Navigating displacement: trajecto-making among forced migrant and refugee children and youth

Growing up from childhood to adulthood is part of an individual’s life course. Yet the developmental trajectories of many children and adolescents are disrupted by major life events. Among them, wars and displacements are crises of global proportions whose effects are felt by millions of children worldwide. An estimated 426 million children (over one in six) live in areas affected by conflict (Ostby et al., 2020). Many are forced to flee their places of origin. By the end of 2020, among the 82.4 million people who are forcibly displaced, an estimated 35 million (42%) are children living as internally displaced refugees or asylum seekers across the globe (UNHCR, 2021). The impacts of these ruptures are multi-layered; they are felt across a range of domains, including psychological, relational and cultural ones. Furthermore, the consequences of becoming a refugee unfold dynamically across time: they are felt in the present, but they also shape the imagined and strived-for future of children and young people.

This is a draft chapter/article. The final version is available in Research Handbook of Children and Armed Conflict edited by Myriam Denov & Maya Fennig, published in 2024, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd: http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781839104817.00019