Agency dei bambini palestinesi colpiti dalla guerra: tensioni decoloniali, etiche e epistemologiche

Palestinian War-Affected Children’s Agency: Decolonial, Ethical, and Epistemological Tensions This contribution interrogates the construct of children’s agency within contexts of protracted settler- colonial violence, foregrounding its ethical, epistemological, and political implications. Rather than conceptualizing children merely as passive recipients of trauma or beneficiaries of psychosocial interventions, this work situates them as historical subjects embedded within asymmetrical regimes of power. Agency is therefore examined not as an abstract developmental capacity, but as a relational, situated, and politically mediated process that unfolds within conditions of structural oppression. Drawing on more than a decade of empirical research conducted in Palestine and grounded in mixed- methods designs integrating quantitative indicators with narrative and participatory approaches, this work critically examines how children articulate forms of everyday resistance, civic engagement, and activism while living under chronic military occupation and recurrent collective trauma. The analysis resists depoliticized resilience frameworks that individualize suffering and instead situates coping, meaning- making, and mobilization within broader ecologies of colonial domination, surveillance, and material deprivation. A central theoretical tension explored in this work concerns the ambivalence of agency in contexts of political violence. While children’s participation in activism and collective resistance may operate as protective processes—enhancing dignity, coherence of identity, social belonging, and perceived efficacy—such engagement simultaneously exposes them to intensified repression, surveillance, and direct harm. Agency thus emerges as a dialectical construct: it may serve as a pathway to psychosocial protection while concurrently amplifying vulnerability within militarized environments. From a decolonial standpoint, this inquiry challenges Eurocentric developmental paradigms that universalize normative models of childhood detached from geopolitical realities. It interrogates how knowledge about war-affected children is produced, who is authorized to define vulnerability and resilience, and how research methodologies can either reproduce or disrupt epistemic hierarchies. Particular attention is devoted to collaborative knowledge production with local practitioners and communities, recognizing indigenous and situated forms of meaning-making as epistemically valid rather than ancillary to Western psychological theory. Ethically, the work confronts the dilemma of documenting children’s resistance without instrumentalizing their suffering or romanticizing their exposure to violence. Practically, it calls for psychosocial interventions that acknowledge children not solely as traumatized subjects but as political actors navigating—and at times contesting—structures of domination. Such a repositioning demands a critical revision of systemic and community-based approaches to psychotherapy and intervention in colonized settings, emphasizing partnership, reflexivity, and structural analysis. Guido Veronese, Ph.D. Guido Veronese is a clinical psychologist and systemic psychotherapist specializing in individual, couple, and family interventions. He holds a degree in Clinical and Community Psychology from the University of Padua and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Milan-Bicocca, where he currently serves as Associate Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology. His academic and clinical trajectory is centered on collective and extreme trauma within contexts affected by armed conflict, military occupation, and grave human rights violations. Since 2020, he has been affiliated as a Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and serves as a Visiting Professor at the School of Psychology, University of Sydney. His work is characterized by a sustained effort to critically revise mainstream systemic and trauma-informed frameworks in light of coloniality, structural violence, and the ethical demands of collaborative intervention in politically contested territories.