Responding to children and media literature that emphasizes an analysis of the effects on or reception by children living in non-Middle Eastern peace zones of fictive violence, children, media and conflict literature emphasizes an analysis of the effects on or reception by children living in non-Middle Eastern peace zones of non-fiction violence, or news. Both sets of literature focus on how to help non-Middle Eastern children cope with violence (whether imagined or real). Neither body of literature addresses children whom live in the Middle East, or more specifically, in Middle Eastern conflict zones. In this paper I discuss alternative approaches that emphasize Middle Eastern, North African, and Persian/Arabian Gulf conflict zones. I critically examine and merge the children and media; and children, media and conflict bodies of literatures with three others, including youth and social movements literature focusing on how young people protest unequal material structures; children and conflict literature positing children as passive victims and/or active perpetrators of conflict; and conflict zones literature emphasizing adults’ efforts to “normalize” their mundane practices amid physical and structural violence. By critically merging these varied scholarly approaches with comparative and global studies to engage Middle Eastern children specifically, I introduce a new transdisciplinary approach, one I refer to as, “Children, Youth and Media in Middle Eastern, North African, and Gulf Conflict Zones”. Such a merger enables for the scholarly examination of how Middle Eastern, North African, and Gulf children and youth living amid armed conflict, including (forcibly-) migrated, and borderlands populations, and those born due to uses of rape as a weapon of war, (might) respond to, interpret, use, and produce media to participate in building and making of positive peace across their regions. When critically placed in dialogue with one another, these bodies of literature allow for understanding of how both children and youth, whether passive victims and/or active perpetrators of conflict, are influenced by, interpret, use, and articulate their intergroup attitudes, political opinions, and peace and conflict related practices and behaviors in relation to and through media. By achieving such a synthesis, this approach illuminates more than just “children” and “youth”. It describes the attitudes, opinions, and peace and conflict practices of those whom otherwise are not typically counted by so-called “public” (read: adult) opinion polls but whom in fact represent a combined demographic and conceptual majority. They embody the very meaning of daily life across Middle Eastern conflict zones.

In 2015, the footage of a young Kazak boy with short black hair, executing two Russian men with a pistol held in both hands went viral Online. Using children for various military strategies is not novel. Throughout history and across different cultures children were used as spies, informants, and soldiers and for various propaganda purposes. Not much has changed with the passage of time. The use of children by terrorist groups such as ISIS and the Taliban is a modern day continuation of these trends. ISIS has been training children at an industrial scale referring to them as “the Cubs of the Caliphate”, while the Taliban have frequently recruited children for suicide missions. This paper investigates why children’s images are used on social media, namely on Facebook and YouTube by the Taliban and ISIS. The research draws upon images and videos of children circulated across 65 Facebook accounts of a group of Taliban supporters (mainly aimed at an Afghan audience), and approximately 56 videos and images of Middle Eastern caliphate child soldiers posted on YouTube. In addition to performing a content analysis of these images and videos, this paper also analyses reactions of viewers (i.e. comments, likes and shares). The findings show that the choice by terrorists to depict children as followers and fighters serves terrorists several purposes: (1) these images and videos project to their audiences a trajectory of fear that will continue to exist for a long period of time. The message clearly indicates a “new” generation of terrorists to fear. (2) A photo of a child while engaging in violent acts can intensify terror and fear among its viewers since it disrupts the commonly perceived image of children associated with “innocence”, and “purity”. (3) This is an effective recruitment strategy because it gives positive publicity to terrorist groups’ call for jihad among their followers. This publicity would seem to work because children’s “purity” can be projected on to jihad missions to help present the missions as “pure” and “uncorrupted”.

This paper analyzes the genderization and nationalization of orphan boys on the Ottoman provincial home front during the First World War by comparing the representation of war orphans in print media and their daily lives in the government-sponsored orphanages in Konya. This paper does so to answer two questions. First, “how did the state-sponsored orphanages and print media of the time function in gendering and nationalizing orphan boys?” Second, “how did the treatment of the orphan boys by orphanage administrators contradict the ideals for raising and educating these children, as represented in print media, and in what ways did children respond to their traumatic experiences inside the orphanage?” Between 1914 and 1918, displaced and orphaned children coming from different ethnoreligious backgrounds constituted a large proportion of the local population in the strategically significant geographical setting of the Ottoman provincial home front. Among these, orphans who had been driven out of their hometowns in the Balkans as the Ottoman state lost its territories to Bulgaria in 1913 and those who had survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915 were moved to Konya. The Ottoman intellectuals advocated the reorganization of Ottoman society according to the state’s wartime needs along the ideals of Turkish nationalism through print media. War orphans became the main targets of this elite project as citizens in potentia, who could pose a threat to social stability if they were not provided with the right form of guidance. Although orphan boys were described with heroic and masculine features in the wartime newspapers, the sexual abuse and violence children received inside the orphanages violated this ideal image. I argue that certain controversies existed between the representation of orphanhood in the wartime local media and the real-life experiences of war orphans. Although the elites attempted to cultivate ideal citizens out of orphan boys by appropriating the meanings of gender and national belonging for orphans through newspaper accounts, the traumatic experiences of children on the home front contradicted these ideals. This paper analyzes this dichotomy through the Ottoman police records, which include testimonies from orphan boys who were sexually harassed and physically abused by the administrators of Konya’s local orphanage, together with local newspapers published during wartime, thereby shedding light on the impacts of war on the experiences of orphan boys and the ways in which these experiences failed the elites’ attempts to construct ideal boyhood as a part of their nationalist project.

Palestinian youth in the West Bank have been born into a conflict zone where they experience isolation, lack of freedom and political repression. In this context, youth in the occupied territories are increasingly utilising virtual space as a way to escape their lived realities of oppression. This paper asks whether such dependence on the virtual space reinforces Palestinian youth’s entrapment or provides them with any real space for resistance and emancipation. Palestinian youth’s use of the internet is unique and full of tensions and contradictions worthy of further exploration. The adoption of digital repertoires by Palestinian youth has evolved slowly and was not initially a means for collective action. Therefore, it is important to track this development and application of the use of tactics and repertoires of contention from traditional to digital means and examine how they coexist, compete with, and complement each other. This conundrum over Palestinian youth’s use of the internet is illuminated by the relatively mundane uses of social media practices by Palestinian youth in the West Bank. Designating practices that are personal and apolitical contributes to our understanding of the Palestinian youth’s use of social media spaces as a political space of daily resistance that James Scott (1985) describes as ‘the weapon of the weak’. A qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured in-depth interviews with youth, including among them, activists, journalists and students, will shed light on this digital culture of contention among Palestinian youth and its intricate meanings. This study will illuminate how digital culture has been incorporated into the Palestinian struggle by highlighting how digital tools have been adopted by youth and have been added to the traditional repertoires of Palestinian resistance. Additionally, this paper will address the factors that have enhanced and affected that digital culture on the one hand, and how that culture shapes Palestinian society and social change, on the other hand.