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Interest in the effects of armed conflict on children and adolescents has come from two main sources: from academia, on the one hand, and from humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations on the other. Scholarship on conflict issues has traditionally been conducted apart from that relating to displacement and refugees. Within the former, study at the macro-level, which addresses political and economic issues, has rarely included consideration of young people as a distinct population group.
At the micro-level, a psycho-medical approach has prevailed. The burgeoning body of work by psychologists, psychiatrists, and paediatricians has led to the consideration of children and adolescents principally in terms of the effects of conflict on their psychosocial development and mental health. Published research is commonly based upon the therapeutic setting in which individual children and adolescents are involved as patients. This, in itself, raises ethical questions about confidentiality which have yet to be fully addressed. The approach generally adopted from within the psycho-medical field has promoted a notion of children as traumatized victims of conflict. However, a growing number of scholars have begun to consider children’s resilience, and their strategies for survival and coping.
For their part, social scientists have contributed relatively little to the study of children and adolescents in conflict situations. As a discipline Anthropology might be expected to contribute most to the consideration of young people’s experiences of conflict. However, anthropologists have demonstrated only limited interest in young people and this has predominantly been focused on processes of socialization. Societies experiencing the turmoil and instability associated with armed conflict may be considered unsuitable for such enquiry since ‘normal’ processes of socialization and child development are assumed to be arrested. In any event, there are often considerable practical obstacles to the conduct of research with children in conflict situations, employing the methods commonly pursued by anthropologists. Long-term participant observation – the hallmark approach of the discipline– requires a level of access to populations which is often impossible due to obstruction by the authorities or serious security considerations.
Access to conflict-affected children has more generally been possible in the setting of refugee and IDP camps. Here the agenda for research is often set by humanitarian agencies responsible for the provision of basic services to children. The research process itself is often short-lived and oriented towards specific, programmatic goals. There is also a limited literature based upon more in-depth, long-term study by scholars from various social science backgrounds. However, these rarely consider the specific situation of displaced children and adolescents. 1 Unsurprisingly, most studies of conflict-displaced children and adolescents have tended to come from research in Western countries, particularly the USA, where constraints of access are less pronounced. Here again the literature is dominated by the work of scholars in the psycho-medical field. 2 Only a very small number of studies consider the situation of refugee children and adolescents in broader, socio-cultural terms. 3
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