Conclusion

Social science research agendas on the impacts of war on children and youth have tended to focus on topics that have clear policy agendas (demobilization of child soldiers, settlement of young refugees) but also raise interesting theoretical questions, for example, about violence and masculinity, the boundaries of childhood, territory, and identity.

The broader impacts of war on children, including the UN’s six grave violations mentioned above, have not attracted as much attention. This chapter has taken the child’s body as a central space in thinking about how children’s geographers might develop a research agenda for war-affected children. The research reviewed in this chapter has drawn on several disciplines including the emerging agenda in security studies on sexual violence, the research of the psy-sciences (psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychosocial studies) on war trauma, and research on injury and disease in the health sciences and medical anthropology. This chapter has focused on these three areas (sexual violence, injury and disease, and psychological trauma) because they have (gendered) child-specific impacts but also because they tie different spaces and scales together: the space of the child’s body with the space of national (in)security; the scale of the (injured) individual with the scale of the international (laws, forces, and capital). It has shown that the specific capacities and vulnerabilities of the child’s body are central to the affects of war on their lives, indeed on whether they will live. This is not only, as geographers will appreciate, about the individual child’s body but where it is positioned in relation to national spaces, for example is the child living in a region that is the site of a contested political economy? Is the government able to guarantee the security of the geography of the child? Does international law protect girls, for example, in making rape a war crime or does it further harm children, for example, in authorizing international military action that destabilizes a region? This chapter therefore makes an implicit case for a research agenda on war-affected children and youth that investigates what difference spaces (the child’s body, national boundaries, international firms) make to how war impacts on children and youth. This necessarily will involve being more attendant to what difference bodies make to experiences of the world and how the specific vulnerabilities and capacities of children’s bodies shape their exposure to war. Children’s geographies may traverse the local spaces of children’s bodies, the ethnographic contexts in which children live, and the global- national spaces of political economy that structure their lives, to map the shared vulnerabilities of children, qua children while also attending to how different bodies (say, sex and age) in different contexts (say, social networks or cultural meanings) render children more or less vulnerable.

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

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