New article in International Political Sociology, by Alice König, Rebecca Sutton, Jana Tabak, Ali Altiok, Tugce Ataci, J Marshall Beier, Mehmet Ilhanli, Patrícia Nabuco Martuscelli

Featuring work by young people submitted to Never Such Innocence‘s annual competition, this article reflects some of the work we have been doing on children’s voices on war and peace.

Young people are often talked about as “the future,” with the dual implication that they will inherit the results of contemporary decision-making and direct policy-making once they reach adulthood. However, it is not only in the future that they will encounter, have to think about, suffer from, and develop expertise in conflict. Building on a growing body of work considering young voices in peace and conflict studies and their participation as future-makers in global politics, this collective discussion looks at where children, youth, and adults meet in this endeavor—and at how conceptions of childhood (as distinct from actual children) can work against such dialogue. We explore what both young people and adults bring to intergenerational exchanges of experience and expertise and how adult ideas of childhood and adult frameworks of inclusion can enable or constrain young people’s contributions to discourses on war and peace. We also disentangle adulthood/adultism from adults, foregrounding the positive roles that the latter can play in dismantling the former. Our goal is to stimulate further conversation about how the barriers to young people’s inclusion in the politics of war and peace are produced, perpetuated, and resisted in the processes of ordering everyday political life.

Follow this link to read the full article.