Child soldiers like this one are not uncommon in the central African country of Chad.

By Coleman Cornelius

Children of war are the focus of growing global concern: Not only are their experiences disturbing, but these young people are on the cusp of leadership and decision-making roles in their societies. Understanding and meeting their needs is critical to achieving long-term regional stability, says Dr. Brian Barber, founding director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“There are countless hundreds of thousands of youth around the world who confront violence on a daily basis. By virtue simply of their mass, they deserve attention,” says Barber, a professor of child and family studies and advisor to the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Under Barber’s leadership, the center is building a foundation of knowledge about adolescents, primarily teenagers, in war-torn regions of the world. These young people might be passive victims of war, coerced child soldiers, or even voluntary fighters. But no matter their roles, war-affected youth are hungry for education, paths to economic opportunity, and restoration of family and community ties, Barber and his colleagues have found.

The scholars hope their findings will dispel misconceptions about war-affected youth—and ultimately promote the efficient and effective delivery of services young people need to move beyond strife and contribute to peaceful societies. A key question Barber and his colleagues hope to answer: How might policy makers, aid workers, and others better assist young people in the wake of conflict?

To help answer that question, the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence is conducting four symposia through 2011 to bring together a variety of experts, educators and service providers; proceedings are being published for widespread distribution. The first conference was in Cape Town, South Africa, in fall 2007, with another held this fall in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The final conferences will be in Bosnia and Israel-Palestine. Meantime, Barber has edited Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Violence (Oxford University Press, 2008), a volume that examines wartime experiences and their effects on young people.

Barber, a widely published scholar who serves on the executive council for the Society for Research on Adolescence, recently sat down with Brad Fenwick, vice chancellor for research and engagement at UT Knoxville, to discuss the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence:

Q: What are some of the things that really excite you about your research?

A: It’s exciting to see youth function dramatically well, and this is something that surprises most of us because when we think of war and violence, we think of immediate disability and dysfunction. But as I and others who have spent time working with youth in these regions of the world have discovered, it’s really incredibly impressive to see how well they handle their circumstances and how much they want to understand and contribute to their societies.

Q: Are there areas of unexpected discovery that you didn’t anticipate in your research?

A: The discovery is dramatic, and that is just how effectively young people cope with their circumstances, and how hopeful they are, and how much they crave to be understood. In the case of youth, in addition to just doing well, they really want to be heard; they want to be listened to, and want to tell their story. It’s been quite profound to listen to that story and learn how to help them.

Q: What are some of the core misconceptions we have about war-affected youth?

A: The simplistic presumption has always been that as soon as we face a crisis, especially if it has violence in it, we fall apart. It’s just not true, and it’s especially not true for youth who try very hard to make sense out of the political conflicts they’re undergoing. In many cases, they’re very actively involved in those conflicts because they share with their societies the desire to make life better and redress grievances they feel their societies have been subjected to. But even that aside, youth are strong and hardy and need the chance to pick up and resume their lives once the conflict ends. What the research is showing progressively is that far more important in predicting how a youth will survive a war—far more important than how many deaths he or she saw, or how much violence they’ve been exposed to or participated in—are the basic economic issues of “OK, where do we go from here?” Can that youth resume the education that was interrupted? Are there economic opportunities for this youth to find work and to move on? In many cases, there needs to be a restoration of relationships with families, because youth have been either accidentally or intentionally separated from families.

Q: It sounds as if some aid efforts are missing the mark. What do young people who have coped with war and political conflict really need?

A: When we rush in as good-hearted people and want to fix these folks, we’re missing the boat from the beginning because we think they’re suffering this deep psychological stress that we would perhaps ourselves feel, were we in their circumstances. But that is not what’s of chief concern to them. In fact, many youth are really perplexed by the whole approach to talk about themselves so privately and individually. When conflict stops, those who are still able-bodied and still not severely injured need to move on with their lives, and that moving on has to do with basics like food and jobs. Several of us who have researched this field have made the same finding, and that is when you talk to youth about their experiences in war, the thing they regularly mention—the thing that was most costly to them through all those years of violence—was the interruption of their education. We would expect them to say it was the trauma of this or the trauma of that. More costly to them is what it’s done to their futures.

Q: You have students working with you, and there’s an interface between research and education on a research campus. How do you see that interface playing out in the scholarship you do?

A: It’s really very enriching to be able to bring in not only these topics of research, but to bring in my fieldwork and my experiences of having lived with youth in these regions. Students get very engaged. They want to read more, they want to talk more, and they want to volunteer for the center we’ve developed at UT.

Q: Where do you see this field going in the next few years?

A: The center we’ve developed at UT is going forward very fast. We’re the only center in the world as far as I know that is trying to link this basic research with on-the-ground efforts to intervene and help kids plan for their futures. Unfortunately, conflict seems to be rampant and even growing around the world, so there’s plenty of opportunity for us to intervene with what we’re learning.

For additional information, visit the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence web site.