Raising children under fire: Civilian agency and intergenerational transmission in Colombia,Northern Ireland and Lebanon

Abstract

Raising a child in a conflict area heightens the already fraught and complex relations between adults and young people. Parents employ strategic agency in how they protect their children from the dangers of conflict and teach them how to navigate it effectively. Yet the next generation is also often burdened with the promise of a better future, and adults may intervene in their education and mind-set with the intent to disrupt conflict trajectories. We explore how civilians respond to both conflict’s individual effect and recurring cycles of harm through their approach to raising children. We examine intergenerational transmission between adults and young people across six conflict-affected communities in Colombia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon. We argue that adults protect individual children from harm by either shielding or instructing them in conflict-related social navigation. Adults also seek to disrupt future conflict by mentoring children to avoid recruitment, transform intergroup biases or offer alternative conflict-resolution skills. We explore the creativity and limitations of these strategies, how maladaptive parenting can affect this transmission and the tension between protective and disruptive objectives.

Introduction

Living in protracted conflict means that for many civilians, ¹ war and the possibility of violence is imbedded in their daily lives. While there has been a growing body of work examining how civilians develop strategies to avoid and prevent violence (Baines and Paddon, 2012; Barter, 2016; Bonwick, 2006; Kaplan, 2017; León, 2021; Rhoads and Sutton, 2020; Schon, 2020), there is less work on how this agency transcends generations living through decades of conflict. We take an interdisciplinary approach to examine civilian agency through intergenerational transmission, drawing from research in psychology, sociology and politics to understand how one generation transmits norms and strategies of conflict protection and disruption to the next. This builds on existing work on civilian protective agency that corrects assumptions that protection is ‘an activity done to civilians by others, as opposed to an activity done by civilians themselves’ (Jose and Medie, 2015: 2). We argue that protection and disruption is also an activity done by civilians for – and through – their children.

We not only highlight how individuals take concrete steps to protect their children in conflict environments (through shielding and instructing) but also examine how intergenerational transmission presents an opportunity for civilians to disrupt the recruitment and radicalisation driving conflict cycles. Civilians exercise agency in creative ways and are often invisible in the broader dynamics of peace and conflict. Yet in protracted conflicts, the ebbs and flow of violence become integrated into civilian lives and reproduced generationally. While there has been an increased focus on the lived experiences and agency of children in conflict beyond their victimhood (Beier, 2022; Jiménez, 2019; Özerdem and Podder, 2011), the next generation also represents the future trajectory of the conflict, and therefore, significance is placed on how they are raised.

We therefore focus on how adults perceive and approach raising children in conflictive spaces, with a distinction between civilian strategies of raising children with protective and disruptive objectives. Protective objectives are private and micro-level (Brett et al., 2024): adults seek to shield a specific young person ² either directly from harm or instruct them on how to avoid harm on their own. Disruptive objectives are publicly orientated, meaning they recognise and seek to minimise the broader implications of generational recruitment and radicalisation. These efforts are not simply about one child’s personal safety but disrupting the patterns of behaviour that sustain protracted conflict.

This article focuses on the unique relationships between adults – largely parents and guardians but not limited to these – and children and youths. Although scholars have rightly pointed out the importance of not overlooking children’s agency and right to participate in decisions that determine their future (Percy-Smith and Thomas, 2009; Sevón, 2015), most of the perceived responsibility on protecting, nurturing and disciplining continues to fall – rightly or wrongly – on adults in everyday life (Wyness, 2016). The family – and the broader social relations involved in raising children – is a sphere of influence where civilians are capable of acting, shaping the norms and behaviours of the next generation. We therefore delve into the intersection of civilian agency, intergenerational relations and conflict, shedding new light on the creativity and limits of everyday strategies in the midst of protracted conflict in six conflict areas: Northern Ireland (north County Antrim and North Belfast), Colombia (Piedemonte and Buenaventura) and Lebanon (South Lebanon and Beirut).

This article is structured to first explore the theoretical foundations of civilian agency and intergenerational transmission in conflict settings, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives. It then presents the methodological approach and case study contexts of Colombia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. The analysis is divided into two main sections: Protection, which examines strategies like shielding and instructing to safeguard children, and Disruption, which highlights efforts to prevent recruitment and radicalization.

We then discuss community-wide interventions and the tensions between protective and disruptive objectives. We show that not just individual guardians, but also communities engage in protection of youths and children. Teachers, sports coaches, volunteers, neighbours and even strangers also all seek to disrupt conflict indirectly through lessons taught to young people. However, prioritising disruption–the public-orientated attitude towards breaking generational cycles of conflict–can reinforce attitudes of parental obligation in raising children ‘the right way’ as an obligation to the community as a whole. And though these objectives are not mutually exclusive, tension arises when the strategies to protect children contributes to sectarian retrenchment and othering of out-groups. We also recognise that other actors can limit the ability of civilians to raise children safely and with pro-peace attitudes, including the children themselves. Yet overall, our findings point to the importance of understanding intergenerational transmission as an underexplored form of civilian agency in protracted conflict.

