Human Security as a Conceptual Framework: The Case of Palestinian Journalists

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study introduces a human security framework to examine the challenges that journalists face from daily professional and societal constraints and pressures when attempting to fulfill their role to inform the public in areas of conflict. The research focuses on the influences on Palestinian journalists in one of the most challenging regions in the world for independently reporting the news. Our framework includes seven dimensions of human security: personal, organizational, community/societal, economic, political, geographic, and infrastructural. Our study found that the Palestinian media are military targets, and journalists face direct and indirect censorship by the Israeli government as well as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Although we have adapted this framework for the Palestinian case in particular, the spheres of these influences on human security would likely pertain to other insecure situations for journalists. Applying this framework to journalism studies could open new avenues of academic discovery to analyze human security beyond violence, safety, and risk. Our main contribution, we suggest, is building out a human security framework for academic journalism studies in contested, conflict-prone, and post-conflict areas around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaza Strip
• human security
• news media
• Palestinian journalists
• press freedom
• West Bank

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our talented, knowledgeable research assistant, Hisham Mahmoud Abdallah Bazzar. We would also like to thank all the participants who contributed to our research by sharing their thoughts and experiences.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The original seven dimensions of human security were economic, food, health, environmental, personal physical, community life, and political (Gasper 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Faculty Small Grant awarded by the Social & Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Arizona.