Electoral violence and its instrumental logic: mapping press discourse on electoral violence during Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in Zimbabwe

Elections are one of the key benchmarks for assessing the international perception of a nation's democratic credentials. However, the credibility of elections is increasingly being tied to questions of whether or not they are conducted in a peaceful atmosphere. Where violence exists as part of the menu of manipulation the press becomes a crucial tool for shaping public perceptions about electoral legitimacy or lack thereof. This study employed a Foucauldian discursive approach to the analysis of election violence in two state-owned newspapers, namely The Herald and The Sunday Mail, and three privately-owned newspapers, namely The Zimbabwe Independent, The Financial Gazette, and the Daily News. Empirical data were drawn from a corpus of news stories published during the 2000 parliamentary and the 2002 presidential elections. The article argues that press construction of election violence was marked by competing discourses reflecting political and ideological bifurcation and this gave way to anti-democratic discursive strategies which could engender political intolerance among the citizenry.