Civilian agency and intergenerational transmission

Intergenerational transmission is more broadly understood in psychology as the transfer of specific ideas, beliefs, values, knowledge and practices between one generation and the next (Collado et al., 2019; Schönpflug, 2009; Tam, 2015). We examine intergenerational transmission as an intentional form of local and everyday agency against cycles of conflict. Mac Ginty (2021: 178–180) draws attention to the role of the family and familial relations, noting that ‘everyday’ people can engage in ‘positive parenting, restraint, and proxy avoidance’ to disrupt conflict dynamics by ‘monitoring, supervision, counselling, correction, and positive reinforcement’ (also see Salifu and Ndung’u, 2017).

Much of the research on conflict and intergenerational relations focuses on the negative and destructive nature of their relationship. The deteriorative effects of conflict on intergenerational relations are well-studied (Dalgaard et al., 2019; Wyness, 2016; Yearwood, 2014). The sociological literature on parenting in conflict largely focuses on the detrimental impact conflict has on parenting and youths (Kankaanpää et al., 2020), rather than how parenting can be pro-peace. Protracted armed conflict damages the ability of families to develop protective relationships and leave ‘adolescent boys and girls particularly vulnerable to the systemic and overlapping factors that influence them to engage with and return to armed groups’ (Blackwell et al., 2023: 1). Much of the existing scholarly work on recruitment and child soldiers still focuses on their determinants (Blattman and Annan, 2010; Jiménez, 2019; Legassicke et al., 2024; Revkin, 2018), rather than preventatives (Blackwell et al., 2023: 3). Adult relations and older peers are often a key factor in influencing or inspiring younger generations to take up arms and radicalise their political positions (Blackwell et al., 2023; Özerdem and Podder, 2011; Spapens and Moors, 2020). Yet as Pedersen et al. (2018: 64) note, little is still understood about how radicalisation is influenced by parents and the experiences children have with adults at home, at school and at key institutions, except to notice the effect of their absence (Almohammad, 2022: 5–6).

Despite this, family support can still be a potential protective factor against recruitment, as studies in organised crime show (Besemer et al., 2017; Hjalmarsson and Lindquist, 2012; Spapens and Moors, 2020; Van Dijk et al., 2022). Emotionally supportive family environments have been shown to minimise retention in armed groups and positively influence reintegration (Blackwell et al., 2023; Medeiros et al., 2020; Revkin, 2018). Van Dijk et al. (2022) observe that ‘discontinuity’ of intergenerational transmission is in part driven by protective factors at the ‘family level (e.g. adequate parenting style and supervision) and meso-level (e.g. prosocial hobbies and having non-delinquent friends’ (p. 349). Parents are often strategic in how they raise their children under adverse circumstances, as noted in the different approaches taken by Black and white parents in teaching children to navigate complex and potentially hostile environments (Vincent et al., 2012). And parents and guardians alone do not influence children and youths. Communities and social resources also shape the experiences and lessons learned by children (Bray and Dawes, 2016; Rodrigo et al., 2014). Therefore, even though civilians in conflict-affected areas may find their agency limited against the interests of armed actors, adults take an active role in attempting to protect and influence the next generation.

This intergenerational transmission of pro-peace attitudes is also explored in the work on peace education, which highlights the importance of teaching and guiding young people in advocating for peaceful futures (Rosen and Salomon, 2011; Schubotz and Robinson, 2006). White (2013) observes that in Northern Ireland, ‘an assumption of a generational change is embedded in the logic of the peacebuilding process’ (p. 99), with emphasis on promoting youth civic engagement (McKeown and Taylor, 2017) or youth sports programmes, which are also used in Colombia to encourage young people to avoid armed groups (Cardenas, 2016; Mejía Restrepo and Núñez, 2025; Rodríguez et al., 2025). Recent work in Lebanon also emphasises the bottom-up and transformative agency of teachers (Zakharia, 2017; Van Ommering, 2020). Yet these programmes have been criticised for imposing top-down beliefs rather than reflecting existing practices and norms (Higgins and Novelli, 2020; Podder, 2022: 209) and rarely engaging with the perspectives of teachers (Kirk, 2004; Wolf et al., 2015), volunteers or facilitators.

We build on this work in Colombia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon to examine how adults across different contexts raise and mentor children in response to the insecurity posed by the conflict. We emphasise that – unlike Mac Ginty’s ‘collateral peace’, where positive parenting may unintentionally disrupt conflict – adults (and not just parents) are often aware and strategic in how they raise children. Therefore we examine intergenerational transmission during protracted conflict as an extension of ‘agency’s goal-seeking, projective, and purpose dimension’ (Krause et al., 2023: 7). We distinguish between the purposeful protective and disruptive objectives of adults, building on Verweijen’s classification of public and private facets of protection. She argues that some actions have a more ‘private character, implying the benefits are limited to specific networks, groups (such as ethnic group), or individuals’. Protecting an individual child from harm is geared at adaption, either shielding the child from insecurity and danger or instructing them to avoid it themselves. This effectively transmits tools of ‘social navigation’ needed to handle complex and dangerous environments safely (Verweijen, 2018; Vigh, 2022).

