ABSTRACT
For the past ten years, radio has been the focus of many media assistance projects in the African Great Lakes region, especially in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi. In these post-conflict contexts, radio stations have been considered as crucial for peace building, reconstruction and reconciliation at the national as well as regional levels. But very little is known about how local audiences relate to media as audience polls are scarce and qualitative research is often limited and biased. Only international NGOs (and not media institutions nor the advertising industry) occasionally investigate media consumption in order to assess the impact of their programmes. In this chapter, we first interrogate the notion of the audience as viewed by media assistance organizations and the assumptions they make in relation to media’s potential ‘effects’ on peace building. Then, drawing from a study carried out in 2011−2012 in five cities of the region1, we will underline a few findings which draw a more complex profile of these post-conflict audiences. Looking at the popularity of some programmes and journalists, as well as at the reasons for their success, we will show on the one hand how cross-national comparison can be useful for a better understanding of media practices in the region, and on the other hand how both national contexts and transnational developments mix to produce a diversity of local and permanently re-shaped media cultures (Couldry and Hepp 2012).
