Tribute to Johan Galtung (1930-2024)

JOHAN GALTUNG MEMORIAL, 29 Jul 2024

Jake Lynch | International Journal of Communication Ethics - TRANSCEND Media Service

A Personal Recollection

Jake Lynch pays tribute to one of the founders of peace journalism whose death in February 2024 went largely unnoticed by the Western corporate media.

I first met Johan Galtung in 1997 at Taplow Court, a stately home in southern England in use as UK cultural centre for a Japanese-based Buddhist Group, the Soka Gakkai International. Indra Adnan, a friend who worked at the centre, created a series of events to honour Buddhist traditions of peace, and – since my partner, Annabel McGoldrick, and I were both journalists – a media-themed workshop felt like a natural choice. Johan’s published dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda, the SGI president who died last year, made him a natural choice to lead it.

Decades earlier, Galtung had published – with co-author Mari Holmboe Ruge, in the Journal of Peace Research – an article that was to prove highly influential on the study of journalism. The 1965 Galtung-Ruge essay, titled ‘The structure of foreign news’, tilted the emphasis away from journalists’ own individual tastes and prejudices, as determinants of news content, and towards the economic and political structures in which the news was conceived, commissioned, gathered and published.

When it came to covering conflicts, the commercially-driven appetite for discrete, large-scale and impactful events, as the basis for each new story, tended to downgrade and occlude conflict dynamics operating in between such events – and driving the processes that led up to them.

The concern was over the meanings audiences would most likely make in response to such a pattern of representation, the influence on their expectations as to what would happen next and the spectrum of possible conflict responses. With no opportunity to appreciate underlying relations of cause and effect, there would be no apparent point in considering how to divert these along different paths. ‘People act on their image of reality,’ Johan wrote – and the media, with their daily coverage of selected conflicts and wide reach, were a good candidate as ‘number one image-former’.

News about conflict could, therefore, be seen as a problem requiring a solution. Mainstream coverage was oriented towards violence, propaganda, elites and victory – so the remedial strategy of peace journalism would adopt the opposite of these. Hence the famous four orientations towards peace (and conflict as opposed to merely violence), truth, people and solutions. These, Johan summarised – at Annabel’s request – on a single sheet of A4, for circulation at the Taplow event.

Johan himself was principal speaker, of course, to an audience composed mainly of journalists. Two of the more senior participants came from one of Britain’s biggest newspapers, the Mirror Group, then hurriedly looking to recalibrate coverage of and from Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland) in light of the peace process underway there.

Since then, peace journalism has gone through the three phases of response famously set out by Arthur Schopenhauer to any significant new idea: first ridicule, then violent opposition then acceptance as self- evident.

The call for improvements in coverage of Gaza, signed by nearly 300 Australian journalists last year,¹ reads as an almost uncanny recapitulation of Johan’s main points from a quarter-of-a-century earlier, so maybe we are now in the third phase. Back in 1997, however, there were some signs of friction.

I had invited my boss, Nick Pollard – then newly-appointed head of news at British Sky Broadcasting – to give a guest presentation, which dealt largely in generalities about the strengths and weaknesses of television journalism. The wisdom of this decision began to be called into question when Johan, frustrated at this diversion from what he saw as the main thread of discussion, informed Nick he was talking ‘bullshit’.

Later, I was honoured to take up Johan’s invitation to join him as co- facilitator in a training workshop in Amman for journalists from Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, sponsored by the official Danish aid agency, DANIDA – a chance to appreciate at close quarters the incisive quality of his versatile and creative thinking.

By 2010, I had exchanged life as a TV reporter and presenter for a university post and organised the biennial conference of IPRA, the International Peace Research Association, at Sydney University. To be in the packed auditorium for Johan’s spellbinding keynote presentation was to feel the hairs on the back of one’s neck prickle with intellectual excitement.

On that same trip to Australia, Johan joined me to launch our monograph, Reporting conflict: New directions in peace journalism, published by Queensland University Press, at a venerable institution of Sydney literary life, the iconic Gleebooks. It is from that event that the picture is taken, with Frencie Carreon, a Philippines journalist and war correspondent who was studying, at that time, for her PhD under my supervision.

Johan Galtung’s thinking is every bit as vital now as at any time during his long, productive and highly influential life as one of the great thinkers of our age. To follow stories in the Western media of conflict in Gaza or Ukraine – to mention just two current examples – is to feel the familiar pressure from propaganda, to reject understanding and explanation as tantamount to justification and excuse-making for the conduct of the parties.

Reopening those distinctions is crucial to making, keeping and building peace. Johan’s signature concepts – of structural and cultural violence and, indeed, peace journalism itself – are, in turn, crucial in doing so. That they now loom large in mainstream debates is testimony to his prescience in raising, elaborating and developing them in his role as an intellectual pioneer.

Note

¹ See https://form.jotform.com/233177455020046

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Jake Lynch is the most published and most cited author on peace journalism (seven books and over sixty articles and book chapters). His work has appeared in field-leading scholarly journals, and been translated into languages including Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesia. He served as secretary general of the International Peace Research Association, 2010-2012. Jake has devised and delivered training courses for professional editors and reporters in many countries, for clients including major official aid agencies. For contributions to both theory and practice, he was awarded the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, by the Schengen Peace Foundation. Before joining the University of Sydney, in 2007, Jake was in journalism, with spells as a political correspondent for Sky News and Australia correspondent for the Independent, culminating in a role as on-air presenter at BBC World TV News. He won five international awards for his documentary film, Soldiers of peace, narrated by Michael Douglas. In 2020, Jake was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations of Coventry University. His debut novel, Blood on the stone, an historical mystery thriller set in Oxford of the 17th century, was published 2019 by Unbound Books.

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