Ethnic Conflicts and the Media

Abstract

Most of the wars since the fall of the Iron Curtain, have mainly been intra-state conflicts rather than between states, and such conflicts have predominantly been ethnic in nature. This paper intends to examine the roles that the media have played in coining and forging ethnic identities, in perpetuating prejudice as well as
in compelling people to conflict. The research is based upon collating several comparable case studies in order to find out the regularities and patterns that exist in the complex relationship between the media and ethnic conflicts. More specifically, the study is focused on the generalistic mainstream media´s constraints
concerning ethnic and religious representation, relating those constraints with the main theoretical perspectives regarding ethnic conflicts understanding: primordialism, instrumentalism and constructivism.