Finding peace journalism: An analysis of Pakistani media discourse on Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan

Abstract

This study investigates media coverage of Afghan refugees by English-language media in Pakistan and explores how coverage is shaped by a shift in the political stance of the Pakistani state and establishment towards Afghanistan. The author examines how Afghan refugees, their forced repatriation from Pakistan, and the subsequent conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan were framed in both long-form and short-form media coverage over three years. Using Galtung’s Peace and War Journalism Model to inform the Critical Discourse Analysis, this study finds that conflict-escalatory frames dominated media coverage, and media stance changed over time to reflect state policy on the forced repatriation of over three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Findings reveal that the coverage in all four publications was highly politicized and inflammatory, the voice of Afghan refugees was significantly missing from coverage, while the Pakistani government and military elite were predominantly used as news sources. Based on the findings, the author argues that pressures from the Pakistani state and military establishment are key reasons why media coverage of Afghan refugees frequently contained negative frames of terrorism and ethnonationalism. Sporadic employment of limited peace-oriented framing was, however, observed in some of the coverage.

Keywords

Afghan refugees conflict reporting Critical Discourse Analysis media framing Pakistani media peace journalism

Introduction

In 2016, Pakistan – the largest host country for Afghan refugees over the last 40 years – officially began the repatriation of Afghan refugees, directing them to return to their homeland within a short period of time. This sudden announcement was not well received by the Afghan government, which claimed it was not economically and politically stable to resettle and rehabilitate such a large number of returnees, and asked the Pakistani government to allow Afghan refugees more time. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a history of tense relations (Baqai and Wasi, 2021; Threlkeld and Easterly, 2021), mainly caused by Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan’s internal politics and its role in creating and facilitating the Taliban, providing a safe haven for Taliban leaders, Pakistan’s allegiance with the US in their ‘war on terror’, and cross-border terrorism. Amidst this, Pakistan’s forced repatriation of Afghan refugees to an unprepared Afghanistan (Green, 2016) became a new bone of contention between the two countries, and thus a subject of great interest for the media, becoming a central point of political discourse across the country. In this article, I employ a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, informed by Johan Galtung’s Peace and War Journalism Model (1986, 1998), to analyse how Pakistani media framed Afghan refugees after repatriation officially began in 2016. In doing so, I also analyse whether a peace journalism approach was used in the coverage. According to latest UNHCR figures, there are approximately three million Afghans living in Pakistan. Of these, only 1.4 million are documented.

During the 1990s, Pakistan had an open-door policy for Afghan refugees (Ghufran, 2006) as they fled the civil war (1992–1996) and Taliban rule (1996–2001). However, post-9/11, Pakistan’s state policy on Afghan refugees started to shift, primarily to prove their allegiance to the US in their ‘war on terror’ (2001–present). Soon, the Pakistani media also shifted their stance on Afghan refugees to align with the state policy. The same media that were welcoming Afghan refugees and referring to them as ‘friends of Pakistan’ during the 1980s and 1990s, started presenting them in a negative light as a threat to Pakistan’s national security. The negative coverage intensified, especially after 16 December 2014, when Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants – the Pakistani faction of Afghan Taliban – attacked a school in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, killing 150 people, 134 of whom were children, and leaving over 100 injured in the 8-hour ordeal, making the Army Public School (APS) attack a national tragedy for years to come. The images of blood-soaked classroom floors and piles of young bodies left the nation shaken and mourning for months. As a response to the APS attack, the Pakistani government launched a special crackdown on terrorism in January 2015 under the National Action Plan (NAP). Though the purpose of the action plan was to arrest the perpetrators of the APS attack and also supplement the ongoing counter-terrorism offensive in KP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – the formerly semi-autonomous tribal region in northwestern Pakistan along the Afghan border – some political analysts argued that it primarily targeted Afghan refugees in Pakistan as the state accused them of providing a safe haven to Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists in refugee camps across the country (Ghani et al., 2016; Khan, 2021). The provincial government directed all Afghan refugees to leave Pakistan in a month (Ijaz, 2015). At the same time, the KP government began biometric verification and geo-tagging of Afghan refugees, which was later expanded to other provinces after the TTP militants attacked another educational institution, the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, also in KP, a year after the APS attack. A total of 21 students were fatally shot in this attack. In addition to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) also got involved in the crackdown, making it one of the largest counter-terrorism offensives in the country in terms of scope, and thereby attracting extensive media attention.

