This ethnographic study explores the experiences of Ivorian journalists in the context of the 2002-2009 crisis in Abidjan, the economic capital city of Côte d’Ivoire. I present material on the political affiliations of newspapers, the structure of the news industry, the attitudes of journalists, and certain aspects regarding the reception and dissemination of media texts in the streets of Abidjan. My interests lie in analysing the origins and the impacts of the accusations to which journalists of the written press are being subjected concerning their role in the Ivorian conflict. I explore how the crisis has been constructed and construed by and through media agents. I focus on the reflexive moments of journalists and on what their metadiscourses reveal about the context of news production in Côte d’Ivoire. Data was collected through participant-observation and interviews over 18 months of fieldwork in 2003, 2004-2005 and 2006 mainly in three newsrooms in Abidjan. This dissertation questions the emphasis placed upon the role of media in African conflicts, which I term the Rwandan paradigm. The Rwandan paradigm is the reductionist notion that mass media indoctrination plays a decisive role in mobilizing African audiences to commit acts of communal violence. Ultimately, I suggest two avenues to broaden our understanding of the intersection between communication and conflict: 1) a recognition of the complex agency of media producers and their audience; 2) an exploration of alternative media and public spaces.

This ethnographic study explores the experiences of Ivorian journalists in the context of the 2002-2009 crisis in Abidjan, the economic capital city of Côte d’Ivoire. I present material on the political affiliations of newspapers, the structure of the news industry, the attitudes of journalists, and certain aspects regarding the reception and dissemination of media texts in the streets of Abidjan. My interests lie in analysing the origins and the impacts of the accusations to which journalists of the written press are being subjected concerning their role in the Ivorian conflict. I explore how the crisis has been constructed and construed by and through media agents. I focus on the reflexive moments of journalists and on what their metadiscourses reveal about the context of news production in Côte d’Ivoire. Data was collected through participant-observation and interviews over 18 months of fieldwork in 2003, 2004-2005 and 2006 mainly in three newsrooms in Abidjan. This dissertation questions the emphasis placed upon the role of media in African conflicts, which I term the Rwandan paradigm. The Rwandan paradigm is the reductionist notion that mass media indoctrination plays a decisive role in mobilizing African audiences to commit acts of communal violence. Ultimately, I suggest two avenues to broaden our understanding of the intersection between communication and conflict: 1) a recognition of the complex agency of media producers and their audience; 2) an exploration of alternative media and public spaces.

My critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the New York Times' front-page and editorial articles, within the framework of Herman and Chomsky's (1988) propaganda model, shows that the newspaper constructed the intervention in Rwanda as suicidal for the United States and beyond the capacity of the international community. On the other hand, U.S. and NATO intervention and military airstrikes against Serbia were represented as surgical and the only options available to save ethnic Albanian lives in Kosovo. My analysis finds that the New York Times' constructions of the two conflicts, conflict actors and victims of the conflicts heavily favored the official U.S. policy of nonintervention in Rwanda and intervention in Kosovo. In particular, the analysis of the Kosovo conflict discourse in the New York Times found strong support for the dichotomization hypothesis of the propaganda model. I further analyzed U.S. policy papers or the official propaganda discourses alongside news media discourses, and also reviewed my CDA findings alongside key historical episodes related to the two conflicts. My analysis shows, while the New York Times showcased and regurgitated arguments that were in favor of U.S. policy of intervention in Kosovo and nonintervention in Rwanda, the newspaper--deliberately or otherwise--omitted and distorted key details that could potentially and fundamentally reshape perceptions of the need or lack of need for U.S. interventions in each of the two conflicts. Lastly, my analysis finds that there was high degree of similarity between the official propaganda discourses and the discourses in the New York Times.

The graduation thesis describes some problems of Africa in last 50 years and it pays special attention to the case of Rwanda. It contains also a short history of the african continent as the roots of many conflits have originated hundreds of years ago. It concretely describes 6 african countries: Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda and a special chapter is dedicated to the civil war and genocide in Rwanda.

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The thesis deals with the issue of photographs taken during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The ethnically motivated conflict, in which the Hutu majority tried to exterminate the Tutsi minority, claimed almost a million victims in a hundred days. The Rwandan genocide is notoriously associated with machetes and radio. Most of the victims were killed with primitive weapons, and the murders of neighbours and family members took place under the influence of a propaganda radio broadcast. The thesis describes how photojournalism in the 1990s reported on such a specific conflict as modern genocide. The thesis uses visual framing analysis, which is based on the theory of framing. After that it was possible to identify the recurring visual frames through which the Rwandan genocide is depicted in the images.

When authors write fiction about real, traumatic events, they face ethical challenges about how to portray trauma and its impacts. This dissertation employs methods of close reading and application of theory to investigate authorial choices. I argue that authors writing fiction about trauma often make aesthetic choices that blur the line between figurative and literal language in order to portray bodily experiences. This dissertation takes as its subject novels from sub-Saharan Africa that depict traumas caused directly and indirectly by colonialism. Authors including David Diop (1966-) and Birago Diop (1906-1989) have used these techniques to write about tirailleurs sénégalais, West African men conscripted to serve France’s military in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I bring these authors together with Boris Boubacar Diop (1946-) and Véronique Tadjo (1955-), who wrote books about the Rwandan genocide, because they also perform this translation for the body, asking readers to approach these works with a sensitivity to the ways the body endures trauma. The effect of these choices is a humanizing and integrated portrayal of trauma as a phenomenon that challenges the mind-body separation of cartesian influence and complicates human experience of time as linear. These works create space to think about trauma and recovery as individual as well as communal, to map similarities of human responses to trauma without pathologizing it. Ultimately, these works point to the conclusion that living through/with trauma is possible when the trauma can be incorporated into a new conception of the self.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This research attempts to answer the following questions: How and why genocide became possible in Gishamvu and Kibayi? In other words, what was the nature of power at different epochs and how was it exercised? How did forms of political competition evolve? In relation to these forms of competition, what forms of violence occurred acrosshistory and how did they manifest themselves at local level up to 1994? And what was the place of identity politics? Then, what were economic and social conditions since colonial times up to 1994 and how were these conditions instrumentalized in the construction of the ideology of genocide? Finally, how did the Tutsi genocide unfold in Gishamvu and Kibayi? / South Africa

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.