The risks of peace: Exploring the relationship between peaceocracy and journalism in Kenya

Abstract

Scholars have recently suggested that a peaceocracy is emerging in nations experiencing intermittent conflicts. A peaceocracy is an institutionalised political strategy – rather than a political system – that aims to promote stability in states considered fragile. While scholars know how the press functions in a democracy, little is still known about how a peaceocracy shapes journalism. This article explores the Kenyan context to illuminate how the press co-opts a peaceocratic discourse and discusses its implications to the profession. We pose that a political consensus between the state and the press foments a strong peace-building discourse that challenges professional autonomy. Secondly, in a peaceocracy, the state takes the role of the guardian of peace and the press, a promoter of peace, both of which legitimise a degree of restriction on press freedom.

Introduction

In February 2022, the Nation Media Group (NMG), the largest media conglomerate in Kenya, tweeted about the launch ceremony of a campaign dubbed #MimiMkenya (“I am Kenyan”). NMG announced that the campaign aimed to promote “patriotism, issue-based politics, peace and unity” (@NationMediaGrp, 2022). In the tweet, there were photos of the fanfare–held 6 months before the general election–with politicians and top media personalities in attendance. The tweet further explained that the campaign was important because of the “uneasiness” that “befalls our country” every 5 years, during general elections in Kenya. Such sentiments are not uncommon. Since at least 2008, following unprecedented election violence, news organisations have either initiated such campaigns or taken part in ‘peace caravans’ across the country. The peace agenda has attracted both support and criticism, especially because they are considered as detrimental to critical journalism in a country with a high level of political parallelism and ethnic polarisation. For example, in a response to the tweet, Kenyan journalist Dickens Olewe replied that it would be a “worthwhile cause” for journalism to instead “support democracy” rather than peace (@DickensOlewe, 2022). Other journalists, commentators and social critics have condemned the press for promoting a ‘peace narrative’ that glosses over structural injustices and election crimes (e.g. Gathara, 2017).

The Nation Media Group's tweet and critics’ responses capture the tensions that arise when the media are key actors in the institutionalisation of a ‘peaceocracy’. A peaceocracy is a political strategy – rather than a regime or political system – that aims to create peace in transitional democracies (Lynch et al., 2019). Commentators first coined the term in the aftermath of Kenya's 2013 polls while referring to the intense peace campaigns steered by the local press and politicians. The campaigns were meant to forestall violence during the elections in 2007 (Lynch, 2020: 2). Since then, political scientists and journalism scholars have suggested that peaceocracies are emerging in several other post-conflict nations (Lynch, 2020; Cheeseman et al., 2019).

In a peaceocracy, citizens do not merely make ‘rational and informed decisions’ regarding how they should be governed, like in a democracy (Schudson, 1995: 207), but they exercise ‘good citizenship’ by actively keeping/protecting the peace through the stewardship of the political elite mostly during national elections (Lynch, 2020: 3). Furthermore, journalists in a peaceocracy are active promoters of good citizenry. This is because the press is considered a critical partner of the state in institutionalising peace as a buffer against political violence. Whilst peaceocracy and democracy can function side-by-side, the former can often be detrimental to the latter, as it prioritises stability over establishing independent institutions (Lynch et al., 2019: 603). Peaceocracy can be deployed to justify state repression, delegitimise political dissent, and ‘discipline citizens’ through imposing tolerance of ‘the other’ (Lynch, 2020: 2).

While media and journalism scholars know how the press functions within a democracy, little is known about what peaceocracy portends to journalism. By using Kenya as an example, we aim to understand how a peaceocracy shapes journalism. More specifically, we draw on empirical insight from two research projects to examine how practising journalists and media critics perceive the relationship between journalism and peaceocracy and the attendant risks to the profession, but also the expansion of journalistic discourses within a transnational public sphere that shapes both the press and politics (Volkmer and Sharif, 2018). Journalism is exposed to risks when it is subjected to disruptive forces that make it lose control over its functions, legitimacy or even relevance within society (Beck, 1992; Volkmer, 2010). We particularly highlight the double bind in journalistic autonomy that defines professionalism within a peaceocracy, which has implications for journalism studies. The peaceocratic role of the state as a guardian of peace, and of the press as a facilitator and promoter of peace, legitimise a degree of restriction on press freedom. This study contributes to the understanding of how journalism as a profession functions within a discursive space of peaceocracy.