Though Afghan refugees had no proven links with either of the terrorist attacks, they were at the heart of this counter-offensive (Ijaz, 2015). As the state narrative on Afghan refugees began to shift from generally neutral to one targeting them, the country’s media also consequently followed and an overall anti-Afghan framing started frequenting news coverage, almost on a daily basis. Mainstream media were regularly blaming Afghan refugees for terrorist attacks in the country (Alimia, 2019; Batool, 2019) and for using Pakistan as their safe haven. As the mainstream media’s anti-Afghan refugee narrative was becoming more explicit with time, antagonism and hate for Afghan refugees was also becoming evident among social media users in Pakistan. Racist and derogatory hashtags against Afghan refugees, including #GoAfghaniGo and #KickOutAllAfghans, trended for months (Ali, 2017). Pakistani social media users largely referred to Afghan refugees as haram khor (an expletive used for dishonest and corrupt people), and demanded that all Afghan refugees be forcibly repatriated to Afghanistan as soon as possible. It is argued that the concerted effort on social media was part of the feedback loop caused by the anti-refugee coverage in mainstream media in Pakistan, a narrative that emerged more explicitly after the APS terrorist attack (Ali, 2017).

Framing conflicts and refugees

In this study, I use CDA to identify the dominant frames used in the coverage of Afghan refugees. Entman (1993: 52) defines frames as ‘a process that involves selecting some aspects of perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text’. For Entman, the selection and salience are intentional and happen at a conscious level as frames help us ‘select some aspects of a perceived reality’ before we use them in our communicating texts ‘in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. Media frames are developed and employed in the text to shape the messages that are conveyed to the readers (Nelson et al., 1997), and therefore contribute to the media’s influential role in shaping public perception of a crisis (Perse and Lambe, 2016). This is evidenced by how the Israeli and Palestinian media covered the Patt Junction bus suicide bombing in Jerusalem in June 2002, in which 19 people were killed. Media on both sides reinforced national hatred for the other side, placing the other country’s leadership on the defensive. Researchers studied how the media in both countries framed the attack and found high indicators concerning the level of emotionalism associated with the broadcasts (Wolfsfeld et al., 2008). They argue that these framing routines are permanent and influence every news story that is constructed. Separately, in a study of state and military censorship during conflict coverage, Carruthers (2011) suggests that mass media become willing accomplices in wartime propaganda and may even play a role in instigating the conflict through the use of conflict-escalatory frames in their coverage. In my research, the application of frame analysis served more than one purpose. First, it helped me identify dominant themes in news stories and articles on Afghan refugees, and second, it showed me how frames interact with prior knowledge (existing realities) to create new knowledge (new realities).

Evidence demonstrates that mainstream media are often propagandist and nationalistic, especially in the coverage of refugees and asylum seekers, and side with the powerful (Knightley, 2004; Ross, 2006). In their study of media and political representations of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, Malloch and Stanley (2005) found that the coverage was infused with language denoting refugees as a ‘danger’ and a ‘risk’, consequently contributing to the rise of xeno-racist and anti-refugee sentiments in the public. A study of Canadian print media coverage over a 10-year period showed that refugees were presented as potential security threats, and greater media attention was given to the validity of refugee claims and to the extent to which refugees ‘take advantage’ of social programs (Lawlor and Tolley, 2017: 972). Separately, Nassar (2020) found that the US and Canadian media showed a general preference for Christian refugees from Syria compared to Muslim–Syrian refugees, who were framed as a threat to national security. Australian media have also presented an overall similar image of refugees through frames containing dehumanizing visual patterns (Bleiker et al., 2013). The authors found that asylum seekers were predominantly represented as ‘medium or large groups and through a focus on boats’, reinforcing a ‘politics of fear’ (p. 398) and consequently failing to generate compassionate political and social response. Similarly, many other critical scholars of media and communication studies have argued about the destructive role of media in reporting war and conflicts (Hamelink, 2008; Nohresdet, 2009; Williams, 2003) and its impact on how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and treated, globally.

Amidst the media’s indisputable appetite for war and conflict, the way the media present an event or people can also raise awareness, and develop a broader understanding of conflict issues in distinct ways. Over the last decade, peace journalism has emerged as a counter-narrative to a conflict-escalatory approach in media coverage. The term was first coined by peace scholar Johan Galtung, who explains peace journalism practice as one that brings the four implicit themes of peace, people, truth and solution to an explicit level for the broader population to comprehend easily. Galtung (1986, 1998) developed the first Peace and War Journalism Model, in which he divides conflict coverage into four binary oppositions, also called classifications: peace-orientated vs conflict-orientated coverage, truth-orientated vs propaganda-orientated coverage, people-orientated vs elite-orientated coverage, and solution-orientated vs victory-orientated coverage. According to Galtung, while war journalism legitimizes violence and becomes part of it, peace journalism focuses on non-violent responses to war and conflict. Peace journalism humanizes the affected people by giving them a voice, and provides some background and future implications of events, decisions and policies for the parties involved. The focus on the background provides readers with an opportunity to understand and contextualize the conflict and the parties involved, while the suggestion of solutions and ways the situation can de-escalate presents readers with a chance to infer and decide (McGoldrick and Lynch, 2000, 2016), thus presenting a complete package.

