An interview with the editors of a new book, Children and Violence: Agency, Experience, and Representation in and beyond Armed Conflict
Our members, Dr. Christelle Molima Bameka (the University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Dr. Jastine C. Barrett (UK), Prof. Karl Hanson (the University of Geneva, Switzerland), and Prof. Mark A. Drumbl (Washington and Lee University, US), along with their co-editor Prof. Mohamed Kamara (Washington and Lee University, US), talk about their edited collection, Children and Violence: Agency, Experience, and Representation in and beyond Armed Conflict (Routledge, 2025).
Q: What is this edited collection about?
Extant research largely has looked at the iconic child soldier figure almost exclusively as a boy from the Global South without also reflecting on the consequences for young people of group violence, collective struggles, and militarisation patterns in the Global North. This multi-disciplinary volume provides an innovative approach to children and violence, looking beyond the existing literature.
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.
This book ultimately transcends discourses of children’s victimhood by emphasising the resilience, humanity, and agency of children entangled in violence amid its myriad manifestations. It advocates for the creation of cultures of young people’s rights while critically engaging with children’s role within global power politics and decolonisation, challenging us to rethink how children navigate and resist the forces that shape their lives.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
This volume emerged from our desire to challenge the framing of existing research on children and violence, particularly regarding child soldiers. This desire led us to organise a major international conference at Washington and Lee University in 2023, entitled ‘Children’s Fights: Commonalities and Differences Across Time, Space and Place’.
The event brought together over 20 speakers from across the Global South and Global North, and from multiple disciplines and career stages. The discussions explored the various ways in which children become entangled in struggles – whether through armed conflict, liberation movements, criminalised violence, or broader fights for recognition, equality and economic security.
Following the conference, we selected a number of papers for further development, along with one additional invited contribution, to expand the conversation and present a more inclusive perspective on the various forms of violence children experience worldwide. We believe that child soldiering cannot be seen, taken, or studied in isolation from other forms of structural, collective, gendered, or racialised violence.
In the end, as editors we hope for this book to ask novel questions. We aim to push new conversations. We hope to open, rather than conclude, but crucially to end on a note that current efforts to conceptualise the relationship between children and violence are far from definitive.
Accessibility is also crucially important to us. Hence, while we encourage those with the means to do so to purchase copies, including for libraries, we also are proud to announce that this book is available open access.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
The effects of armed conflict on children have concerned academic research for many years. Overall, research has clarified the phenomenon of child soldiering, documented its persistence despite considerable dissuasive global efforts, and analysed the way it affects the course of armed conflict. This research has furthermore explored avenues to remediate war-afflicted youth by examining children’s experiences during conflict and setting out post-conflict realities for children. Existing studies also gesture towards – though do not much engage with – links between child soldiering and human trafficking, immigration, poverty, youth gang criminality, the surveillance state, race, urban violence, child labour, and terrorism.
[...]
Despite considerable remedial and preventative efforts, child soldiering endures and recurs. The effects of war on children, for example, currently roil the Russian– Ukraine armed conflict. Media reports show that, in Russian schools, ‘children in nursery grade don uniforms and take part in marching practice. Older kids are being taught how to dig trenches, throw grenades … [c]hildren as young as seven or eight are receiving basic military training’ (Lister and Krebs, 2023).1 Programmes are being developed to instil ‘in students “an understanding and acceptance of the aesthetics of military uniforms, military rituals and combat traditions,” according to an Education Ministry document uncovered by the Russian independent media …’ (Lister and Krebs, 2023). The deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia singularly animates the criminal charges that the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) has thus far brought against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As alluded to earlier, research on children and military violence tends to focus on child soldiers enmeshed in armed conflict in the so-called Global South, to wit, the so-called new wars (Kaldor, 1999, 2005). The focus aims almost exclusively at boys presented in extremist images, notably, as passive victims or as incorrigible demons (Denov, 2010; Lee-Koo, 2011). However, such a parsimonious approach fails to acknowledge the complexities inherent in addressing the intersectionality of children and violence. Children engage in many more ‘fights’, so to speak, than militarised fights. Many contributions to this volume expose the reality that, for youth – as perhaps for everyone – the official end of armed conflict is not necessarily coterminous with peace, security, or opportunity. What is more, even in contexts where the ‘end’ of armed conflict ‘begins’ peace, many former youth combatants need to fight for recognition, fight to be seen, and fight to participate in reintegration programmes (even in programmes putatively designed by ‘wise’ adults for the benefit of ‘needy’ children).
This volume makes two innovative moves.
The first move is territorial. This book commences with armed conflict but then gazes beyond the paradigmatic concepts of ‘soldier’ and ‘war’ by engaging a number of questions. What other kinds of collective violence have ensnared children? What can be learned from the involvement of children in armed groups to better understand the involvement of children in other forms of organised ‘fights’? How should theoretical, experiential, and empirical knowledge guide courts and policymakers in addressing violent situations? This book expands the frame of war, armed conflict, ethics, and security studies by interrogating other angles of armed violence, including cyber-warfare and self-defence, and then other kinds of fights that ensnare and embroil children and youth such as: trafficking; misogyny, transphobia, and racism; youth gang criminality; state-sponsored violence in ‘peacetime’ (torture, repression, spying, informing on others); the surveillance state; and intergenerational transmission of harm. In the United States, homicides committed by minors have tragically risen by 65% between 2016 and 2022 (Yancey-Bragg, 2024).
This volume’s second move is conceptual. It interrogates the reality of child soldiering and of children’s experiences with ‘fights’ from the perspectives of both the South and the North; and, furthermore, it tilts towards assessing implicated children as actors with the capacity for ethical discernment, as demonstrating agency, and having an awareness of virtue and evil. To what extent can expertise gained over the years in Southern countries enhance the responses of all countries to analogous challenges outside of extreme militarisation, such as the reintegration of former urban gang members, young people’s engagement in violent political struggles, and the return to civilian life of child terrorists and, thereby, diversify the epistemology of ‘international’ practice? To what extent can expertise gained from Northern countries be equitably and meaningfully shared with the Global South and vice versa? And how can this knowledge base contribute to moderating the bimodal global ‘victim’ or ‘demon’ imagery?
This book is a multi-disciplinary project that synergises established and emerging scholars and practitioners from law, social sciences, and the humanities. Jurisdictions that are discussed include Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.), Uganda, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Yemen, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Czechoslovakia, C.S.S.R.), Afghanistan, the United Kingdom (U.K.), Guatemala, and Rwanda. This book aims to surface the experiences of children through their own voices. Hence, diverse methodologies are utilised. These include interviews, literary and cinematographic analysis, archival work, narration and storytelling, critical reading of secondary literature and discourse, ethnographic studies, as well as interpretation of images. This book aims for a representational analysis that respects the perceptions that children affected by violence have about themselves and their own identities. Throughout, the authors explain their methodologies and the ethical approaches they have undertaken in terms of their research.