How Journalists Navigate Conflict, Territorial Contestation, and Multiple Levels of Government: Notes from the Field

Post by Olga Zeveleva. Olga is a political sociologist working on social control, media, and prisons. She completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge in 2019, and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded project GULAGECHOES at the University of Helsinki, focusing on social control and penal systems.

Over the past four years, I have been grappling with the question of how to analyse the effects of conflict and political transformation on journalists. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, I watched Moscow ramp up security measures and rhetoric about external threats to Russia’s territorial integrity, and the media became a central part of the state security framework. Journalists who challenged dominant state discourses about security and territory ran the risk of becoming targets of criminal proceedings, state violence, and other forms of punishment. Yet neither mainstream studies of the media nor criminological research offer methodological tools and theories that can help us navigate how states punish and reward journalists working in such volatile political landscapes. Both fields of study suffer from methodological nationalism, which blocks from view both transnational and hyperlocal contexts. My research ties together the transnational and the hyperlocal dimensions of media production, addressing how journalists deal with direct and indirect methods of punishment at various levels of state and society.

In 2015-2018, I conducted a large research project on conflict and media in Crimea (you can read about some of my results in the paper How States Tighten Control in the British Journal of Sociology, 2019). I explored the question of how conflict and border change shape journalistic strategies. I also conducted a comparative case study of a peaceful region that is not embroiled in border contestation, turning to Tatarstan, a republic in the east-central part of European Russia.

To compare a context of conflict with a context of peacetime, I relied on biographical sociology (which allowed me to gather interviews with journalists in politically sensitive settings) and Bourdieusian field theory in order to examine career strategies used by journalists. My analysis draws on 70 narrative interviews with journalists, as well as officials and human rights workers who work with the media.

Both of the regions I examined (Crimea within Ukraine, and Tatarstan within Russia) have fostered comparably lively local media environments after the breakup of the Soviet Union, including TV channels, municipal newspapers, as well as media that target multiethnic and multilingual populations. Both regions, according to Russian law, now have “republic” status within the Russian Federation, which means they formally enjoy a higher level of autonomy of local government than other types of regional sub-divisions in Russia. Russia’s claims over Crimea, however, are hotly contested, and Ukraine and much of the international community recognize Crimea to be a part of Ukraine.

Despite some similarities, there are important differences between the regions. Crimea has been the focus of a territorial conflict between Russia and Ukraine since 2014, when Russia annexed the region; Tatarstan is a peaceful region with no border conflicts. Moreover, while Tatarstan’s government is relatively autonomous in comparison to other regions in Russia, the government of Crimea has been heavily controlled by Moscow since the 2014 annexation.

Journalists who continue to work in Crimea in the post-2014 period have learned to navigate a highly securitized media landscape that has been largely shaped by funding, production practices, and pressure from Moscow. However, some journalists who are critical of Russia have also left Crimea since 2014 and have formed a dynamic community of ‘exiled’ media in Kyiv. Approximately half a dozen outlets based in Kyiv today continue to focus on Crimean news, and, according to journalists I interviewed in Kyiv, have loyal audiences on the peninsula. As a result, the Crimean media landscape has become one that can be characterized by polarization: mostly Russian state-controlled media reporting from within the peninsula with dominant pro-Russia discourses, and those in opposition to Russia’s actions in Crimea reporting from outside the peninsula targeting Crimean audiences (for more on this, see my paper Towards a Bourdieusian Sociology of Self-Censorship in the European Journal of Communication, 2020).

Journalists in Tatarstan, by contrast, work in a media environment shaped by different factors. I use Larissa Buchholz’s term “multiscalar media field” to describe the situation in Tatarstan, as various actors at different levels of government (municipal/district level, regional level and federal level) both constrain and enable local journalists in their work. Tatarstan, unlike Crimea, is not a part of any international conflict and there are no external challenges to the foundations of its local social and political configurations. Local journalists in Tatarstan cannot easily ‘pick a side’, and do not feel they will be protected or rewarded for doing so. Thus, when a journalistic community is less polarized and less mobilized around a cause, journalists are less certain of their position in relation to different powerful actors, and are more nuanced and careful in their professional roles.

The relationship between journalists and various political scales (i.e. the city, district, region, nation-state, international arena) determines the types of resources that journalists seek to advance their careers. In Crimea, a region embroiled in a territorial conflict and where the two relevant scales are Moscow and the international scale, symbolic capital is most important. If a journalist demonstrates their loyalty to Moscow and reproduces pro-Kremlin discourses, this will enable them to rise up in their career. In Tatarstan, by contrast, social capital (i.e. personal connections) is most decisive for journalists as they navigate complex and sometimes unpredictable relationships between different levels of state influence (from the municipal to the regional and federal), and play these levels off of each other depending on the target of their critiques.

This research shows that that it is helpful to analyse journalistic fields by considering their embeddedness in municipal, regional, national, and international geopolitical contexts simultaneously. If we analyse only one of these contexts, we risk misjudging the degree of autonomy of the field, as well as missing crucial actors and institutions that play roles in shaping the limits of journalistic autonomy.

Acknowledgements:This research would not have been possible without the generous support of Newnham College Cambridge, the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. 

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Zeveleva, O. (2020). How Journalists Navigate Conflict, Territorial Contestation, and Multiple Levels of Government: Notes from the Field. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/11/how-journalists [date]