Introduction
This chapter aims to outline a research agenda for war-affected children and youth that is specifically social spatial and child focused. To that end this chapter focuses on the impacts of war on children’s bodies, thinking of the body as a specific space that shapes our engagement with and experiences of the world.
In order to bring the effects of international powers and US foreign policy into the frame and thereby to understand war as a manifestation of the interaction between the global and the local, this chapter attempts to focus as much on the Syrian, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars as on conflicts in Africa (principally Sierra Leone, Northern Uganda, and Eastern DRC) that have tended to dominate the social science and political science literature on the impacts of war on civilians.The chapter begins with a consideration of child soldiering as a single-issue campaign and situates this within the wider context of international child protection. It argues that single-issue campaigns necessarily simplify the impacts of wider political structures on people’s lives in order to identity discrete problems that can be the target of specific interventions whose success can be monitored and evaluated, usually in quantifiable terms. This chapter is then divided into three sections, sexual violence, psychosocial trauma, and injury and death that draw on the psychological and health sciences and to a lesser extent social science literature to describe the impacts of war on children’s bodies and psyches. These sections show the visceral impact of war on children’s bodies to warrant a claim that war impacts differently on children than it does on adults. To be clear, this chapter is not suggesting that war is not destructive to adults’ lives too but rather it is emphasizing the specific vulnerabilities of children’s bodies. The conclusion sketches out what a research agenda that is sensitive to the space of children’s bodies and draws the connections between the different scales of children’s bodies and national and political economy might look like.
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