Georgios Terzis

European Centre for Global Education

Georgios Terzis is a Senior Resident Fellow at the European Centre for Global Education. He is also Associate Professor in Communications at the Brussels School of Governance, VUB. George carried out postdoctoral research at University of Pennsylvania and University of Oxford on media and security, received his Ph.D. in Communication Science from the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel, and studied Journalism and Mass Communication in Greece, UK, the US, and The Netherlands.

His expertise lies in media and security, disinformation and media literacy, research and media ethics, media and governance, risk and crisis communication, science diplomacy, the role of art and culture in conflict resolution, and cultural diplomacy. He has been teaching and doing research in communication departments of many universities around the world for more than 25 years. He has been involved in more than 20 international research projects and networks and he has been WPL and a member of the Coordinator’s team for the past years in three FP7 and Horizon projects, namely Infocore, EL-CSID and RePast. His is also currently a member of the coordinator’s team of the EU funded project EDMO BeLux ,the European Digital Media Observatory for Belgium and Luxembourg, a hub for research on digital media and disinformation. George is also the founding Chair of the Journalism Studies Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and has been working as a reviewer for most of the major publishing houses and journals in the communication science field, as well as for the European Commission and the Council of Europe.

Informing Conflict Prevention, Response and Resolution (INFOCORE)

INFOCORE is an international collaborative research project funded under the 7th European Framework Program of the European Commission. It comprises leading experts from all social sciences dealing, and includes nine renowned research institutions from seven countries. Its main aim is to investigate the role(s) that media play in the emergence or prevention, the escalation or de-escalation, the management, resolution, and reconciliation of violent conflict. INFOCORE provides a systematically comparative assessment of various kinds of media, interacting with a wide range of relevant actors and producing diverse kinds of conflict coverage. It focuses on three main conflict regions – the Middle East, the West Balkans, and the African Great Lakes area. Its findings address both the socially interactive production process behind the creation of conflict coverage, and the dynamics of information and meaning disseminated via the media. INFOCORE focuses on the conditions that bring about different media roles in the cycle of conflict and peace building. It generates knowledge on the social processes underlying the production of conflict news, and the inherent dynamics of conflict news contents, in a systematically comparative fashion. Based on this perspective, the project identifies the conditions under which media play specific constructive or destructive roles in preventing, managing, and resolving violent conflict, and building sustainable peace. INFOCORE reconstructs the production process of conflict-related media contents, focusing on the interactions between professional journalists, political actors, experts/NGOs, and lay publics. It analyzes these actors’ different roles as sources or advocates, mediators, users and audiences in the production of professional news media, social media, and semi-public expert analysis. To assess the roles of media for shaping conflict perceptions and responses to ongoing conflicts, INFOCORE analyzes the dynamics of conflict news content over time. It identifies recurrent patterns of information diffusion and the polarization/consolidation of specific frames and determines the main contextual factors that influence the roles media play in conflict and peace building. Specifically, the project assesses the roles of individual agendas and resources, professional norms, media organizations and systems, political systems, and characteristics of the conflict situation. The INFOCORE project team has taken up its work on January 1, 2014. Its findings and selected data will be accessible to all public. During and beyond the project duration, we invite collaboration by interested researchers and practitioners.

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