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.

Societal turbulence, state collapse, religious and ethnic conflict, poverty, hunger, and social exclusion all underlie children's involvement in armed conflict. Drawing from empirical studies in eleven conflict-ridden countries, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Colombia, Uganda, Palestine, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and South Sudan, Children Affected by Armed Conflict crosses cultures and contexts to capture a range of perspectives on the realities of armed conflict and its aftermath for children. Children Affected by Armed Conflict upends traditional views by emphasizing the experience of girls as well as boys, the unique social and contextual backgrounds of war-affected children, and the resilience and agency such children often display. Including children who are victims of, participants in, and witnesses to armed conflict in their analyses, the contributors to this volume highlight innovative methodologies that directly involve war-affected children in the research process. This validates the perspectives of children and ensures more effective outcomes in postwar reintegration and recovery. Deficits-based models do not account for the realities many war-affected children face. The alternative approaches presented in this edited collection—which acknowledge the realities of both trauma and resilience—aim to generate more effective policies and intervention strategies in the face of a growing global public health crisis.

The Research Handbook of Children and Armed Conflict adeptly explores childrens’ lived realities of armed conflict and its aftermath. Featuring empirical, conceptual and policy analyses alongside moving first-hand accounts of the experiences of war-affected children and youth, it highlights the urgent need for advocacy and action.

The law of armed conflict is a key element of the global legal order yet it finds itself in a state of flux created by the changing nature of warfare and the influences of other branches of international law. The Routledge Handbook of the Law of Armed Conflict provides a unique perspective on the field covering all the key aspects of the law as well as identifying developing and often contentious areas of interest. The handbook will feature original pieces by international experts in the field, including academics, staff of relevant NGOs and (former) members of the armed forces. Made up of six parts in order to offer a comprehensive overview of the field, the structure of the handbook is as follows: Part I: Fundamentals Part II: Principle of distinction Part III: Means and methods of warfare Part IV: Special protection regimes Part V: Compliance and enforcement Part VI: Some contemporary issues Throughout the book, attention is paid to non-international conflicts as well as international conflicts with acknowledgement of the differences. The contributors also consider the relationship between the law of armed conflict and human rights law, looking at how the various rules and principles of human rights law interact with specific rules and principles of international humanitarian law in particular circumstances. The Routledge Handbook of the Law of Armed Conflict provides a fresh take on the contemporary laws of war and is written for advanced level students, academics, researchers, NGOs and policy-makers with an interest in the field.

This series reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field and includes within its scope international law, anthropology, medicine, geopolitics, social psychology and economics.

Written by a team of distinguished and internationally renowned experts, this Oxford Handbook gives an analytical overview of international law as it applies in armed conflicts. The Handbook draws on international humanitarian law, human rights law, and the law of neutrality to provide a comprehensive picture of the status of law in war.

1. The Global Picture

Young people have been at the forefront of political conflict in many parts of the world, even when it has turned violent. In some of those situations, for a variety of reasons, including coercion, poverty, or the seductive nature of violence, children become killers before they are able to grasp the fundamentals of morality. It has been only in the past ten years that this component of warfare has captured the attention of the world. Images of boys carrying guns and ammunition are now commonplace as they flash across television screens and appear on the front pages of newspapers. Less often, but equally disturbingly, stories of girls pressed into the service of militias surface in the media. A major concern today is how to reverse the damage done to the thousands of children who have become not only victims but also agents of wartime atrocities. In Child Soldiers in Africa, Alcinda Honwana draws on her firsthand experience with children of Angola and Mozambique, as well as her study of the phenomenon for the United Nations and the Social Science Research Council, to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done. Honwana looks at the role of local communities in healing and rebuilding the lives of these children. She also examines the efforts undertaken by international organizations to support these wartime casualties and enlightens the reader on the obstacles faced by such organizations.

Passed in 2000, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent seven Resolutions make up the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. This agenda is an international policy framework addressing the gender-specific impacts of conflict on women and girls, including protection against sexual and gender-based violence, promotion of women's participation in peace and security processes and support for women's roles as peace builders in the prevention of conflict and rebuilding of societies after conflict. The handbook addresses the concepts and early history behind WPS; international institutions involved with the WPS agenda; the implementation of WPS in conflict prevention and connections between WPS and other UN resolutions and agendas.

This book explores how children have been affected by armed conflict in the borderlands of Thailand, particularly in the region abutting the Thailand-Myanmar border, and in the most southern part of Thailand. The author argues that the Thai government has made great efforts to protect children from armed conflict in these borderlands. The author analyzes the obstacles facing the Thai government in protecting children from armed conflict in the borderlands, and advances alternative solutions for how the Thai government might better protect children from armed conflict in the foreseeable future. This book not only opens a window for future research on children affected by armed conflict in the borderlands of Thailand and beyond, but also contributes to the breadth of perspective and depth of expertise in related fields, such as studies of human insecurity. It is relevant to scholars, graduate students, and policymakers interested in the impact of armed conflict on children.