While children and youth form the largest demographics in conflict zones, there exists a disconnect between them and the communication rights and media technologies made available to help them cope or, even more rarely, become empowered to mediate conflict nonviolently. And yet media are optimal tools for humanitarian intervention into conflict zones (e.g. in contrast with military and economic tools). It is therefore vital that media-based efforts and resources to establish sustainable global peace, including equality, justice, and security, consider best approaches for aiding and empowering children and youth. When Conflict Is Real: Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones critically reviews nascent Children, Media and Conflict (CMC) literature and exposes it for its exclusion of the world’s most vulnerable population, with its focus ironically on peace-zone, not conflict-zone, children and adolescents, and a conceptualization of media largely only as contents, e.g. as news coverage. It calls for alternative analytical approaches that include this abandoned demographic in a manner that will help aid and empower them, namely, those living in conflict zones, displaced by and/or born from them.

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This new approach refocus scholarly analyses and practitioner and policy engagement on how young people might fix the problem of conflict by working to end it. Currently, a gaping whole exists in the production of scholarly evidence relevant to the needs of practitioners, activists and policymakers seeking to address conflict-zone young people. When Conflict Is Real problematizes the variable of conflict within the children-media-conflict equation to address the lives of this vulnerable population. It redirects media attention, resets the agenda about communication rights and media uses of intersectional young people, namely of populations rarely if ever considered, broadens the conceptualization of media and considers equitable communication rights and media resources available to conflict-zone young people. This book, in turn, asks whether media might be used as tools for mediating peace, including by trying to alter intergroup attitudes, policy-relevant political beliefs, national and other intersectional identities, and daily practices inside conflict zones. This approach also opens a methodological backdoor to help illuminate the needs and potential roles for children in conflict zones. Media, as forms of expression, can serve as alternative barometers of public opinion serving as alternative means to source statewide public opinion,namely that of the demographic majority of most conflict zones.

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When Conflict Is Real encourages scholars to conceptualize young populations based on a combination of developmental, legal, instrumental-biological, social constructivist, and subaltern approaches to most effectively ensure their chance to live a minimally decent life. These new, critical, and creative approaches will enable academics to produce needed evidence, and media, conflict-management and human rights policymakers, activists, and practitioners to best aid and empower these young people to become resilient and/or grow into agents of change. When Conflict is Real provides a roadmap for this life-changing, life-saving policy and practice- relevant analytical journey for young people living in conflict zones, displaced by and/or born from them.