Tufekci, in Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), shows that digital movements rapidly reach a scale of mobilization but are often organizationally fragile: regimes quickly learn to counter them. Recent cases such as Hong Kong 2019, Belarus 2020, Iran 2022 and Russian protests allow us to discuss the difference between connectivity and organization, and the asymmetry between initial mobilization capacity and movement sustainment. We retrospectively connect to the protest paradigm: do social media really change media coverage of dissent? The second part analyses the transformation of war journalism practices. Open source intelligence as a new journalistic practice: from Brown Moses (Eliot Higgins)'s pioneering work on Syria to the birth of Bellingcat in 2014 and its cases (MH17, Skripal poisoning, Ukraine). The techniques – geolocation, chronolocation, metadata analysis, amateur video verification – and the ambiguities: who funds OSINT? What relationship with state intelligence? Citizen journalism in Syria (the White Helmets, Russian delegitimization campaigns). How the war correspondent's figure changes: from the reporter "in the trenches" to the remote analyst.

Week 9 – Disinformation and the Ukraine case The week revolves around the war in Ukraine as a laboratory of contemporary war communication, preceded by an analytical framework on disinformation and computational propaganda. The first part presents Wardle and Derakhshan's taxonomy (2017), distinguishing misinformation (unintentional error), disinformation (intentional and harmful) and malinformation (true information used to harm), articulated in seven types of information disorder. Computational propaganda is examined in its operational dimensions: bots, sockpuppets, troll farms, astroturfing. The second part offers an in-depth case study based on the conflict in Ukraine.

Week 10 – Communication for peace The week opens the "peace" side of the course and addresses the question: can media favour peace processes, or are they structurally an obstacle to them? We start from Galtung's 1986 original programme, On the Role of the Media in Worldwide Security and Peace, which outlined the principles of a journalism oriented to peace rather than war. Il will be analized the war journalism / peace journalism oppositions through four orientations: towards peace and conflict vs. war and violence; towards truth vs. propaganda; towards people vs. elites; towards solutions vs. victory. Empirical evidence – experimental and field studies – on peace journalism's effectiveness in changing public perception is presented, along with the recent developments of constructive journalism and solutions journalism.

Week 11 – Memory, post-conflict, reconciliation The week closes the "conflict-peace-memory" arc of the course, showing how the way conflicts are narrated, remembered and erased is itself constitutive of peace processes and their fragilities. The first part introduces transitional justice as a field: truth and reconciliation commissions (South Africa 1996, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Sierra Leone, Colombia), international criminal tribunals, reparations, institutional reforms. Particular attention is paid to the role of media in publicising testimonies: the South African TRC and its television broadcast (Krog, Country of My Skull) as a paradigmatic case of post-conflict mediatization. The categories of cultural memory and media memory are introduced: how media construct and transform the collective memory of conflicts, which narratives are transmitted to subsequent generations, which silences and erasures stratify over time.

Week 12 – Contemporary frontiers: AI, cognitive warfare, course synthesis The week closes the course with a prospective view on the most recent transformations of conflict communication and a synthesis of the threads traversed in the three months of work. The first part addresses the transformation that generative artificial intelligence is producing in war communication. Different levels are distinguished: production of synthetic content (deepfake video and audio, generative images such as Midjourney, texts produced by LLMs); manipulation of existing content (face-swapping, voice cloning); scale automation of propaganda (LLMs serving troll farms, low-cost fake news generation). Recent cases are analysed and the documented use of AI in Russian and Chinese influence campaigns. In the second part the lesson shifts from content to systems. The NATO concept of cognitive warfare and its critiques are introduced: cognitive warfare as an extension of information warfare taking as battlefield not narratives but cognitive and attentional processes themselves. Algorithmic platforms as cognitive warfare infrastructures and three open research directions are discussed: automation of violence (algorithmic targeting systems), the climate-conflict-media nexus, platform geopolitics (splinternet, digital sovereignty).