Children and young people in times of conflict and change: Child rights in the Middle East and North Africa

The Arab Spring was not only about citizens toppling the regime in Tunisia, occupying Tahrir Square in Egypt and the streets of Yemen and Bahrain, and militant confrontations in Libya. It was about a generation that had dreams and that is now facing challenges to live in dignity. Not only young people, but children too were part of the uprisings, whether joining their parents or joining the dissent against their parents’ wishes. Others who had no one to encourage or discourage decided for themselves: street children, child street vendors and school pupils were present on the streets in many instances of pacifist demonstrations or violent clashes since 2011, including in Syria which has turned into a devastating prolonged violent conflict. Their role remains neglected in Arab Spring commentaries, and their suffering has not invited the in-depth study it deserves. The extent to which their involvement in different political contexts has also influenced children’s and young people’s memories and identities has also escaped thorough documentation.

The aim of this special issue is to bring together articles from established and emergent academics and practitioners who have direct experience and empirical data on the lives of children in the Middle East and North African (MENA) regions, particularly since the Arab Spring uprisings. Our critical focus is on the role of children and young people in influencing political and cultural change in the region and the impacts upon them of conflict and political change.

This ambition emerged from a capacity building collaboration between the guest editors who were partners in a European Union (EU) Tempus-funded project: Diploma in Public Policy and Child Rights (2010–2013). Two universities in Egypt (Cairo University and Assiut University) and two in Jordan (Jordan University and Hashemite University) with European partner universities (University of Bristol, England; Free University of Berlin, Germany; Maastricht University, Netherlands and the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, Netherlands) as well as Research in Practice in England and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Egypt and Jordan came together to develop a postgraduate diploma for advocates and children’s rights practitioners in Egypt and Jordan to address the role of policymaking in facilitating the articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; UN, 1990) to be recognized in domestic law and in rights-based practice with children and young people.

The project timescale enabled first-hand experience of what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’ that began in Tunisia on the 18th of December 2010, with protests occurring from the 25th of January 2011 in Egypt where, in particular, the protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, became a symbol of hope for democracy and equality across the region. Witnessing the changes that occurred across the MENA region and the differential impacts of such changes challenged the project in respect of the political upheavals that occurred and the lack of consistent policymaking processes that resulted – even as it underlined the importance and urgency of the project’s objectives. Yet these changes and challenges were unequally felt across Jordan and Egypt and across other MENA countries. We also became intensely aware as a team that media and academic coverage of the role of children and young people in the ‘revolutions’ and protests swayed from positioning the young as political innovators (Ezbawy, 2012; Wardany, 2012; Youniss et al., 2013) mobilizing resources through modern means of social media (Hassan, 2012; Herrera, 2011, 2014; Howard et al., 2011; Stepanova, 2011) or as passive victims of military and police interventions or of circumstances of poverty and social inequalities (Ammar, 2009; Campante and Chor, 2012; Elkoussi and Bakheet, 2011; Kotb et al., 2011; Nada and El Daw, 2010). What these polarized narratives provided was an idealized and stylized view of children and childhoods through conflict that failed to capture the untold everyday stories in humanistic and empathetic ways that recognized the agency and resilience of children and young people. While many published studies of children in the MENA uprisings pointed to the presence of children in streets, their need for protection and the impact of the instable and violent circumstances left on their safety, whether during and after the uprising or in the following prolonged street clashes, little has been written about their agency as being a component of the wave and their participation as a reason to reconsider the status of children as ‘junior’ citizens and political actors (Ezzat, 2007).

The state of childhood studies

It is important to highlight how children are generally conceptualized in social sciences today. A strong link exists between how children are ‘imagined’ and the wider modernist imagination. Recent approaches of the study of childhood include the socially constructed child, the tribal child, the minority group child and the social structural child (James et al., 1998). These four models of the child also prefigure four dichotomous theoretical themes: agency–structure, universalism–particularism, local–global and continuity–change (James et al., 1998). We can add, based on our work here, two categories: the ‘political child’ and the ‘nomad child’, the first describing children caught in situations of violent instability that do not reach the stage of armed conflict in terms of civil war, and find themselves engaged in political actions or in direct relation with political structures and agents without support of family or protection of laws, and the second referring to refugee children who do not enjoy the citizenship of the locations they inhabit and where international law is not a sufficient umbrella when it comes to the complexity of risk situations or the capacity of hosting countries to provide basic services – an alarming phenomena in the Arab world today.

