How the book was made
Everything here is open. The book grew out of a master's thesis in political science completed at the University of Geneva in 2009 under the supervision of Léa Sgier. The thesis, the corpus and the coding frame are all below, so the analysis can be checked, extended or contested.
The research question
To what extent does the Western press, when reporting armed conflict on the African continent, construct its account along lines inherited from the colonial relationship?
The question is deliberately narrow. It is not about whether coverage is “fair”, nor about the intentions of individual reporters. It asks whether a specific, historically identifiable discourse — colonial discourse, with its recurring figures and vocabulary — can be shown to organise the framing of a contemporary conflict.
Why the Second Congo War
Three reasons. It is the deadliest conflict since 1945, so any argument about neglect cannot be answered by saying the story was small. It is unambiguously political and multi-state — nine national armies were involved — so a “natural disaster” framing cannot be explained by genuine confusion. And it runs alongside the Bosnian war closely enough in time to allow a controlled comparison between how a European and an African conflict were narrated by the same publications.
The corpus
Every article on the conflict published in The Economist and Le Point between 1 August 1998 and 30 July 2003 — the full span of the war, from the mutinies in Kinshasa to the formation of the transitional government. Forty-six articles form the core corpus: 34 in The Economist, 12 in Le Point.
Both are weekly news magazines of record, addressed to an educated and influential readership, with a stated commitment to analysis rather than breaking news. Neither is a tabloid. That is the point: if the colonial script is visible here, it is not a fringe phenomenon.
Three analytical frameworks
Framing theory
Following Entman, Goffman, Gitlin and Iyengar: media do not reflect reality, they select aspects of it and make them salient, promoting a particular definition of a problem, a causal interpretation, a moral evaluation and a recommended treatment. Each of these four functions becomes a coding category.
Critical discourse analysis
Following Fairclough and Van Dijk: language is examined as a site where power relations are reproduced. Attention goes to lexical choice, metaphor, transitivity — who acts and who is acted upon — nominalisation, and the distribution of quoted speech.
Postcolonial theory
Following Said, Mbembe, Bhabha, Mudimbe, Spurr and Fanon: the colonial relationship produced a durable body of representation about the colonised. The analysis tests whether the figures catalogued in that literature reappear, intact, in contemporary reportage.
What was coded
- Attributed causes and moral evaluation — how the conflict is explained, and to whom responsibility is assigned.
- Proposed solutions — which actors are presented as capable of ending the war, and which initiatives are treated as credible.
- Interlocutors — who is quoted directly, who is paraphrased, who is described but never heard, and in what capacity.
The three chapters of the thesis correspond to these three axes; chapters 3 to 5 of the book follow the same division.
Limits, stated plainly
- Two publications, both weeklies, both elite. The findings describe a segment of the Western press, not all of it.
- Print only. Television and radio coverage — arguably more influential — is outside the corpus.
- No newsroom ethnography. The analysis reads outputs, not the decisions that produced them.
- The corpus ends in 2003. Chapter 7 discusses continuity into the present, but does not code it.
Each of these is an opening. The section below suggests what to do with them.
Primary materials
The original research, in full, exactly as submitted.
Six research projects this leaves open
Written for students looking for a dissertation topic. Each of these can be done with the method described above and publicly available archives.
Replicate on a 2020s corpus
Run the same coding frame on coverage of the M23 resurgence in eastern DRC, 2021 to today. Do the four frames survive twenty years and a change of newsroom generation?
Change the publications
The same period, the same war, but Jeune Afrique, The Continent or Congolese outlets. What does the story look like when the frame is not inherited?
Move to broadcast and social
Extend from print to television packages, podcasts and platform video, where visual grammar carries much of the framing work.
Trace coverage into policy
Match the framing timeline against parliamentary debates, aid allocations and Security Council language. Does the naturalisation frame precede or follow the policy?
Compare across regions
Apply the playbook to coverage of Haiti, the Sahel, Papua or Indigenous communities in settler states. How portable is the script?
Interview the newsroom
The missing half of this study: what correspondents and editors believed they were doing. Elite interviews with the bylines in the corpus.
Works cited
The book's full bibliography, grouped by theme. Everything here is either foundational to the method or directly quoted in the text.
Framing, media and the manufacture of attention
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. On Television. Trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. New York: The New Press.
- Carruthers, Susan L. 2000. The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century. London: Macmillan.
- Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
- Entman, Robert M. 2004. Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
- Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Hall, Stuart, ed. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
- Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Moeller, Susan D. 1999. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York: Routledge.
Colonial discourse and postcolonial theory
- Achebe, Chinua. 1977. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 18 (4): 782–94.
- Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2000. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge.
- Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
- Blanchard, Pascal, and Nicolas Bancel. 1998. De l'indigène à l'immigré. Paris: La Découverte-Gallimard.
- Conrad, Joseph. 1902. Heart of Darkness. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.
- Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.
- Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold's Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
- Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Young, Robert J. C. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Blackwell.
The Congo wars and the Great Lakes
- Autesserre, Séverine. 2010. The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Braeckman, Colette. 2003. Les nouveaux prédateurs: Politique des puissances en Afrique centrale. Paris: Fayard.
- Clark, John F., ed. 2002. The African Stakes of the Congo War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Gilmore, Inigo. 2006. The Black Heart of the Congo. London: Pan Books.
- Human Rights Watch. 2005. The Curse of Gold: Democratic Republic of Congo. hrw.org
- International Rescue Committee. 2008. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis. rescue.org
- Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. 2002. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History. London: Zed Books.
- Prunier, Gérard. 2009. Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Renton, David, David Seddon, and Leo Zeilig. 2007. The Congo: Plunder and Resistance. London: Zed Books.
