Children as Informers and Denouncers, in Children and Violence: Agency, Experience, and Representation in and beyond Armed Conflict (Christelle Molima Bameka et al. eds., 2025)

Authors

Mark A. Drumbl, Washington and Lee University School of LawFollow
Barbora Holá, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Files

Description

This chapter explores the use of children in propaganda and informing networks as forms of violence. While this chapter nests in 20th- century Communism in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the interface of children with these networks is not unique to these times and places. Indeed, these experiences link to those elsewhere, thereby elucidating the dually manipulated and agentic role of children in a regime’s fight for legitimacy and thereby blending with a number of contributions to this volume including those by Mohamed Kamara and Sylvie Bodineau. The point of this chapter is not to particularise (or pathologise) Soviet and Czechoslovak approaches to youth mobilisation, but rather to unpack these as examples of far wider phenomena. We thereby shed light on the imagery and iconography of ‘childhood’ in public life. The specific historical analysis in this chapter, however, does suggest there is much more to learn about children and violence than offered by literature about ‘new wars’ in the Global South and that historical developments in Central and Eastern Europe also offer rich insights. We also touch upon the blurring of lines between the public and private, the political and the personal, the family and the state – and the reciprocal machinating of one by the other. This chapter – in the spirit of this edited volume as a whole – transcends a rigid and binary division between childhood and adulthood solely based on chronological age of 18. Age is instead presented as a continuum, with childhood experiences seen as informing adulthood, and dotted in between by the interstitiality of categories such as youth, adolescent, and juvenile. Indeed, the experiences of children and adults in fights may evince continuities rather than the prevailing (and often totalising) presumption of stark differences.

ISBN

9781032710716

Publication Date

2025

Publisher

Routledge

Disciplines

Criminal Law | Family Law | Human Rights Law | Juvenile Law | Law | Military, War, and Peace

Repository Citation

Mark A. Drumbl & Barbora Holá, Children as Informers and Denouncers, in Children and Violence: Agency, Experience, and Representation in and beyond Armed Conflict (Christelle Molima Bameka et al. eds., 2025),
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/fac_books/201