Pakistani media and the military’s influence

Although it was created as a democratic state, Pakistan has spent several decades under military rule. Even under democratic governments, the military’s influence on national politics and society has been significant. This includes the media industry, which has been largely managed by the military, enjoys very limited freedom and is highly politicized (Siddiqa, 2006). In this sense, Pakistan’s media system reflects many aspects of Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) Polarized Pluralism Model. In this model, the media are integrated into party politics, but there remains a strong role for the state amid a weak history of commercial media development. The press is mainly aimed at the political and cultural elite, and is as focused on political alignment as much as it is on commercial benefits (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). I situate Pakistan in this context due to its history of a combination of dictatorial and democratic governments, both of which frequently interrupted the development of media through periods of direct and indirect restrictions, and curtailment of press freedom. To further understand the dynamics and political economy of Pakistani media and their relationship with press freedom and peace journalism, understanding Pakistan’s relation with praetorianism and its influence on state policies and public opinion is crucial. Pakistani media have been a prime casualty of nationalism and attacks on freedom of speech, where the military establishment has clearly demarcated no-go areas for journalists, and no one can violate these guidelines (Rehman, 2020). Recent studies of ongoing conflicts in the region show that the military establishment in Pakistan is unwelcoming of any critical coverage of its role and influence in the conflicts with India, Afghanistan, and the Taliban, and in Balochistan (Hussain and Lynch, 2019; Iqbal and Hussain, 2017). Yet, despite multiple studies on conflict-escalatory and de-escalatory journalism in Pakistan over the last decade, mostly using a preliminary peace journalism classification framework (Hussain, 2017; Hussain and Lynch, 2019; Iqbal and Hussain, 2017), the Afghan refugee conflict and the refugees’ forced repatriation from Pakistan remains broadly unexamined despite its length, intensity, and impact. However, some scholarly interest has started to sparsely generate over the last couple of years. These studies, although conducted on smaller scales, echo the findings of existing international research on framing of refugees, and suggest that Afghan refugees in Pakistan are reported predominantly through the ‘national security’ frame (Batool, 2019) in a negative light through war-oriented framing (Alam et al., 2022).

There is a high prevalence of conflicts stemming from religious, ethnic, sectarian, tribal and race-related issues, and differences in Pakistan. The Afghan refugee conflict stems from more than one of these factors as locals view refugees as foreign to Pakistan’s society and politics, despite a shared history, language, culture, and religion. Afghan refugees have very limited access to work, housing, education, and legal protection in Pakistan, and face frequent discrimination and harassment by law enforcement agencies (Joles, 2021). Additionally, belligerent nationalism that runs through Pakistani society, fuelled and reinforced by the state and the military, also plays a significant role in the way the media frame Afghanistan and Afghan refugees. By studying how Afghan refugees are represented in media coverage in Pakistan, I was able to identify dominant and emerging frames that are exclusive to the refugee conflict and media practices in Pakistan.

Method

As mentioned earlier, I used the CDA approach to distil dominant frames in the media coverage of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. CDA is a systematic study of text to understand structures, strategies, and meanings at various levels of description (Fairclough, 1992; Van Dijk, 2013). Wodak (2006) argues that, without context, a study of language would fail to develop insight into a social process. In other words, CDA helps develop a link between the explained and the understood. The main purpose of this study is to identify the different patterns in refugee representations in a selected sample of Pakistan’s four largest English language news publications – two daily newspapers (Dawn and The Express Tribune) and two monthly magazines (Herald and Newsline) – all available both online and in print. By analysing newspapers and magazines, I was able to cover discursive representation across both long-form and short-form, and present a more accurate picture of the overall peace- and conflict-oriented narrative contextualization in the country’s English media on both a daily and monthly basis. The selection choice also stems from my curiosity to analyse news framing in what are referred to as progressive media publications in the country and that have a wide online and offline readership inside and outside Pakistan. Entman’s (1993) framing theory informs the CDA conducted for this study. I use Galtung’s (1998) four peace and war journalism orientations as a guiding framework to analyze media coverage of Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan to answer the overarching research question: What type of discursive representations of Afghan refugees are commonly used by Pakistani media, and what are the dominant frames used in the coverage?

