When Conflict Is Real: Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones
Yael Warshel
Under Contract with Stanford University Press
Synopsis
Ajna Jusic became an outcast in her community before she took her first breath. Born as a result of rape during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, she suffered discrimination and bullying for not knowing who her father was, a fate not unlike many other child victims of conflicts they had no part in creating. Ajna shared her pain: “I thought my mother hated me because I was the most horrible experience in her life” (Sito-Sucic 2019). Grace Achara was just 16 when she killed for the first time. “I covered his eyes first with a dirty rag.... I used a wooden club to do the job. It only took a minute,” she recounted (Ellison 2016). Abducted as a child, she spent over half her life as a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, one of many children – boys and girls as young as 6 – who grew up to loot and kill.
While children and youth form the largest demographics in conflict zones, there exists a disconnect between them and the communication rights and media technologies made available to help them cope or, even more rarely, become empowered to mediate conflict nonviolently. And yet media are optimal tools for humanitarian intervention into conflict zones (e.g. in contrast with military and economic tools). It is therefore vital that media-based efforts and resources to establish sustainable global peace, including equality, justice, and security, consider best approaches for aiding and empowering children and youth. When Conflict Is Real: Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones critically reviews nascent Children, Media and Conflict (CMC) literature and exposes it for its exclusion of the world’s most vulnerable population, with its focus ironically on peace-zone, not conflict-zone, children and adolescents, and a conceptualization of media largely only as contents, e.g. as news coverage. It calls for alternative analytical approaches that include this abandoned demographic in a manner that will help aid and empower them, namely, those living in conflict zones, displaced by and/or born from them.
It expands on CMC literature – which looks at the effects on or reception of news, including non-fiction violence, by peace-zone children, itself a response to the focus on fictive violence like violent cartoons in peace zones by children and media (CM) literature – and introduces instead a transdisciplinary merger of an array of literatures about children and conflict (CC), which posits children as either victims and/or active perpetrators of conflict; conflict zones (CZ), emphasizing “normal” everyday practices amid structural and physical violence; and youth and social movements (YSM), which focuses on how youth protest unequal material structures, including through media expression. When Conflict is Real critically examines and fuses the theory, methodology and policy implications from these and additional global, comparative international, gender, sexuality, and disabilities studies literatures to refocus scholarly analyses and practitioner and policy engagement on how young people might fix the problem of conflict by working to end it. Currently, a gaping whole exists in the production of scholarly evidence relevant to the needs of practitioners, activists and policymakers seeking to address conflict-zone young people. When Conflict Is Real problematizes the variable of conflict within the children-media-conflict equation to address the lives of this vulnerable population.
This new approach redirects media attention to the regions where, contrary to popular misperceptions, the number and magnitude of conflicts are largest, Asia and Africa; and to where children live in closest proximity to violence, India. And it resets the agenda about communication rights and media uses of intersectional young people, populations rarely if ever considered like terrorist/freedom fighters and child soldiers, war babies, child mothers, LGBTQ+, disabled, stateless and borderlands and forcibly migrated internally displaced and refugee young people. CMC literature’s focus on how Danish producers prepared news about the war in Iraq for Dutch children, for instance, yields more pressing questions like, Can media technologies be used to divert Iraqi children’s leisure practices away from the violence raging around them and into safer spaces like homes?
By broadening the conceptualization of media and considering equitable communication rights and media resources available to conflict-zone young people, this book asks whether media might be used as tools for mediating peace, including by trying to alter intergroup attitudes, policy-relevant political beliefs, national and other intersectional identities, and daily practices inside conflict zones. By, for example, elucidating the interpretations of news produced for current or post-conflict zone children in Africa and Asia – should more practitioners address the gap and produce news for them – we might learn how their consumption affects them social-psychologically and/or what impacts it has on their behaviors in support of or in protest against existing policies and structures. Conversely, by conceptualizing young people as media producers, we might also learn how they themselves use media not simply for gratification, as shelter from the violence, but expressively, to build sustainable change. This new holistic approach can shed light on how girls like Ajna use social media to effectively leverage resources for their forgotten status as war babies or for their “girl-mothers” struggling to raise them, and effectively network beyond contiguous borders to forge glocal and global transnational social change peer-group linkages with same and different ethnopolitical group members or members of other marginalized constructed categories. And it can more readily pose the uncommon conflict-management scholarly question about Grace, To what uses might communication policies be put in service of post-conflict reintegration for child soldiers to help prevent the re-eruption of post-conflict violence?
This approach also opens a methodological backdoor to help illuminate the needs and potential roles for children in conflict zones. Television and electronic games, for example, may be used to transform interviews into stress-free fun scenarios that procure active conversations about their mundane conflict-zone lives. Use of such methods reveal children’s attitudes, opinions, and practices, allowing their voices to be more readily incorporated into global efforts seeking social change.
Media, as forms of expression, can serve as alternative barometers of public opinion. Neither public opinion polling nor voting include children, even in conflict zones where children predominate. By comparison, interpreting young peoples’ media expressions sheds light on conflict-zone populations’ opinions. And since in anocracies (middling democratic autocratic systems), which most overlap with conflict zones, the votes of even those eligible are not meaningful, having alternative means to source statewide public opinion is crucial.
When Conflict Is Real considers young people intersectionally and treats them as complicated beings as it would adults. It encourages scholars to conceptualize these populations based on a combination of developmental, legal, instrumental-biological, social constructivist, and subaltern approaches to most effectively ensure their chance to live a minimally decent life. These new, critical, and creative approaches will enable academics to produce needed evidence, and media, conflict-management and human rights policymakers, activists, and practitioners to best aid and empower these young people to become resilient and/or grow into agents of change. When Conflict is Real provides a roadmap for this life-changing, life-saving policy and practice-relevant analytical journey for young people living in conflict zones, displaced by and/or born from them.
References
Ellison, M. (2016, January 14). Tales from Uganda's female former child soldiers. Al Jazeera. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/tales-uganda-female-child-soldiers-151130115418168.html
Sito-Sucic, D. (2019, October 15). 'Invisible' Bosnians born of wartime rape use art to find their voice.Reuters. www.reuters.com/article/us-bosnia-war-play/invisible-bosnians-born-of-wartime-rape-use-art-to-find-their-voice-idUSKBN1WU1SC