Children and Violence: Agency, Experience, and Representation in and Beyond Armed Conflict

This multi-disciplinary volume provides an innovative approach to children and violence, looking beyond the existing literature that focuses on child soldiers in the ’Global South’.

Harnessing expert contributions from over a dozen countries, the book examines the relationship between children and violence, with a focus on children ensnared in military conflict, embroiled in criminal gangs, and enmeshed in political activism. It analyses how children join fights, how they fight, and what happens to them after fighting officially ends. It addresses cutting-edge issues such as cyberwars, self-defence, intergenerational trauma, gender fluidity, racism, and state surveillance. Throughout, the book underscores the need to respect the agency and dignity of children and youth, to build cultures of juvenile rights, and to think critically of the place of the child amid global power politics and decolonialization. Through accessible writing, and the provision of considerable new data, this book supports advocacy work, and will enrich teaching and spark further academic research.

This book will be of great interest to students of International Law, Human Rights, Childhood Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Post-conflict studies and Security Studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Christelle Molima Bameka is the Scientific Coordination of the Law and Society Initiative of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She is the author of Enfants soldats et reinsertion socio-communautaire. Questions de responsabilité pénale en droit international et national congolais (2022).

Jastine C. Barrett is an independent human rights consultant, international lawyer and academic based in the UK. She is the author of Child Perpetrators on Trial: Insights from Post-Genocide Rwanda (2019) and co-editor of the Research Handbook on Child Soldiers (with Mark A. Drumbl, 2019).

Mohamed Kamara is Professor of French and Africana Studies and chair of the Romance Languages department at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. He is the author of When Mosquitoes Come Marching In: A Play in Spectacles (2021) and Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie (2023).

Karl Hanson is Director of the Centre for Children’s Rights Studies and Full Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the University’s Transnational Law Institute. He is the author of Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-editor (with Jastine Barrett) of the Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (2019) and of Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (2024, with Caroline Fournet).