Analytical criteria and coding

Using strictly defined categories, I developed a 12-point coding ‘analytical criteria’ (Lynch, 2006) comprising multiple sub-research questions for each of the four classifications in Galtung’s Peace and War Journalism Model (1986, 1998) – peace/conflict, truth/propaganda, people/elite and solution/victory (see Appendix 1 in the supplemental material). The coding analytical criteria approach was developed by Lynch (2006) and used to identify war and peace frames in the coverage of the Iran nuclear crisis by the UK press. Developing analytical criteria to study media coverage demands raising and answering questions that are exclusive to a specific context, which, as Lynch argues, helps present an accurate picture of the developing news during an event in an ongoing conflict. Since 2006, this approach has been adopted in many studies of peace and war framing (Abdul-Nabi, 2017; Galava, 2018). In my present study, the set of questions in the analytical criteria are exclusive to the socio-political complexities of the Af-Pak. The time period under study began on 1 January 2016 when the Pakistani government announced their first official deadline for repatriation of Afghan refugees. The study time period ends on 31 December 2018 – five months after the new government took charge and the process of refugee repatriation had slowed to an extent, moving somewhat into the periphery, but not away from media discourse. Another reason for extending the analysis over three years was to reduce margins of error in interpreting media narrative, and to analyze the larger and wider picture for greater accuracy in findings. To avoid risk of human error in accessing all relevant news stories and articles in the four publications, I accessed the content through the Factiva online database using the keywords ‘Afghan*’ and ‘Afghan refugee*’. After trying multiple other keywords, such as Af-Pak, Pak-Afghan, and repatriation, I noted that some of the stories were not relevant to my topic. Using ‘Afghan*’ and ‘Afghan refugee*’ as keywords provided access to all the stories and articles that had been published that year and were explicitly focused on the Afghan refugee conflict in the country. A total of 1,489 news stories (626 in 2016, 419 in 2017, and 444 in 2018), and 61 magazine articles (35 in 2016, 15 in 2017, and 11 in 2018) met the search criteria and became the final media corpus for this study (N = 1,550). The average length of news stories was 300 words and that of magazine articles was 620 words. After the initial selection was completed, I started the process of identifying the dominant frame in each text by passing it through the analytical criteria. The questions in the analytical criteria were designed to help identify the presence of Galtung’s orientations in the text. For each orientation present, I marked the text as Y (yes), whereas if the element was missing, the text was marked as N (no) (see Appendix 2: Coding Sheet in the supplental material). The more Ys that a text was marked with, the more peace-oriented the story was identified as, and vice-versa. The dominant frames were measured based on the presence (Ys) and absence (Ns) of a certain criterion under each classification. Where an additional frame was identified that did not fall under any of the four major orientations, the text was marked as E (emerging frame), explained in the following section.

Results and discussion

I distilled four dominant frames based on the recurrent themes in each media text in the corpus: (1) the terrorist frame characterizes Afghan refugees as terrorists or facilitating terrorism indirectly; (2) the enemy frame describes the perceived threat Afghan refugees cause to Pakistan’s national security; (3) the blame frame focuses on Afghanistan as the bad neighbor, and is causing a standoff between the two countries over the peace process; and (4) the ethno-nationalist frame emphasizes the link between terrorism and the refugees’ ethnic background. Table 1 presents the percentages of each frame in the media corpus.

Table 1.

Dominant frames in the media coverage of Afghan refugees in Pakistan (%).

	Newspapers(N = 1,489)		Current affairs magazines(N = 61)
	Dawn The Express Tribune (n = 677) (n = 812 )		Newsline Herald (n = 35) (n = 26)		Total (%)
Terrorism frame	52	67	76	21	54
Enemy frame	51	65	68	17	51
Blame frame	49	64	59	11	46
Ethno-nationalism frame	12	22	27	9	18
Political and military elite sources	48	56	47	51	51

Afghan refugee as the ‘terrorist’

The terrorist frame is one way of ‘othering’ and vilifying refugees, mainly by focusing on their religious or ethnic identities (Chuang and Roemer, 2013; A Hussain, 2010; Powell, 2011). Through a rampant use of the terrorist frame in the media corpus (54%), I noted a subtle but significant re-casting of Afghan refugee identity, as evidenced by news stories where Afghan refugees suspected of terrorist activities were referred to as ‘Afghan terrorists’, ‘home-born terrorists’, ‘Afghani traitors’, or ‘illegal refugees’ rather than simply calling them ‘Afghan refugees’. These labels are created with the repeated use of certain words and imply that Afghan refugees are not authentic refuge seekers or temporary residents, but a threat to Pakistani society and its national security, which further contributes to their perception as terrorists and dangerous. These labels contribute to a culture of dehumanization and demonization, and are later picked up by other media sources and reinforced or made into new tags in their coverage. This was particularly evident from a recurrent use of words such as ‘terrorists’, ‘dangerous’, ‘security threat’, ‘dangerous elements’, and ‘miscreants’ for Afghan refugees. These representations emerge from a conflict-escalatory approach in framing and contribute to inaccuracy in journalism, especially where claims are promoted as facts. Such communication practices pose a serious risk to truth and accuracy in journalism, as repetitive references to unsubstantiated or unproven claims can result in claims becoming ‘facts’ over time. This ultimately hurts the truth, which otherwise enables media audiences to decode propaganda and distinguish between facts and claims (Lynch, 2013).

