Comunicación, violencia cultural y Alianza de Civilizaciones tras el 11-S. De la Espiral del Silencio de Noelle- Neumann y el Cultivo de Gerbner a las Espirales de Paz como entendimiento intercultural

Abstract

The following thesis has a multidisciplinary approach and its objective is to study the role of communication in the processes of violence and peace building in a context marked by the massive flow of information that permeates daily life and by the processes unleashed by the attacks on September 11th, 2001 in New York. One of the starting points of this research was to analyse if after September 11 there were communicative actions that generated or promoted violence (especially what we call cultural violence) and if these actions constructed the idea of ¿the enemy¿ to legitimate the subsequent armed attack against Afghanistan. This initial objective led me to explore whether the spirals of cultural violence and the mechanisms described by Gerbner and Noelle-Neumann in their communication theories of Cultivation and Spiral of Silence, respectively, could be transformed towards the reconstruction of peace through the prism of communication literacy.

The selection of the subject of this thesis and its interdisciplinary approach were motivated by several factors. First, one of the motivations is derived from my academic background and work as a journalist since 1999. During this period I became aware of the importance of media representations in perception construction, social development, intercultural coexistence, human rights, and the processes of violence and peace. It is for this reason that I decided to start a dual path pursuing a PhD in communication, which will culminate in this thesis, and a complementary specialization in peace, conflict and development studies. This duality has been crucial to my work as a journalist for the newspaper Levante de Castelló and has led me to connect the communication field with human rights and peace work with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in New York, the Red Cross in Spain, The Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York, the NGO Communicators for Peace, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), Amnesty International, the UNHCR Spanish Committee, UNESCO-UNAOC UNITWIN Global Chair on Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue and the European Union¿s program Youth in Action, among others. This journey gave me the opportunity to broaden my experience as a journalist and researcher of communication for peace in contexts such as the UN Secretariat in New York, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Western Saharan refugee camps, Morocco and Mexico, among others. I connected these professional experiences to my research work as a PhD candidate within the Department of Communication at UJI and in the area of communication for peace for the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace and the Inter-University Institute of Social Development and Peace (IUDESP) at Universitat Jaume I, as well as two research stays at Columbia University in New York and a third at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Thanks to these research activities I have published several academic articles and a book, and have participated in international conferences that connect communication and journalism with representations of ¿the other¿, conflicts, human rights, peace building, mobility and intercultural dialogue in the context of globalization and the network society.

Using this research and professional background as a base, this PhD thesis is drawn from a personal and academic commitment to put journalism and communication at the service of the values of the culture of peace, human rights and intercultural understanding, all of which have, since its inception in 1991, been core principles of University Jaume I. Similarly, this thesis stems from an academic commitment to action research from the perspective of communication literacy.

This thesis frames its analysis in an international context, where the theory of the Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington and the conceptual answer of the Alliance of Civilizations are addressed. The proposal of the Alliance of Civilizations resulted in the creation of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, with the support of more than 138 countries, as well as academic institutions, civil bodies and a Secretariat based in New York. Peaceful conflict transformation and intercultural understanding are part of the core goals of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, which works based on a concept (the alliance of civilizations) that has already crossed the plane of politics and has begun to be incorporated into various academic papers - not only as a concept in response to Huntington¿s theory of the Clash of Civilizations (1997), but also as concept with value in itself (Colomer, 2008).

In fact, the essence of the idea of the Alliance of Civilizations connects to peace building and improved human understanding ¿ linked to recognition of ¿the other¿ - and has been proposed at various times in history by authors such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Habermas, Kant, Husserl, Buber, Taylor, Rawls, Martínez Guzmán and Cortina (Colomer, 2008).

In this context, the first part of the thesis focuses on analysing the social impact of the messages and communicative actions produced by the dominant U.S. lobbies and the Bush administration after 9/11. For this, Noelle-Neumann¿s theory of the Spiral of Silence and Gerbner¿s theory of Cultivation are used as references.

