‘Peace is not just the suspension of war:’ peace communication on Twitter

Abstract

‘Strategic communication is something we are very bad at’, tells us a tweet from the Geneva Peace Week. One of the examples of strategic communication is public engagement content on Twitter. Empirical studies, however, never looked at public engagement content about peace on Twitter. In turn, I use grounded theory approaches to explore and map peace communication among seven research organizations and events in the West. My data set comprises a total of 9,874 tweets in English. Thematic coding with Atlas.ti results in 4,274 codes that are grouped into 63 distinct themes. I find sustainable peace as the main type of peace in data. Yet, the themes that presumably contribute to it – health, accountability, trust, and transparency, among others – are marginal. While gender is among the dominant themes, it emerges disconnected, with a lack of meaningful integration of it in other topics such as health or participation. A pattern emerges of the level of view that is mainly positioned on the global, with the local, community, family left at the margins.