Sean Molloy: Children in Transition: From the Child of Conflict to the Child of Peace

Children in Transition: From the Child of Conflict to the Child of Peace 

Children affected by armed conflict are understood in multiple and sometimes competing ways: as vulnerable, as victims, as agents and, at times, as security concerns. This book starts from that established insight but asks a different question: what happens to these understandings as societies move from conflict towards peace? Transitions are critical moments in which decisions are made about the political, legal and social order that follows conflict. Through peace negotiations and agreements, transitional justice, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration, constitutional reform and wider processes of reconstruction, understandings of children developed during conflict can be reinforced, contested, transformed or given more enduring institutional form. International law is central to this process because it gives legal recognition to multiple understandings of childhood without necessarily resolving the tensions between them. The book traces what happens to these competing understandings across transition and asks how particular ways of recognising children can become embedded within the post-conflict state. In doing so, it shifts attention from how children are represented during armed conflict to what happens to those representations at the critical junctures through which the child of conflict becomes the child of peace.