The rise of peaceocracy

As a leadership strategy, peaceocracy could be short-lived or long term and is most effective in transitional countries with hybrid regimes (Lynch, 2020), where there is consensus among politicians, the press, civil society, and even the church over the methods to achieve political stability. While peaceocracy is not anti-democracy, scholars argue that it devalues democratic principles, especially when deployed strategically to gloss over human rights violations, electoral malpractice, or poor governance (Matlosa, 2021). Constant change and political disruptions (e.g. through the cycle of democratic elections) are inimical to peaceocracy. Instead, this system favours the status quo over political transitions as this brings much more promise of stability. Moreover, in a peaceocracy, peace is considered the DNA of institutional culture, which also defines the press and how it functions. Peaceocracy is likely to attract less antagonism between the press and the state often witnessed in liberal democracies.

A distinct feature of the democratisation processes in parts of sub-Saharan Africa is its response to the balance between internal pressure, that is, securitisation and the need to keep the post-independent but fragile state united, and external pressure, that is, the post-colonial influences and demands to respond to international norms and traditions/practices of justices, trade or even law. The press is often the subject of this pressure, with the African political elite perceiving it as critical in the post-colonial agenda for national building, but at the same time, with the expectation externally (within the international political space, especially among development partners and donors) that the African press would grow and play a role like its counterparts in liberal democracies. Kenya, for example, is a frequent subject of institutional experiments from Minority World Countries (Ochieng, 1992; Stremlau and Gagliardone, 2015) that range from democracy projects to human rights campaigns of INGOs, to reproductive health missions of the Christian right. Owing to such internal and external demands, the press experiences constant tensions that largely stem from mixed expectations of its role and a lack of a clearly defined relationship between itself and those in power locally and internationally. Such tensions are particularly worthwhile to study, especially because of how transitional actors contribute towards increased risks to both politics and journalism (Volkmer, 2010).

Kenya has proven an interesting case in journalism studies because its media are often described as robust, sophisticated, and widely consumed in sub-Saharan Africa (Ireri, 2017; Ismail and Deane, 2008). However, the press is captive of a ‘neo-patrimonial system’ (White and Mabweazara, 2018), which thrives in endless cycles of corruption and impunity. That is not to mean that Kenya is short of critical press. Indeed, it fairs better in global press freedom indices ¹ than most sub-Saharan countries, but it is its conformity to a peace discourse aimed at temporal political stability that has made it an exceptional space for the emergence of a peaceocracy (Cheeseman et al., 2016). In this article, we thus consider Kenya's case as critical towards sketching how a peaceocracy regime has taken root in the production of metajournalistic discourse. We however do not seek to place Kenya as a unique category. There are indeed numerous post-conflict nations with exceptional experiences of peaceful transitions, but political scientists have considered the Kenyan case as a befitting template for the emergence of a peaceocracy. We also argue here that political shifts in Kenya's post-independence period, after 1963, have entrenched a mostly elite-driven discourse of peace, which has been instrumental in shaping the relationship between the press and the state, mainly in two ways.

First, Kenya has experienced episodic conflicts before, during and after presidential elections. The trigger to most of the conflicts – mainly comprising mass protests and localised fights between members of ethnic communities – has been the mismanagement of elections, especially the perceived manipulation or actual rigging of elections (Nyabola, 2019; Cheeseman and Klaas, 2018). These localised conflicts foment highly polarised and ethno-nationalistic politics, but often are only a symptom of deep-seated divisions over socio-economic inequalities that are rooted in colonial capitalism (historical marginalisation, where British colonisers took away communal land and a post-colonial elite that thrived in the plunder of economic resources). Traditionally, ethnic identity defines voting patterns, and Kenyan elections often involve political parties created through (temporary) coalitions or consensus of ethnic communities (Bratton and Kimenyi, 2008). Ethnic rivalry combined with mistrust of institutions – like the courts and election agencies – intermittently results in violence, especially among the urban and rural poor populations (Cheeseman et al., 2019).

