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.