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5 - Feminism
- from Part I - Theories of international relations
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- By Katrina Lee-Koo, Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University
- Edited by Richard Devetak, University of Queensland, Jim George, Australian National University, Canberra, Sarah Percy, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- An Introduction to International Relations
- Published online:
- 21 June 2018
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- 11 September 2017, pp 79-93
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter examines a number of feminist approaches to the study and practice of international relations. It highlights the similarities between these approaches, but also the differences. First, it traces the interventions made by feminists into international relations and the creation of a distinctly feminist agenda. Second, it uses the ‘gender lens’ to demonstrate and analyse how experiences and understandings in international relations can be ‘gendered’. Finally, it explains and examines the critiques of the different feminist approaches to international relations.
Feminist interventions into international relations
On a global level, significant inequality remains between women and men. This is evident in many areas of politics, including political participation in governments and political decision-making realms, ownership of wealth and resources, and access to human rights and justice. The goal of feminist IR is to highlight, understand and address this inequality. It also seeks to encourage the discipline of IR to recognise and better understand the role of gender politics in shaping how we think about the world and the people and institutions in it. Consequently, like international relations generally, feminist IR is a broad and diverse field of study, rich with debate, controversy, cutting-edge research and challenging new methodological approaches. Feminist IR scholars are often necessarily interdisciplinary, synthesising IR with gender, cultural and post-colonial studies as well as history, sociology, international law and political theory. Feminist scholars have made important contributions to all areas of international relations, including theory, security studies, peace and conflict studies, foreign policy analysis, the international political economy and global governance.
While feminist international relations encompasses numerous feminisms based on distinct theoretical approaches, feminist IR scholars have a common commitment: to highlight and address the discrimination and disadvantage that women in particular experience in international politics. Thus feminist IR scholars are concerned primarily with how the study and practice of international politics discriminates against women and leads to disadvantage (see Box 5.1).
9 - Who speaks for children? Advocacy, activism and resistance
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
- Published online:
- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 249-281
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Summary
I do not intend to return children to murderers because it would not be fair. They do not have the right to have them. So, I will ′rule not to return any children to you. It does not make sense to disturb those children that are in the hands of decent families that will be able to educate them right, not like you educated your children. Only over my dead body will you obtain custody of them.
Introduction
The Argentine Grandmothers with Disappeared Grandchildren was formed in 1977 by grandmothers who organised themselves to locate children taken during Argentina's Dirty War. The children were systematically abducted for adoption by military families and the allies of the regime as part of a plan to control the subversiveness of future generations. The search for the missing children in Argentina, El Salvador, Chile and Guatemala developed one of the most symbolic and effective transnational human rights networks in contemporary history. Keck and Sikkink emphasise that networks are characterised by the prominence of principled ideas and the central role of NGOs. They articulate how grandmothers travelled to Europe, the United States and Canada to denounce human rights violations and to seek international solidarity. The solidarity framework is one of the most important pillars of advocacy and activism among NGOs and other human rights actors, involving ‘relationships between oppressed peoples and those in a position to support them’.
Drawing from Keck and Sikkink's ground-breaking study of advocacy and activism, this chapter explores the norm-setting and framing agenda for children's rights and protection in conflict zones. This chapter seeks to identify some of the factors mobilising global and local movements in responding to children's concerns in conflict zones. It considers the initiatives used to protect children from abuse and exploitation in various regions, and the tensions that exist within advocacy and activism for children, especially with regard to the political processes and shifting dynamics of conflict zones.
3 - Children and IR: creating spaces for children
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 65-88
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Summary
Introduction
Armed conflict is one of the central considerations of the discipline of IR. Yet, IR has demonstrated no curiosity concerning the impact of conflict on children, or, alternatively, children's impact on conflict. This is in spite of the fact that, as noted in the Introduction, UNICEF calculates that around one billion children currently live in conflict zones. IR, which has remained largely silent on this issue, is therefore an outlier with respect to other social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy and social work, all of which have made significant contributions to the contemporary understanding of children in conflict zones. Watson notes that the discipline of IR is unique within the social sciences for its neglect of children. She writes that ‘no international relations theory currently makes any specific reference to children as actors’.
