Children, Youth, and International Development syllabus (original) (raw)
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Youth and International Development
Course Description: This seminar examines the key concepts and theories underpinning both social studies of childhood and youth, and international development scholarship and practice. Beginning with the recognition that engaging young people in a constructive manner constitutes a development imperative, we will analyze the role of youth as significant actors in international and local community development as well as key players in civil society and peacebuilding. Topics to be discussed include young people’s education and health, their involvement in labor and contribution to livelihood strategies, environmental issues, the situation of youngsters living in especially difficult circumstances, and youth’s engagement in peacebuilding, social and economic justice and community organizing. We will also consider how youth’s potential for participation in development processes may be undermined by poverty, inadequate access to education and health facilities, exploitation, violence, insecurity, and displacement. Attention will be paid to the ways in which youth’s involvement in process of international development in shaped by globalization and growing international inequality, as well as more local conditions and cultural practices. The approach will be interdisciplinary, combining theoretical and practical dimensions, and acknowledging the contributions of social scientists, human rights advocates, and young people themselves to youth-inclusive development research, policy and practice. Discussions, lectures and assigned readings provide the bulk of the course materials, supplemented with occasional videos and guest speakers.
Examination of how the United Nations (‘UN’) and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as ‘youth-in-conflict’) in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as ‘victims’ requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as ‘capital’ that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because ‘youth’ and ‘youth identity’ are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either ‘victims’ of war or ‘troublemakers’. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This ‘discursive’ relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.
The Child as Vulnerable Victim: Humanitarianism Constructs Its Object
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Over the last one hundred years, humanitarian agencies have considered children primarily through the lens of vulnerability. Advocacy for attention to children’s agency and for their participation has burgeoned since the 1980s without shifting the powerful hold that assumptions of vulnerability have had over the policy and practices of humanitarians. This article seeks to denaturalise the conceptualisation of children in contexts of emergency as primarily vulnerable (would-be) victims, placing it in historical and geopolitical contexts. It offers a critical analysis of both conventional humanitarian thinking about vulnerability per se and the reasons for its continued invocation in settings of displacement and political violence. Drawing upon examples from the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in 1950s Kenya, and current humanitarian response to the situation of Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation, this article relates the continued dominance of the vu...