Second, Kenya's story of peace begins in the post-independence period when the political elite found it necessary to stabilise a nation founded on a fragile compromise among ethnic mini-nations vanquished through the colonial project of the British. Maintaining the stability of a new republic in 1964 was seen as necessary for the nation-building project and to achieve ethnic cohesion. However, the political elite also deployed a post-independence pacification strategy to defeat any demands for reparations by communities that lost land to European settlers. From the 60s to the 90s, re-examinations of colonial historical injustices were consistently quashed through an alternative peace discourse that emphasised tolerance among Kenya's diverse ethnic communities and support for a nation-building project. When Kenya's long-serving president Daniel Moi was in power (1978–2002), he reinforced within the national discourse a strong rhetoric of what he referred to as ‘nyayo philosophy’. Nyayoism, as Ogola (2011) described, was rooted in the philosophical underpinning of what Moi termed ‘peace, love and unity’. This philosophy was often associated with ethnic cohesions and patriotism, but critics saw it as thin on social justice and human rights. However, the peace discourse in the nyayo project was frequently used in political speeches, that received wide coverage in traditional media but also co-opted news organisations and journalists to participate in peace campaigns.

An eruption of violence following the presidential elections in 2007 was a watershed period for Kenya. Owing to the scale of violence (that cost deaths of over 1000 and internal displacement of more than 500,000 people), Kenya attracted the attention of the international community. The political elite, religious groups and the press were implicated in the violence (years later, politicians and a journalist were indicted at the International Criminal Court over the violence). What followed were a series of peace projects, mostly steered internally through the support of politicians, the press, civil society groups and the church, and externally through the United Nations, African Union, the European Union, and the US government. To forestall future violence, the aforementioned actors promoted a strong ‘peace narrative’, which was supported through intense peace messaging by journalists (Cheeseman et al., 2016). Social and press critics in Kenya argue that the peace narrative was essential in creating values such as tolerance and ethnic cohesion, but it also eclipsed other critical issues such as justice for the victims of electoral violence (see Gathara, 2017). To better understand the relationship between journalism and peaceocracy, we seek to illuminate how a peaceocracy takes root within the profession of journalism. However, it is also important to first interrogate how a peaceocratic discourse establishes itself to (possibly) challenge journalistic authority and how subsequent journalistic practices reveal the risks of peaceocracy.

Peaceocracy, journalism and its risks

Firstly, what could easily be overlooked in such a study is the important distinction between journalism as practised within a peaceocracy and peace journalism, often referred to as a practice that inculcates values and principles of non-violence in conflict reporting (e.g. Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005). While peace journalism values journalistic autonomy, peaceocracy imposes a consensus between journalists and the political elite to pacify and securitise institutions and communities in a transitional democracy (Maweu, 2017; Jenkins, 2020). However, the two can easily be conflated especially in practice, and in countries like Kenya, peace journalism has been employed to legitimise a peaceocracy (Cheeseman et al., 2019; Ogenga, 2019).