The terrorist frame was used in two distinct ways throughout the coverage. First, through a repetitive highlighting of alleged recruitment of Afghan refugees by the Islamic State (ISIS) militant group. Additionally, in 33 percent of news stories and articles, Afghan refugees in Pakistan were compared to Syrian rebels, allegedly backed by an array of anti-government proxies, and posing a ‘security threat’ to US allies in the region. Second, the terrorist frame was used to emphasize the refugees’ frequent use of the Torkham Border, the main checkpoint between Pakistan and Afghanistan, repeatedly referring to it as a ‘terrorist entry point’ and highlighting the need to temporarily or permanently close it. Over half of the stories on Afghan refugees (56%) mentioned the Torkham Border and referred to the inward movement of refugees as a ‘potential threat to national security’. Almost all these stories suggested permanent or periodic border restrictions. Of these, 40 percent suggested that Pakistan needed to urgently stop all movement into the country at the Torkham Border, while the rest (60%) suggested an episodic closure or further tightening of security at the Torkham Border such as through the deployment of more security personnel. In 2016, Pakistan imposed new travel restrictions on the Torkham Border, which resulted in further deterioration of relations between Islamabad and Kabul (Yar, 2019). My findings suggest that media coverage of the new restrictions explicitly reflected this political tension. By aligning themselves with the state policy, Dawn, The Express Tribune and Newsline justified the government’s decision of tighter restrictions at the checkpoint, and reminded the readers of the cost of not closing the border, for example, ‘Pakistan has paid a heavy cost for being a neighbour of Afghanistan . . . Now the terrorists take advantage of the porous border . . . and conduct attacks on Pakistan’ (Dawn, 17 October 2017). Nearly two-thirds of news stories (67%) that reported on the Torkham Border restrictions or cross-border movement used the word ‘porous’ for the checkpoint and nearly half of the news stories in the corpus echoed the Pakistani government’s stance on stricter border restrictions and building a fence. Most of these stories were from the 2016 corpus (72%). In 2017, one of the main tasks that Pakistan took on was to make the Pak-Afghan border secure by installing a 2,450-km barbed-wire border, starting from Torkham. Though the decision was political and had been under consideration for a few years, the government’s public announcement was accelerated by the negative media framing of the use of the border, the consequent rise in anti-Afghan refugee sentiments across the country, and pressure from the military establishment. There is evidence to argue that a pro-fence media coverage in 2016 and parts of 2017 may have contributed to shaping public opinion in favor of an immediate installation of the fence at the Durand Line, which had otherwise been regulated fence-free over more than 124 years since its inception.

Afghan refugees as ‘the enemy’

The enemy frame emerged as the second most prominent frame in the media coverage, presenting Afghan refugees in a negative light. Over half of the coverage studied for this research (51%) made direct and indirect references to Afghan refugees using terms such as ‘enemy’, ‘threat’, ‘alien’, ‘illegal’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘suspicious’, ‘snakes’, and ‘friends with the enemy’ (referring here to Afghanistan’s growing friendly terms with India, which Pakistan calls its number one enemy). Within the pool of stories that had employed the enemy frame, over half (57%) had also referred to Afghan refugees as terrorists, indicating multiple competing conflict-escalatory frames in a single story. Such targeted, frequent and, at times, saturated media framing representing Afghan refugees as the ‘enemy’ legitimizes the public fear attached to Afghan refugees and may have contributed to the Pakistani public becoming suspicious about refugees, in particular about their presence and movement inside Pakistan. This type of framing highlights refugees as a potential threat and becomes one of the main ways through which the media dehumanize refugees (Esses et al., 2013; Henry and Tator, 2002). Additionally, the enemy frame draws upon existing stereotypes that are embedded within a society about individuals associated with an ‘out-group’ (them or other). According to Halpern and Weinstein (2004), out-groups often lose their identity and come to represent mere categories. This is evidenced in the use of the words ‘illegal aliens’ for Afghan refugees (Dawn, 19 September 2018), noted 74 times in the news corpus, and repeated reference to Afghan refugees as ‘dubious’ and a ‘major security threat’. The enemy framing occurs first on an individual level, where individual members of the Afghan refugee community are singled out in reportage, and later shifts to a collective negative identity, which is part of the dehumanization process. The ‘us vs them’ discourse prevents members of the in-group (us and we) from associating with the out-group (Bahador, 2012). As a result, negatively perceived actions by an out-group, even if conducted by a few, are projected to the entire population, and this further delegitimizes all members, who thus become: the enemy.