However, other actions are public-facing, generating security as a ‘public good from which the population at large benefits’ (Verweijen, 2023: 116). These public objectives are geared at a broader project of social transformation, an attempt to shift – within the bounded space of the ‘local’ – the structures that generate the risk in the first place. Thus, adults take steps to minimise the interest of children and young people in joining armed groups or to prevent radicalisation of young people against other groups. We observe that a broader public concern with recruitment also heightens the responsibility of ‘raising children the right way’. Therefore, agency in child-rearing is not only a matter of what civilians are able to do in the face of conflict but also what they are expected to do.

Case studies and methods

The framework presented in this article was developed through a grounded approach, drawing on empirical data collected in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Lebanon. Data collection was geared at unpacking the micro-dynamics that occur in rural and urban areas in conflict-affected contexts. Semi-structured interview questions were developed by the research team, drawing on literatures of everyday peace, conflict, reconciliation, intergroup contact and social identity approach (Allport, 1954; Brett, 2022; Mac Ginty, 2021; Reicher et al., 2010). As such, attention was paid to strategies employed at the local level in how individuals and communities stayed safe, informed by existing research in self-protection strategies and mechanisms of community resistance to violence as detailed previously. Over 75 interviews were collected from March 2022 to August 2023 with non-combatants, with the consent of participants and following a strict protocol of anonymity to prevent participant identification. ³ We analysed the data to identify recurring patterns of strategies across the three countries and six cases.

All three countries in our sample have experienced protracted internal armed conflict and have all signed peace accords, yet protracted violence and division persists in all three countries. This has led to successive generations having to live and raise families in contexts of recurring conflict. In Northern Ireland, despite the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998, communities living in the greater north Belfast area, which contains enclaves of majority identity (Catholic or Protestant) neighbourhoods, continue to experience some conflict, with paramilitaries continue to hold some unofficial presence and position of authority in the mainly single identity neighbourhoods. In north County Antrim, a majority Catholic village and its surrounding Protestant countryside has become the occasional flashpoint for tension and violence particularly around parades disputes (between the Orange Order and residents).

In Colombia, the port city of Buenaventura and its majority afro-descendant community have been continuously victimised by different armed groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), paramilitary groups and other armed organisations battling for control over the strategic position of the city since the 1990s. In the rural area of Piedemonte in the department of Nariño, the predominantly indigenous population suffered the entry of the National Liberation Army (ELN) in the 1980s, with the FARC taking over and clashing against state and paramilitary forces in the early 2000s until their demobilisation in the 2016 peace agreement. Since 2018 the region has experienced a new wave of violence as armed groups attempted to reassert control, including the ELN, FARC dissidents and criminal organisations.

In Lebanon, the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut straddle the former Greenline during the civil wars in Lebanon (1975 – 1990), dividing Beirut into West (predominantly Muslim) and East (predominantly Christian) sides. The presence of armed groups (officially and unofficially) here is known locally, and spikes in violence occur sporadically. In South Lebanon, where Israeli occupation lasted from the 1980s until 2000, villages and towns are predominantly Shia Muslim, with some exception of Christian (Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox), and in rare cases, mixed Christian and Shia Muslim villages. The area experiences periods of escalation since, including the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Protection

The responsibility of a child’s life under relatively peaceful conditions already makes the world seem like a dangerous place for guardians. In areas affected by armed conflict, these dangers are magnified ten-fold. Guardians must be aware of risks that either do not exist in other contexts or are heightened by the conflict environment, and therefore work to protect children from an extended array of harms. We term this work shielding, a form of direct protection that means physically preventing harm from befalling the child or removing children from danger. This is an umbrella term that can cover a diverse set of strategies, such as those identified by the work of Voisin et al. (2016: 523) work in urban areas affected by gang violence in the USA that range from ‘sheltering’ (keeping children off the streets), ‘chauffeuring’ (transporting or accompanying children to and from places) and ‘removal’ (enrolling children in schools outside of the neighbourhood).

This section details how adults shield and instruct children to navigate conflict-related dangers. When fighting broke out in North Belfast between Protestant and Catholics in 2021, a Catholic father refused to let his son from walking to school alone, either driving him or having him take the bus. ⁴ In Buenaventura, a mother recounts taking a strict approach to ‘chauffeuring’ her young daughter to and from school:

From so many things happening now, the situation being what it is now, I said I will not bring her back [to visit work]. My daughter, she leaves the house, and I will drop her off where she needs to go and I know where she can go, and not go, and that’s that. There is no discussion. ⁵

In sectarian conflicts, adults may also shield their children from specific identity-related events or areas. One Protestant mother in North Belfast avoids taking her young children to a bonfire after masked men came one year and began shooting over the bonfire. ⁶ In north County Antrim, Catholic parents recall having to quickly remove their children from the area when an Orange parade coincided with a school sports day in the early 1990s:

