The sixth ACRPS International Winter School, titled “Media in Wartime”, began on Saturday 11 January 2025.

The event takes place against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, during which the Western mainstream media narrative has aligned itself with that of the perpetrators. This approach further serves as a tool to dehumanize and depersonalize the Palestinian people. How do conflicts and the media mutually influence one another? In what ways are war coverage shaped by ideological and cultural biases? These are just some of the questions being challenged at this edition of the ACRPS Winter School. The program will also shed light on the dual role of journalists in wars as both targets and instruments and how they can be subject to control, censorship, and violence, or employed as tools of military power.

The first day of the Winter School kicked off with opening remarks delivered by Arab Center Researcher Hani Awad, who outlined the winter school mission and the topic for this year. Awad pointed out that the very complicity in the media's portrayal of the Gaza genocide set the tone for the program to examine the ever-evolving relationship between war and media. This was followed by a lecture by Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the first hour, Freedman’s lecture centered on the different approaches between mainstream journalism and the communication of conflicts. He not only described mainstream media as the ‘fourth state’ through which power is held to account and state transparency in military operations is magnified, but also as ‘propagandists’ for state-sanctioned military activities. The lecture challenged the role of media and questioned whether journalists are able to operate independent of the state’s ideological restrictions or further serve the voice of current geopolitical and imperial structures of power. Freedman further elaborated on this topic through his research on the language, framing, and agenda-setting practices that have dominated news coverage of the destruction of Gaza.

The first day of the Winter School kicked into gear with a session featuring Baird Howland, who presented his paper titled “A Genocide vs. a ‘War with Hamas’: Documenting the Western Media Narrative on Palestine”, and Liliya Mantsevich, who presented on “The Representation of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in French Media: Patterns and Influence on Public Opinion”. Howland explained how he used a novel computational approach to analyse western media narratives, through a dataset of 89 online news websites based mostly in the US, and other countries from 10 October 2023 to 20 February 2024. Mantsevich, on the other hand, explained how the perplexed relationship between media narrations and the construction of political and societal narratives expose the media's role as ‘both the mirror and the architect of public discourse’.

This was followed by the second session of the Winter School, in which Archil Sikharulidze presented his paper titled “Kazakh Media Coverage of Ukrainian-Russian War”. He explored how media in the ‘supposedly’ neutral state of Kazakhstan, reports on the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. In the second paper of the same session, “Branding the War: Using Social Media for Recruitment Campaigns by Ukrainian Brigades and Battalions”, Kateryna Bystrytska explained how Ukrainian brigades used social media during the conflict to recruit military forces. She used 130 YouTube videos published by the Ukrainian Third Assault Brigade between July 2022 and June 2024 to draw this conclusion.

The first International Winter School was launched by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in January 2020, cementing an academic tradition in the region. The research papers of this sixth round draw on data from warzones across the Arab world, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Latin America, and China.

* The Booklet

** The Timetable