This chapter investigates the relationship between children and the disciplinary study of IR in relation to the discipline's core concerns of conflict, peace and security. To this end, it focuses upon three theoretical traditions: realism, liberalism and critical approaches to IR. It considers the theoretical contribution of these traditions within contemporary conflict and the prevalence of so-called ‘new wars’, whose non-traditional features challenge conventional understandings of war as a clearly defined state-against-state enterprise. While this is only a snapshot of the rich and complex theoretical tradition in IR's study of conflict, it nonetheless provides an analysis of a dominant orthodox tradition and powerful contemporary critique. Realism's analysis of conflict, contemporary ideas of the liberal peace and critical approaches to IR's re-visioning of conflict analysis currently dominate IR debates with regard to conflict. While these approaches have made important contributions to the study of conflict analysis, it is worth noting that none of these traditions have explicitly developed either a significant body of work or dedicated theorising on the role that children play in conflict zones. However, despite this explicit silence, implicit theorising on the relationship that children have with conflict can be detected in each approach.
6 - Child forced migrants: bio-politics, autonomy and ambivalence
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 159-184
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Summary
Introduction
Children are on the move, covering great distances and facing daunting obstacles, increasingly without adults by their side. Fleeing conflict-ravaged and destitute regions of Latin America, children risk drowning, dehydration and imprisonment en route to the United States. From Africa and the Middle East, they are crossing the Mediterranean and hiding inside or under trucks and even on planes in the hope that Europe will fulfil promises of fraternity and civilisation that stretch back to the colonial age. In recent years, Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi and Sri Lankan children have risked their lives on overcrowded boats to reach far-flung destinations such as Australia and Canada. These movements are propelled by a mix of global, local and personal forces and raise fundamental questions of liberty and justice.
This chapter examines children's political exclusion and agency in the contemporary Age of Forced Migration. The first section outlines the global dynamics of forced migration and develops explanations from Agamben and Fassin as to why liberal democracies are fearful of and fearsome towards unauthorised arrivals, especially children. However, the profound objectification and mistreatment of forced migrants does not mean that they are totally superfluous to contemporary politics in the sense that they have no place in or impact upon it. Rather, they are highly politicised as warnings to people both outside and within borders of what happens to those who do not belong. Moreover, drawing from the work of Anne McNevin, it is argued that forced migrants, both adults and children, retain and fashion a degree of political autonomy even in contexts where their power is tightly constricted and the outcomes of their actions are ambiguous. The second section focuses on the demographics of child forced migration and sets out the push, enabling and pulling factors that have contributed to their prominence. The third and fourth sections apply the insights from the first two sections to an Australian context in which the bio-political contest over the suffering and resistance of irregular migrant children reflects a much larger struggle over what it means to be a liberal democracy in the twenty-first century.
Appendix
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 284-286
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Summary
I. UN human rights instruments
a. Treaties and protocols
• Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989.
• Optional Protocol I to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, 2002.
• Optional Protocol II to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, 2002.
• ILO Convention No. 182 concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, 1999.
b. Security Council resolutions
• Security Council Resolution 1261 (August 1999, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1314 (August 2000, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1325 (October 2000, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 1379 (November 2001, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1460 (January 2003, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1539 (April 2004, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1612 (July 2005, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1820 (June 2008, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 1882 (August 2009, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 1888 (September 2009, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 1889 (October 2009, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 1960 (December 2010, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 1998 (July 2011, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 2068 (Sep 2012, Children and armed conflict)
• Security Council Resolution 2106 (June 2013, Women, Peace and Security)
• Security Council Resolution 2143 (March 2014, Children and armed conflict)
c. Resolutions by the General Assembly related to children and armed conflict
• Resolutions on the rights of the child introduced by the EU, jointly with Group of Latin America and Caribbean Countries (GRULAC), in the Human Rights Council and Third Committee of the UN General Assembly on a yearly basis. These resolutions contain para- graphs on children and armed conflict.
Frontmatter
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp i-iv
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4 - The rights of the child: political history, practices and protection
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 89-122
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Summary
Introduction
As demonstrated in Chapter 1, there are a range of direct and indirect threats to children and their rights in armed conflict. Accepting that it is ‘law that creates and sustains the regulatory frameworks that define childhood and therefore also the social practices that encapsulate and systematise everyday interactions between adults and children’, a variety of national, regional and international legal standards and practices are integral to the rights of the child.