Our boys were wearing their GAA tops and we had to get them out of the place because the looks they were getting. And what saved them was they were so young – 14s [. . .] but we had to curb and get them out of there. ⁷

Removal can also be a more permanent strategy; concern for children is a key motivation for displacement from a conflict area (Amnesty International, 2011; Yearwood, 2014). A mother from North Belfast recalls her own mother moving their family out of an estate in the 1980s to avoid the sons getting involved in paramilitarism. ⁸ In Buenaventura, a resident’s parents moved the whole family away from Medellin to avoid the influence of gangs after their 4-year-old son pulled out a knife over a small altercation: ‘[my brother] was already seeing that [killing] was easy. So Dad said no, that’s not a life. That’s when we decided to come to Buenaventura’. ⁹ In Southern Lebanon, during the Israeli occupation, parents left or arranged for their children to go to Beirut or abroad ¹⁰ to protect them from being recruited into militias:

Before the Liberation ¹¹ with like, a month, my wife was telling me that our son has grown rather tall, which means he was at risk of being enlisted into the SLA. I swear, the summer was coming up, final exams at the end of June, and my wife tells me that we need to prepare to go to Beirut. We owned a house there and needed to move, as my daughter was joining university, and my son after her, and didn’t want him taken away into mandatory service in the SLA. ¹²

Shielding could also be literal, such as a father building a small bunker in a Piedemonte home to shield his sons from the cross-fires between the FARC and army in the mid-2000s. ¹³ In Lebanon, parents used the unfinished hospital they were building to shelter their children and other family members, ¹⁴ while others sheltered their family in the innermost room in the house to avoid bomb blasts. ¹⁵

Yet parents and guardians cannot remain constantly vigilant of children. Therefore, adults often instil in their children the knowledge on how to independently navigate the complex and dangerous terrain of conflict-affected environments. This instruction, an indirect form of protection, includes where to avoid, who to avoid, how to act in public and how to react when confronted with a dangerous situation. In Northern Ireland, 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, a mother warns her child to ‘never get too close behind a landrover or a police car . . . in case somebody takes a shot at them’. ¹⁶ Often these instructions warn children from going into areas associated with danger, or what to avoid wearing (such as identifying sports gear) if they do go there. ¹⁷ A mother in Piedemonte describes instructing her young son on the dangers of the road, where there is traffic and occasionally armed gunmen: ‘so he stays at home, or says “Mommy, take me”’. ¹⁸

These lessons often become cyclical. In North Belfast, one resident remembers that his parents taught him what to avoid navigating day-to-day life in the Troubles – ‘because if you were walking down the street . . . and you’re wearing something like that [GAA or Celtics top] there, you are liable to get a bullet put through you’. He now teaches his children to avoid similarly identifiable attire 40 years later. ¹⁹ A resident from Buenaventura also recalls his parents warning him to avoid a specific type of car in the 1980s and early 1990s which violent police officers would drive around looking for young men associated with the contraband and gang culture of the port city. ‘Your parents would say, “look if you see this [type of] car, go inside the house”’. Now, 30 years later, he teaches his own children and nephews how to stay safe between the gangs and guerrillas that patrol in and around Buenaventura:

If the phone rings with an unknown number . . . [my son] only answered the familiar numbers [. . .] if he sees someone with an armband, I would say that he is someone of something else. If someone in an armband, I tell him to lower his head, he lowers it until they leave. If someone with an armband calls you, you don’t go. If there is someone you see that he has more than two drinks in his head, do not approach him either. He knows if this street is very empty, don’t go there. Or if there are a lot of people, maybe kind of sitting around strangely, don’t go either. ²⁰

Similarly, a young student who grew up in the south of Lebanon recalls her father taking particular care in how he raised his children so that ‘he felt safe to let us out’. ²¹ These lessons persist across cycles of conflicts and across generations.

Yet instructing young people can also be about the family’s protection. In South Lebanon, a daughter recalls how her father instructed her on how to treat the wife of a local commander:

My father always told me to not take money from them, regardless of whatever they want, do whatever they ask for, tell her ‘na’eeman’ ²² and that’s that. Rid yourself of that burden and she won’t have anything against us, rather than the opposite (she would). ²³

A slight against a powerful armed actor by a young person – who may not know better – can invite retaliation against the whole family. In the next section, we discuss how civilians recognise the broader consequences young people’s behaviour can have on conflict, and how to mitigate it.

