Grown-Ups, Grown-Downs, and Pan-Generationality, in Parents, Children, and the Ripples of Transitional Justice (Kirsten J. Fisher & Caitlin Mollica eds., 2026)

Authors

Mark A. Drumbl, Washington and Lee University School of LawFollow

Files

Description

Until one becomes a grown-up, one perhaps remains a ‘grown-down’. Indeed, a refrain among concerns that have been raised about demobilization programmes for former child soldiers is that they treat former child soldiers as grown-downs, often even as infants, notwithstanding the experiences of these young people in terms of fighting and foraging and fending and fleecing which, indeed, surpass the kinds of challenges that many grown-ups ever face. In the end, then, as Grace Akello has poignantly demonstrated, many decommissioned child soldiers remain grown-downs who end up going down paths on which they shift from armed conflict to drift into criminal violence and, in this way, their reintegration becomes disturbingly hobbled by the recidivism of violence (Akello, 2019). Indeed, these youth may become ground down by the very transnational expert initiatives and programmes that adults develop for them and which often remain devoid of their very own input for the purposes of their very own reintegration. The objects remain as subjects and never become actors (see Beier’s and Fisher and Mugero’s chapters in this book for discussions of the object/ subject dichotomy of children in transitional justice).

ISBN

9781529248555

Publication Date

2026

Publisher

Bristol University Press

Disciplines

Comparative and Foreign Law | Family Law | Human Rights Law | Juvenile Law | Law | Military, War, and Peace

Repository Citation

Mark A. Drumbl, Grown-Ups, Grown-Downs, and Pan-Generationality, in Parents, Children, and the Ripples of Transitional Justice (Kirsten J. Fisher & Caitlin Mollica eds., 2026),
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/fac_books/220