This book examines how conflict has affected the rights of youth in Northeast India. Examining youth engagement in protracted conflict and its impact on youth rights, the author considers the complex issues besieging the region, including armed insurgency, conflicts between ethnic groups, human rights violations, poor governance and a lack of economic development, all factors contributing to the lack of growth in the region, and a consequent sense of alienation from the Indian mainstream. Moving beyond considering Northeast India as a theatre of insurgency, this pivot offers an alternative understanding of youth unrest in India and issues of non-representation in terms of rights and ethnic, national and cultural identities.

Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, Vikas Shah quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.

Societal turbulence, state collapse, religious and ethnic conflict, poverty, hunger, and social exclusion all underlie children's involvement in armed conflict. Drawing from empirical studies in eleven conflict-ridden countries, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Colombia, Uganda, Palestine, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and South Sudan, Children Affected by Armed Conflict crosses cultures and contexts to capture a range of perspectives on the realities of armed conflict and its aftermath for children. Children Affected by Armed Conflict upends traditional views by emphasizing the experience of girls as well as boys, the unique social and contextual backgrounds of war-affected children, and the resilience and agency such children often display. Including children who are victims of, participants in, and witnesses to armed conflict in their analyses, the contributors to this volume highlight innovative methodologies that directly involve war-affected children in the research process. This validates the perspectives of children and ensures more effective outcomes in postwar reintegration and recovery. Deficits-based models do not account for the realities many war-affected children face. The alternative approaches presented in this edited collection—which acknowledge the realities of both trauma and resilience—aim to generate more effective policies and intervention strategies in the face of a growing global public health crisis.

In Youth and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Agents of Change, Stephanie Schwartz goes beyond these highly publicized cases and examines the roles of the broader youth population in post-conflict scenarios, taking on the complex task of distinguishing between the legal and societal labels of "child," "youth," and "adult."

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved “people’s judge”; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives. Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire conflicts are marginalized, we miss essential stories: stories of faith, feminist action, and the power of citizen-activists.

While young children's rights have received considerable attention and have accordingly advanced over the past two decades, the rights of adolescents have been neglected. This manifests itself in pervasive gender-based violence, widespread youth disaffection and unemployment, concerning levels of self-abuse, violence and antisocial engagement, and serious mental and physical health deficits. The cost of inaction on these issues is likely to be dramatic in terms of human suffering, lost social and economic opportunities, and threats to global peace and security. Across the range of disciplines that make up contemporary human rights, from law and social advocacy to global health, history, economics, sociology, politics, and psychology, it is time, the contributors of this volume contend, for adolescent rights to occupy a coherent place of their own. Human Rights and Adolescence presents a multifaceted inquiry into the global circumstances of adolescents, focusing on the human rights challenges and socioeconomic obstacles young adults face. Contributors use new research to advance feasible solutions and timely recommendations for a wide range of issues spanning all continents, from relevant international legal norms to neuropsychological adolescent brain development, gender discrimination in Indian education to Colombian child soldier recruitment, stigmatization of Roma youth in Europe to economic disempowerment of Middle Eastern and South African adolescents. Taken together, the research emphasizes the importance of dedicated attention to adolescence as a distinctive and critical phase of development between childhood and adulthood and outlines the task of building on the potential of adolescents while providing support for the challenges they experience. Contributors: Theresa S. Betancourt, Jacqueline Bhabha, Krishna Bose, Neera Burra, Malcolm Bush, Jocelyn DeJong, Elizabeth Gibbons, Katrina Hann, Mary Kawar, Orla Kelly, David Mark, Margareta Matache, Clea McNeely, Glaudine Mtshali, Katie Naeve, Elizabeth A. Newnham, Victor Pineda, Irene Rizzini, Elena Rozzi, Christian Salazar Volkmann, Shantha Sinha, Laurence Steinberg, Kerry Thompson, Jean Zermatten, Moses Zombo.

Legislation is one of the most important tools for empowering children. It reflects the commitment of the state to promote an ideal and progressive value system. Recent years have seen several key developments in the law, policy, and practice related to child rights. Significantly, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, a rights-based approach has acquired prominence in the child rights discourse across the world. The book analyses the laws in the light of court judgments and policy initiatives taken in India. It also examines the interventions and strategies employed by non-governmental organizations in recommending legislative reforms in support of children. This fully revised third edition focuses on the new legal developments in India—such as the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015; the new Central Adoption Resource Agency guidelines; the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009; and the National Food Security Act, 2013—thus attempting to integrate the law in theory and field practice.