Disruption

In this section, we move on to examine strategies aimed at breaking cycles of recruitment and radicalisation. As discussed, intergenerational transmission has become a key point of study for the recruitment of new generations into armed groups which is essential to reproducing the cycles of protracted conflict. Beyond displacing themselves entirely, adults also resort to creative ways of preventing children from joining armed groups, such as parents in Piedemonte using persuasive arguments and observations about the importance of education, ²⁴ or pointing out how unpleasant and hard life could be with guerillas. ²⁵ One parent describes asking his oldest son – who had joined the group – to explain in detail the grueling hours of hiking, carrying heavy loads, the mud, the heat, the rain to his younger sisters and rob the experience of any romance. ²⁶ These conversations are indicative of the negotiated element of intergenerational transmission. While many parents and guardians may opt for a strict disciplinarian route, here we see that parents do not always simply forbid certain actions, but rather engage in persuasive argument to influence young people’s decision-making, a parenting strategy that recognises the children’s agency in determining their future.

Parents’ concern about recruitment is not merely in fear of the child’s safety but also the wider repercussions of such a decision and preventing cycles of retaliation. One participant from South Lebanon explained how his father reacted when he thought his son had potentially gotten caught up with armed groups:

But my dad [said] ‘I spent 30 years in Africa for this home, not for them to blow it up and ruin my future because of you, and expel us’ . . . he even, at some point said to me that you’re not my son, and that he’ll disown me. [I left and later he] brought me back home after he made sure I wasn’t part of politics or anything of that sort. ²⁷

Children may suffer this rejection from their parents and make their own choices to distance themselves when guardians react to their potential involvement in armed groups. Similarly, in Buenaventura, young family members who join armed groups leave home in part because of the strain with family members who do not want them to attract violence. ²⁸

In contexts where in-group and out-group mentalities contribute to cycles of division and tension in conflict such as Lebanon and Northern Ireland, adults are not only concerned with recruitment but also radicalisation of the next generation. By radicalisation we take Özerdem and Podder’s (2011) understanding of radicalisation as ‘the process of developing extremist ideologies and beliefs’ (p. 67). Teaching a pro-social and pro-peace value system to their children is a form in which parents seek to disrupt generational cycles of sectarianism and hatred. In Beirut, a resident was raised to not ask ‘Where are you from? Which family?’ to avoid highlighting sectarian division, while a young man from Southern Lebanon observes, ‘personally feel like I’m cool with whatever because I wasn’t raised on this sense of discrimination and uptightness against the other’. ²⁹ Similarly, a Shia resident observes that Shia parents are sending their children to Christian schools like they did during the civil war:

It is becoming common again . . . Because a lot of the schools here are now run by either Hezbollah or Amal. And if you don’t want your children have that indoctrination and you want kind of affordable quality, you would have to kind of send them to schools elsewhere. And it all becomes a balance, I think, between how open you are and what you care about. ³⁰

The transfer of relations can also maintain ties that prevent division. A community leader in North Belfast notes that despite his Republican leanings, the Protestant friendships he has inherited from his parents mean that he is also approached by Protestants for help.

Friends, neighbours of my parents for years are originally from the Shankill [Protestants], . . . They’re just good people. They’re actually friends – friends who I’ve inherited from my parents . . . But then after growing up, I’ve taken on a more community role and be known about the place, maybe in a Republican role. But even now to this day people come to the door, Can you help with this? It’s good. ³¹

The same participant recalls that the lessons his father and his mother – both peace activists – provided him as a child to keep him safe were also about preventing him from adopting sectarian attitudes. Again, the disruptive strategies by the adults range from persuasive to disciplinarian, indicating the complex interplay between their actions as parents and the agency of their children.

My parents encouraged me to work in town because you then worked with people from all communities, from all walks of life. There was never any sectarianism in our home growing up. It was – if there was any hint of sectarianism, my mother and father would have been quite strict, and we would get a slap (laughs).

The cases in Colombia do not reflect the same sectarian tensions as Northern Ireland and Lebanon. However, adults were still concerned with ensuring that the next generation was able to cope with conflict without resorting to extreme or radical responses. One former FARC combatant notes that her own experience helped her teach her 5-year-old son to not use violent language with other children:

They play [with their friends] with little fake guns, saying well, I’m going to kill you. And I say no, that isn’t allowed. That’s bad . . . what I learned with the guerrilla is that you need to talk, you need to hear good people talk, you need to talk to older people and to younger people. That way one can learn a lot about how you should be. If you haven’t learned from all [those experiences], well, then it can all go to waste. ³²

In South Lebanon, a young man reflected on the impact a teacher had in how he taught them to look past divisions, observing that the teacher ‘cared about all of us, but also as a human he wanted to secure the future, which is us’. ³³ These collective actions are therefore not limited to the protection of one individual child, but rather seen as a necessary generational disruption of the conflict for the whole community.