In Chapter 1 it was argued that certain cultural and legal specificities have influenced the definition of childhood in the UNCRC, and Chapter 2 noted that de Certeau's PEL could be adopted in childhood scholarship to offer insights into developing responsible and responsive approaches to children's lives in highly stressful environments. This chapter draws on these two observations about childhood to consider various perspectives that have contributed to the legal basis of children's rights. The chapter examines how the development of international and national discourses on children's rights is relevant to children's specific rights in armed conflict situations. It argues that ideas regarding children's rights are culturally constructed and contested; that they emerged from historical and social crises and are the product of particular power relations. It is further argued that a combination of legislative and regulatory frameworks and innovative advocacy measures co-ordinated between international, regional and national levels is the way forward in ensuring the rights of the child.
The first part of this chapter focuses on children's rights across cultural contexts. It examines a number of aspects in detail: the search for common ground and a common global language of children's rights that permeates the local/state-based settings and reaches communities and families; secondly, the manner in which children endure, despite deeply divisive social/cultural orders that are in many cases perpetually transformed due to armed conflict. Reviewing the history of children's rights in international forums it then argues that although debate regarding children's rights is ongoing, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that it shifted from a language of ‘salvation’ to substantive protection of those rights.
Dedication
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp v-vi
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Children and Global Conflict
- Kim Huynh, Bina D'Costa, Katrina Lee-Koo
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- Published online:
- 05 May 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 April 2015
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Over one billion people under the age of eighteen live in territories affected by armed conflict. Despite this, scholars and practitioners often lack a comprehensive knowledge of how children both struggle within and shape conflict zones. Children and Global Conflict provides this understanding with a view to enhancing the prospects of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This book presents key ideas and issues relating to children's experiences of war, international relations and international law. The authors explore the political, conceptual and moral debates around children in these contexts and offer examples and solutions based on case studies of child soldiers from Vietnam, child forced migrants in Australia, young peace-builders in post-conflict zones, youth in the international justice system, and child advocates across South Asia and the Middle East.
2 - Children and agency: caretakers, free-rangers and everyday life
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 35-64
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Summary
Introduction
‘I've been waiting ages to find out what's going on behind those piercing little eyes.’ You shrugged. ‘Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.’
See? Kevin was (and remains) a mystery to me. You had that insouciant boy-thing going and blithely assumed that you had been there yourself and there was nothing to find out. And you and I may have differed on so profound a level as the nature of human character. You regarded a child as a partial creature, a simpler form of life, which evolved into the complexity of adulthood in open view. But from the instant he was laid on my breast I perceived Kevin Khatchadourian as pre-extant, with a vast, fluctuating interior life whose subtlety and intensity would if anything diminish with age. Most of all, he seemed hidden from me, while your experience was one of sunny, leisurely access.
This fictional dialogue between the parents of a juvenile murderer expresses two important perspectives relating to the issues of how much agency children have and how much power adults can exert over them. Kevin's father sees his son as delicate yet malleable. For him, the weakness of the child evokes the power and duty of care that comes with being grown up. This is an essentially sanguine perspective because the child's incompleteness embodies the family's – and indeed humanity's – boundless potential for replenishment and growth. Kevin's mother, on the other hand, sees her son as more capable of shaping himself and others than her husband would like to believe. For her, children are complex and perhaps even unknowable. She is thus inclined to maintain some distance from them. However, Kevin's profound inaccessibility undercuts his mother's authority and maternal instinct; she is unable to steer him away from the world's worst evils or prevent him from becoming one.
List of abbreviations
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp x-xii
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Index
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 320-341
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8 - Children and justice: past crimes, healing and the future
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 212-248
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Summary
Introduction
Narrated by Death, who is haunted by humans, Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief is a powerful story about Liesel Meminger, a nine-year-old German girl. Liesel is given up by her mother to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann shortly before World War II. Hans then agrees to hide twenty-four-year-old Max Vandenburg, who befriends Liesel. After Max is taken to a concentration camp, Liesel falls into despair and starts to disdain the written word, seeing Hitler's words as the source of her suffering:
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words? She said it audibly now, to the orange-lit room. ‘What good are the words?’
