Reporting the periphery: War and peace journalism in the coverage of the 2023 Manipur violence

This study examines national media coverage of ethnic conflict through the lens of peace journalism, focusing on the 2023 Manipur conflict in Northeast India – a region often absent from national news discourse. While peace journalism research has expanded across diverse conflict contexts, scholarship foregrounding marginalized peripheral regions remains limited. Drawing on Galtung’s peace journalism framework and center-periphery theory as complementary analytical lenses, the study analyzed 360 news reports published by three leading Indian national news outlets from May to October 2023. The analysis identified the prevalence of war and peace frames across outlets and employed a novel indicator co-occurrence approach to assess the depth of violence coverage. Results show a clear dominance of war frames, with emphasis on immediate developments, visible effects of violence, and elite sources, while peace-oriented indicators such as the examination of causes, civilian voices, and solution orientation were systematically underrepresented. An indicator-level analysis further revealed that while outlets diverge in framing orientation and language use, they converge in their failure to engage with contextual depth. A key implication is that journalistic neutrality alone does not necessarily prevent, and may inadvertently contribute to, the epistemic marginalization of peripheral communities in national conflict reporting.