It takes a village

Given the broader repercussions of continued cycles of violence, intergenerational lessons are given importance beyond the family home. We observe that across cases, other adults in the community also step in to protect children and understand the importance of shaping generational perspectives to avoid future conflict. For example, a Christian respondent in Beirut recalls facing sectarian bullying from other children for presenting work on a renowned Lebanese poet and a teacher intervening to prevent further attacks. ³⁴ Another participant remembers that during a bombing in Beirut, a teacher took her and her sister home with her when her father could not come out to get them. ³⁵

Youth clubs and initiatives offer collective mediums through which adults in a conflict-affected community contribute to a generational shift in recruitment and radicalisation. A resident of north Antrim views youth sports as an important vector for change, volunteering his own time to a local youth club:

So it’s been a calming influence and keeps young ones out of trouble, keeps young’uns on the straight and narrow, keeps them away from the scourge of drugs and stuff like that. They’re involved in sports. ³⁶

The culture of drugs and paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have become highly intertwined, even in areas where paramilitary presence is less visible. Youth workers in North Belfast work to help children from across Protestant and Catholic communities to engage in sports and stay away from paramilitary influences and drugs. ³⁷ In Piedemonte, indigenous leaders stressed the importance of rural schools in breaking the cycles of violence by offering young people alternatives such as education. ³⁸ Mingas – an indigenous tradition of cooperative voluntary work – brought communities together to build schools and educational spaces for this purpose. ³⁹

There are often considerable community efforts to develop safe spaces for children in conflict-affected communities in Colombia (Berents, 2018; Mejía Restrepo and Núñez, 2025). This intergenerational approach to conflict disruption is especially evident in Buenaventura, where respondents highlighted the importance of role models and opportunities to address child recruitment into armed groups. ⁴⁰ One former peace activist from Buenaventura views his new role as youth sports coordinator as an explicit continuation of peacebuilding work – a strategy of

snatching away young men from the armed groups. Those who would think that, it’s not a football [programme] where young men will go. No, what I am doing is transforming minds, and getting them out like that, so they see that there are opportunities. ⁴¹

Protective and disruptive strategies collide; the strength of sport and culture as vectors for social transformation suppresses recruitment while providing cover for young boys who are more susceptible to suspicion by armed groups safe manoeuvring through a territory.

As members of a shared community, adults – and not simply parents – also take initiative to shape the way children understand the conflict and the options they have for disengagement. These kinds of interventions with younger people may occur in ad hoc circumstances. One resident of North Belfast recalls helping with a local children’s team:

I can think of one time aboard the minibus and one of the young guys – he would have been, I don’t know, nine, ten – and we’re talking about the IRA and UVF and all those sorts of things. Anyway, so actually the conversation’s around, ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’ He says, ‘I want to join the “RA”’. And I says, ‘oh right’, I says, ‘so . . . you’d kill me?’ ‘No, I wouldn’t kill you, sure I know you’. So, I says, ‘So, you’d kill the driver?’ ‘I wouldn’t kill him, I know him too’. So, by the time we went around the whole bus, he knew everybody. So, I says, ‘So, who are you going to kill? See, you couldn’t even get joining the “RA”’. ⁴²

Similarly, a Christian in Southern Lebanon took the initiative to council the younger generation on divisions and prejudices in the community through encounters in the church:

I really took a mediator role at that setting, and I really asked for our kids to be present for what I had to say, and if not present to be told and explained to what I was about to say. They all listened as I stated how we have no animosity with our Shia brothers, and second of all, that the Liberation, we all benefited from it, not just the Shia, we were all liberated. ⁴³

However, highlighting the agency involved in intergenerational transmission also foregrounds a sense that recruitment and radicalisation – and therefore wider community insecurity – are at least partly the responsibility of guardians and parents to control. Young women in Piedemonte who have been coming more involved in community leadership recognise that it is a dangerous decision with threats and attacks from armed groups against social leaders. Their reflection on their decision to become more involved and the dangers it poses also reflects their sense of responsibility as mothers:

We are women too, so it affects us in everything. Our children, that we might leave them alone, as orphans, and who will keep them safe? So that they do not choose, do not think, let’s see with these weapons, we can get ahead? ⁴⁴

The women understand their role is to protect their children, but also prevent them from participating in further cycles of violence. A participant in Buenaventura explained the individual responsibility that parents had to take on to consider the broader public question of insecurity and conflict:

As parents we must correct our children, not give them wings for them to go down the wrong path . . . a week ago [a young man] tried to behave aggressively towards me in the neighbourhood, because I was challenging his behaviour towards one of my girls, and I did not like that, I thought it was very bad because you can see the poor education that he is receiving at home from his elders, because when a young person behaves aggressively towards an older person, that is synonymous with something going wrong in the house and the environment where they act. ⁴⁵

A teacher in South Lebanon was similarly frustrated with how parents are raising their children in reinforcing stereotypes and divisions.

I was teaching . . . and at some point, there was this girl in her last 2 years, like, someone around that age should know, she said ‘Teacher, what do you worship?’, and I understood the context within which she is asking, and what am I to tell her!? I told her that what am I to tell you? We worship the rock, the statue, the stone, we worship God. She wasn’t convinced, so that means whoever taught her, hadn’t taught her well. ⁴⁶

Van Ommering (2020: 103) similarly observes in a Shia-majority school in Beirut that teachers felt their efforts to foster more collaborative attitudes were often undermined by parents who exposed their children to sectarianism. In Piedemonte, a local leader also expressed frustration at the role of the community and parents in not doing enough to prevent the recruitment of minors, ⁴⁷ while another resident noted that the children who joined did not have ‘a strong family unit’ at home. ⁴⁸ Therefore, the perceived responsibility of parents to raise their children ‘right’ can also generate tension in the wider community.