The ‘bad’ neighbor

The unwarranted attribution of blame appeared as a prominent framing approach in the overall conflict-escalatory media logic. In nearly half of news stories and articles (46%), Afghan refugees and the Afghan government were blamed for non-cooperation with Pakistan over refugee repatriation, situational escalation of political tensions between the two countries, and security events at the border and elsewhere in Pakistan. Additionally, journalists in these stories also blamed Afghanistan for hampering the peace process in the region, referring to their attitude as ‘child-like’, ‘immature’, ‘nasty’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘non-serious’, and ‘unpredictable’. Stories that incorporated the blame frame presented Afghan refugees as a ‘burden’ from the ‘bad neighbor’, who is ‘thankless’, a ‘user’, and a ‘traitor’. Two accusations were recurrently attributed to the Afghan government. First, that the Afghan government was deliberately refusing to take back Afghan refugees despite peace in their home country. This is not factually correct since political instability and security were major concerns of the Afghan government at the time. The US Department of Homeland Security recorded 1,716 terrorist attacks in Afghanistan in 2015; 1,343 in 2016; 1,171 in 2017; and 1,294 in 2018. The second accusation was that Afghanistan was aligning itself with India against Pakistan. These stories focused on the growing relations between Afghanistan and India, and how the Indian government and intelligence services were using Afghan refugees for spying, terrorism, and other criminal activities in Pakistan.

Overall, the Pakistani media seems to be at war with the Afghan refugees. The antagonistic framing in Newsline repeated similar framing patterns found in the two newspapers, creating a limited or distorted view of a conflict, sensationalizing coverage, and misrepresenting the oppressed groups (Carruthers 2011; Lynch and Galtung, 2010; Rodny-Gumede, 2015). Since historical references to the conflict and Afghan refugee movement into Pakistan was acutely missing from the coverage, with limited prior knowledge, readers become more prone to adopting the frames offered by journalists (Rodny-Gumede, 2015) and thinking along the same lines as the journalist. The incorporation of the blame frame thus becomes easier.

Ethno-nationalism and tribalism

My analysis exposed the ordinariness of ethno-nationalism and tribalism in the way Afghan refugees were presented in media coverage. The ethno-nationalist frame was employed in 18 percent of the stories, primarily by linking terrorism with the ethnic identity and background of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. This alignment was clearer in stories where journalists focused on who was responsible for terrorism-related security issues in Pakistan. These stories focused more on the ethnicity of the refugees than on the event, the threat or the security measures taken by law enforcement agencies. For instance, in the November 2018 edition of Newsline, the journalist went to the extent of presenting Afghan refugees as a threat to the identity of the Pakistani Pashtun. According to the article, ‘Should Afghan and Bengali refugees be given citizenship status?’ (Newsline, November 2018), granting Afghan refugees Pakistani citizenship would make Pakistani Pashtuns weak in Pashtun-dominated areas, such as KP province. The article suggests an overpopulation of Afghan Pashtuns would trigger ethnic rivalry in the country. This type of inflammatory framing can generate a sense of hyped insecurity and social anxiety among the Pakistani audience. The article is asking readers to view refugees as not only an economic threat, but also a threat to their tribal and ethnic survival. The article demonstrates the media’s propagandist coverage, where strategies nudging public emotions concerning national and ethnic ideologies are at play. As a whole, the media corpus reflects how acutely Pakistan mistrusts Afghan refugees. The media predominantly speak for the government, which uses Afghan refugees to bear the brunt of political misunderstandings and hostility between the two governments. It is a vicious cycle. A public suspicion about refugees and other minorities can lead to their social isolation, legitimize their suffering, and encourage their marginalization.