Examining how journalism functions within a peaceocracy, requires us to sketch out the relationship between the hegemonic model of journalism (Nerone, 2012) – as embedded with a democratic political system (Carey, 1996) – and, on the other hand, a peaceocratic dispensation. The theory of metajournalistic discourse (Carlson, 2016) helps us to understand how visions of peaceocracy are legitimised within journalism (cf. Lindell and Karlsson, 2016) and aids us in exploring visions of peaceocracy through the discursive construction of peace as a practice and its legitimisation. When journalists and non-journalists (in a peaceocracy, the political elite) discursively construct imaginaries of a peaceful nation, the goal is to attain an antagonism-free relationship between the government and the press. The production of metajournalistic discourse about peace is promoted and legitimised through a strong narrative of peace (Cheeseman et al., 2014). In the case of Kenya, this narrative appears through political messaging that receives sufficient news coverage, or through media events or programmes like political talk shows (Lynch et al., 2019). What further aids the discourse of peace is the socialisation of journalists in ‘peace campaigns’ and consensus-building talks with the political elites with the goal to engender an ideology of peace within the profession. What this then means in practice, is that a peace discourse can supersede journalistic discourse, for example, when the political actors’ agendas shape editorial decisions in news-making.

Moreover, it is critical to understand the antecedent risks associated with the practice of journalism within a peaceocracy. Here our interest is in the harms and threats when journalism functions within a ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992; McCurdy, 2011), which consequently exposes the profession to disruptive forces–local and global – that constantly shape the relationship between journalism and politics. There are vulnerabilities that peaceocracy engenders and professional consciousness of the threats that emerge in the practice of journalism, for example, the risk to editorial independence. In Kenya, for example, peaceocracy is criticised for elevating peace as an instrument to achieve political stability at the expense of justice (e.g. through overlooking crimes of the political elite so as not to stir tensions among their supporters), and ultimately the suppression of critical reporting (Gathara, 2017; Cheeseman, 2014, 2019). Additionally, peace promotion is considered a state project and press conformity to the promotion of ethnic cohesion and tolerance supersedes any editorial agenda, such as that of investigative journalism to expose corruption in government. It is also important to note that peaceocracy is a well-oiled national/political agenda through a generous state budget and donor funding from, among others, the European Union, and international NGOs (some who sponsor training of journalists on the coverage of violence and elections). Accordingly, it is worth exploring the implications of these practices to the journalism profession. In other words, we seek to provide insights on how journalists as well as press critics describe the profession within a peaceocracy and how they reflect on its attendant risks. We argue that as carriers of metajournalistic discourse, critics (non-journalistic actors who exemplify ideas about what journalism is and could be) and journalists are pivotal in understanding how a peaceocratic discourse establishes itself within the profession and how it challenges journalistic authority.

Finally, regarding the imaginaries of peaceocracy within the profession, it is important to interrogate the discursive struggle that journalists engage in as they strive to maintain professional authority. The current research focus in journalism studies is often hinged on a stabilising effect of democracy even when this political system is not fully embraced in a journalistic culture (see Hanitzsch, 2007). It then becomes interesting to empirically investigate how journalism functions within a peaceocracy, especially when both journalistic authority and peace need to be equally maintained.

Methodology

Based on qualitative interviews, we seek to understand how practising journalists and ‘high profile’ media critics perceive and understand peaceocracy and the potential risks to journalism. By high-profile critics, we mean audiences with a keen interest in the state of journalism and a considerable public and digital presence, like former journalists, commentators and political analysts who are active social media users or bloggers. Scholars consider these actors active participants in the production of metajournalistic discourses, and their imaginaries about journalism could influence both news professionals and society (Fengler, 2012; Cheruiyot, 2018). In contrast, journalists include reporters and editors from a range of mainstream media organisations with national reach that play an agenda-setting role.

To illustrate the perceptions of critics and journalists, we critically examine empirical insights from qualitative in-depth interviews with these actors gathered as part of two different large-scale research projects, conducted by each author, that examine peace journalism and media criticism in Kenya. The first study, conducted by the first author of this article, was concerned with the multiple understandings of peace journalism in Kenya and included interviews with 15 journalists and three media critics in 2021. Participants were selected via purposive sampling, as they all published content in the country's two largest newspapers during the 2017 presidential elections. ² The second project, carried out by the second author, examined the impact of media criticism to the profession and employed qualitative interviews with 10 critics and 15 journalists in Kenya. Participants were first selected via purposive sampling – those with experience in the phenomenon being explored (Cresswell and Plano Clark, 2010: 112) – followed by snowball sampling, in which some respondents granted access to other individuals. ³

