UC San Diego

This dissertation is divided into three parts. In Part I, I describe the historically applied global uses of communication in an effort to intervene into political conflict. I delineate and classify these practices into seven models. Next, I critically review the capacity of each practice to successfully manage conflict, and recommend these become the subject of scholarly inquiry as part of a new communication subfield I term "Peace Communication". In Part II, I begin an assessment of a peace communication intervention case, designed according to what I refer to as the "Mediated Contact Effects Model". In Chapter 4, I conduct a concise production study in order to outline the encoding of the case I assessed, namely Israeli and Palestinian versions of the television program Sesame Street. These television programs were co- produced by Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and American teams, and together constitute a simultaneously closed, open, glocal and hybrid text. After describing the text's encoding, I describe the methodologies I employed to, in turn, be able to assess its decoding by Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Arab/Palestinian-Israeli 5- to 8-year old children. Each of these groups of children interprets the Israeli-Palestinian ethnopolitical conflict, which is framed by the wider Arab-Israeli interstate conflict, through the categorical frameworks that they currently structurally occupy. These categories are, respectively, stateless nation, statebearing nation, and state minority and, they in turn, frame each group's organizational representatives' narrative goals towards (resolving) "the conflict", within the wider context of the interstate- system. Their goals are justice, security, and equality, respectively. In my effort to assess these children's interpretation of the text, I conducted an audience reception analysis. In order to conduct this analysis, I employed a combination of methodologies. These included comparative, multi-sited ethnographic, audience reception analysis, cognitive development, childhood and conflict zone field methodologies. I combined these methodologies with peace education praxis and used a mixture of largely qualitative, and, to a lesser extent, quantitative methods to carry out the study. In Part III, I conduct the audience reception analysis. By including in it what I refer to as a "context analysis", I demonstrate how the respective categories of stateless nation, statebearing nation and state minority formed the schema through which the three separate audiences filtered their interpretations of the efforts of the Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street text. Each audience accepted and negotiated the aspects of the text related to themselves and what I refer to as their "shared others" (e.g. Arab/ Palestinian-Israelis for both Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians), typically interpreting both to be in the text and to be good-natured human beings. However, they opposed it to the extent that, in many cases, they did not even "see" their "others", or primary partner to "the conflict" in the text. I.e. with respect to the latter, Palestinian children and Jewish-Israeli children tended to simply erase each other from the text. The former erased the latter because they did not decode from the text the presence of "armies" and the latter erased the former, in part, because they did not decode "terrorists". My findings shed light on the "normalcy" of life within zones of conflict. They describe how ethnopolitical conflicts are fundamentally rooted in limited and unequal forms of contact and help to explain the socialization processes at play that serve to make these and other political conflicts intractable. Moreover, they help to, in turn, trace precisely the reasons why the context of the conflict framing each of these children's lives led them to oppose the encoded mediated contact provided to them by the Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street text. In light of their active decodings, in most instances, this peace communication intervention text ultimately suffered from difficulties in being able to potentially foster behavioral changes on the part of its audience members, particularly with respect to their "others", and, in turn, trying to either build or make peace. I conclude by recommending that mediated contact interventions encode both the structural and narrative contexts of their specific conflict into their design if they are to best stand a chance of effectively building and/or especially, of making peace