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This book provides a critical exposition of the international law concerning child soldiers. It starts by looking at the situation of child soldiers in the world today, examining why children are recruited into armed forces and groups; why they volunteer for military service; and, once recruited, what treatment they receive. The book explores how perceptions of childhood and children's rights have changed, and how this has affected the ways in which child soldiers have been treated. It describes the activities of the United Nations with regard to the child soldier phenomenon. The book examines the legal regulation of the recruitment and use of children in hostilities. It shows that although international law comprehensively regulates the recruitment and use of child soldiers, owing to the plethora of treaties on the subject, states' obligations continue to differ and children can still lawfully be recruited and used to participate in armed conflict. The book discusses how, once recruited into armed forces and groups, international law treats child soldiers. It considers the status of child soldiers as combatants and as persons in the power of an adverse party in both international and internal armed conflicts, and states' obligations with regard the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of child soldiers. An unusual feature of how child soldiers are viewed is that they are often seen as both victims of human rights abuses and as human rights violators. Finally, the book examines the extent to which the recruitment and use of child soldiers is an international crime.
This is a book about parents, power, and children and, in particular, the legitimacy of parents' power over their children. It takes seriously the challenge posed by moral pluralism, and considers the role of both theoretical rationality and practical judgement in resolving moral dilemmas associated with parental power. The book first examines the prevailing view about parental power: a certain form of paternalism, justified treatment of those who lack the qualities of an agent, and one that does not generate moral conflicts. It proposes an alternative, pluralist view of paternalism before showing that even paternalism properly understood is of limited application when we evaluate parental power. According to the caretaker thesis, parental power makes up for the deficits in children's agency, and for that reason children should be subjected to standard institutional paternalism. The liberation thesis stands at the other end of the spectrum concerning children's rights. The book then addresses the counter-argument that issues of legitimacy arise in the political domain and not in respect of parent-child relations. It also examines the 'right to parent' and whether parents should be licensed, monitored, or trained children's voluntariness and competence, and the right to provide informed consent for medical treatment and research participation. Finally, the book talks about parents' efforts to share a way of life with their children and the State's efforts to shape the values of future citizens through civic education. The overall approach taken has much more in common with the problem-driven political philosophy.
Position of Children in Society , Leuven/Amersfoort: F. Acco, 1989, pp. 297–300; and David Archard, Children : Rights and Childhood , London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 15–17. 4 Taken in turn from John Rawls, see Archard, ibid ., pp. 21–2. 5
The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. In transposing the threat from the personal to the national, the literature rendered support for the child rescue movement a patriotic act. Rescue was thus constituted a 'wise and patriotic, as well as a benevolent act', providing the individual with 'self-respect' and the nation with a 'prosperous and productive' workforce in the future. Child rescuers developed a taxonomy of space in which geography determined destiny. The relationship drawn between the nation and the child enabled child rescuers to articulate a new concept of children's rights, creating a direct claim to citizenship which bypassed the property rights of the parent. The work begun by Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and Benjamin Waugh was now recognised as essential for national survival.
This chapter discusses some of the key facts around gender-based violence (GBV) in the Yugoslav wars. The Bosnian conflict was the first conflict with widespread use of GBV and forced impregnation alerting the world to rape as a weapon of war. The chapter explores a specific aspect of the child born of war (CBOW) discourse, namely that of children's rights within the context of the wider human rights issues affecting the children's immediate environment. The Balkan Wars were the first conflict that took place after the signing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). All principles of the CRC can come into conflict with the local and regional cultural practices, and some such practices 'command even more legitimacy than the universal standards for the protection of children'.
Following the conclusion of the two APs, the locus of the development of the law relating to the recruitment and use of children in hostilities moved from the arena of international humanitarian law to that of international human rights law. An article regulating the participation of children in hostilities appears in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). However, following dissatisfaction with the provisions contained in the CRC, in 2000 an Optional Protocol (OP) to the CRC on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict was adopted to cure their defects. Difficulties in the negotiation of the OP, however, meant provisions on child recruitment were also included in a 1999 ILO treaty, ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour. The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child is the only regional human rights treaty specifically concerned with children's rights.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a critical exposition of the international law concerning child soldiers. It starts by looking at the situation of child soldiers in the world today, examining why children are recruited into armed forces and groups; why they volunteer for military service; and, once recruited, what treatment they receive. The book then discusses how perceptions of childhood and children's rights have changed, and how this has affected the ways in which child soldiers have been treated. Next, it describes the activities of the United Nations with regard to the child soldier phenomenon. The book examines the legal regulation of the recruitment and use of children in hostilities. Finally, it provides a brief conclusion, which is intended to reprise and analyse the various themes appearing throughout the previous chapters.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
Children's Citizenship: Negotiating Structure, Shaping Meanings .” International Journal of Children's Rights 22 : 21–42 . Bauböck , Rainer . 2015 . “ From Moral Intuition to Political Change: On Joseph Carens’ Theory of Social Membership and Open Borders .” Political Theory 43 : 393–401 . Bennett , Jane . 2009 . Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
: 343). Since the end of the Cold War, for example, the UN has embraced liberal norms around democracy and human rights (Paris 2004 : 35). In addition to respecting the core peacekeeping norms of impartiality, consent, and the non-use of force except in self-defence, blue helmets are supposed to uphold cross-cutting thematic norms like gender equality, children's rights, and the protection of civilians (PoC) (UN DPKO 2008 : 16). It makes sense, then, that peacekeeping scholars frequently use the constructivist toolbox to analyse the form, function, and activities of