Both projects were centred on the profession of journalism between 2017 and 2021, a period in which peaceocracy became entrenched in Kenya. With the goal to diversify empirical evidence, we merged the datasets from the two projects. Since the two large-scale projects had separate initial aims, we formulated fresh objectives for data analysis, which focused on how practicing journalists and media critics perceived the peace narrative in the news coverage of elections and electoral violence. The recurrence of similar themes such as the ‘peace narrative’, ‘peace mode’ or ‘preaching peace’ in the initial projects were a suitable guide towards merging the datasets and setting new objectives of analysis. We acknowledge that a limitation to combining qualitative data in such a manner is that separate aims of the previous projects could create bias in analysis. To minimise this bias, we set clear objectives of the analysis as well as compared our interview transcripts.

After a thorough reading of transcripts from both projects, we gathered the specific fragments that touched upon relevant themes for this article. These excerpts were then subjected to thematic analysis to identify and group themes and patterns of meaning found in the data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Themes include the roots of the peace narrative in the country, the specific practices of journalism that characterise a peaceocracy, the tensions surrounding journalistic roles in scenarios where peace is prioritised over justice or democracy, and the perceived risks to professional autonomy and the safety of journalists, which the following sections describe. To identify interview fragments, we use the code ‘J’ to reference journalists and ‘MC’ for media critics, followed by a number assigned to each of the participants.

The roots of peaceocracy

Previous literature usually pin-points the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya as the beginning of a peaceocracy that was then crystallised in the following presidential elections of 2013 (Lynch et al., 2019). Whilst this was undoubtedly a turning point, a critic claimed that the ground was being slowly set up from before and that the ‘roots’ are ‘the 2005 referendum’ for a new constitution (MC-4). Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote, which was finally rejected. At that point, the news media was critical of the state and regarded as pro-opposition, which led to immense backlash against the press and ended with former First Lady Lucy Kibaki storming into the offices of the Nation Media Group (Nyabola, 2019: 54). In essence, the antagonistic relationship between government and media during this period led to public confrontations and backlash that resulted in the climate surrounding the 2007 elections. When violence erupted, the government blamed it on the media and their ‘hyper-partisan reporting’ that was ‘instigating people’ (MC-4).

The peaceocratic practices that have existed in Kenya since then are a product of this: ‘After the 2007/2008 experience, (…) we were preaching peace’ and ‘turning a blind eye to anything’ that ‘we thought could cause violence’ (J-13). Moreover, the training for journalists conducted by the Media Council of Kenya (a co-regulatory mechanism) ahead of every election since has ‘emphasised this role of the media as preserving the peace’, and many ‘journalists took that to mean that we are not going to report in a way that might cause problems’ (MC-3). This context kickstarted the consensus between the government and the press in election reporting, and thus a peaceocracy was institutionalised. As such, rather than solely pointing to the 2007/2008 post-election violence and the inception of a peaceocracy, we pose that understanding the inception of this strategy requires looking back at Kenya's history since independence and the complex and intertwined evolution of the relationship between the news media in the country and the state.

Peaceocratic practices: Promoting peace and suppressing details

Peaceocracy manifests in two different yet interrelated journalistic practices. First, it involves actively promoting a ‘peace narrative’ (MC-4). For instance, the ‘key message’ put forward by the press ahead of the 2017 elections was ‘to maintain peace’ and ensure that there is ‘cohesion’ (J-10). One way media houses do this is by publishing ‘editorials calling for peace’ and ‘trying to dissuade the public from descending into violence’ (J-13). The 2022 ‘Mimi Kenya’ campaign described in the introduction illustrates this practice. Moreover, on 3 January 2008, all newspapers in Kenya agreed to publish a shared headline, ‘Save our beloved country’, amid the post-election violence. These cases highlight a consensus amongst all mainstream news outlets in sharing the official narrative.

