U wordt van harte uitgenodigd voor dit event, georganiseerd in het kader van de projecten DIGICOLJUST-2 en 'Rebel Soldiers in Trial' -project, georganiseerd in samenwerking met de ULB
BIO
Prof. Stacey Hynd is professor Afrikaanse en mondiale geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Exeter, waar ze decaan is van Postgraduate Research en het Doctoral College en co-directeur van het Exeter Centre for Research on Africa. Ze is hoofdonderzoeker van de Britse Arts & Humanities Research Council beurs 'Children of War: Evolving Local and Global Understandings of Child Soldiering in African Conflicts, c. 1940-2000'. Ze behaalde haar DPhil aan de Universiteit van Oxford en doceerde wereld- en Afrikaanse geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Cambridge. Haar monografie Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Africa, c. 1915-60 werd gepubliceerd in 2023.
ABSTRACT
Children are integral to contemporary humanitarian and human rights campaigns, both as subjects of intervention and as humanitarian icons. In the 1990s one form of child victim came to prominence: the child soldier. The iconographic image of ‘the child soldier’ was overwhelmingly African. Humanitarian campaigns in 1990s raged against this new ‘child soldier crisis’, depicting child soldiers as traumatized victims of adult abuse and the ‘barbarism’ of new hyper-violent, civilianized forms of contemporary warfare. However, contrary to these campaigns, child soldiering was not a new phenomenon: this paper argues that children were a significant presence in African conflicts throughout the twentieth century, and their involvement was linked to wider patterns of warfare, child labour and modern slavery, and youth mobilization It presents a comparative historical analysis of children’s involvement in warfare from colonial to contemporary eras, analysing thee levels of child soldiering: as able-bodied force multipliers; as liminal covert agents; and symbolic militarized ‘children’, looking at direct and indirect participation throughout. It also presents traces the evolution of humanitarian responses to children’s involvement in war from their absence in 1949 Geneva Additional Protocols to the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, phenomenologically tracing shifting ideas of ‘the African child soldier’ in both African and global knowledge systems.
Deze lezing is een samenwerking tussen SHOC, de Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte van de VUB, de Faculteit Letteren en Sociale Wetenschappen van de ULB, de Onderzoeksgroep Mondes Modernes et Contemporains (MMC) en het Atelier Genres et Sexualités (AGS) van de ULB. Het wordt georganiseerd in het kader van de onderzoeksprojecten 'DIGICOLJUST-2. Militair geweld en de (des)inhoud ervan in koloniaal Congo. Sharing the Records, Writing the History' (BELSPO, Brain 2.0) en 'Rebel Soldiers on Trial. Military Agency and its Repression in Colonial Congo (1885-1960)' (WEAVE FNRS/FWO).