Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

This chapter assesses the evolving literature on power sharing in the context of deeply divided societies. We note that the earliest studies of power sharing understood these mechanisms as a means of fostering democracy under difficult circumstances. Power sharing was typically thought to be the best hope for preventing fragile democracies, often divided along ethnic lines, from spiraling toward violence, dictatorship, or both. Paradoxically, more recent studies now take these same power-sharing institutions to task for being insufficiently democratic, with the most frequently heard complaint being that these institutions provide a means to block the majority’s will. While acknowledging these concerns, we argue that power sharing remains the most viable means by which a limited form of democracy can be secured in states emerging from conflict. We further consider the literature on the relationship between anocracies and conflict, suggesting that power-sharing settlements are unlikely to foster the creation of regimes that are particularly prone either to internal or external wars.