Social conflict is one of the key concepts for social studies, which, however, does not have generally accepted definitions. The purpose of the article is to clarify the main topics of conflict research in Russian media studies and determine their place within the context of the conflictology. We attempted to categorize and theoretically define these objects within the context of the Russian academic tradition, based on the content analysis of articles by Russian authors published in 2014–2021. As a result, eight types of conflict were described, as well as four thematic blocks were found, which together form the structure of the discourse of media and conflict studies. Thus, it is possible to identify several main vectors of scientific research in this field: strategies of conflict representation in the media, assessment of the impact of media on conflict, technologies of media influence and theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of conflict and media interaction. The study found that the field is currently not a unified system.
However, the interdisciplinarity of the research field determines its potential to become an independent field of studies that integrate conflictology and journalism theory, as well as media linguistics, sociology of audience, and social psychology. Such an integrated paradigm makes it possible to analyze the representation of social conflict in the contemporary media taking into account their influence on the dynamics of this conflict at every stage of its "life cycle".