Sexual violence and exploitation occur in many conflict zones, and the children born of such acts face discrimination, stigma, and infanticide. Yet the massive transnational network of organizations working to protect war-affected children has, for two decades, remained curiously silent on the needs of this vulnerable population. Focusing specifically on the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, R. Charli Carpenter questions the framing of atrocity by human rights organizations and the limitations these narratives impose on their response. She finds that human rights groups set their agendas according to certain grievances-the claims of female rape victims or the complaints of aggrieved minorities, for example-and that these concerns can overshadow the needs of others. Incorporating her research into a host of other conflict zones, Carpenter shows that the social construction of rights claims is contingent upon the social construction of wrongs. According to Carpenter, this pathology prevents the full protection of children born of war.

This volume presents research from an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral research project in which 15 doctoral researchers explored a range of issues related to the life-course experiences of children born of war in 20th-century conflicts. Children Born of War (CBOW), children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers during and after armed conflicts, have long been neglected in the research of the social consequences of war. Based on research projects completed under the auspices of the Horizon2020-funded international and interdisciplinary research and training network CHIBOW (www.chibow.org), this book examines the psychological and social impact of war on these children. It focusses on three separate but interrelated themes: firstly, it explores methodological and ethical issues related to research with war-affected populations in general and children born of war in particular. Secondly, it presents innovative historical research focussing specifically on geopolitical areas that have hitherto been unexplored; and thirdly, it addresses, from a psychological and psychiatric perspective, the challenges faced by children born of war in post-conflict communities, including stigmatisation, discrimination, within the significant context of identity formation when faced with contested memories of volatile post-war experiences. The book offers an insight into the social consequences of war for those children associated with the ‘enemy’ by virtue of their direct biological link.

Child soldiers remain poorly understood and inadequately protected, despite significant media attention and many policy initiatives. This Research Handbook aims to redress this troubling gap. It offers a reflective, fresh and nuanced review of the complex issue of child soldiering. The Handbook brings together scholars from six continents, diverse experiences, and a broad range of disciplines. Along the way, it unpacks the life-cycle of youth and militarization: from recruitment to demobilization to return to civilian life. The overarching aim of the Handbook is to render the invisible visible – the contributions map the unmapped and chart new directions. Challenging prevailing assumptions and conceptions, the Research Handbook on Child Soldiers focuses on adversity but also capacity: emphasising the resilience, humanity, and potentiality of children affected (rather than ‘afflicted’) by armed conflict.

Based on interviews and conversations in the Bosnian Federation with women survivors of war rape, children born of rape and armed conflict, leaders of NGOs who work with survivors, and people who lived through the war and who experienced it in different ways, this book challenges one dimensional representations of the Yugoslav war and subsequent peacebuilding processes. Relying on feminist ethnography and autoethnography, this volume offers systematic engagement with the politics of representation of Bosnia and survivors of war in post-war journalism and scholarship. Through rich and varied individual experiences of wartime violence and recovery that go beyond simple ‘us’ versus ‘them’ narratives of ethnic identity and intolerance, the book shows how public and private, individual and collective discourses actively shape one another and contribute to complex forms of engagement in recovery, healing and rebuilding. The author draws upon archival material to undermine the fetishization of ethnicity as a determining category that often underpins journalistic and scholarly accounts of post-war Bosnia. By retracing and repairing separations between individual and collective remembrance, and by complicating linear and monolithic conception of this process, the narratives in the book actively contest reductionist and instrumentalist accounts of the civil war in Bosnia. The book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in memory, peacebuilding, national identity, gendered violence and processes of reconciliation

"Tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of mass rape campaigns or wartime sexual exploitation. What about these living legacies of rape and sexual violence? What do we know about these children and their life chances? This book brings together researchers and practitioners from around the globe, each of whom has spent decades working with women who survived wartime rape and with their children who were the result of that violence. Together the authors rethink some of the assumptions that echo in the literature, policy, practice and popular culture about these children and those around them. This ground-breaking collection is composed of four thematic sections. Section one brings together contributions that explore the "Life cycles of children born of wartime rape across time and space." Section two, "Beyond stigma: Gender, kinship and belonging in northern Uganda," draws upon complementary studies to investigate the complexities of why young people born of rebel rape are or are not able rejoin their families and communities in the post-conflict period. In section three, "(In)visibility: Concealment, disclosure, and the question of categories" contributors explore the different ways these children learn about their origins and how they, their families and societies react to that understanding. Finally, Section four, "Transformations: Intergenerational reconciliation and justice" engages the local, national, and international spheres explore how best to move from abuse, marginalization and pain into belonging and justice for these mothers and their children. Case studies involved in-depth research into the lives and experiences of children and young people born of wartime rape and abuse, their mothers and fathers, their families, societies and governments in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Germany, Iraq, Kenya, Mozambique, Norway, Peru, Rwanda, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Uganda, United States, and Vietnam"--

Focusing on events in Rwanda, Armenia, and the former Yugoslavia as well as the Holocaust, Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century investigates how historically- and culturally-specific ideas led to genocidal sexual violence. Expert contributors also consider how these ideas, in conjunction with issues relating to femininity, masculinity and understandings of gendered identities, contributed to perpetrators' tools and strategies for ethnic cleansing and genocide. The 2nd edition features: * Five brand new chapters which explore: imperialism, race, gender and genocide; the Cambodian genocide; memory and intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma; and genocide, gender and memory in the Armenian case. * An extended and enhanced introduction which makes use of recent scholarship on gender and violence. * Historiographical and bibliographical updates throughout. * Key primary document - excerpt from the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Updated and revised in its second edition, Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century is the authoritative study on the complex gender dimensions of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the 20th century.

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society. Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

Millions of children around the world are affected by conflict, and the enduring aftermath of war in post-conflict societies. This book reflects on the implications of children’s insecurity for governments and the international humanitarian community by drawing on original field research in post-conflict Cambodia and in Burma’s eastern conflict zones. The book examines the way that politics and discourses of security and child protection have further marginalised rather than enhanced the protection of children. In Cambodia, threats from trafficking, exploitative labour, and high levels of domestic and social violence challenge the government and the international humanitarian community to respond to the new human security terrain that is the legacy of three decades of political violence. Burma has endured over 60 years of insurgency and civil conflict in ethnic minority states, significantly affecting children who are recruited into armies, killed, maimed or tortured, and displaced. Analysing the theoretical and practical challenges faced in addressing children’s security in global politics, the book offers a novel framework for responding to the politics of protection that is at the heart of this crucial issue. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Politics and International Relations and Security.

In Children and the Responsibility to Protect, Bina D’Costa and Luke Glanville bring together more than a dozen academics and practitioners from around the world to examine the intersections of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle and the theory and practice of child protection. Contributors consider themes including how the agency and vulnerability of children is represented and how their voices are heard in discussions of R2P and child protection, and the merits of drawing together the R2P and Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) agendas, as well as case studies of children’s lives in conflict zones, child soldiers, and children born of conflict-related sexual violence. This collection of essays was first published in the journal Global Responsibility to Protect (vol.10/1-2, 2018) as a special issue. Contributors are: J. Marshall Beier, Letícia Carvalho, Bina D’Costa, Myriam Denov, Luke Glanville, Michelle Godwin, Erin Goheen Glanville, Cecilia Jacob, Dustin Johnson, Atim Angela Lakor, Katrina Lee-Koo, Ryoko Nakano, Jochen Prantl, Jeremy Shusterman, Hannah Sparwasser Soroka, Timea Spitka, Jana Tabak, Shelly Whitman.