The second practice entails not mentioning ‘the ethnic groups involved’ in violence and blurring out ‘the negative elements of stories so that we do not fuel further rivalry’ (J-4). This call for restraint and self-censorship has ‘been a policy of many media organisations in Kenya’ after 2007 (J-3). The Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya, for instance, published by the Media Council of Kenya (2013: 15), states that ‘articles or broadcasts with the potential to exacerbate communal trouble shall be avoided’. This is a rather open-ended guideline, but it seems journalists have always opted to remain cautious.

In sum, peaceocracy in Kenya manifests in two key journalistic practices: promoting peace and suppressing information assumed to be inciteful. It is worth highlighting, however, that many journalists conflate these practices with peace journalism. For instance, one reporter described ‘peace journalism [as] the kind of journalism that promotes stability and tranquillity in a society’ (J-6). Indeed, it seems many ‘journalists might think that peace journalism has a lot to do with compliance’ (MC-1) and ‘it cannot be’ that the reigning notion in Kenya implies ‘that we cover up the issues’ (MC-3), an understanding that widely differs from the framework first outlined by Lynch and McGoldrick (2005), among others (Arregui et al., 2022; Cheeseman et al., 2019: 86). This confusion, however, leads to talk of peace journalism becoming another tool for legitimising the strategy of peaceocracy in Kenyan newsrooms, thus representing a clear risk to the profession since some of its traditional functions are disrupted.

Peace at the expense of justice

Furthermore, the peace over justice debate merits attention. Centring too much on narratives of peace comes at the expense of asking ‘the hard questions [to] the electoral body’ (J-13) and ‘questioning how the election was conducted’ (MC-3). During electoral cycles, the news media in Kenya has become a ‘megaphone for different interests’ but not ‘an arena where these interests’ are ‘mediated or questioned’ (MC-5). The ‘danger’, echoing a journalist, ‘is that we spend so much effort on peace that we forget about the critical things that affect the election’ (J-3). Put differently, what gets celebrated as ‘peace really is a cover-up for the fact that an election has been stolen’ and that peace comes ‘at the expense of justice’ and democracy (MC-3), an observation that is consistent with the definition of peaceocracy by Lynch et al. (2019: 604).

These interview excerpts thus illustrate that journalists working within a peaceocracy are constantly torn between the ‘ethics of peace’ and the normative expectations of journalism in a democracy. This tension arises when peace is extolled as a news value central to the editorial practice, for instance, as manifested in the practices of peace promotion and in anonymising parties of ethnic conflicts. This, in turn, raises questions as to which professional roles prevail in the coverage of elections. Peaceocracy calls for suppressing the traditional watchdog role of the press that is passed on to journalists when they are trained and educated and instead accentuates the peace advocate, facilitator or mouthpiece roles (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018). These roles, however, are not new to the Kenyan news landscape as development journalism, an approach based on a ‘media-government partnership’ to contribute to the nation-building process, prevailed in the country in the years following independence (Ogola, 2011: 80). Political leaders co-opted development journalism to control the narratives in the news media and, similarly, a peaceocracy is a new type of consensus that allows politicians to stay in power.

This tension is clearly illustrated by respondents, who interrogate whether the role of reporters is ‘to perpetuate the developmental narrative and the agenda of the state’ or to ‘criticise and to hold up a lens for the state’ (MC-4). According to a journalist, while holding the powerful ‘to account’ is important, in situations of conflict ‘the most immediate thing’ to do is ‘try and rally the people together’ (J-15).

Two dimensions of risk

Whilst participants acknowledge that professional roles have somewhat been renegotiated within a peaceocracy, not all buy into it. A media critic expressed that ‘the tragedy’ begins when the ‘public criticism function’ is lost because from that point onwards there is a ‘consociationalism’ between the media and the government (MC-4). Additionally, a journalist asserted that when editors or authorities enforce the peace narrative they are ‘conditioning journalists’ by asking them to abandon ‘the core values’ of the profession for ‘something else’ (J-5). These statements illustrate that journalists and critics perceive clear risks to some values of journalism in a peaceocracy.