Using political and military elite as sources

Half of the news stories and articles in the corpus (51%) drew heavily on the political and military elite as the primary or only source. The use of political and military elite as sources became more evident in follow-up stories on terrorist attacks. Carmichael and Brulle (2017) argue that because political elites have a considerable influence on political discourse, using them as a source has a stronger and long-lasting impact on public opinion. Simultaneously, it may take away credibility from the other side, in this case refugees. By using political or military elites as their primary sources, media are progressing the political agenda, either by choice or through pressure. In both cases, one thing is happening: the politicization of media coverage. For instance, in March 2016, a bomb blast ripped through a bus carrying government employees in Peshawar city, killing 21 people. In this specific case, almost all coverage (98%) quoted political and military elite as primary sources. The special assistant to the chief minister was quick to hold a press conference and put the blame on Afghan refugees, yet again linking it to ‘Afghan perpetrators’. The Express Tribune’s front-page story the following day reported that ‘all masterminds [of these attacks] were in Afghanistan’ (The Express Tribune, 17 March 2016), without giving any context. On the other hand, where political and military elite were not quoted, sources were more likely to be missing (31%). Additionally, stories also lacked solid evidence of Afghanistan’s or Afghan refugees’ involvement in the bombing, making most of the coverage speculative.

Emerging peace journalism frames

In addition to the recurrence of four conflict-escalatory frames in the media discourse, a sporadic employment of peace-oriented frames was also observed, presenting Pakistani media industry as a potential market for peace journalism practice. Three frames were noted that either gave prominence to refugees’ struggles and injustices, illustrated the largely oppressive and exploitative treatment of Afghan refugees by the Pakistani government and security officials, and/or humanized Afghan refugees. However, they were employed infrequently in the coverage over the three years. First was the justice delivery frame, which addresses a broad spectrum of peace journalism properties, and has been used by many scholars who have used the nexus between media and justice as an analytical framework to study media representations in varied cases (Askanius and Hartley, 2019; Austin and Farrell, 2017). In my study, the justice delivery frame speaks for refugees who are victims of oppression, exploitation, and human rights abuse and violation. This frame is based on Galtung’s notion of positive peace, ‘the integration of human society’ and the ‘prevalence of justice, harmony and equality’ (Galtung, 1964: 2). As an analytical frame, justice delivery refers to greater equality in both the resettlement and rehabilitation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and immunity from forced repatriation. One of the ways the justice delivery frame humanized Afghan refugees was by giving prominence to stories of refugees’ struggles that have direct consequences for their intimate lives. For example, a story in The Express Tribune (5 September 2016) details the challenges faced by Pakistani women who had married an Afghan refugee, and were asking the government to stop forcefully repatriating them. It quoted one of the women saying: ‘Our families have divided . . . They have sent my husband to Afghanistan, who has also taken my sons along with him.’ Portraying the women’s struggles through their vulnerability and concerns for their relationships individualizes them as a casualty of state policy on forced repatriation and may provoke compassion among the readers. It also draws attention to the repercussions of repatriation on helpless families, stranded on both sides of the Durand Line. The news story also triggers empathy, which is a significant characteristic of peace journalism (Langdon, 2018) and of a society where justice prevails. Langdon argues that, in recognizing the universality of human experience, media can draw the ‘other’ closer in our consciousness so that we are viewing from a position of morality, empathy, and solidarity rather than fear, distance, and apathy.

Second was the admission–confession frame, which creates a narrative through which the media exercise their independence and power in democracies (Bennett, 2007), and makes the government accountable for decisions that affect marginalized groups. Through calls for transparency and accountability, the media not only ask ‘who is responsible?’, but also answer the question for a broader public understanding. Payne (2008) argues that governments often suppress the media and public debates in the name of national security, peace, and democracy, causing an ideological polarization. Through the employment of the admission–confession frame, media take an agentive role in indexing the power relations between the weak and the powerful, and raising critical issues around state accountability. It starts by exposing cover-ups about human rights violations, and dispelling propaganda. One prominent example of the admission–confession frame is a (2016) Herald article, titled ‘Why should I care about Afghan refugees?’ (Herald, 20 August 2016). In this article, the journalist provides three important reasons behind the Af-Pak political conflict, and the deteriorating refugee crisis: (1) Pakistan’s military assistance to America to create the Taliban; (2) the plundering of Afghan land, culture and resources by Pakistan; and (3) the mistreatment and exploitation of Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan, referring to the exodus as ‘largely forcible repatriation’. She also reminds readers about the Naturalization Act of 1926, under which the Pakistani state grants citizenship to those born in the country. She writes, ‘a birth right enshrined in the Naturalization Act of 1926 – that citizenship cannot be denied.’ In doing so, while she makes a compelling case for the Pakistani government to consider granting citizenship to refugees born in Pakistan, she is also educating readers about a law that is missing from mainstream public debate and knowledge. The admission–confession frame was found in only 3 percent of the news stories and magazine articles over three years.

