Of Tigers, Ghosts and Snakes: Children's Social Cognition in the Context of Conflict in Eastern Sri Lanka

This paper is based on field research with Tamil children and adolescents in the war-affected district of Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka. It examines young people's experiences of conflict in terms of their social worlds and their relations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), finding both to be permeated with ambiguity and dissonance. According to established understandings of social cognitive development this would suggest a significant threat to children's social perception, awareness and skills. Yet, it is found that these children and adolescents hold unexpectedly secure values of sociality. In light of this evidence, the paper raises various questions about the adequacy of current theoretical perspectives on social cognition from psychology and anthropology. In particular, it re-evaluates the common emphasis upon the critical importance of mutuality and durability in the socio-cultural dimension for effective cognitive development.

Children, War and World Disorder in the 21st Century: A Review of the Theories and the Literature on Children's Contributions to Armed Violence

Young populations, and particularly young males, have been attributed a proclivity to aggression and unrest that puts societies at risk. Theories about the dangers of a demographic 'youth bulge' inform public and policy debates about the predictors of violent conflict, as evidenced most recently in the World Bank's World Development Report for 2007. This paper evaluates the validity and utility of claims linking youth bulges to civil conflicts by reviewing different literatures concerning naturalist ideas of young humans' innate aggression and cognitive incompetence as well as environmentalist ideas of environmental stimuli, processes of socialisation, and the dialectical relationship of structural conditions and human agency. This review finds that the moral panic propagated by youth bulge theorists is too often based on only one form of influence on human development and action, whether an aspect of environment, personal experience, or individual traits. A more cogent analysis must integrate the highly complex and dynamic processes involved in cognition and behaviour and aim to develop theories that take account of the social power, ideational and structural forms, and emotional and cognitive processes that young people experience and draw on in times of war. Theories of causality that fail to account for this complexity obscure understanding of the many ways in which young people and conflict may be linked.