The analysis of public communication after September 11th and my commitment to social transformation and peace building from the academic field of communication has led me to expand my research: to go beyond observation and analysis and take a step towards finding solutions. In other words, participatory action research. Hence the theoretical proposal made in this thesis of the Spiral of Peace (based on an idea of helical motion), a humble alternative to the deconstruction of cultural violence discourses with autonomy to reconstruct social and communicative-educative models for peace, intercultural understanding and social change.

The study of this issue required an interdisciplinary approach, which is why I have tackled the following: (1) the study of the impact of media messages on the receiver (especially focusing Noelle-Neumann and Gerbner¿s works) and (2) peace studies (focusing on ¿transrational peaces¿ and John Paul Lederach¿s transformative approach).

Moreover, the Spiral of Peace looks at four basic pillars to transform spirals of cultural violence and thereby generate empowerment and social change. During the research the concept matured in order to address multiple spirals of violence and multiple spirals of peace, which led me to introduce a nuance in my general hypothesis. These four basic pillars of the Spiral of Peace (later changed to Spirals of Peace) are: media literacy and communication for peace, critical pedagogy for peace, non-violence for social change and intercultural and interpersonal coexistence (from a plurality of geographic and cultural origins).

Previous research of communication and education and my results from ethnographic fieldwork both suggested that the combination of these four pillars is more effective than separate implementation. In other words, alone each element is less efficient or might even fail. The introduction of the four pillars to the Spiral of Peace led to critical theoretical analyses of the four areas of knowledge, not as core theories of the thesis but as tools to be explored and filters through which to transform spirals of violence into spirals of peace. Once the idea of the Spiral of Peace was conceived, the aim of the research was to apply it in the field in order to extract results and lessons learned. For this purpose, I conducted fieldwork with 32 high school students in three phases: 1- Assessing the impact of communicative actions and prevalent discourses in the students¿ perceptions of the world, especially those connected with elements of cultural violence detected after September 11th.

2- Implementing the Spiral of Peace Program, an educational and participatory program based on the four pillars of the Spiral of Peace, to empower the aforementioned students. Facilitators from ten different countries helped in this process.

3- Evaluating the project results, lessons learned and their impact on the students, and possible changes of perceptions in comparison with the initial assessment.

The results of these three phases allowed me to answer the initial questions of the thesis concerning the impact of communication on the receivers, cultural violence and the alternative of constructing spirals of peace. The results also allowed me to validate several of the initial hypotheses, as well as others that arose during the process. The thesis ends by proposing a constructive contribution to the communication theories of the Spiral of Silence (Noelle-Neumann), Cultivation (Gerbner) and the Moral Imagination (Lederach).

Subsequently, these preliminary conclusions were submitted for analysis and comments to an international panel of 16 experts composed of Shirin Ebadi (Nobel Peace Prize winner), Federico Mayor Zaragoza (former Director-General of UNESCO and coordinator of the High Level Group of Experts for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations), Ignacio Ramonet (PhD in Communication and director of the Spanish version of Le Monde Diplomatique), Embarka Hamoudi (former member of the African Union Parliament and member of the Saharawi Women¿s Union), Lida Ahmed (researcher and human rights activist in Afghanistan), Francisco Cascón (PhD and expert in peace education), Francisco Fernández (PhD in Communication at Universitat Jaume I, expert in social media and communication in the context of the network society), Alicia Cabezudo (PhD at Rosario University specializing in peace education), Fatuma Ahmed (PhD in Peace Studies, specialist in conflicts in Africa and gender, and professor at Nairobi University), Jaume Pages (managing director of the Barcelona Universal Forum of Cultures), Francesc Michavila (professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, director of the UNESCO Chair of University Management and Policy, honorary and founder rector of Universitat Jaume I), Magnus Haavelsrud (PhD and professor of Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim), Alejandro Tiana (director of the Center for High Studies of the Ibero-American States Organization for Education, Science and Culture (OEI)), Jesús Núñez (co-director of the Institute of Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action (IECAH)) and Araceli Alonso (PhD in Anthropology, professor at UW-Madison University and specialist in gender, peace and human rights).

Finally, taking into account the results, lessons learned and the feedback of international experts, the thesis proposes its final conclusions and incorporates an analogy to Chaos Theory to complete its contribute to the fields of communication for peace, media literacy, and the processes of cultural violence and peace building.