After the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, an uncounted number of children, conceived as a result of wartime rape, were born to traumatized mothers.¹ Many did not want them. Children of refugee mothers in neighboring Croatia were initially denied citizenship and education rights.² Local and international actors contested the babies’ ethnic identities and citizenship rights. Inside Bosnia, there were reports of ostracism and abandonment; some were killed.³

At the time I began to gather research for this book, almost nothing was known outside the former Yugoslavia about what had become of these babies, how to protect their human...

According to a report from the War and Children Identity Project in Bergen, Norway, tens of thousands of infants have been born of wartime rape or sexual exploitation in the last fifteen years alone.¹ If one adds together the estimated numbers of war rape orphans, children born to women held captive as sexual slaves or “wives” of military troops, and children born to women exploited by foreign soldiers, peacekeepers, and even humanitarian workers, this emerges as a population of enormous global scope.

As this chapter details, in Bosnia such children sometimes face physical abuse or neglect, stigma, abandonment, and discrimination...

Since the early 1990s, the protection of children in armed conflict has occupied unprecedented international attention.¹ In the transnational spaces beyond Bosnia-Herzegovina, a broad network of tireless people is dedicated to promoting child rights in conflict zones. They advocate for a child rights perspective in international institutions, in national legislation, and in communities, households, and refugee camps. They oppose the recruitment of children as soldiers, they talk about “zones of peace” for immunization, they champion the right to play and learn. The principled belief at the core of this issue network’s efforts is that all children should be protected from...

I first heard of what was happening to Bosnia’s war babies as a college student reading the news article excerpted here on the brand new World Wide Web. At the time I was an undergraduate government major in New Mexico, far from Bosnia, with little certainty about career directions, and three messages jumped out at me from that piece: Children are being horribly affected by war and by war rape, all this is happening in Bosnia for reasons and at a scale that is unprecedented, and something should be done. This is the moment I hark back to when people...

For four years after the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, humanitarian relief was the international community’s primary response to the conflict.¹ Western European nations viewed the violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina as regrettable birth pangs, a civil war that would quickly run its course if outsiders avoided taking sides. The UN Security Council had authorized coercive military operations in Kuwait, northern Iraq, and Somalia shortly after the end of the Cold War, but these types of missions were already suffering from a crisis of confidence by 1993. The United States pulled out of Somalia after eighteen Rangers were killed, mutilated,...

I arrived on the doorstep of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on July 3, 2007, five years and two days after the court came into force, on the first day of the month after the sixtieth day after the sixtieth government ratified it.¹ My hope was to interview someone from the prosecutor’s office about the likelihood of including indictments for forced pregnancy into any charges leveled against members of the Khartoum regime, said to be behind campaigns of extermination and genocidal rape in the Darfur region of the Sudan. Stories of women and girls forcibly impregnated with “Janjaweed babies,” some...

Early in my fieldwork in 2004, I interviewed the ombudsman for children’s rights for the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sitting in his office over coffee with my interpreter, I went through my customary list of questions. I asked him to tell me about the work of his office and how it tied into other postconflict governance issues. I asked him specifically what he knew about the situation of children born of wartime rape and what his office was doing to ensure that they were protected in the postwar environment.

The ombudsman seemed willing to talk to me and interested in my...

In this chapter I return to the question asked in chapter 3: Why did most of the key organizations central to the advocacy network around children and armed conflict largely ignore children of rape between 1991, when news of stigma against war babies broke, and 2007? My answer is that the discourses identified in the preceding four chapters helped constitute a political context in which transnational gatekeepers—the organizations most associated with an issue area and whose adoption or nonadoption of an issue facilitates or impedes its dissemination through a network¹—came to consider children born of war too sensitive...

In 2007, as I was nearing the end of fieldwork for this project, I wrapped up a week in The Hague, Netherlands by visiting the International Court of Justice. The court is housed in the Peace Palace, an ornate building dedicated to the principle of peaceful conflict resolution. The palace was founded by the last czar of Russia, funded by Andrew Carnegie, and lavished with paintings, woodwork, and statuary that represent the support of all nations for this dream.

In the Great Hall of Justice, where the court meets, a grand painting hangs to the side of the room (figure...