Conference Program

In an era of intensifying geopolitical conflict and the militarisation of European political discourse, peace movements occupy a paradoxical position within contemporary digital communication: structurally marginalised in mainstream media representation, yet among the few collective actors actively contesting the narrative and visual forms through which wars are told — storylines of aggression and defence, figures of victims and heroes, frames of legitimacy and moral necessity. This paper examines the Italian peace movement as a communicative actor challenging dominant war narratives within a media environment shaped by platform logics, information disorder, and the growing presence of synthetic content.

Drawing on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and mediatisation theory (Hjarvard, Couldry, Hepp), and situated within debates on information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan) and connected publics (Boccia Artieri), the research conceptualises the peace movement as a form of collective enunciation operating under conditions of profound communicative asymmetry. The theoretical framework integrates critical discourse analysis (CDA) with attention to platform affordances and algorithmic visibility.

Methodologically, the research combines two approaches. The first is a discourse analysis of political speech acts by Italian parliamentary representatives and government officials concerning peace, war, and military support since the Russo-Ukrainian war and the renewed Middle East crisis. This corpus spans parliamentary debates, media appearances, and social media communication across X, TikTok, and Telegram, mapping the rhetorical structures through which war is legitimised and dissent delegitimised — through securitisation, emotional framing, strategic mobilisation of historical memory, and the discursive construction of peace activists as naïve or complicit.

The second approach examines the communicative practices of the peace movement itself across digital platforms, analysing how movement actors produce counter-narratives linking pacifism to critiques of NATO militarisation, arms industry interests, and the democratic deficit in foreign policy. Crucially, it investigates how these counter-narratives operate within a digital environment where epistemic conditions are fundamentally altered: as synthetic media and deepfakes increasingly infiltrate conflict coverage — as investigations into AI-generated content during the 2025 India–Pakistan crisis and staged footage in the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Gaza contexts have shown — the terrain on which peace movements contest dominant framings is itself unstable. The erosion of trust in audiovisual evidence structurally weakens the evidentiary resources available to counter-hegemonic actors who lack institutional authority to anchor their claims within a fragmented information ecosystem.

Comparing institutional and movement discourse reveals a profound asymmetry of symbolic power, but also how platform logics generate contradictory effects: algorithmic visibility tends to favour affective framings reinforcing war narratives, yet the same platforms enable episodic moments of counter-narrative resonance. The paper contributes to critical media studies by arguing that the Italian peace movement functions as a liminal communicative space where alternative political subjectivities are constructed at the margins of platformised discursive power — and that understanding this marginality requires attention to the interplay between narrative contestation, information disorder, and the epistemic crisis of democratic deliberation on war in contemporary Europe.