The third frame, the empathy–sympathy frame, focuses on the three main elements that play an important part in the process of developing a cognitive empathy towards other people: shared values, beliefs, and norms (Stephan and Finlay, 1999), which, as my findings suggest, were mostly missing from the coverage of Afghan refugees. Empathy-oriented coverage prompts readers to imagine themselves in the place of the marginalized groups and perceive the situation from their point of view. I found a very sporadic employment of the empathy–sympathy frame in the coverage, which may explain why the attitude of Pakistani nationals has been largely antagonistic towards Afghan refugees since their mass arrival into the country after the Taliban first took power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Overall, only 189 news stories and magazine articles (out of the total 1,550) employed the empathy–sympathy frame, mostly in a very implicit way.

The identification of some emerging frames, although used rarely in the coverage, suggest that peace journalism practice in Pakistan lies somewhere between the dormant and emerging stages – it is present, but not enough to challenge or influence the dominant conflict–escalatory narrative in the media in general. Results indicate that, overall, Herald used peace-oriented framing more than Newsline, Dawn, and the Express Tribune. Herald’s coverage included more stories where Afghan refugees were identified by their names, and the focus remained on their suffering. There were more instances where Herald had used individual stories to represent the plight of Afghan refugees at large. The issues that were most highlighted included the challenges of family separation across the border, lack of access to health and education, infant mortality in refugee camps, harassment at border crossings, and illegal detention. There were some happy stories of love and union across the border as well. These stories tend to give the reader a different view of Afghan refugees – a perspective that contrasts with their otherwise dominant representation as terrorists or the enemy. For some time, through these stories, the Afghan refugee is not a threat, but a vulnerable individual who is displaced, separated from family, exploited by security agencies and police in the host state, and misrepresented by the mainstream media.

Conclusion

This study broadens the scope of peace journalism in the media coverage of an ongoing conflict in a non-western and high context socio-political setup. Informed by Galtung’s Peace and War Journalism Model (1986, 1998), the CDA reveals that the coverage over three years was largely conflict-oriented, anti-Afghan refugees, highly politicized in the matter, and almost exclusively aligned with state policy on Afghan refugees and Afghanistan. The use of conflict-escalatory frames was consistent through the sample years and mutually reinforced by all four publications – almost as if the government was legitimizing its forced repatriation policy and treatment of Afghan refugees through media discourse. Afghan refugees were largely presented as a threat to national security with narrow and one-sided framing. Identifying the common discursive structures and themes used in the media coverage of Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan, the study presents a grim picture of peace journalism practice in the country. Moreover, the debate about the settlement and peaceful repatriation of Afghan refugees was broadly missing from the coverage, consequently ignoring issues such as the need for reform and peaceful resolution of the conflict. Based on my analysis, I conclude that: (1) all Afghan refugees in Pakistan, regardless of their residency status, gender, age or vulnerability, are incorporated into media discourses of deviancy that stem from and are based on notions of the ‘other’; (2) (mis)representations, stemming from the conflict-escalatory framing in Pakistani media, actively contribute to the production, reinforcement and reshaping of structural and systemic anti-Afghan sentiments; (3) the problematized framing of the Afghan refugees and the issues around their arrival, alleged involvement in terrorist activities, forced repatriation and settlement in Pakistan is legitimizing the collective insecurities and uncertainties of the host country and increasing public anxiety around the free movement of Afghan refugees; and (4) media are politicized, and anti-Afghan-refugee nationalistic coverage that amplifies securitization is frequent. My findings suggest that this negative media representation is almost entirely intentional, and it would be interesting to examine whether dominant framing patterns in the media coverage of Afghan refugees have changed after Kabul fell into the hands of the Taliban on 15 August 2021, triggering another exodus of Afghan refugees into Pakistan and Iran. Additionally, the need to rethink the media narrative in Pakistan cannot be denied. I observed that the Pakistani media coverage of Afghan refugees and the Pak-Afghan conflict explicitly denies refugees or Afghan authorities any voice in the discourse. Not only are their voices and perspectives missing or alarmingly underreported, but there is also an exaggerated level of nationalism, propaganda, and conflict provocation in the repertoire. The media have the power and ability to bring the narrative of the oppressed and the marginalized to light and become a catalyst for social and political change. These problems in the media coverage cannot be resolved unless Pakistani media are depoliticized, a process that can begin by giving Afghan refugees a voice in coverage.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-mwc-10.1177_17506352221149559 – Supplemental material for Finding peace journalism: An analysis of Pakistani media discourse on Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mwc-10.1177_17506352221149559 for Finding peace journalism: An analysis of Pakistani media discourse on Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan by Ayesha Jehangir in Media, War & Conflict

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article, and there is no conflict of interest.

ORCID iD

Ayesha Jehangir

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biography

Ayesha Jehangir is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology Sydney. Ayesha’s research focuses on mainstream and digital media narratives of war, conflict and peace, media framing and representation. Her forthcoming book is The Missing Peace: Refugees, Media and the State (Routledge, 2023).

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