Foremost is the risk to journalistic autonomy that manifests itself through the relative loss of editorial independence, as the mainstream media privilege the ‘official narratives that flow out of government [and] the political class in general’ in their coverage (MC-5). Moreover, the lack of autonomy is also reflected in journalists’ constant self-censorship when they abandon news coverage – for instance, on ethnic tensions – deemed to threaten political stability. One problem with this tendency is the ‘deletion’ of other narratives ‘that could have helped us (…) understand the conflict better’ and given victims ‘some sense of closure’ if what different parties did was openly acknowledged (MC-2).

Yet potential risks to journalism in a peaceocracy have another dimension, that is, the risks to the safety of practitioners. It is not uncommon for the political elite to ‘instil fear’ so that journalists do not ‘report critical issues’ (J-5). Political interference is one of the main constraints journalists in Kenya face when reporting on sensitive issues, often executed by bribery and threats (Arregui et al., 2022: 14; Lohner et al., 2019). On occasion, then, journalists do not act as a megaphone of the government because they want to, but rather because they are pressured to do so. Yet, amid this context, some argue that they opt to stay neutral and impartial even when expected to follow the official narrative: ‘You don’t want to get involved in that, (…) so you try and stay back’ (J-29). This, however, requires being ‘careful’ and learning how far one ‘can go’ (J-1).

There is thus a complex and intertwined relationship between individual journalists, media outlets and politicians in setting and contrasting the expectations for the role of news reporting in times of political campaigns and elections. Whilst in a peaceocracy the media is seen as a critical partner of the government in guarding peace and stability, the excerpts above reveal that this relationship is dictated more by power than consensus. In short, it is enforced between the political elite and the high levels of management within the newsroom, and individual journalists remain somewhat stuck in executing a strategy they often disagree with.

Contrasting visions: Risk to autonomy but a necessary evil

Perceptions surrounding the peace narrative have evolved over the years. Due to the guilt that the media felt after being blamed for inciting the 2007/2008 post-election violence, in the coverage of the 2013 polls, ‘there was pretty much silence across the board’ about the problems ‘associated with that election’ (MC-5). Over time, however, critics and journalists ‘began to ask whether the peace narrative was manipulated by the government’ to ‘marginalise opposition voices’ (Cheeseman et al., 2019: 99). Accordingly, there was a shared feeling that the coverage of 2013 elections was a ‘let down’ (J-13). Consequently, when the 2017 elections were approaching, newsrooms made an ‘effort to do better’ (MC-1) and tried to ‘correct the mistakes’ from the past (J-9). At this time, several journalists stopped considering peace promotion as their main role to fulfil. So did the public, as in 2017 ‘there was quite a reaction amongst the audience, that was saying [that] any peace that we have has to be underlined by justice, we cannot just accept that an election is stolen just so that we preserve a sense of calm’ (MC-3).

Whilst neither media critics nor journalists seem to buy into a peaceocracy, their perceptions have certain nuances. Media critics consider journalism in a peaceocracy a risk to autonomy and a hindrance to fulfilling the watchdog role of journalism. Yet journalists, while generally aligned with this vision, also tend to rationalise the compromises to their practice in a peaceocracy and take divergent stances.

A group of journalists seem to position themselves completely against a peaceocracy: ‘[If] we give a blind eye to what is happening and start promoting peace, I have a problem (…). My stand is that we report everything, but we report responsibly’ (J-8). Others, while they might agree in principle, feel constrained in practice by the editorial directives in their news organisations: ‘You would know something is happening but (…) you have some limitations (…) because you find that ownership is an issue (…) [and] there is nothing we could have done’ (J-1). For that matter, the practices of peaceocracy are not only up to ‘journalists themselves’ but ‘about making sure that news organisations are not too wedded’ to ‘the political system’ (MC-2). News organisations in Kenya normally act as ‘mouthpieces of politicians during elections because’ they ‘get millions’ and that is why there is a need to ‘develop alternative revenue streams’ (MC-2). According to these critics, the way to restore journalistic autonomy lies in structural changes to the political economy of the media in the country.