- Stearns, Jason. 2011. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York: PublicAffairs.
- Turner, Thomas. 2007. The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality. London: Zed Books.
- United Nations. 2002. Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo. S/2002/1146. digitallibrary.un.org
Africa's media image, and the alternatives
- Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TEDGlobal, July.
- Allen, Tim, and Jean Seaton, eds. 1999. The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence. London: Zed Books.
- Gathara, Patrick. n.d. Columns for Al Jazeera. aljazeera.com
- Hawk, Beverly G., ed. 1992. Africa's Media Image. Westport, CT: Praeger.
- Myers, Garth, Thomas Klak, and Timothy Koehl. 1996. “The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia.” Political Geography 15 (1): 21–46.
- Rau, Milo, dir. 2017. The Congo Tribunal. Fruitmarket Arts & Media. thecongotribunal.com
- Wainaina, Binyavanga. 2005. “How to Write About Africa.” Granta 92.
- Wall, Melissa. 2007. “An Analysis of News Magazine Coverage of the Rwanda Crisis in the United States.” In The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, ed. Allan Thompson, 261–73. Ottawa: IDRC.
Every article analysed
The complete list, in order of publication. Reading the headlines alone is close to an argument in itself.
The Economist — 1 August 1998 to 30 July 2003
- 15 Aug 1998 Congo bloody-go-round
- 15 Aug 1998 Congo erupts again
- 22 Aug 1998 War in the heart of Africa
- 29 Aug 1998 Congo. Friends, ex-friends and rebels
- 5 Sep 1998 Heading for an African war
- 3 Oct 1998 A continent goes to war
- 3 Oct 1998 Congo. The cost of Kabila
- 24 Oct 1998 Congo. War turns commercial
- 7 Nov 1998 Uganda and Congo. Gambling on the war
- 7 Nov 1998 Zimbabwe and Congo. Down with the war
- 23 Jan 1999 Congo, Wall Street raided
- 20 Mar 1999 Congo, bash and grab
- 26 Jun 1999 Congo's fractured war
- 17 Jul 1999 The war is dead, long live the war
- 23 Oct 1999 Split Congo with peace treaties…
- 20 Nov 1999 Fighting over the carcass
- 15 Jan 2000 Mobutu, warts and all
- 26 Feb 2000 Get out of our country
- 29 Apr 2000 War and peace in Congo
- 17 Jun 2000 Congo's hidden war
- 29 Jul 2000 Far from Congo's battlefield
- 19 Aug 2000 A snub from Kabila
- 23 Sep 2000 In Congo, war gets serious
- 9 Dec 2000 In the heart of darkness
- 20 Jan 2001 Laurent Kabila
- 20 Jan 2001 Kabila's Congo
- 20 Jan 2001 Congo without Kabila
- 27 Jan 2001 Kabila is dead, long live Kabila
- 23 Mar 2001 Who killed Laurent Kabila?
- 12 Oct 2002 At last, a sort of peace to keep
- 29 Mar 2003 Peace, they say, but the killing goes on
- 17 May 2003 Waiting to be rescued
- 24 May 2003 The global menace of local strife — civil wars
- 14 Jun 2003 Is protection a mirage?
- 14 Jun 2003 Africa's open wound
Le Point — 1 août 1998 au 30 juillet 2003
- 15 août 1998 Les multiples erreurs de Kabila
- 22 août 1998 Goma, l'histoire bégaie
- 29 août 1998 Congo, la situation dégénère
- 5 sept. 1998 Pourquoi la paix se fait attendre
- 14 nov. 1998 Menace d'incendie généralisée
- 28 nov. 1998 Congo-Kinshasa : la descente aux enfers
- 28 nov. 1998 France–Afrique : le marigot congolais
- 20 mars 1999 Profil : l'homme de pierre de Kabila
- 20 août 1999 Congo, une guerre entre alliés
- 9 mars 2001 La guerre des diamants
- 16 juin 2001 Rwanda–Ouganda : le bain de sang de Kisangani
- 2 août 2002 Congo-Rwanda : un fragile accord de paix
The Second Congo War, 1998–2003
The events the corpus is reporting on. Sources: Olivier Lanotte, République démocratique du Congo: guerres sans frontières (GRIP/Complexe, 2003); Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War (2009).
Kabila dismisses General James Kabarebe as interim chief of staff and expels 800 Rwandan soldiers. Open conflict with his Rwandan allies begins.
Simultaneous mutinies across the country; the attack on the presidential palace fails. Rwandan and Ugandan troops seize airliners and airlift forces west. Zimbabwe, then Angola and Namibia, intervene for Kinshasa. The front line between government-held west and rebel-held east is set for the duration.
The MLC is founded with Ugandan backing; the RCD, increasingly backed by Rwanda, splits into factions.
The Sirte agreement produces only a Chadian withdrawal. In July, the Lusaka ceasefire is signed by six national armies and three rebel groups. It is largely never implemented.
Rwandan and Ugandan forces — until now allies — fight each other in Kisangani over control of the gold mines.
Laurent-Désiré Kabila is assassinated by members of his guard. His son Joseph succeeds him and announces a new mining and investment code.
Security Council Resolution 1291 authorises 5,537 peacekeepers. They arrive in March.
A UN panel names 85 companies in breach of international law over the exploitation of gold, diamonds, coltan and timber, and finds that appropriation of natural resources is a primary objective of the parties. No sanctions follow.
The Sun City accords are signed and, unlike their predecessors, respected. A transitional government including all Congolese parties is formed in July, formally ending the war.