Tensions and limitations

Despite often overlapping – such as preventing child recruitment – protective and disruptive objectives are not always compatible. In this section, we examine the challenges and contradictions in civilian strategies. Often parents, in a bid to protect their child from the conflict, avoid discussion on the topics of sectarianism or violence. ⁴⁹ While they may attempt to shield their children from difficult and dangerous topics, this approach can also prevent meaningful discussion and often reflects the parents’ own complex relationship with the conflict rather than addressing the reality of a new generation (Dalgaard et al., 2019; Kevers et al., 2024; O’Malley et al., 2007). One rural resident of north Antrim observes that generational trauma is passed down as ‘helpful advice’:

as I get older – a lot of mumblings about maybe ‘don’t bother with “such and such” because they would be – and their father would have been, or their grandparent’, from our perspective, ‘they would be in the Orange Order’, or ‘they would be a Black Man’ or ‘they would be the UDR’, which was the Ulster Defense Regiment, or ‘they would be in the police’. . . that must have been in the ‘70s. But those stories were passed down to us as well, of like ‘That’s what they did’. ⁵⁰

In another example, a participant in Beirut recalls:

I would go home and be like, ‘hey, I have this friend, her name is, let’s say, Dana’. And they would ask, ‘Is she one of them?’ Like in a low voice, you know what I mean? Like ‘it’s shameful’, and their eyes wide ‘Is she one of them?’, this fear. ⁵¹

In this case, the child wants to take a stand against the attitudes of her parents, rejecting their divisive language to support her friend. Parenting is an expression of personal experiences and attributes (Kershaw et al., 2014), including maladaptive parenting practices such as the overprotection of children (Rojas-Flores et al., 2013). Old hurts are translated into warnings to the new generation to avoid potentially dangerous people from the ‘other side’, yet often only reflect risks that may not exist in the same form or potency in present day. A Protestant mother in North Belfast admits that her own experience of the Troubles prevents her from going into Catholic neighbourhoods to pick up her daughter from her schoolfriend’s house: ‘I don’t feel safe for her. I felt intimidated. I went and picked her up. I told her “I don’t want to go in there anymore”’ ⁵² These protective measures can also reflect the power relations that assert a unidirectional transfer of knowledge in the transmission of behaviours and norms between adults and children, instead of encouraging an intergenerational approach that dismantles hierarchies for a more lasting and inclusive peace (Lee-Koo and Pruitt, 2025).

Therefore, strategies for protection can reinforce long-term division, as these may manifest as people retreating and ‘hunkering down’ in their perceived safe zones and safe topics (Dixon and Durrheim, 2003; Huck et al., 2019). In more extreme cases, a desire to protect the family may also drive people to take up arms in for self-defence (Braithwaite and Cunningham, 2020; Krause and Milliken, 2009; Schubiger, 2021). One participant in Beirut admits that not only advice is passed down generationally:

There is no Lebanese home without weapons. There isn’t. These are from the days of our great-grandparents. The Lebanese house is not devoid of weapons. There is no Lebanese home – now, God forbid, God forbid, if the war starts again, you will see everyone carrying weapons and descending on the streets.

Equally, another participant from Southern Lebanon lays out clearly how strategies to protect children and families can reproduce militant behaviour.

[my cousins’] path to maturity was much more wrinkled [than mine]. They grew up, they grew up in an environment which led them to be the way they are, while I grew up in an environment which was much, much, much less tough than they grew up in. Like, they’re the type of people that would like currently hold a gun. These are the same people that are my age right now. My cousin, right now, he goes to [university] with a gun in his pocket. He’s ready in case, for whatever reason. While I turned out to be an atheist (laughs). ⁵³

The difference in how both the participant and his cousins were raised was a product of their environment and the lessons each learned from their parents on how to navigate the world. Both weapons and the expectation of their potential necessity for protection are transmitted across generations despite changes in conflict dynamics.

This entrenchment may even be reflected in how protective strategies are remembered and interpreted by children as adults. For example, a Shia participant from Beirut expressed resentment and anger at an experience where her father – to protect his children – stayed quiet in the face of aggression by a Syrian soldier at a checkpoint during the war:

My father was afraid, he did not speak, he was afraid for us . . . I was very hurt inside – my hero was so humiliated to me by someone who is not even . . . a human being . . . now, I mean, [the Syrian soldier] is definitely a human being. And if he does not know how to read, it does not mean that this reduces his value. But do you understand what I mean? ⁵⁴

We are not suggesting that protection strategies are necessarily a barrier to long-term peace and reconciliation. Yet parents concerned with immediate risks to their children may be counterproductive to broader conflict transformation.

