In Chapter 10, we assess the broader consequences for the health of our democracy on the process of political discussion in contemporary America. We suggest that this process – while certainly not responsible for psychological forms of polarization among the mass public – certainly contributes to its perpetuation by decreasing the likelihood that Americans engage in meaningful exchange with others whose viewpoints disagree. On the one hand, it may be preferable that Americans seem to prioritize protecting their relationships, stretching the social fabric across the political divide. But there are reasons to be concerned that this process exacerbates stereotyped thinking. It appears that Americans don’t want to follow with the prescription of previous researchers who suggest that our ailments can be remedied if only we talk with knowledgeable others.

The programs portrayed a utopian world, by resolving “the conflict” through the creation of the separate and newly independent Palestinian Street. Internally to it, they modeled and offered opportunties for the simulation of pro-social inter-“group” contact and friendship, including through targeted behavior change curricular components. This chapter describes the process of producing the series, from the intended encoding, or curriculum design, to the adapted encoding of the curriculum into a screenplay with characters, to the expressed encoding, the ultimate episodes edited together, to their broadcast and evolution over two seasons. The series satisfied the five contact hypothesis “requirements” for successfully reducing prejudice, including by substituting official support recommended for interpersonal encounters with the brand-name appeal of Sesame Workshop, together with Israeli and Palestinian elites’ approval of the series. As discussed in Part II, parents’ trust of the name may have helped boost children’s exposure. For decoding analyses, the author edited together a mock episode featuring the key elements necessary to compare the Palestinian, Jewish Israeli, and Arab/Palestinian Israeli children’s decodings against the producers’ encodings within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian ethno-political and Arab-Israeli multi-state conflicts

This chapter provides seventeen recommendations intended to improve PeaceComm practice worldwide.

The first six recommendations suggest continuing the Sesame Workshop design. The remainder provide a design template for Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street and other future cross-comparative PeaceComm interventions around the globe. Where relevant, these range from weaving in structural inequality realities and relative narrative approaches to conflict contexts, varying intervention designs by world system categorical target populations, treating children as active human beings when they are the target of interventions and only targeting them if indeed treating them more like adults, developing direct and ongoing relations with communication and peace and conflict scholars, structuring interpersonal communication, treating communication as a process not only product, continuing the use of the embedded factor of production effects model, conceptualizing communication also as a mediating artifact, and cultivating the bicultural “target” of an intervention to be peace-maker mediators-in-the-making. In the case of these conflicts, that means incorporating peacebuilding into child development approaches for Arab/Palestinian Israeli children out of an aim to empower their active future mediation roles

Describes the logic behind Sesame Street interventions’ design and goals, through the performance of concise encoding and production studies of the text of Israeli and Palestinian versions. Compares how the producers intended, negotiated, and expressed the text’s encoding with how the child audience decoded the series after broadcast, thereby revealing how the PeaceComm interventions may have “worked” on the children. The glocalized hybrid series—produced in the euphoric period of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid-1990s by separate but intertwined Israeli, Palestinian and American teams, later joined by a Jordanian crew, in multiple zones—interpreted and negotiated the American team’s, Sesame Workshop’s, global concept to fit local concerns, incorporating original Sesame Street segments dubbed into Hebrew or Arabic during both optimistic and crisis conflict phases. They created two separate street-state sets and series, privileging the intersection of the axis of ethnopolitical “group” identity and state-based citizenship rights to populate each street-state. The closed text of a “mediated contact effects” PeaceComm model illustrating pro-social interactions between and within the two streets operated in tandem with television’s open text that allowed children to read it on different levels. This inherent contradiction complicated the series’ potential to effectively build and make peace.

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 analyzes whites who actually served in World War II, asking to what extent their military service had racially liberalizing effects on them, relative to similarly situated non-veterans. For veterans, the results are somewhat mixed. White veterans were indistinguishable from non-veteran whites on many measures of racial prejudice, and they were equally committed to segregation both in the armed services and in society more broadly. They were, however, more supportive of federal anti-lynching legislation in the war’s immediate aftermath, and southern white veterans were more supportive of black voting rights in the early 1960s. Relying on archival materials related to small-scale experiments in the military, this chapter also considers the counterfactual where Roosevelt had moved to integrated the armed forces during or prior to U.S. entry into World War II, highlighting the potential consequences for white racial attitudes of FDR’s refusal to integrate the armed forces during the war