Children as Legacies of War: An Exploratory Study of Humanitarian Actors as Agents of Change

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HSD-0432844Charli CarpenterUniversity of PittsburghThe PI will support an exploratory project on the humanitarian response to children born of mass rape and forced pregnancy in conflict situations. The research analyzes the transformative processes triggered by the use of forced pregnancy campaigns in ethnic warfare and the role human rights advocates in post-conflict situations can play in mitigating negative socio-cultural reactions to children born of mass rape. The initial project includes an interdisciplinary workshop and a resulting volume of essays, which is designed to initiate comparative research on the ways in which different societies respond to children born as a result of wartime rape. NSF funding will allow participation in the project by non-North American scholars who would otherwise be unable to travel to the workshop. Secondly, the PI will conduct focus groups with humanitarian practitioners in New York, Geneva and Nairobi in order to gather data on the state of and gaps in existing knowledge about the conditions under which norm advocacy efforts in post-conflict situations impact socio-cultural reactions to mass rape survivors and their children This research will increase our understanding of the relationship between gender, ethnicity, violence and group identity. A burgeoning literature has identified the ways in which gender violence in armed conflict relates to broader socio-political upheavals, but very little has been written on the role played by children born of such violence, or ways in which human communities adapt to an influx of such children after armed conflict. The study's results will be disseminated through an edited volume, a policy paper and conference presentations and has the potential to impact scholarship on identity, aggression and inter-ethnic violence, as well as policy initiatives to mitigate the impact of these dynamics on human groups after conflict. Moreover, by actively involving scholars and practitioners from non-Western contexts in the theory-building and research enterprise, the project will broaden the participation of geographically under-represented groups and broaden our insights about the complexity of these social dynamics.