Framing an African Conflict: Perspectives from the Local Press – An Explanatory Mixed Methods Study of Newspaper Coverage and Framing of the 2013 South Sudan Conflict in Three East African Countries.

This mixed methods study analysed coverage and framing of the violent conflict that erupted in South Sudan in December 2013, in leading newspapers in three East African countries (Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda). Grounded in the Framing Theory and in literature on media framing of war and conflict, and of Africa and her conflicts, the study had three objectives. These were: to identify frames in the coverage of the conflict in six English newspapers (two in each of the selected countries); to identify the factors that influenced the framing; and to draw inferences about this faming in relation to Western/international media portrayal of conflicts in Africa as mainly ethnic and tribal. The study used the Explanatory Sequential Design–Follow-up Explanations Model, including quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the coverage and qualitative in-depth interviews with a select number of journalists. The findings show that the dominant frames were: conflict solution, security threat, and humanitarian crisis. Other frames present were: attribution of responsibility, power struggle, economic consequences, ethnic hatreds, and morality. From a country perspective, the conflict solution frame was prominent in the Kenyan press, while humanitarian crisis and security threat were the dominant frames in South Sudan and Uganda respectively. Overall, the coverage did not depict or classify the conflict as typically ethnic, or as having been caused by rivalries between the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups, although ethnicity served to contextualize the coverage. The factors that influenced framing of the conflict were: sources, access, the hostile media environment, complexity of the conflict, local context and audience interests, and journalists’ own knowledge and convictions about the conflict.