Yael Warshel Advances Conflict Zone Children’s Rights

 Yael Warshel has further deepened and broadened her work to provide policy guidance and expertise in pursuit of worldwide compassion and the rights of stateless children. Warshel recently became a signatory to the nascent Global Movement for Compassion launched by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Kalish Satyarthi and co-authored a United Nations report, with Marieke Hopman and Guleid Ahmed Jama, focused on the rights of stateless children.

“My aim with all of these efforts is to shine the spotlight on invisible populations living in, displaced by and/or born from conflict zones,” Warshel said. 

Warshel is founding director of the Children, Media and Conflict Zones Lab and author of the 6-time award winning peer-reviewed book “Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization” (Cambridge, 2021), which examines peace communication interventions and their impact on the largest demographic in conflict zones: young people.















STRATEGIC NEW ALLIANCES

During a recent visit to India, Warshel joined with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s newly launched Global Movement for Compassion, helping to foster the mission aimed at enhancing the framework for protecting the rights of “all our children” worldwide.

The movement was launched at the Laureates and Leaders for Children conclave where other hosts and participants included Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, which advocates for human rights and pursues strategic human rights litigation worldwide, and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jody Williams and Leymah Gbowee.

This collaboration underscores a pivotal moment in global child rights advocacy, Warshel said, positioning her at the heart of a major international effort to integrate empathy with actionable child protection strategies. Warshel’s primary research focuses on management of armed political conflict through media tools to improve the lives of conflict zones young people.

“I went to India to advance the rights of children globally and to engage with and address the largest demographic of young people within a single country living in closest proximity to violence: Indian children and youth," Warshel said.















In conjunction with her policy work, Warshel also engaged with Bal Umang Drishya Sanstha (BUDS), a local child’s rights non-governmental organization, to explore innovative ways to prevent violence against children, particularly girls. BUDS works to treat and empower so-called street children facing precarious living conditions.

“There, exploring future partnerships with BUDS’ managing trustee, Rajeev Seth, he and I discussed the role of edutainment and other media in their future intervention efforts,” Warshel said, highlighting her dedication to applying research to real-world challenges. In her book “Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization,” Warshel investigates how edutainment targeting children, such as ‘Sesame Street’, try to influence opinions in conflict zones and whether and how they are effective in peace-building, making and sustainment.


“My goal is to find openings to advance relevant policy and practice in order to bring about meaningful change for those experiencing the violence of conflict zones daily life,” she said.

















UNITED NATIONS REPORT

The co-authored report for the United Nations, “Born in a non-existent place?: Towards inclusive global rights protection for children living in de facto states,” represents a crucial part of Warshel’s efforts to extend child rights to another overlooked segment, she explains: stateless children.

The report aims to amend methods for participating in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to include stateless populations, ensuring comprehensive rights and protections are extended to all children, irrespective of their geopolitical status.

Published in May, “The U.N. report recommends ways to ensure that children from so-called de-facto states, where no monitoring mechanisms exist to ensure their rights under the UNCRC, might be modified to make them visible,” Warshel said.

Following meetings with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in Geneva, the report was since already cited by Ann Skelton, Chair of the UNCRC, during the 96th Session of their 2816th Meeting, as a working-blueprint to make its recommendations a reality.

The report is the product of Warshel’s partnership with Maastricht University in the Netherlands’ Children’s Rights Research group and Warshel’s scholarship about Palestinian and Sahrawi stateless children. The latter being illustrated by her peer-reviewed articles in African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review and the Journal of North African Studies.

“Born in a non-existent place?” is co-written with Marieke Hopman, the initiator of the CRR, and Guleid Ahmed Jama, a human rights researcher and lawyer based in Somaliland, another “de facto state,” as well as other parties, including contributors from Defense for Children International.

Warshel’s forthcoming third book “When Conflict Is Real: Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones” (Stanford University Press) will address significant gaps in the protection and empowerment of stateless and other conflict zones populations.

The publication refocuses media attention and uses on children who live closest to violence, and the young “intersectional” populations who are rarely, if ever, considered, such as children disabled in, or prior to, the onset of conflict rather than only by conflict, and “war babies,” or those born through uses of rape as a weapon of war or other forms of conflict zones violence, spotlighting often-overlooked segments of the population.