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over the complicated conflicts it seeks to controlaround the world. The perplexing complexity of suchnegotiations was revealed with all of its frustrations inthe Balkan conflict. The Clinton administrationsought a settlement that would avert a war overKosovo through its negotiation of the DaytonAccords. At first it seemed that the United Nationswar crimes tribunal had assisted this process byindictingRadovanKaradzicandelevatingthepositionof Slobodan Milosevic. However, Milosevic soonproved to be no better a partner for peace thanKaradzic, and the Serbian violence was allowed tocontinue, resulting in his belated indictment as well.The lesson may simply be that mass killings andgenocide will continue to occur until a system of deterrents comes into effect through an institutionsuch as the ICC.It is of special note that two of America’s closestallies, Canada and Great Britain, have taken aparticular interest in the Rwandan and Balkan tri-bunals and the ICC, often seeming to lend moredurablesupportthantheUSA.TheCanadianForeignMinister,LloydAxworthy,builtontheleadershiproleplayed by the Canadian jurist, Louise Arbour, duringher term as Chief Prosecutor of the Rwandan andBalkan tribunals. Both have emphasized that armedconflicts in the world now increasingly involve strug-gles within rather than between nations, with parallelincreases in civilian as opposed to military casualties.They argue this requires new ways of thinking aboutanddealingwithissuesofnationalsovereignty,so thatefforts to protect the latter do not become shields usedby political and military leaders to cloak such crimesas murder, torture, rape, forced deportations, andexpulsions. During the Kosovo crisis in particular,and the subsequent Milosevic indictment, the Britishgovernment showed a firm resolve to use internationalcriminal law to deal with intra-national crimes againsthumanity.The Canadian-born and now British-based journal-ist Michael Ignatieff, and the British lawyer andhuman rights activist Geoffrey Robertson, have beenamong the most effective spokespersons for a per-manent international criminal court. Ignatieff’s (2000)book,
Virtual War
, makes a powerful argument for just how much the politics and technology of war havechanged in recent decades. Ignatieff argues that it isour failure of moral imagination to keep pace withthese changes that inhibits the movement to a per-manent international criminal court. Robertson’s(2000) book,
Crimes Against Humanity
, paints ahistorically and geographically sweeping picture of aworld in which violent human rights abuses moreoften than not go unpunished. Nonetheless,Robertson argues that the Balkan and Rwandantribunals signal a new ‘age of enforcement’ that ispromising and already in progress. Many shareRobertson’s hope that these tribunals will continue toevolve into a permanent ICC.
4. Research Priorities
Many important questions remain regarding warcrimes tribunals. In particular, it will be important tolearn how the international prosecution of war crimesis organized and to contrast this with the work of nationaljusticesystems,suchasRwanda’s,whichmayalso prosecute and punish war criminals in largenumbers. Answers to the following kinds of questionswouldbeespeciallyusefulinexpandingourknowledgebase: How are the presumed worst offenders andoffenses selected for international prosecution? Howare prosecutors and judges selected for tribunal work?What are the patterns of conviction and punishment?What is the role of international public opinion ininfluencing the tribunals and the prospective per-manent court? What are the effects on the prosecutorsand judges who become involved in this work? Whatare the prospects of a more permanent internationalcriminal court and how might its work differ from thecurrent efforts of the
adhoc
tribunals? The importanceofinternational war tribunalwork seemsobvious, andour knowledge of this work is unfortunately modest.
See also
: First World War, The; Second World War,The
Bibliography
Allen B 1996
Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzego
ina and Croatia
. University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis, MNBassiouni M, Manikas P 1996
The Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugosla
ia
. TransnationalPublishers, New YorkFinkielkraut A 1992
Remembering in Vain: The Klaus BarbieTrial and Crimes Against Humanity
. Columbia UniversityPress, New YorkIgnatieff M 2000
Virtual War: Koso
o and Beyond 
. Henry Holt,New YorkMarrus M 1997 The Nuremberg trial: fifty years after.
