Beyond Visibility : How NGO Reports Frame Children’s Participation in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how NGO peacebuilding program reports construct and represent children’s participation in post-conflict settings. In such settings, NGO and international organisation reports play a central role in documenting these contributions for donors, policymakers, and researchers. Although children’s participation is widely promoted in policy and organisational commitments, the ways in which institutional reports describe, frame, and selectively present this participation have received limited attention. This study adopts a child centered approach through an interpretivist epistemological lens and a constructionist ontological position. It views reports as active institutional texts that shape meanings of childhood and participation rather than neutral records. For this reason, data was collected through qualitative document analysis of four publicly available NGO peacebuilding reports published between 2022 and 2024. The study explores how these reports describe children’s participation through organised activities, roles, and outcomes, the extent to which children’s perspectives are presented as being listened to, taken seriously by adults, and shaping peacebuilding programs, and how institutional and Western frameworks shape what counts as legitimate participation while making other forms less visible.