Anticipatory Approaches on Conflict and War and Agenda Building: A Content Analysis Study based on the Portuguese Press Coverage

This contribution examines the role of press, as an important player, through an anticipatory approach and also from an agenda building perspective, in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Considering that the press can be an important tool in meeting the most likely future trends and events in this conflict, the research question is: how can communication and the press play a role in war in order to break a reactive response cycle? Future studies and anticipatory approaches have been very important, in many fields, even more so when considering the urgency of several policy domains where more evidence and research is urgently needed. This is the case of democracy and decision-making processes (Bezold, 1978; Cailot, 2012; MacKenzie, 2023) and it is the case of war (Hegre, 2014), a domain that combines a complexity of requirements such as the human capacity for vision, creative thinking along with strategy, politics, governance, communication and information. With regard to the press, it plays an important role in war, referring to the fundamental connection to the civil community but also and essentially to its saliency in politics. In this sense, the agenda building approach has been an important tool to understand newsmaking processes. According to Vu (2020). “the agenda building approach refers to the process in which salience of an issue is formed in the news agenda through reciprocal interactions between actors including the news media, the public and political figures”. In other words, the analysis of the media coverage makes it possible to examine the inter-influence between political decision-makers, between these and different social and media agents and the results of decision-making. In methodology terms, this contribution is based on content analysis technique applied to a set of selected Portuguese newspapers (daily and weekly) considering the period of 2014 – 2023 (July). The news selection criteria strictly attends to the inclusion of articles that deal with political and strategic information regarding the war in Ukraine, referring to international organizations and EU actors, together with the Russian and Ukraine actors. The expected results are to provide empirical evidence about the relationship between different regimes and how the policymakers and policy processes are placed in a dynamic perspective of future action, considering the role of press, on the one hand. On another, this contribution aims to furnish an in-depth research on future trends, in a political anticipation approach, in terms of political and strategic action, considering the evidence analysed. References Bezold, C. (1978). Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future, Random House. Caillol, M.-H. 2012. Political anticipation: observing and understanding global socio-economic trends with a view to guide the decision-making processes, International Journal of General Systems 41:1, 77-90 Hegre, H. (2014). Democracy and Armed Conflict. Sage, pp. 159-172. MacKenzie, M., M. Setala, S. Kyllönen, (2023). Democracy and the Future. Future Regarding Governance in Democratic Systems. Edinburg University Press. Vu, H. T. (2020). Agenda Building. In Bulck, V. The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.