The Moral Pathways of War-Exposed Youths

Abstract

It is too often hard to reconcile what happens in war-torn environments with notions of benevolence and justice. Given that youths develop moral understandings and a sense of themselves and others as moral beings in the context of their everyday experiences, the harrowing backdrop of war is likely to have significant and perhaps long-standing effects on their moral development. In this chapter, contemporary scholarship on morality and on the development of moral agency is used to outline a conceptual framework for understanding the unique challenges faced by war-exposed youth when called to make sense of their own war-related experiences. The chapter includes narrative examples from research with Colombian war-displaced youths and Colombian child soldiers to illustrate distinct ways in which war constrains their attempts at moral meaning-making.