Zusak represents children as having a remarkably creative ability to analyse a world that is at times too brutal even for adults to comprehend. Liesel realises that Mein Kampf and Hitler's propaganda are fuelling the war around her, and therefore constitute the ultimate cause of her grief. Liesel's struggles and the unbearable choices that the war forces upon her and her family echo questions about the justice and injustice of war.
Moving away from fiction, the real-life tale of thirteen-year-old Jewish girl Anne Frank has become an iconic account of the Holocaust, especially of children bearing witness to violence. The Frank family went into hiding in July 1942 in the top two floors and attic that formed part of their Amsterdam family business. Assisted by Dutch friends they managed to remain undetected until August 1944, when they were betrayed and sent to the concentration camps. The father, Otto, survived the ordeal and after his return was given Anne's diary, kept safe by their friends. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, just six months before the end of the war.
5 - Child soldiers: causes, solutions and cultures
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 123-158
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Summary
Introduction
We will fight until the last drop of blood!
This is what my father and uncle wrote on the wall of the family ancestral shrine, using blood that trickled from their freshly cut fingertips. Shortly afterwards, they left their village to become Viet Minh revolutionaries. At the age of twelve, my father was convinced that this was the best way for him to break free of poverty and attain an education. At the same time, he was eager to rescue his country from colonial oppression and was willing to sacrifice his life if need be.
This chapter examines some of the international, national, local and personal factors that motivate children to engage in war. Caretaker (or liberal humanitarian) and free-ranger (or critical childhood studies) perspectives are adopted to analyse the child soldier problem. From a caretaker position, no one is more vulnerable than a child and nothing is more senseless and destructive than war; therefore, the coalescence of the two in the form of a child soldier represents an injustice of the highest order. This perspective, which is prominent in international legal and advocacy circles, promotes a broad definition of child soldiers in terms of both age and activity and seeks to protect these victims of circumstance regardless of what they have done. When it comes to providing that protection, caretakers also take a global view in that ‘everyone shares responsibility and a degree of blame’. The free-ranger position, on the other hand, asserts that the caretaker understanding of the child soldier problem does not so much reflect the lawlessness and insecurities of the global south, but rather a deep-set anxiety and desire for control in the global north. While the differences between these two camps are considerable, there is room for agreement in terms of how to address the child soldier problem. Specifically, indirect efforts that focus on socio-economic development, peace making and peace building can result in children and adults having less incentive to fight and can be more effective than direct efforts to save child soldiers which carry a high risk of cultural imperialism.
7 - Children and peace building: propagating peace
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 185-211
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Summary
Children and young people must play a key role in [the peace] process – not only because peace and security are basic ingredients for the full realization of children's rights, but because children are such a large proportion of the world's people.
Introduction
In October 2012, a Taliban assassin boarded a girls' school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley. The gunman asked: ‘Which one of you is Malala?’ When the fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was identified, she was shot in the face. This child had been targeted for assassination; she was a threat to the Taliban because she deigned to believe that her homeland might be better than it is, and because her activism had the power to influence others. Prior to the attack, Malala had been a long-time activist for girls' rights to education in Pakistan. When the Taliban issued an edict banning girls from school in her region, she and many of her classmates continued to attend. She had expressed her views as a blogger for BBC Urdu and became the subject of a New York Times documentary about her life in the Swat Valley.
Though a child, Malala understood conflict. She wrote on her blog in January 2009:
I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending school.
As she wrote her blog, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban battled for control of her homeland and the Taliban in particular targeted civilian women and girls for gender-based violence. During the conflict, Malala had witnessed the public shooting of celebrated Pakistani female dancer Shabana, 3 and Malala herself was the victim of several threats of violence. This reinforced her already well-established and vocal commitment to defy the conflict that engulfed her community and seek a better future for herself and her schoolmates.