Many reasons lead to the dominant view of children as subjects rather than agents of change in political change research, mainly because the ‘political’ is seen as a rational sphere, while it is believed that children are still maturing and lack full reason, and their will is not independent. It is also a sphere of contestation, antagonism and power believed to be unsuitable for children to enter. Children are by definition apolitical in the dominant paradigms:

Adults tend to view children as a largely apolitical social group occupying the apolitical space of childhood, yet the exclusion of children from discussions of politics and nationalism belie this assumption […] Children’s rights discourses tend to reify constructions of apolitical childhood in such a way that the systematic exclusion of children from the full rights of citizenship receives little notice. (Cheney, 2007: 12–13)

Events like the Arab Spring directly confront this notion. Political socialization as a social and educational process is the utmost we can find under the title of politics when it comes to children. Their presence in domestic violent political scenes is also overlooked and their voice is usually muted because the state is assumed to be the vehicle for securing their wellbeing and it is not expected that it would consider them part of the ‘state of exception’ when it takes full command of defining sovereignty and exercising it regardless of law (Agamben, 1998). Yet it usually does, and they are caught in emerging situations of political conflict, with no parties allowed to interfere – as compared, for instance, to spaces of war when laws, political bodies and international agencies have a clear role (Greenbaum et al., 2006). It is no secret that some of the international organizations keep a low profile in such times of uncertainty for fear of being banned from working in the respective country where the state of politics is exceptionally harming of the basic rights of children, including the very basic of all rights: the right to life.

While national and international laws and organizations can uphold rights and defend entitlements, we still live in a liquid modern condition, where the remoteness of global systemic structures is coupled with unstructured and under-defined fluid states of the immediate setting of life, politics and human togetherness (Bauman, 2000: 16–52). Children are the most vulnerable social segment in such liquid conditions (Bauman, 2000: 16–52).

The articles

The articles in this issue present different and challenging perspectives on children and young people’s rights in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia and Palestine. Some of the articles chosen present a commentary on the country’s progress towards addressing children’s rights such as Janette Habashi’s article which reports the challenges faced by the incoming Palestinian government to ensure that the Palestinian Basic Law incorporates the articles of the UNCRC. She identifies the reservations likely to be made, particularly in addressing the challenge of universalism/secularism enshrined in the UNCRC and the cultural relativism and religiosity in Sharia Law. While Habashi offers a future-focused commentary, Mahmoud Boussena and Habib Tiliouine chart the progresses made and challenges faced in Algeria, where reservations to certain articles are exemplified by a state focus on the Islamic faith as the state religion and the importance of family and the religious commitment of fathers in defining freedom of thought for children. Algeria did not witness Arab Spring uprisings in 2010/2011, yet many observers claim that it had the first Arab Spring in 1991 when, through elections – unlike in other countries where opposition was satisfied with its role – Algerians witnessed a sweeping victory of the Islamic party, the Front Islamic du Salut (FIS), that promised a structural change in power. The response of the regime was to totally nullify those elections and later ban FIS. After a decade of armed conflict, stability was maintained and the political status quo has been largely unchallenged. As such, this article reads quite differently from others that have focused on issues of conflict, change, agency and activism by children and young people. While they report incremental gains in some areas of children’s rights, the authors acknowledge the ongoing challenges to the country of addressing children’s freedom from violence in the home and school, and they identify schools as possible agents of further change and advocacy for children’s protection and participation rights.

Four of the articles provide empirical insights into the lives of children and young people in the MENA countries considered. For example, in the article from Jordan, Hind Farahat and Kristen E Cheney explore the reasons why orphans’ protests of their inferior citizenship were so short-lived and failed to transform orphans’ social disadvantage, which is largely due to the pervasive patriarchy and tribalism embedded in the state system under a veneer of democracy that only upholds the status quo and entitlements of the powerful. The article from Jordan and the articles from Tunisia and Egypt focus on young people’s involvements in uprisings and challenges to the state. In the Jordanian case, this is by a particular group of young people excluded by society to address fundamental questions of identity and belonging; while the article by Barbara Lethem Ibrahim, Betsy Mesard and Leah Hunt-Hendrix in Egypt reports a mobilizing of young people to volunteer and engage in political activism in ways that challenge established norms of youth social service in Egypt through organized movements such as Resala. The article reports the extent to which young people felt empowered as Egyptian citizens, occupying their own political and social space, largely marked by the occupations of Tahrir Square. The postscript is a reminder of the durability of such political movements as, despite yet more upheaval and unrest in Egypt, Resala has survived. While focused on the activism of these young people, this article also highlights the situation of children under military-led regimes, where there are elections yet there is no democracy. Such regimes undermine children’s rights under strict hegemony over public space and education, where many social and cultural rights of children are undermined. Furthermore, their protection rights lose priority when the regimes face dissent, with the result that the resultant security measures corrode basic rights of citizens – most severely those of children. Challenges to political processes operate on many levels: as one young volunteer commented, the 2011 ‘revolution’ in Egypt was ‘a revolution of politics (overthrowing the regime), a revolution of cleaning up the country, and a revolution of the self (Ibrahim et al., this volume).

The article by Fatma Jabberi and Sofia Laine also focuses on the role of young volunteers in creating dialogic spaces of cultural exchange and learning through their participation in the World Social Forum (WSF) held in Tunis in 2013. Through the combination of the auto-ethnographic voice of Jabberi (a young Tunisian volunteer) and Laine’s ethnographic field notes, the authors theorize the WSF as a ‘contact zone’ where, through translation and interpretation of knowledge and practices, Laine was enabled to enter the experience of the young volunteers and open up North–South dialogue in a non-hegemonic manner. The notion of the ‘contact zone’ operates in this article in a number of ways from the local to the global and across the research relationship that flourished through bringing the two different voices together. From a methodological perspective, this is an excellent example of co-produced writing where neither one voice nor the other dominates.

