Preface
This volume seeks to examine the different ways in which children and young people become entangled with violence, conflict, and peace. These relations extend across subject positions that breech dualistic divides between perpetrators and victims and that also include bystanders and postconflict engineers.
The volume begins by examining how violence might be conceptualized when viewed from and through the youthful/child subject. Violence is an everyday reality for many children and youth around the globe, tied up with and part of a wider spectrum of power relations that map across different scales, times, and spaces and that include structural inequalities, cultural marginalizations and exclusions, political conflict, as well as interpersonal abuse. In some circumstances, violence itself is remembered, articulated, and given meaning by being framed as youthful. Age and generational power are further key to understanding how and why violence affects young people’s place in the social world. Dominant constructions of age and of the “proper” place of children and youth frequently glance over the violence suffered by young people. Such constructions furnish simplistic understandings of the complex motivations for and feelings about violence amongst young people in different circumstances. The first chapters in this collection seek to untangle this complexity.
The volume then assesses the different ways in which warfare and conflict can shape children’s lives, whether as child soldiers, orphans, street children, or citizens. It is important to understand that these experiences also extend in time and space, to include postwar experiences of coping, recovery, and reconstruction. The second half of the volume examines the relationships between children, family, and violence; the violence of borders and transnational migration; and the economic violence that shapes the lives of children and young people.
Spanning all of the chapters is an attention to the specificity of place in connecting and disconnecting young people and violence, and the different spatial relations and processes that create, modify, and undermine violent youthful relations.
Durham, UK Christopher Harker
Leipzig, Germany Kathrin Horschelmann