This is a book that students and professionals from different disciplines and backgrounds, including from academia, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, the medical community, governments, etc., will find to be a valuable resource in their quest to learn more about an area of study that has long been neglected. 2 Volume set.
Societal turbulence, state collapse, religious and ethnic conflict, poverty, hunger, and social exclusion all underlie children's involvement in armed conflict. Drawing from empirical studies in eleven conflict-ridden countries, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Colombia, Uganda, Palestine, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and South Sudan, Children Affected by Armed Conflict crosses cultures and contexts to capture a range of perspectives on the realities of armed conflict and its aftermath for children. Children Affected by Armed Conflict upends traditional views by emphasizing the experience of girls as well as boys, the unique social and contextual backgrounds of war-affected children, and the resilience and agency such children often display. Including children who are victims of, participants in, and witnesses to armed conflict in their analyses, the contributors to this volume highlight innovative methodologies that directly involve war-affected children in the research process. This validates the perspectives of children and ensures more effective outcomes in postwar reintegration and recovery. Deficits-based models do not account for the realities many war-affected children face. The alternative approaches presented in this edited collection—which acknowledge the realities of both trauma and resilience—aim to generate more effective policies and intervention strategies in the face of a growing global public health crisis.
This series reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field and includes within its scope international law, anthropology, medicine, geopolitics, social psychology and economics.
"In this path-breaking study, Professor Goodwin-Gill and Dr Cohn assess the status of the Child Soldier in international law and highlight the ways in which international humanitarian law fails to provide effective protection, particularly in the internal conflicts which are the most common battlefields today. Based upon empirical data gathered from places of conflict all over the world, the authors examine the consequences for child soldiers, their families and communities, of their participation in armed conflict. They conclude their study with practical suggestions for preventing recruitment, and call for a more coherent policy of treatment for those children who have participated in acts of violence."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This book contains an Open Access chapter. The second of two volumes, the chapters offer a compelling exploration of how children and youth endure conflict and how their stories are told and retold in the public sphere, influencing advocacy, policymaking, and community responses worldwide.
Children's rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the field's core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children's rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world's population and every human being's first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) signalled a definitive shift in the way that children are viewed and understood--from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children's rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached a state in the evolution of children's rights in which we need more critical evaluation and assessment of the CRC and the large body of children's rights law and policy that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children's rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children's rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children's rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children's rights law.
Graca Machel, UNICEF's special rapporteur, also scrutinises sexual crimes in time of war, the fate of orphans, the disproportionate suffering of children endure in civil wars, and their special vulnerability to such side-effects of conflict as famine, disease and social fragmentation. "The Impact of War on Children" is an urgent call to action-for the commitment and tenacity needed to protect children from the atrocities of war. Children present a uniquely compelling motivation for mobilisation, and an opportunity to confront the problems that cause their suffering. This book is complemented by 16 evocative photographs by Sebastiao Salgado, a documentary photographer of world renown, covering Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Rwanda and elsewhere.
Children and youth in armed conflict grow up in very challenging circumstances. Thus, an in-depth examination of the many interrelated issues they face is warranted, which this comprehensive book provides. This book addresses their situation in a multidisciplinary way, linking their reality in peacetime to their situation in wartime, and deals with issues such as: their economic, social and cultural rights; public health; the traumatic consequences of war; whether violence gives rise to violent behavior; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and international humanitarian law. Other issues explored include the provision of education in armed conflict; the African Union's Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons; Colombia's Constitutional Court's Auto decision 251 on internally displaced children and youth; the Inter-American, African and European human rights work on children in armed conflict; and the numerous challenges involved with transitional justice
This edited book offers a collection of highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods in peace and conflict across political time and space. Organized according to three broad themes (ontologies, pedagogies, and contingencies), each chapter explores the complexities of a particular case study, providing new insights into the ways children’s lives figure as terrains of engagement, contestation, ambivalence, resistance, and reproduction of militarisms. The first three chapters challenge dominant ontologies that prefigure childhood in particular ways. These include who counts as a child worthy of protection, questions of voice and participation, and the diminution of agency. The chapters in the second section bring to view everyday pedagogies whereby myriad knowledges, performances, practices, and competencies may function to militarize children’s lives, including in but not limited to advanced (post)industrial societies of the global North. The third and final section includes investigations that foreground questions of responsibility to children. Here, contributors assess, among other things, resilience-building, the exigencies of protection, and the ethics of military recruitment practices targeting children.
Child soldiers remain poorly understood and inadequately protected, despite significant media attention and many policy initiatives. This Research Handbook aims to redress this troubling gap. It offers a reflective, fresh and nuanced review of the complex issue of child soldiering. The Handbook brings together scholars from six continents, diverse experiences, and a broad range of disciplines. Along the way, it unpacks the life-cycle of youth and militarization: from recruitment to demobilization to return to civilian life. The overarching aim of the Handbook is to render the invisible visible – the contributions map the unmapped and chart new directions. Challenging prevailing assumptions and conceptions, the Research Handbook on Child Soldiers focuses on adversity but also capacity: emphasising the resilience, humanity, and potentiality of children affected (rather than ‘afflicted’) by armed conflict.