Another group of journalists, however, consider the practices of a peaceocracy as a ‘necessary evil’. For instance, ‘someone can say that people wanted to instil fear in us so that we cannot report. But, I think, as journalists, we had a responsibility to ensure that the elections are peaceful to an end’ (J-10). Many journalists thus talk about a ‘balance’ between ‘promoting peace but also still speaking the truth and criticising the politicians’ (J-13), which hints at reporters wanting to fulfil watchdog and peace advocate roles simultaneously. Whilst they see elections as a particularly sensitive case that calls for fulfilling certain professional roles, they nonetheless shy away from deviating too much from the traditional expectations of journalism in a democracy.

Discussion and conclusion

In sum, journalists and ‘high profile’ media critics in Kenya identify the strategies of peaceocracy surrounding presidential elections and campaigns in the country. This article thus contributes to expanding existing literature on peaceocracy by shedding light on its specific journalistic practices and the implications to professionalism. Overall, peaceocracy and its related practices – promoting peace and self-censoring potentially inflammatory information – are a risk to journalistic autonomy. The peaceocratic role of the state as a ‘guardian of peace’ and of the press as a facilitator and promoter of peace, legitimise a degree of restriction on press freedom. In the same vein, a peaceocratic vision of journalism creates a fertile ground for polymorphism of roles, by which journalists acquire different, and often contrasting, roles at the same time (Vobič, 2022). In our case, this polymorphism of professional roles presents a dilemma where choices must be made between promoting peace or upholding the watchdog role. Whilst these risks are arguably of a local nature, they are however embedded in wider, global trends of risks to the profession. For example in the case of 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, whose investigative works in the Philippines have been featured in international discourses on press freedom.

Moreover, we here pose that pointing to the post-election violence of 2007/2008 in Kenya as the beginning of a peaceocracy is a rather simplistic view. It is also necessary to consider the evolution of the complex interplay between media and politics. Development journalism – which also called for a media-government partnership – was the reigning strategy during the nation-building process following independence and was later replaced by a more adversarial relationship during the democratisation years of the 1990s (Nyabola, 2019; Ogola, 2011). Yet the news media, entangled in the political fragmentation that took place at the turn of the century, ended up in a position that allowed the government to partly blame journalists for the increasing tension and violence surrounding elections. This discourse led to the new consensus centred around a peace rather than a development narrative. Digging into this context thus helps better understand the complex ways peaceocracy crystallised in Kenya. Yet precisely because these local risks could be indicative of global trends, there is a need to investigate similar tendencies in other emerging democracies.

Yet whilst in a peaceocracy the state and the media are considered partners, our findings show that in Kenya this is enforced by the powerful and is not a consensus in which journalists are included. In that regard, the political economy of the media plays a central role, as actors with strong connections to the main political players in Kenya own major news outlets. And so, even when most journalists do not buy into it, peaceocratic practices are often imposed from the top down during electoral cycles. Additionally, what serves as both a tension within journalism, and a limitation to studying the influence of peaceocracy in journalism, are the multiple understandings of peace journalism, which can both be deployed to legitimise peaceocracy or altogether confused with the latter (Cheeseman et al., 2019).

This study also underlines the nuances in the different visions of journalism between journalists and media critics. It is evident that the latter group is strongly against peaceocracy being implemented in Kenya, and the use of words such as ‘danger’ or ‘tragedy’ clearly reflected that. Journalists, on their end, also express their reservations about the compromises to their practice brought by the peaceocratic state. And while some are constrained by the editorial guidelines and policies of their news organisations and regulatory bodies, others consider it a ‘necessary evil’ to avoid further violence. In shedding light on this complex range of perceptions, this study thus contributes to the understanding of how journalism as a profession functions within a discursive space of peaceocracy.