TheAmerican Scholar
66
: 563–70Neier A 1998
War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and theStruggleforJustice
.TimesBooks
\
RandomHouse,NewYorkPrunier G 1995
The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
.Columbia University Press, New YorkRobertson G 2000
Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle forGlobal Justice
. Penguin Books, London
J. Hagan
War, Political Violence and theirPsychological Effects on Children:Cultural Concerns
1. The Problem
Social science research on children and war can betraced back to at least the first World War but began16360
War Crimes Tribunals
 
in earnest during World War II. For most of this timethisworkhasbeenregardedasoutsidethemainstreamof psychological research largely because it wasbelieved that few children were exposed to war orpolitical violence. This is beginning to change becausetoday civilians are increasingly becoming the victimsof war. World War I recorded 10 percent civiliancasualties; World War II some 50 percent, but in allsubsequent wars around 80 percent of casualties havebeen civilians.While it is difficult to say how many of thesecasualties have been children, one estimate is thatduring the 1980s alone some 1.5 million children mayhave died while an additional 4 million may have beeninjured.Further,evenmorechildren(perhapsasmanyas 15 million) may have managed to escape physicallybut still have had their lives thrown into turmoil asthey and their families fled to other countries orbecame ‘internally displaced’ within their own coun-tries.
2. Mental Health
Despite this long history the field today still focusesmainly on its initial area of concern—the possibilitythat exposure to political violence is a traumatizingexperience for children. Certainly there is evidencethat war experiences can lead to clinical illnessesinvolving a wide variety of variety of symptomstypically referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder(see
Anxiety Disorder in Children
).The empirical evidence however, suggests thatsuch suffering is not inevitable. This conclusion isbased on relatively sound evidence that has beenaccumulated over the last half century. The onlyweakness in this area, it could be argued, is thatresearchers have tended to rely too heavily on teacherand parental estimates of child stress levels, with notenough direct measures from children themselves. Afurther problem is the almost complete lack of studiesin which children have been seen both before and aftertheir exposure to political violence.The realization that children show resilience evenwhenexposedtopoliticalviolencehasledinvestigatorsto search for those factors which may be helping atleast some children to escape the more severe forms of stress. Early candidates in this area included personalfactors such as age, sex, and personality. Surprisingly,in the context of political violence, very few studieshave examined these in any systematic way, whichmakes it difficult to draw clear conclusions.Additional sources of social support have attractedspeculation including the extended family, the child’speers, and the wider community. Here the evidence isalmost entirely anecdotal but provides many interest-ing ideas that warrant empirical investigation. Thecognitive-phenomenological model of coping mayindicate a way forward in this area. For example thereis some evidence that the child’s religious and politicalbeliefs may influence the way in which politicalviolence is appraised. On the other hand, we appear toknow almost nothing about children’s sources of information regarding political violence and howthey evaluate these sources.Also problematic is the long-term effect of exposureto political violence. Evidence from holocaust sur-vivors provides the largest source of information onthis subject. Here it appears that claims of universaldifficulties in later life have possibly been exaggerated.In contrast, evidence from children who becomerefugees is mildly optimistic, at least in the mediumterm, with the role of the child’s pre-refugee familysupport emerging as an important factor. Again,muchofthisisbasedonweakevidence.Unfortunatelystudiesinthisareaoftenlackadequate(orany)controlgroups, while samples are open to bias because theyare obtained from clinical sources.
3. Attitudes and Values
Either because children are modeling themselves ontheadultsaroundthemorbecauseaggressivebehavioris a form of coping, the expectation has been thatexposuretopoliticalviolencewillleadtoanincreaseinaggressive behavior, for example when interactingwith peers.Several well-designed studies have examined thisquestion, but evaluating the evidence is difficultbecause no two studies are identical. Some haveinvolved children exposed to long-term political vio-lence, but only one of these employed observationalmethods. In another study the children were observedbut had only been exposed to political violence for ashort time. Therefore despite the unusually highquality of the evidence, no clear conclusions can bereached.Ifnothingelse, this illustrates theurgent needfor cross-national replication of research in this area.There has also been much speculation that chil-dren’s moral attitudes and values may be altered byexposure to war, however, once again there is littleempirical evidence testing this hypothesis. What evi-dencethereisappearstocomealmostexclusivelyfromone society—Northern Ireland. The suggestion is thatchildren in Northern Ireland may have an under-developed sense of the complexity of moral problems.This comes from research using measures of moralreasoning. However, when moral behavior (measuredusing paper and pencil tests) has been examined, noeffect for political violence has been found.Whatever the explanation, permanent changes inmorality are almost certainly not linked to an increasein crime among young people at this time. Juvenilecrime does increase with increasing political violencebut the most likely explanation for this is the absenceof authority figures, such as fathers or the police,combined with extreme levels of deprivation.16361
