Strategies for Peace, Strategies for News Research

Abstract

Despite the seeming uniformity of mediu presentation of news aboutpace, the fomnats of news reporhng and the contest among various discourses allow for the appearance and sometimes prominence of alternative and men oppositiond discourses that offer a pragmatic for social a c h They made a desert a n d called itpeace-Tacitus Peace and war mean different things at different times, in different places to different people. They are categories that have to be located in the multiple contexs of their use. While hardly new, these observations about the semantic historicity, localness, and specificity of the terms need restating if we are to resist the universalizing and generalizing tendencies that dominate discussions of war and peace in the media and in academic scholarship.In the continental Europe of the Middle Ages, peace meant not only the absence of fighting between knights and war lords but also the protection of the poor and their means of subsistence (29, p. 246). Pax or Landfrieden, as guaranteed by the emperor or the church, meant access to and utilization of water and pasture, woods and livestock. Peace provided a network of social relations that not only protected people but also entitled them to subsistence and survival. broadened to include guarantees to exploit resources and to trade commercially for profit. The Lanqi-ieden was a people's peace, a paxpopuli; the new economic peace, pax economica, vanquished this peace. Other semantic changes came about as well. Subsistence living came to be associated with "unproductive" life and traditional ways with "underdevelopment" (29, p. 246). Today, when U.S. presidents talk about peace in the Middle East or Latin America, they refer to this pax econornica: the license to wage a war called economic development against all those who are not yet integrated into the capitalist system and its recent mutations.With the development of capitalist market economies, the meaning of peace

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