 Via: beyondintractability.org By Mainlehwon Ebenezer Vonhm George Mason University – Fairfax, Virginia June, 2015 Background Since the end of World War II, most wars have occurred within, rather than between, states, and most of these wars have taken place in... BackgroundSince the end of World War II, most wars have occurred within, rather than between, states, and most of these wars have taken place in countries that were once controlled by imperial powers (Henderson and Singer, 2002). In 2002 alone, there were 21-armed conflicts in 19 different locations throughout the world (SIPRI, 2003), five of which were in African nations. According to Stedman (2002), civil wars in Africa have been among the world’s worst, ranging from those in Rwanda and Somalia to the conflicts in Angola to Liberia, each resulting in between 250,000 to 1,000,000 total deaths. Most of the civil wars have been dominated by rebel movements, with a total of 74 civil wars since the end of the Cold War (Byman, Chalk, Hoffman, Rosenau, and Branna, 2001). According to Richards (1995), many of these rebel movements comprise young people as fighters. Young fighters are defined under international law as people less than 18 years of age (Wessells, 2009). Richards writes that youth were so heavily involved in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighting that these wars were dubbed a “crisis of youth”. Children who do not directly participate in these wars often bear direct consequences of the war as well, such as school closures, separation from family, and starvation. A Human Rights Watch (2004) report also reveals that children who do not take part in the war most often became victims of sexual assault, abduction, torture, forced labor, and displacement.
The International Bureau for Children’s Rights Report (2010) states that the impact of armed conflict on children can be substantial and have long lasting repercussions on their physical, emotional and mental well-being. Furthermore, the consequences of civil war often disrupt the normal routine of a child’s educational attainment. UNICEF estimates that just over one billion girls and boys live in countries or territories affected by armed conflict, and of these, around 300 million are under five years old (International Bureau for Children’s Rights, 2010). In fact, approximately half of the 104 million children worldwide not attending schools currently live in countries recovering from violent conflicts or similarly fragile states (UNESCO, 2004). The high numbers of children not in schools, along with the destruction of education facilities, displacement of teachers, and collapse of the education systems in conflict areas, have given increased international recognition to education as a universal right driven by the need to get children in schools. Whilst it is salient to get the school system functioning again and to get children in schools, the dearth of information and discussion about normalizing the relationship among children affected by war who in some cases were on opposing sides of the conflict, render the current peacebuilding education approach inadequate to reconcile children’s differences. Reference: https://www.beyondintractability.org/library/role-education-build-peace-and-reconciliation-post-conflict-settings
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