Abit Hoxha

Universitetet i Agder | UIA · Department of Media and Nordic Studies

Killings, as the most extreme form of violence against journalists, receive considerable attention, but journalists experience a variety of threats from surveillance to gendered cyber targeting and hate speech, or even the intentional deprivation of their financial basis. This article provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework of journal...

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly used for visiting historic places. Research on VR experiences in dark tourism (that focuses on mortality) focuses almost exclusively on adults. No studies were found that used virtual tours to engage children with their own country’s conflicts. The present study addresses this gap by designing and developing vir...

This chapter examines the politics memory and remembrance by focusing on the perceptions of citizens regarding the framework of Europeanisation and dealing with the troubled past. Although Kosovo signed the Stabilisation and Accession Agreement (SAA) with the EU, the country struggles to deal with its past in the framework of EU integration. This c...

Media Landscape in Kosovo: Hate and propaganda influences

This article documents the findings of an empirical project combining socio-legal and media studies, which examined journalists’ perceptions of their role in relation to transitional justice in Kosovo. Based upon the qualitative analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews with professional journalists in Kosovo during the summer of 2018, the article...

Fixers and the journalistic labour they provide have been examined by many researchers. This research sheds new light into the practices of fixers during and after the conflict in Kosovo to show how their work contributed to the development of the journalism profession in that country. This study demonstrates how an examination of the interaction b...

In this chapter we ask the basic but fundamental question: Who are the journalists? Our aim is to identify key insights into gender distribution, journalists’ ages and levels of experience, their education, work environment and employment conditions.

In this chapter we ask the basic but fundamental question: Who are the journalists? Our aim is to identify key insights into gender distribution, journalists’ ages and levels of experience, their education, work environment and employment conditions. In this book we ask how do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in s...

Investigative journalism is a particular way of newsgathering practice where journalists deeply investigate one or more stories over a longer period of time in order to create deeper knowledge on the subject and confirm multisourced information and build a trusted report. Stories reporting crime, political corruption, financial frauds, human traffi...

In conflicts between nations or ethnic groups, journalists can play a major role in bridging between the sides, in particular by interacting sources from the other side of the conflict. The relationship with these sources can shape the context in which journalists see and present the conflict to their audiences. This article investigates the practi...

It belongs to common wisdom that journalists write the first draft of history. This is particularly true for journalists reporting on conflict and violence. They provide their audiences with an immediate account of events as they unfold in places to which most members of their audience often have very limited access. It is for this reason that conf...

Fixers and work provided by them in the field has been critically examined by many researchers, however the importance of fixers should not only be seen from content and conflict perspective but rather also from production perspective as well as from the development perspective. The example of Kosovar journalists that gained practice during 1997-19...

Based on interviews with 215 conflict journalists and 315 reconstructed articles, this article explores the way conflict coverage comes into being. The study used retrospective reconstruction to investigate the genesis of news through the journalists’ recollections of decisions and considerations made during the process of news production. The anal...

This report provides unique knowledge on actual history teaching in Kosovo high schools, with a focus on the teaching of the Second World War. The findings are based on research conducted by two teams of scholars in the two separate educational systems operating in Kosovo, one governed by Kosovo authorities (Albanian high-schools), and the other by...

After almost 20 years of political instability and ongoing conflicts in the Western Balkans, the region is still haunted by the past, and there is an ongoing synergy of influence between media and the political sector. Media in this region have frequently been criticized for fueling conflicts, instigating ethnic hatred and taking political sides. T...

With Kosovo as its case, this article explores the context and challenges of journalism education in transition societies. Journalists in Kosovo have lived through constant changes from authoritarian to democracy. In this struggle, journalism education has never been stable and steady. The past conflict events of the destruction of Yugoslavia haunt...

Post-conflict societies are subject to other societal forces than non-conflict or conflict societies. As a result, news production might differ between these three societal forms. In conflict, news is influenced either by the affiliation with a conflict party or at gunpoint. In non-conflict, it is shaped by manifold influences that are mostly conne...

This paper aims to bring light to the phenomenon of self-censorship in (post-) conflict societies in journalism studies. It uses three different but still comparable countries as examples on the subject: Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Through assessing roles and perception of journalists the paper identifies influences on journalism in form of self-...

Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) shared a similar fate in former Yugoslav conflicts and international development on the subject of nation building, international intervention and international relations. The two countries now are making an incremental progress towards the EU integration. However, challenges remain in many aspects, including...

Abstract: This paper illustrates the influences that the Russian Federation has in the Balkans and particularly through using the Kosovo situation and Serbian implication. The Russian Federation attempts to oppose the EU and the US through using Serbia and Kosovo, often using soft and hard power by offering both humanitarian aid for Serbia but also...

When the new country of Kosovo declared its independence in 2008 it received extensive, but fleeting, international news coverage. This study seeks to provide insight into how an international news event was orchestrated by participants and how news coverage was planned and implemented by international media. We do so by investigating factors initi...