Article Identifying peace-oriented media strategies for deadly conflicts in Pakistan Shabbir Hussain International Islamic University Jake Lynch University of Sydney Abstract This paper investigates the existing journalistic practices in three deadly conflicts in Pakistan and also proposes corrective peace-oriented media strategies. Based on semi-structured interviews with journalists, analysts and stakeholders involved in the religiously inspired Taliban conflict, separatist-led Balochistan conflict and the ethno-political conflict in Karachi, six strategies have been identified. These include highlighting the problems of sufferers and contextualization of the Taliban conflict; inclusion of multi-perspectives and highlighting the voices of peacemakers in the Balochistan conflict; humanization and solution-oriented coverage of the ethno-political conflict in Karachi. While the journalists agreed these strategies were very much in line with their professional duties, the analysts and stakeholders hoped the proposed journalistic practices would lead to better understanding and facilitate resolution of the three conflicts. Based on the findings of this article, the researchers advocate a pragmatic form of peace journalism that reflects the ground realities as compared to the more critical form of peace journalism that becomes difficult to be practiced in conflict scenarios. Keywords peace journalism, deadly conflicts, semi-structured interviews, propaganda, censorship, Pakistan Submitted: 22 March, 2018; Accepted: 29 May, 2018. Introduction and background Johan Galtung developed the concept of peace jour- nalism in the 1970s as a corrective approach to the traditional journalistic practices of conflict reporting. Peace journalism offers practical guidelines for con- structive reporting of conflicts alongside a critique on the existing journalistic practices that are often accused of escalating conflicts (Kempf and Shinar, 2014). Peace journalism is defined by Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) as a set of “choices—of what to report and how to report it—which creates opportu- nities for readers and audiences to consider and value nonviolent responses to conflict” (p. 6). In the model originally developed by Galtung (1998), the dominant war journalism form is characterized by four key “orientations”: towards war and violence; towards propaganda; towards elites; and towards victory. The remedial peace journalism form, then, is oriented towards peace and conflict, towards truth, towards people, and towards solutions. Shinar (2007), in a later survey of the field, identified five key aspects of what researchers referred to as peace journalism: 1. Explores backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation, and presenting causes and options on every side so as to portray conflict in rea- listic terms, transparent to the audience. Corresponding author: Shabbir Hussain, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, International Islamic University, Islamabad. Email: shasain2@gmail.com Information Development 1–11 ª The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0266666918784122 journals.sagepub.com/home/idv