Bibliography
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 287-319
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Contents
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp vii-ix
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Conclusion
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 282-283
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Summary
William Ross Wallace's (1819–1881) poem, ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle is the Hand that Rules the World’ glorifies motherhood as a divine mission of ‘strength and grace’. The infant in Wallace's poem is almost entirely invisible and inert. It is mentioned only once when likened to a ‘tender fountain’. This concluding poem asks us to consider how children rock the cradle in their own right and how they might rule the world in their own way.
The cradle it rocks
Against
My best wishes,
Our best efforts,
its best interests.
The cradle it rocks.
From inside,
it stirs.
Breaching the crib to
Slap my cheek,
Blubber my lips,
Chatter my teeth.
its shrewd little hands,
Like butterfly wings,
Stroking my hair,
Molesting my lids.
The cradle it rocks.
Outside,
The world stirs.
Oblivious it is
To conflict and slurs.
To small arms new wars
And gasses uprising.
Soon it will emerge
With virtue admiring,
With justice by sceptre
By sword and by shield.
The cradle it rocks.
We cannot
But yield.
1 - Children and armed conflict: mapping the terrain
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 9-34
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Summary
Introduction
Children live in the world's most violent places. Children do not start wars, yet armed conflict affects and devastates their lives in many ways. Armed conflict can lead to disruption of their schooling and everyday practices; the loss of family members; forced displacement; poverty and health concerns; and brings physical, structural and psychological violence into their lives. There is no doubt that conflict victimises children and hinders their futures. Yet children have demonstrated the capacity not only to be shaped by conflict, but also to shape conflict in ways that are both predictable and surprising. In short, children have complex and distinctive relationships with conflict. These relationships are produced by the nature of the conflict around them, the investment that stakeholders in conflict make to their protection, and the capacities and decisions of children themselves.
This opening chapter examines the relationship between children and armed conflict by focusing upon the three core concerns of this book: children, armed conflict and the responses of international actors. It begins by mapping the conceptual terrain of these three concerns, highlighting the debates that arise in response to key questions regarding what it means to be a child, how armed conflict shapes children's experiences, and what responsibilities the international community has to child protection. Based upon recent research by the global child advocacy network, the chapter then turns to an empirically based overview of some of the impacts of conflict on children. It does so via ‘the six grave violations against children during armed conflict’ that are the focus of the UN Security Council. It then critically engages these six grave violations in order to reflect upon how they construct and reinforce conceptualisations of children, conflict and the international community's responses towards them. Furthermore, in demonstrating the complex relationship that exists between these three themes, this chapter highlights the role that children themselves play in shaping conflict and their own experiences of it.
Introduction: why children matter to global conflict
- Kim Huynh, Australian National University, Canberra, Bina D'Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Children and Global Conflict
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- 05 May 2015
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- 09 April 2015, pp 1-8
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Summary
Just over 1 billion children under the age of eighteen live in countries or territories affected by armed conflict; that is, almost every second child, or one-sixth of the total world population. Of these, approximately 300 million are under the age of five. In 2012, an estimated 17.9 million children were among displaced and vulnerable populations, of which there were around 5 million refugee children and 9 million internally displaced children. In terms of sheer numbers and need, children clearly matter a great deal to global politics.
In recognition of this, the United Nations (UN) declared 2001–2010 to be the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. Given that the numbers of war-affected and displaced children remained largely constant over this period, it is worth looking back and asking some fundamental questions about what might be done to assist children in conflict zones. Are children any more or less deserving of peace than adults? Are they instinctively peaceful? Do they only become violent when raised improperly or within a conflict-ridden environment? Should campaigns for peace and non-violence incorporate children as a means of sustaining that mission across generations? How do we, as adults, scholars and policymakers meaningfully talk about and make representations for ‘the children of the world’?
These types of questions go to the core of Children and Global Conflict. Put succinctly, this book is concerned with the confluence of children, armed conflict, and the international responses to both. It illustrates how children can represent both the reason for waging war and the reason to move towards peace. The first half of the book focuses on the philosophical, theoretical and legal debates over how to conceptualise war-affected children. The second half applies these ideas to major issues relating to children and global conflict; namely, child soldiers, forced migration, peace building, justice and advocacy. The book considers the impact of these issues on children and how they in turn shape these issues in their own interests, according to their own principles, and for the sake of their own communities.
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