Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived” to object to the ‘disavowal of childishness’ that was part of assuming ‘male adulthood’ in the 1970s, which usually meant the ‘denial of the value of any connection to oneself as a child or to children in general.’ The crucial matter here concerns the politics of age relations, which is instructed by adultism. In this view children are often presented as inchoate, as not yet fully human, and as 'less' than adults so that the figure of the child demarcates the boundaries of personhood, a limiting case for agency and voice. This research, following the main tenets of the new historiography on children and youth in its recognition of the historical identity of children, along with their agency, focuses on Armenian children's agency during the genocide and how children worked against unchilding. Armenian children survived under paradoxical circumstances. On the one hand, they were targets (and so, victims) of direct violence, sexual exploitation, and erasure of their identities. They were also agents who tried to fight back through escape, pretension, and resistance. In the context of the genocide, children’s agency was not a limitless ‘capacity’, or one that could bring progressive change. Agency mostly constituted the capacity to endure and suffer. Armenian survivor’s agency was also relative to several social structures, especially age, gender, and solidarity. Different genres of testimony, including oral histories, memoirs, and diaries, were used as primary sources for this paper. The analysis focuses on proud and strong self-representations of survivors that portray themselves as heroes, as self-rescuers, and as ‘agents’, who had a say in their own fates. The research highlights certain empowering tropes in survivor testimonies in which the hero is a rebellious misfit—the main subject of this essay. Through the themes of journey, play, friendship, and solidarity, the protagonist (the survivor) assumes power, resists authority, saves the weak, retaliates against bullies, and embarks upon a journey. Side by side with a child victim who had suffered from innumerable violent experiences, loss, and trauma, these survival stories also portray a proud and self-confident survivor, who came ‘through hell alive’ – and still as a child. The narratives bring to light several aspects of genocidal violence, but also the genocide survivors’ agency.

Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in 2010 catapulted young people around the country to mobilize a revolution. The protests found their epicentre in Sidi Bouzid and quickly spread to the surrounding towns of Thala, Kasserine, Sbeitla, Menzel Bouzayane. These are the most historically marginalised and disadvantaged areas of the country, where unchilding occurs on a daily basis. Young people were responding to daily economic hardships, coupled with structurally repressive political measures and police violence. Their peaceful street protests rapidly transformed into violent clashes with the state security forces and the police, resulting in the first wounded and martyred youth of the Tunisian revolution. Within a month, the young people’s heroic actions unseated autocratic president Ben Ali, who had unanimously held office for 23 years. The effects of the youth’s revolutionary actions were also felt at the intimate level, touching, disrupting, and changing the protester’s and their family dynamics. Based on my fieldwork conducted with 29 children (aged 10-17) and 21 youth (18-26 years old) in Tunisia in 2018 and 2019, the paper demonstrates the role of young people in the 2010-2011 revolutionary mobilizations highlighting various forms of resistance undertook against the authoritarian regime. Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues that the infrastructure of unchilding operates partly through spatial control and also in the intangible world of language. My paper argues that activism against unchilding also occupies these two realms. I look at the physical and imaginary space where young people work to resist normalized authoritarian oppression and violence, and to exercise their political agency. I also consider the intergenerational and intragenerational ramifications of violence and trauma experiences and their mutation in political activism. My case studies explore specifically how trauma from political violence impacted the everyday life of siblings of the wounded and martyred, and how it affected the interplay between protester’s activism and their parent’s past political activism.

This paper narrates the perceptions of the children of Al-Amari Refugee Camp in Ramallah of their lived experiences, and more precisely of the experiences and practices of violence and belonging. It aims to investigate the structural spatial (V)iolence of neoliberal and colonial policies of exclusion and oppression, and how such policies have been perceived, lived, negotiated and re-appropriated. This research is based on an on-going ethnographic study that began in August 2019 and is expected to last until March 2020. At this point, the research has found, that the combined effects of the spatial violence of settler colonialism and neoliberalism that negate and rob Palestinians of basic experiences of childhood, have been resisted and re-appropriated by the children through counter violent practices and understanding of violence (always small v). (v)iolence whether against colonial Israel or Palestinian security forces or public spaces, are understood as an intentional desire, either to reclaim children’s sense of belonging or to reassert that sense of belonging and existence. (v)iolence in this context represents the dialectical relation between being excluded, marginalized and oppressed and the desire for the children to become, to exist as children and to belong. From a critical perspective, this study emphasizes that children’s understanding of (v)iolence is the ultimate response to the politics of unchilding and reflects a process in which counter-violent practices are used to neutralize unchilding and reaffirm childhood. This analysis draws on Franz Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence and his notion of violence and reconstituting the subjectivity of the colonized, on Walter Benjamin’s theory of distinguishing between structural violence and divine violence, and last but not least, on Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical engagement with the notions of desire and of becoming.

Palestine is among the most dangerous places in the world to be a child (United Nations General Assembly Security Council, 2015). Through both the direct violence and ongoing oppression of the settler-colonial context in Palestine, Palestinian children face threats to their individual and collective selves. Hostility and violence from Israeli army and Israeli settlers; arrest and detainments; interrupted access to education, health care, and sacred sites; and home invasions and demolitions all represent significant challenges to Palestinian childhood. Understanding notions of childhood in this context demand theoretical frameworks that consider how children not only experience threats to their individual selves, but also to their sense of cultural and collective selves during this critical developmental timeframe. As Collins (1990) suggested related to mothering within African American communities, when faced with violence and oppression related to identity and culture, children are threatened both emotionally and physically. In these contexts, mothers and children struggle in concert with one another, and within a community of mothers and children, to ensure individual, family, and collective well-being. This entails ongoing defense of the physical welfare of children, constant negotiations around power, and continual protection and fostering of positive individual and collective identities (Collins, 1990). The research described here takes seriously the need to examine childhood and mothering from critical vantage points that carefully consider the realities of oppression based on the racism and violence connected to settler-colonialism. Using focus group data gathered in five sectors of the West Bank with Palestinian women (N=32), I analyze mother’s descriptions of how political violence and oppression, in the context of a larger project of settler-colonial attempts at control, transforms childhood. I also consider how children and mothers endure and strategize together, as individual mother-child dyads, but also as collectives of mothers and children. In so doing, I demonstrate how confronting the loss of childhood (unchilding) against the backdrop of political violence is a very much a collaborative task of endurance and anti-colonial resistance.