The final article in this volume is the only article that addresses the experiences of younger children as it reports experiences of 11- to 13-year-old boys and girls in Balata refugee camp in the West Bank of Palestine. Like Jabberi and Laine, David J Marshall utilized ethnographic methods to capture boys’ and girls’ everyday use of space within the confines of the camp – in particular focusing on concepts such as mobility and fear of violence to illuminate the gendered restrictions placed upon the children concerned. What is of particular interest is that while it would appear girls are more constrained and confined within the home environment, they have utilized this situation to enhance their learning advantage in order to achieve greater academic successes. Boys, on the other hand, appear to be disadvantaged by the expectations placed upon them to occupy wider spaces and to defend their homes and neighbourhoods. Yet what emerges from both accounts is the agency of the children, whom in engaging in local debates about space within the camp have also engaged in political, religious and gendered debates.

Common themes

A unique aspect of this collection is thus its use of intersectionality – attention to the ways various dominant institutions, systems of oppression or discriminatory practices such as race, class and gender interact with age and generation – to convey MENA children’s subjective experiences of the Arab Spring. Gender is hugely important across the articles in respect of children and young people’s experiences. The very fact that ‘youth’ is often defined as ‘male’ indicates that girls and young women can be marginalized in contexts of struggle and social change (Ibrahim et al., this volume), and although their lives may be adversely impacted by the patriarchy in which MENA societies are embedded (Farahat and Cheney, this volume), these pieces demonstrate that young people find creative ways to resist and even subvert gendered oppression (Marshall, this volume).

The gendered and generational use of space was also a key issue for children’s experiences, particularly as reported in the occupied Palestinian territories (Marshall, this volume) and the ‘contact zones’ of the WSF in Tunisia (Jabberi and Laine, this volume). There is also a dimension of urbanity in the articles. Although politics and change encompass all sectors and spaces of a society, the civil struggles are usually linked with central urban locations, as is the case in the studies reported here. In better understanding the diversities of MENA childhood experiences, there is also a need to expand the focus to include children in rural and Bedouin areas. However, taken together, attention to the intersectionalities reported across the articles provides a much more nuanced and complex picture of young people’s experiences of the Arab Spring than could be conveyed in approaches to childhood that take it as the sole social variable and object of analysis.

The impact of religion on children’s experiences is also far greater than might be the case in other parts of the world, particularly where Sharia law interacts with children’s rights discourses in sometimes disparate ways (Farahat and Cheney, this volume; Habashi, this volume; Ibrahim et al., this volume). The articles in this volume deal honestly and critically with this intersection. The tension between the legacy of Islamic norms, principles and laws and modern conventions needs to be resolved within the frame of wide civil deliberations. Many religious opinions have managed to reconcile different views, yet sometimes issues are polarized beyond need (especially during elections), or globalized beyond necessity. The issue is not so much Sharia as much as it is cultural differences and the need for respecting pluralist perspectives, without undermining basic human rights. Sharia can also be the basis for fostering civic virtues and compassion needed in many problems related to children in day-to-day life. This dimension has been neglected with the over-legalization of children’s issues, overstating the State in protection, and undermining social networks and even primordial social structures, whose role strengthens in times of crisis and where religion becomes a key frame of reference.

Future directions

It is obvious from the study of children in many countries today that young people develop new approaches to cope with the rapid changes in their lives and circumstances. There is also a need for a contextual approach so that the study of childhood and youth can add to the understanding of the spaces and the sectors of modern life in MENA countries. The camp, the playground, the locale of political dissent, the spaces of deliberation and the dynamics of power, law and morality that govern in each space are important for ‘locating’ our understanding of children’s issues in times of change.

Many societies are witnessing unprecedented levels of violence and displacement. Regimes that signed the UNCRC are negligent in adhering to the basic measures of child protection, and civil society is crippled when sovereignty is at stake and their role is hindered. More research in the direction of childhood/youth and politics needs to be done but also more attention should be given to areas outside the mainstream research topics and spatial locations. A comparative approach between different regions can highlight common problems, not only in the global South but also between South and North. The case studies here reflect a need for more theoretical research to develop analytical categories as well as empirical tools to explore emerging problems. Our own work as editors highlighted commonalities rather than differences in the problems children are facing in a global age. An outcome of that eye-opening experience is a call for more effort to cover issues related to childhood, identity, politics and urban injustice.

The articles included in this issue did not cover conflict hot spots like Iraq, Syria and Yemen. This is itself an indicator that researchers in such countries often give more attention to macro-issues rather than the everyday lives of their younger citizens. We are considering a future effort focusing on these cases and the reconstruction of images and revisiting of issues and methodologies in the light of empirical challenges.

As the changes and transformations in the Arab world are still unfolding, and a clear generation gap is emerging, children and young people are expected to play a crucial role in shaping the future of their countries. Any futuristic perspective cannot afford to ignore that, and the measures of securing and empowering children and young people should be at the heart of any social negotiation to bring civic and civilized peace to a turbulent region.