Living with violence, making care: Childhood, power, and everyday life in Manipur, India

The majority of work dealing with children in contexts of political violence tends to focus on protectionist, humanitarian, and trauma-centred frameworks. While these paradigms have generated important safeguards and services, they often conceptualise children primarily as vulnerable subjects requiring rescue, rehabilitation, or psychological repair. These approaches risk obscuring how childhood is actively lived and constituted within conditions of protracted conflict. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Manipur, Northeast India, this article proposes an alternative framework grounded in social pedagogy and feminist care ethics. It argues that childhood in violent contexts is not merely interrupted or damaged by violence, but there is a rapid process of forming through everyday pedagogical relations of care. Care is conceptualised not as a moral response to harm but as a relational and political practice that mediates vulnerability and agency. By foregrounding everyday care practices, the article contributes to childhood studies by reframing children in conflict zones as relational actors whose subjectivities are constituted within networks of interdependence structured by violence. The study calls for a relational reorientation of child protection and humanitarian policy in protracted conflict settings.