We will be collaborating with Making Peace Visible’s 2025 International Symposium in Washington, D.C.
Making Peace Visible (MPV) is the only bridge-building organization dedicated to convening journalists and other media professionals with peacebuilders. Our mission is to foster a more informed, engaged civic culture that supports peace as an essential part of democratic participation. By activating cross-disciplinary connections, we aim to help reduce the prevalence of divisive narratives and promote methods of reporting that highlight peace and reconciliation efforts that help prevent and resolve conflicts.
2018 MPV International Symposium, NYTimes Center, NYC
MPV will launch our second international Summit in October 2025, in Washington, D.C. We will host experts in journalism, peacebuilding, neuroscience, and technology, examining how media both helps and hinders peace efforts. We will critically address how narratives about peace are shaped and disseminated; how the news can help educate the public on the viability, successes and long-term impact of peacebuilding; and how we might collectively implement strategies across all media platforms for powerful, transformative storytelling.
The Problem We Are Addressing: Multilayered peacebuilding is largely invisible, as our media landscapes are heavily dominated by reporting on bombs, blood, and bad news. Stories that capture human decency, mutual understanding, and heroic, painstaking peacebuilding efforts rarely see the light of day. This is despite growing evidence that media consumers, particularly in the U.S., increasingly prefer news that is hopeful, solutions-based, and constructive.
Scholars in media and journalism studies have long recognized that the news plays a crucial role in shaping public and political discourse. Conventional ways of covering political conflict distorts this discourse, offering the public a narrow, incomplete view that marginalizes, if not ignores altogether, key actors. This skewed narrative restricts opportunities for informed participation, depriving citizens of the full context needed to engage meaningfully in democratic processes. Oversimplified, polarizing narratives exacerbate conflicts, deepen divisions, and undermine public support for peace efforts.
Peacebuilding is a proven, long-term process that requires changing attitudes, behaviors, and social norms before, during and after conflict. It involves analyzing conflicts to understand their root causes and developing strategies to prevent and reduce violence. But peacebuilding will continue to be ignored as long as the public remains unaware of its proven effectiveness.
The 2025 International Summit: We are working with our partners and allies to move peacebuilders and peace initiatives closer to the front burner of public discourse. A two-day summit in Washington, D.C. will create a platform for key stakeholders in conflict reporting to engage with peacebuilders, neuroscientists, and technologists to examine how both the news media and social media play dual roles in hindering and promoting peace efforts. These key stakeholders include journalists worldwide, editors as gatekeepers, researchers providing critical media analysis, peacebuilders facilitating civil discourse, journalism students, and program officers at philanthropic foundations. The summit will feature dynamic presentations, experiential workshops, and the latest research, to foster strategies for reimagining media coverage of peace and conflict. We will also debut the first ever MPV Story Awards, monetary awards given to journalists for excellence in peace reporting. This event follows the success of our inaugural symposium at the New York Times Center in 2018, a partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting that attracted over 400 journalists and peacebuilders. Following this, MPV founder Jamil Simon was awarded the Luxembourg Peace Prize.
Our current partners include George Washington University Media and Peacebuilding Project, Beyond Conflict, and Search for Common Ground, and we are exploring partnership with several other leading organizations.
Themes and Outcomes: This summit will be a pivotal opportunity to refine media practices and promote improved conflict reporting. Incorporating pre- and post-event analysis and surveys, this summit will offer:
• Mindful and Inclusive Reporting Practices: Journalists will learn how peace initiatives are best reported, including best practices for ethical, trauma-sensitive reporting and the necessity of including a greater diversity of voices, especially the invaluable yet overlooked role women play in peacebuilding processes. Strategies to avoid biases, propaganda, and misinformation will also be included.
• Tech and Social Cohesion: The news media landscape has been transformed by social media and AI, democratizing information but also amplifying misinformation and divisiveness, which stifles peace narratives. Experts in tech and social cohesion will address these challenges and explore solutions.
• Neuroscience, Journalism and Peace: In collaboration with Tim Phillips of Beyond Conflict, we will feature discussions led by experts in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science, providing a deeper understanding of how media narratives and language influence human emotions, decision making, and behavior. We will explore strategies to create stories that include empathy, dialogue, and constructive conflict resolution.
• Peacebuilding Workshop for Journalists: We will offer an immersive workshop to provide a hands-on experience of conflict resolution. By modeling key aspects of the negotiation process, participants will gain a deeper understanding of strategies for de-escalation. This experiential approach will equip journalists with the tools to report on peace efforts more accurately.
• Communication for Peacebuilders: We will highlight case studies of effective peacebuilding communication, demonstrating how messaging and the creative use of both narrative and nonfiction media tools can influence public perception, encourage engagement, and foster peaceful outcomes. This will provide valuable insights for journalists and peacebuilders.
• Strengthened Collaboration and Networking: The summit will provide a rare opportunity for idea exchange and relationship-building among journalists, peacebuilders, media scholars, and funders, fostering future collaborations, advocacy efforts, and joint projects to improve conflict reporting.
Additional Offerings: To extend the reach of the summit beyond the event itself, MPV will incorporate these crucial dialogues into our online offerings in the form of podcast episodes, articles for our journal NUANCE, and video content for the MPV Education Initiative:
• Making Peace Visible Podcast Features journalists, peacebuilders, scholars and activists, grappling with the news media's impact on public perceptions of peace and conflict. Our 45+ podcast episodes have been downloaded in 124 countries.
• NUANCE is a seasonal online journal with essays, interviews, and photojournalism projects that explore innovative solutions for elevating peace in the media.
• MPV Education Initiative offers global training in ethical reporting, reconciliation coverage, and media literacy through online and in-person courses for journalists, journalism students, and educators.