During March 2020, as the American President and the British Prime Minister addressed their constituencies, they were also framing their perceptions regarding COVID-19. By analyzing the formal pronouncements of both leaders, we show that they used terminology and frames that are associated with conflicts: They described the pandemic as a war, saying they had a plan on how to "win" it; they defined isolation as patriotism and conferred war hero status on their medical teams, all the while expounding how their plan for handling the situation was better than the plans of others (although fighting a global pandemic). We claim that the leaders used words, language, and frames that resonated with what they believed their audiences would know and accept. In doing so, they allowed themselves considerably more leverage in what they asked of the public, such as a complete change in their everyday behavior, acceptance of higher casualty numbers, and compliance with harsher measures. They even went so far as to paint extreme images of potential outcomes-namely expecting a complete victory. COVID-19 changed the behaviors of billions of people, but the framing used by the leaders was based on the traditional way societies build their conflict stories. Public Significance StatementThis study's contribution is threefold: Firstly, Understanding how leaders used war-framing in order to structure the way their constituencies perceived COVID-19. Secondly, explaining how war framings enable leaders to demand certain actions and to make the public anticipate certain outcomes. Lastly, showing how framings of a violent conflict are "copy-pasted" to different circumstances.

During three days in 2003, an Israeli–Palestinian group met in London to negotiate the draft of the “Geneva Initiative,” which offered a potential final status agreement between Israel and Palestine. In this article, I analyze the video recording of these unofficial negotiations and examine how the framing and conduct of the talks enabled significant progress toward reaching an agreement.I describe six main framing techniques used by the mediators: calling the meetings an “exercise,” which reduced restraints on the participants and enhanced their flexibility, avoiding deep historical issues to focus solely on future‐oriented pragmatic solutions, allowing the participants to discuss any topic they chose while deliberately avoiding crucial narrative issues, convincing the participants that this track two negotiation was crucial for the future of official Israeli–Palestinian relations, accentuating the parties' understandings and agreements with each other, and building a sense of superordinate group identity among the participants, to encourage cooperation.These components were the key “ingredients” for the first — and still the only — (unofficial) detailed proposal for an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. They provide lessons that could improve the success of other track two negotiations.

The violent cycle between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, which took place in the summer of 2014, was understood and perceived by Israeli society as having characteristics of a new war: it was seen as part of an ongoing and never-ending conflict, with no clear starting point or finish, in which one side is not an official state that has an organized military, and in which it is hard to determine what is the ideal outcome for either side. By studying Israeli newspapers' reports of the war, this research report shows that although embracing the mind-set of new wars, it was also framed and perceived in Israeli society as having old war characteristics: There was a belief that a tie breaker can be found; that this violent cycle can fundamentally change the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and there was hope for a clear and decisive end to the war in which one side will be the winner. It is therefore claimed that societies, even when rationally understanding what new wars are, still hold a collective memory of old wars. This shared memory makes them think and hope in ways that fit their past experiences, even when knowing that the nature of conflicts has changed.

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The article compares the definitions and components of an ethos of conflict to one case study of cultural texts produced in a society in an intractable conflict: Israeli films produced in the last 3 decades that deal with the Israeli-Lebanon conflict. These films criticize the national narrative and at the same time preserve and support it further. The findings show that an ethos of conflict can be retained even when the in-group manifests self-criticism, does not full-heartedly embrace and justify its own goals, does not de-legitimize or show negative attributions to the opponent, and is ambivalent on topics of patriotism and victimization. Because of the findings, it is claimed that an ethos of conflict—as it is produced and manifested in cultural texts—can exist without the majority of its components; therefore, its current definitions should be revised.