About us
CHIBOW is a research network in which academic and non-academic partners have organised themselves informally to continue the impactful work that arose out of a formal European-Union-funded network with focus on the experiences of CBOW across time and space. Based on research of a group of your interdisciplinary researchers and their supervisors as well as four years of intensive intersectoral engagement, CHIBOW’s core is formed by historians, social scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists whose work has influenced significantly our understanding of the life courses of CBOW.
History of the Project
CHIBOW was initially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Curie grant agreement. It ran for four years, from 2015 to 2019, and enabled 15 PhD researchers to work collaboratively across disciplines to further our understanding of how children born of war in conflict and post-conflict situations are integrated into society; how militaries, governments, and non-governmental policy makers assist this integration process; and how the children’s lived experiences reflect broader societal attitudes to memories of war and vice versa.
The network was coordinated by the University of Birmingham, and lead researcher Prof. Sabine Lee.
Our Vision
The network aimed to enhance our understanding of the challenges experienced by children born of war in volatile societies, in order to inform the normative debates and, ultimately, policies on the reintegration of children born of war into post-conflict societies.
By combining historical, social, empirical, psychiatric, political, legal, memory, public health and development studies with the discourse surrounding currently enacted humanitarian intervention, insights gained from this network have surpassed existing knowledge and helped improve on current integration efforts. The CHIBOW network is committed to promoting scientific excellence by exploiting the specific research expertise and infrastructure of the co-ordinating partners, and all participants, in order to advance the research competencies.
Organisation
The network comprised over 20 organisations in an interdisciplinary collaboration pooling world-leading researchers in the field of Children Born of War among others from history, psychology, psychiatry, social sciences, public health, and international development. Intersectoral aspects united fundamental and applied research with NGOs, commercial and media partners, interdisciplinary research institutes, policy makers, and cultural and educational institutions.
Alongside the development of academic excellence, ESRs worked with non-academic organisations, to develop skills and competencies that transcended academia. The interdisciplinary training and intersectoral awareness was facilitated by trainee exchanges between academic and non-academic member organisations, and exposure to other sectors – Commercial, NGOs, Media, Museums, consultancies and medical facilities.