Communicating narratives about mass violence to a broad public is a messy and often complicated endeavor. Non-governmental organization (NGO) actors and other practitioners seek to impress on the world specific interpretations of these situations, yet they often face competing voices and varying receptivity across countries. What approaches are most effective, and whose narrative gets the most traction? My recent study, funded by the National Science Foundation, helps to shed light on these underlying and complex mechanisms of transmitting narratives to a broad public. Involving analyses of over 3,000 media reports and interviews with Africa correspondents and with experts in foreign ministries and NGOs from eight countries, this study addresses representations of the Darfur conflict across social fields and countries. The main findings indicate that although NGOs, governments and humanitarian organizations used different frames, the media prioritized narratives about human rights and criminal violence over those about civil war, humanitarian emergency and an aggressive state. Yet these portrayals differed among countries, often based on cultural factors. How does this filtering affect the global response to mass violence?
First, human rights NGOs framed the violence as criminal perpetration, consistent with and supportive of International Criminal Court (ICC) intervention. They provided high estimates of victimization and focused on purposeful actions by high-level leaders of the Sudanese state, seeking to advance justice and establish an understanding of mass violence as atrocity. Such framing works well in an era of what Kathryn Sikkink calls a “Justice Cascade”, and is also bolstered by Hyerjan Jo and Beth Simmons’ recent findings that ICC prosecutions substantially deterred violence by government and rebel actors alike. Importantly, human rights NGO campaigns supplemented ICC interventions that were strongly reflected in journalistic reporting.