Like with any exploration of civilian agency in the midst of ongoing violence and conflict, we also cannot ignore the limitations to the ability of civilians to address the insecurity their children face. One local leader in Buenaventura observes that despite the disruptive potential of sport and dance, they are hampered by lack of resources, political will and local corruption. ⁵⁵ Community workers in Belfast also found that their efforts to transform sectarianism through joint youth work could be hampered directly by armed actors who decided they did not approve of cross-community programmes. ⁵⁶ This reflects the importance in acknowledging the structural forces that can shape the experiences and futures of young people and the transformation of broader society (McInerney, 2009; for more on structural factors and education, see Freire, 1970).

Fundamentally, just as parents and guardians cannot prevent a bomb from falling on a house, or a child from ever being hit by a bullet or attacked for their identity, they cannot always stop young people from joining armed groups. One resident in North Belfast recalls her mother trying to prevent her brother from joining the paramilitaries: ‘My mummy’s even went to top men in these organisations. She’s just been told to get away from the door (chuckles)’. ⁵⁷ In Piedemonte, mothers also went to confront the guerrilla when their children left to join them. In some cases, it could work, but the final decision was not only left to the guerrilla.

On one occasion I remember that [the parents] did succeed [in getting their son back], but there were others that they were going to demand [their son back], but they said that [the son] did not want to return. So it was impossible. ⁵⁸

Finally, we also find that intergenerational transmission can be geared at pro-conflict rather than pro-peace mentalities (Haer and Böhmelt, 2016). Parents at times openly prohibit their children from seeing or dating people from other backgrounds for sectarian rather than security concerns. ⁵⁹ As Martin (2021: 459) argues, agency in conflict spaces is too often conceptualised as resistance, without understanding its nuances and variations. Civilian agency in intergenerational transmission is a double-sided sword: it can push the next generation towards or away from repeating the same conflict dynamics. Crucially, this transmission is not straightforward, as the occasional collision between protective and disruptive objectives demonstrates.

Conclusion

The transmission of norms, beliefs and attitudes occurs in the micro-level interactions and relationships built organically within a community and across generations. We argue that this transmission is a form of agency that individuals can exercise both to protect children and to disrupt cycles of conflict. The findings in these protracted conflicts reflect similar observations in other contexts: in their study on risk factors leading to youth recruitment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, adolescents who had not engaged in armed groups ‘reported that their caregivers or other family members had explicitly advised them not to engage with armed groups and discussed with them possible consequences of this decision’ whereas adolescents who had joined armed groups reported ‘having parental approval more often, though endorsement from caregivers was overall mixed’ (Blackwell et al., 2023: 20). Therefore, we build on these observations that challenge an overwhelming focus on the transmission between generations (also see Van Dijk et al., 2022). By focusing on protective and disruptive objectives, we highlight how civilians are proactive in raising children in response to the threat of protracted conflict.

This transmission is not solely reserved to parents; adults across a community protect young people and volunteer to help them avoid the recruitment or radicalisation that entrenches cycles of violence. Raising children in conflict areas is not only as a matter of private responsibility in the home, but also of public consequences. This reflects the youth-ed tropes that abound in the discourses of peacebuilding and of structural violence, where the youth are framed as a containable danger (Berents and McEvoy-Levy, 2015). Parents and guardians are still often charged with mitigating this danger, indicating a perceived responsibility – and therefore agency – in determining a child’s path. We observe this attitude can reproduce hierarchies that prevent a truly intergenerational peace (Lee-Koo and Pruitt, 2025), especially since in many cases the parents in this article have shown a disciplinarian approach that curtails the child’s own agency. Yet adults at home and in the wider community still recognise that children make choices and work to make more peaceful choices more attractive.

Therefore, we present intergenerational transmission as an underexplored dimension of civilian agency, as a way for ‘so-called ordinary people’ (Mac Ginty, 2021) to both protect vulnerable youths and disrupt cycles that feed on new generations of recruits and radicals. Our findings reveal a pattern in protective and disruptive strategies across three different countries, responding to Krause et al.’s (2023) call for researchers to ‘accommodate contextual differences but still allow for the investigation of a broader set of comparable cases’ (p. 258) in understanding civilian agency in conflict. Future research could explore how these strategies evolve at different periods of protracted conflict and how this intergenerational transmission is also interpreted and transformed by young people. As we observe, despite significant parental influence in shaping children’s decisions, children and young people can also exercise their preferences, which means we must take the voices of the young seriously in their role and agency in conflict as in constructing peace (Berents, 2015; Greenberg, 2020; Percy-Smith and Thomas, 2009: 54).

We argue that pro-peace interventions should identify and support the efforts that adults already take, both in the private and public spheres, as strategies of civilian self-protection and broader conflict disruption. As Herrera Kelly (2024) argues, civilians exercise agency to disrupt conflict in often ‘subtle localised ways’ (p. 314). Interventions therefore should help reinforce protective measures without undermining the disruption already practised by civilians. Even where conflict may limit unarmed civilians from acting, intergenerational transmission remains a space for agency, resistance and disruption.