Juvenicide and the Politics of Youth Killings: Violence, Repression and Resistance

Juvenicide is the systematic and persistent annihilation of young people, which operates as a device of violence, perpetrated or permitted by the State, with the complicity of other power groups, which is part of processes of social exclusion, precariousness of life, stigmatization and criminalization of youth, and ultimately leads to the death of young people. The category was proposed by Mexican scholoars like Valenzuela (2012), and Reguillo (2021), leading to the creation of the Collective Juvenicide and Social Resistance by researchers of different Iberoamerican countries (Feixa et al., 2026).

The proposal for this session is an attempt to extend the concept beyond Latin America. The cases of Philippines -where President Duterte (2016-2022) extended “social cleaning” against youth through his anti-drugs policy- and Palestine -where children and youth are directly targeted by the Israeli Colonisation, and were they are killed, incarcerated, injured, but still resist and create livability amid the atrocities of a Genocide and erasure (Musleh, 2025). The structural violence against the Palestinian youth has been noticed in many forms, in which direct killing is a way, but the dehumanizing the young people, and taking away the concept of their youth is one way of Juvenicide.

We invite youth researchers from other continents who have worked on violence to assess whether the notion of juvenicide, and its intersectional connections with the notion of genocide and femicide, can contribute to understanding the politics of youth killings on a global scale, and above all to evaluating strategies to combat them.