My thesis compares the constructions of children’s and adolescents’ experiences of contemporary wars in two genres published for Western audiences: young adult fiction and childhood and adolescence memoirs. I argue that both genres evoke the pattern of the rite of passage in order to accommodate contradictory perceptions of young people’s war involvement: notions of children’s innocence and need of protection, but also of children’s possession of greater resilience than adults, or ability to perpetrate violence; ideas of the devastating impact of war, but also traditional notions of war as a maturing experience. My comparative approach elucidates the genre specifics in the employment of the rite of passage, conditioned by the different ways in which each genre relates to and participates in the extraliterary “passages” in which its authors and readers are involved. Young adult fiction offers representations of adolescence and war which demonstrate how Western adults understand both phenomena, and what they wish Western adolescents to know about them. As the genre is determined by a power imbalance between its adult creators and its young adult consumers, its use of the rite-of-passage framework acquires particular didactic significance in the context of the diffuse transition to maturity in contemporary Western societies. Childhood war memoirs, in comparison, belong to a referential genre with a special relation to past and present lived reality, and can throw into relief the characteristics of mediation performed by young adult fiction. However, I demonstrate that memoir representations are governed by their own genre- and context-specific rules. They construct subjects in transition, who re-evaluate their war experiences and negotiate a similarly power-imbalanced cultural passage from childhood to adulthood, and from their communities of origin to the Western countries to which they have immigrated.

This thesis seeks to analyse military and civilian loss from violence during contemporary armed conflict in order to facilitate understanding of the evolution of war and its impact on human behaviour. It comprises four chapters; the first two concentrate on the 2033 Iraq War whilst the last two are focused upon global armed conflict during the recent past. Chapter 1 explores how and to what extent military deaths during the Iraq war affect US domestic opinion, proxied by various poll questions concerning war-related issues. Having addressed irregular frequencies of poll data that restrict time series application, this chapter renders a fresh perspective on casualty-opinion research, suggesting that cumulative military casualties prior to the poll did not have an immediate effect on the poll respondents' opinion regarding the continuation of military actions in Iraq, Instead, respondents are influenced by marginal casualty information from the previous time period, implying a slow adjustment in forming opinion through the Error Correction Mechanism (ECM). Chapter 2 presents a comparative analysis to gauge any different standards between the US department of Defense and the media in counting violent civilian deaths during the Iraq war. In spite of substantial discrepancies during the initial period of the war, non-parametric tests corroborate that the US military authority and media reports had a non-differential approach towards counting violent civilian deaths during the war period across the spatial and spatiotemporal dimensions. However, the conspicuously conservative count by the US military authority during the initial stage of the war may have hindered the US forces' ability to predict and prepare for the subsequent escalation of violence that brought about large-scale human loss as well as the prolongation of the war which lasted more than 7 years. Chapter 3 analyses to what extent warring actors intentionally used lethal force against civilians, through the employment of a Civilian Targeting Index (CTI), a newly invented measure to indicate the intensity of civilian targeting for each actor. Building upon Chapter 3, Chapter 4 further examines factors that lead to warring actors targeting civilians as opposed to engaging in battle with war combatants. A dynamic panel approach shows that an increase in the degree of civilian targeting in the previous year further intensified civilian targeting in the current year for the actors involved in prolonged armed conflict.