CONCLUSIONS
This work demonstrates that the media serve both as a tool in the hands of policy makers and negotiators, and as an independent actor pursuing their own interest and agenda. The many media projects in conflict regions show how the media can be used to advance conflict resolution.
Contributions to specific functions such as confidence building and mediation demonstrate the media's independent role. The media, however, can both help and hinder conflict resolution. It can contribute to confidence building but also to confidence destruction, and both could be pursued intentionally or unintentionally. In general, practitioners and scholars have highly exaggerated the actual and potential media contribution to conflict resolution.This work reveals substantial gaps in knowledge, practice and research on the media's roles in conflict resolution. The gaps exist at several levels and areas. Experts and practitioners in conflict resolution have often ignored relevant knowledge in communication, while communication scholars and practitioners have often ignored the relevant literature on conflict resolution. Scholars in both conflict studies and communication have often ignored the contributions of practitioners. Several scholars and practitioners in the same field have even ignored each other. The local and national media are much more significant because they directly affect the evolution and development of conflict resolution. Yet while most practitioners have designed programs for the local and the national media, most scholars have paid much more attention to the Western and the global media.
Most approaches to the media's roles in conflict resolution suffer from structural, theoretical and methodological weaknesses. Practitioners have been very optimistic about the potential contributions of the media to conflict resolution, and consequently have initiated and created many interesting media projects in conflict regions.
They have ignored, however, relevant research on media effects that don't support many of their assumptions. For example, ideas about media intervention are based on the assumption of powerful, casual and linear media effects. “Media effects,” however, is a major field of research in communication and the findings reveal more limitations than power and influence (Hanitzsch, 2004). Media intervention considers the audience as a single aggregate of dispersed individuals, but communication theory has identified pluralistic audiences with different characteristics. Media intervention assumes that publishers and journalists, especially at the local media level, can disregard the interests of their specific audiences, but communication theory suggests that this assumption is unnatural and economically impossible. Moreover, the media intervention approaches place responsibility on the media to resolve and transform conflicts, but communication theory does not recognize this role, and sociological system theory places responsibility for these functions on political institutions and leaders.Another weakness is the emphasis on normative assertions. Scholars and practitioners mostly write about the roles the media should play and much less about the roles the media actually do. Not enough empirical scholarly studies have been conducted on media and conflict resolution. Evaluative research should be an integral part of any media project designed to promote conflict resolution. Scientific progress requires much more collaboration among scholars and practitioners from all the relevant disciplines. Conflict resolution practitioners should consult communication theories and models, particularly on media effects, and scholars should focus much more on empirical studies.
Researchers have employed many different theories, methods, and concepts to analyze potential and actual media contributions to conflict resolution. Future research, however, has to be much more systematic and cumulative. An effective approach requires a multidisciplinary and multi-dimensional framework that could explore the media's roles in conflict resolution and reconciliation through several identical or similar categories. The proposed multi-disciplinary and multidimensional framework combines and integrates communication and conflict theories and could be a first step in the right direction. The framework is very comprehensive and requires prioritizing of research. The first priority is to investigate functions and dysfunctions of the local media and the next one is to focus on the new media. Systematic application of the framework to case studies at different levels may help to promote badly needed knowledge and understanding of the various ways the media are influencing conflict resolution.