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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the six main articles which represent the special issue on “Growing up in divided societies” and to locate the articles within a framework of children's experiences of divided societies.

The article reviews the main methodologies employed by authors of the six articles and evaluates how these methodologies contribute to debates on researching children and young people's everyday lives.

The paper presents the core findings of the six articles and discusses these in relation to core themes, methodologies and policy implications.

The authors argue that there is a dearth of research on children and young people's everyday lives in politically contested societies and the special issue responds to this vacuum.

The purpose of this paper is to present young people's attitudes to peace‐walls in Belfast and whether they feel that these peace‐walls should be temporary or permanent structures.

The methodology is based on questionnaire responses from 125 young people between the ages of 14 and 15 from six schools located in areas in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side yet apart. The paper is also based on their responses to photo prompts, focus group discussions and images of peace‐walls drawn by some of the young people.

The young people produced six discourses on peace‐walls in Belfast and these are outlined in the paper.

The paper endorses the necessity of incorporating young people's views of peace‐walls in Belfast as a prelude to finding ways in which to challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The paper is original in that it addresses the neglect of young people's views on peace‐walls in Belfast and contributes to further understanding of the importance of capturing young people's spatial strategies in divided cities.

The aim of the paper is to present some events in the life of ex‐child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in relation to the social policy in place and the social representation of child soldiers and childhood in the country. The paper presents an overall picture of the different interventions used with child soldiers in Kinshasa, some elements of the social representation of the child soldier, and finally three stages in a child soldier's life, which bring into question those representations.

The study used a qualitative approach including general informal observation, semi‐directive interviews, focus groups based on drawings and inquired‐investigator exercises with 45 ex‐child soldiers in three towns in DRC. Finally 12 interviews, based on the image classification exercise were carried out with Congolese adults belonging to the middle class in Kinshasa.

The paper suggests that child soldiers are represented as passive victims, while the reality of their life shows their capacity for action and decision.

Because of the continuing fighting inside DRC, part of the population is not accessible.

The paper includes implications for actions by the NGO sector or other kinds of aid organization.

First, the paper uses new tools for collecting data from children. Second, it presents a study of a subject that, whilst being widely popularized through the media, lacks adequate scientific research. Third, the paper brings into question the Western point of view of the experience of child soldiers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to understanding the interrelationships between education and violent conflict, namely, one that focuses on the multifaceted, context‐specific impact of conflict on school communities and departs from the lived experiences of teachers and students in conflict‐affected places.

The paper is based on ethnographic, child‐centred research in elementary schools in Lebanon. It explores how the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel and subsequent internal sectarian strife in Lebanon have shaped the ways in which school communities confront issues of violence and identity.

By viewing the relationship between education and violent conflict as multifaceted and context‐dependent, this paper elicits how schools may become complicit in the continuing of violent conflict, rather than supporting its ending. It shows how teachers' pleas for peace are overruled by political conflict, partly as a result of children's engagement with politics. The paper argues for grounding educational interventions in children's lived realities so as to optimise their capacities for bridging differences and shaping a better future.

The lived experiences of students and teachers in conflict zones have rarely been exposed. On the basis of anthropological research, this paper offers original and critical insights into the interrelationships between education and violent conflict, based on the perspectives of elementary school students and their educators.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a situated, theoretically informed account of national identity construction by exploring children's engagement with nationalism in the context of the classroom in divided Cyprus. The paper aims to illustrate how children enter and participate in the cultural world of nationalism in the classroom by accepting, resisting, and negotiating the ideological meanings they encounter there.

The research on which the paper draws used an ethnographic approach. The paper draws primarily on teacher‐student exchanges during class lessons and, to a lesser extent, on interviews with children.

The paper suggests that the process of engagement between children, teachers, and nationalism often produces powerful senses of belonging which are, however, always limited and unstable both because of ideological contradictions and ambiguities and because of children's access to alternative knowledge.

Though the ethnographic evidence suggests that nationalism in educational contexts produces powerful senses of belonging among children, more research is necessary to document the processes by which children consume nationalistic ideologies.

The paper is original because it offers a dynamic explanation of national identity construction through the application of practice theory to ethnographic data which takes into account both the powerful institutional constraints imposed on children at school as well as their agency and ability to impact their worlds.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and illuminate the various ways in which different generations experience and interpret their home and land in one divided Palestinian village in the West Bank.

The study is based on mental maps, walk‐alongs and semi‐structured interviews.

The paper explores the intergenerational geographies of adults and children from one household located in the village of Bilin and outlines the dynamics of continuity and change in their attitudes to and experiences of contested place and space.

The paper suggests that generational perspectives are essential for acquiring a holistic, meaningful understanding of the complexities and subtleties of contested places.

Bringing together anthropological and sociological conceptions of “the everyday” with the new social studies of childhood, this paper seeks to challenge the predominance of the trauma paradigm in understanding the impact of the 1994 Rwandan genocide upon children and youth.

In focus group and ethnographic research conducted with Rwandan children and young people aged between 12 and 25, the challenges identified were primarily within their everyday lives, relationships and environments.

Building on the assertion that “we have great resilience to keep going” the resiliency and agency of children and young people in negotiating an ongoing nexus between violence and peace is emphasized.

This is not to deny the horrendous nature of the genocide, or that there are some children with enduring severe psychological problems. However, the trauma paradigm is only one way of capturing the legacies of the genocide and can give rise to a misplaced emphasis on passivity and vulnerability. The framework of the everyday provides a holistic paradigm for policies and programmes addressing the situation of children and young people post‐conflict and builds upon their resources and competencies.

This paper offers a more complex and nuanced understanding of trauma, resilience and the legacies of genocide for children and young people.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on links between entrepreneurship and resilience.

The authors discuss some key themes in this emerging area of research and reflect on how the papers in the issue contribute to debates in the literature on resilience.

While the papers in the special issue make important contributions, there is still scope for more research.

This is one of the first issues of a journal devoted to investigating this topic.

The paper aims to examine the conditions under which disaster entrepreneurship contributes to community-level resilience. The authors define disaster entrepreneurship as attempts by the private sector to create or maintain value during and in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster by taking advantage of business opportunities and providing goods and services required by community stakeholders.

This paper builds a typology of disaster entrepreneurial responses by drawing on the dimensions of structural expansion and role change. The authors use illustrative case examples to conceptualize how these responses improve community resilience by filling critical resource voids in the aftermath of natural disasters.

The typology identifies four different disaster entrepreneurship approaches: entrepreneurial business continuity, scaling of organizational response through activating latent structures, improvising and emergence. The authors formulate proposition regarding how each of the approaches is related to community-level resilience.

While disaster entrepreneurship can offer for-profit opportunities for engaging in community-wide disaster response and recovery efforts, firms should carefully consider the financial, legal, reputational and organizational implications of disaster entrepreneurship.

Communities should consider how best to harness disaster entrepreneurship in designing their disaster response strategies.

This research offers a novel typology to explore the role that for-profit firms play in disaster contexts and adds to prior research which has mostly focused on government agencies, non-governmental organizations and emergency personnel.