War, Political Violence and their Psychological Effects on Children: Cultural Concerns
 
4. Social Problems
Of course the ‘normal’ problems that children faceduring childhood do not evaporate simply because of the onset of political violence, in particular thedisadvantages associated with lower socioeconomicstatus. Therefore, even for children in societies wherethere is political violence, the major hurdles of every-dayliferemaintobesurmounted.Inaddition,becausepolitical violence can damage the general infra-structure of society, for example, disrupting medicalservices or the food supply, children may be exposedto many risks other than the obvious problems of dealing with bombs and bullets, including increasedrisk of accidental injury or death. These conclusionsare based on good evidence. Further evidence is alsonow becoming available to suggest that it is likely thatthere is a cumulative effect with the direct negativeconsequences of political violence added to the effectsof economic and social disadvantage.Part of this increased risk may be due, it has beensuggested, to the fact that the whole family structurecomes under stress as a result of political violence. Inparticular this may include changes in child-rearingtactics.Further,thereisspeculationthatthesechangesmay carry over to influence the way in which the nextgeneration bring up their children. Unfortunately,despite the importance of this area, the amount of hard evidence is almost negligible. Only the specu-lation that changes in child-rearing styles accompanyexposure to political violence has really been testedand even then only in a very limited way.Inmanysocietiesschoolingisanimportantfactorinthe everyday life of children. Anecdotal evidencesuggeststhatwhereschoolscanbekeptopen theymayactastoprotectchildrenbutthisneedstobeconfirmedempirically. On the other hand, it is clear that politicalviolence can and often does disrupt schooling, eitherbecause children do not attend school or becauseschools are forced to close. The evidence for this isreliable but is confined to developed societies.
5. Child Combatants
Children are not always passive victims of war and
\
orpolitical violence but may be involved in severaldifferent ways. By far the largest of these consists of younger children who are involved at the periphery,often in such overt political activities as rioting ordemonstrating. In some societies, however, for exam-ple in South Africa and Palestine, this form of activityinvolved large numbers of young people and their rolebecame central to the political struggle. Older childrenare more likely to be involved in clandestine activitiesas members of a terrorist organization. A variety of hypotheses have been entertained as to why childrenbecome involved in this form of urban guerrillawarfare. These include the thrill of danger, extensionof gang related activities common at this age, or thepossibility that they are modeling themselves on adultbehavior. A more worrying suggestion is that the roleof adult involvement is more overt—the Godfatherhypothesis.This raises the question of the relationship of thesechildren with their families: do families approve,encourage, admire, or do they disapprove? In terms of hard evidence we know very little about these or otherquestions. Basically we know that children are in-volved but we don’t know why.Membership of paramilitary groups or guerrillaarmies probably involves smaller numbers of childrenand young people who, as noted above, are oftenslightly older than their stone throwing brother andsister. In this area it may be important to recognizetwo types of groups, anarchic
\
ideologues andnationalist
\
separatists. Probably more children andyoung people join the latter.It is clear that it is not possible to fit these youngpeople into any particular sociodemographic or psy-chological categories. In particular there is littleevidence to support the common claim that guerrillaorganizations attract a disproportionate number of psychopathic individuals.Nor is it likely thatthere is aparticular‘terroristtype’—evenwithwidecriteriasuchas action oriented, aggressive, and sensation seeking.Instead rewards may play a role such as prestige,glamour, excitement, and even material rewards. It isnotclearhoweverifthesearethereasonspeoplejoininthe first place or are these factors which sustainmembership?Rather than suggesting that individuals are moti-vated to become political activists because of certainpsychological characteristics or because of the lure of rewards, it is hypothesized that children are socializedinto this role in subtle ways, particularly via theindirect impact of institutions such as the family. Alsothere is the possibility that schools may influencechildren’s political ideas in certain societies, especiallythrough the teaching of history. Of course not allhistory is taught in schools and in more recent timesmedia coverage of other political struggles has alsobeen implicated in this socialization process as para-doxically have prisons. There is also some intriguingqualitative evidence that being a victim or witnessinganotherbecomeavictimmayplayaroleinstimulatingyoung people to become politically involved.Finally, the UN convention notwithstanding, itmustberememberedthattherearestillmanystate-runarmies around the world that include children in theirranks. In addition there are many young people,mostly boys (hence the term ‘boy-soldiers’) who arepress-ganged into serving, usually with irregularforces.As conflicts come to an end the fear is oftenexpressed that child member of groups trained to killor maim will not be able to be resocialized. Anecdotalevidence suggests that this is not necessarily true. One16362
War, Political Violence and their Psychological Effects on Children: Cultural Concerns
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