Two Decades of Child Soldier Advocacy

Attention among academics, policy makers, and development practitioners to the phenomenon of underage combatants has significantly increased since the early 1990s. Contrary to the widespread expectation that the world would enter an era of relative peace, the end of the Cold War saw a surge in the number of intrastate conflicts, notably civil war in developing countries, with sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia regions particularly affected (HSRP 2008, p.

During the 1990s, the principle of state sovereignty was also quickly, if selec­tively, eroded, and armed conflicts were no longer a state’s internal affair. Regional bodies, such as North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), and the African Union (AU), increasingly intervened in civil conflicts.

Child soldiers, it has been suggested, became vital capital in diplomacy, conve­nient signifiers of incapable states offering a ready narrative of regime failure (Brooten 2008) and paving the way for international intervention on their behalf. As Moeller argues, by the 1990s “the concept of protecting children emerged as a core obligation” (2002, p. 53), a profitable humanitarian driver which also eased in some of the “uneasy” truths about childhoods in the new Millennium.

Perhaps benefiting from a post-Cold War interregnum, scholarly research on armed conflict was also no longer dominated by security analyzers and interna­tional relations scholars but increasingly became the subject of study for ethnog­raphers, sociologists, and human rights specialists. It did not take long before the participation of large numbers of underage combatants in civil conflicts was conceptually (re)discovered. Among the first major post-Cold War publications on the issue of underage combatants was Child Soldiers: The Role of Children in Armed Conflicts by Guy Goodwin-Gill and Ilene Cohn. This 1994 study, commis­sioned by the Henry Dunant Institute in Geneva, documented and discussed the role of underage combatants in contemporary conflicts throughout the world.

INGOs created and/or focused specifically on the child soldier phenomenon remained in the ascendance and child soldiers arguably became the poster boys of contemporary conflict. In 1993, War Child International was founded (in a reaction to the wars in Yugoslavia) with the two main offices in Holland and Canada, respectively opening in 1994 and 1998. War Child has continually advocated against the use of children in armed forces. In 1998, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers was formed by six human rights and humanitarian organizations, to cam­paign for the demobilization and reintegration of child soldiers and lobby armed groups and governments which were known to use children in combat roles. UNICEF, Save the Children Alliance, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch are just a few of the many organizations which have launched major cam­paigns against the use of underage people in armed conflicts during the 1990s and after.

It is speculated that there are more child soldier NGOs than any other interna­tional issue area, and in general, child combatants are much more likely to be represented as victims than agents by such organizations. This is an age of human­itarian childhood - and of apparently transcultural constructions - the victim child, the lost child, and the problem child. Partly this is a pragmatic response to society’s unparalleled reaction to vulnerable and infantile images and the legitimacy these appeals can secure. The growth of child-centered media reporting and humanitarian campaigns is one factor in explaining how child soldiers’ also garner direct interest and reportage. Narratives of child soldiers may be deliberately selected by aid agencies because of their apparent, stark reality and the ameliorative action that is immediately suggested by giving attention to such accounts. In a minimal sense at least the story telling has represented a reprieve in these children’s vulnerability and opens up the possibility of a safe future.

their thoughts, concerns and needs were, in the main, those of adults: livelihood strategies, vocation and parenting. Their carers, on the other hand, tended to communicate the notion of former CAAF as dependent youth in need of nurturing. As such, former CAAF were expected to be submissive to adults and respectful of their rules. (2009, p. 66)

Reflecting on the child-combatant reports in general and more specifically on NGO commissioned ones, Susan Shepler observes that: “Child soldier studies almost always begin from a human rights framework, and focus mainly on estimat­ing the numbers involved, recounting individual horror stories, describing the legal instruments against the use of child soldiers, and evaluating reintegration program­ming” (2010, p. 298). Shepler then lists the four most often cited reasons in these reports for the recruitment of children into armed forces, namely: (1) demographics - there is a youth bulge in many countries which have underage conscription; (2) the changing nature of warfare - more intra- rather than interstate conflicts with civilians rather than the military becoming the target; (3) poverty - increasing the level of conscription as a survival strategy to secure basic needs such as protection, shelter, and food; and (4) characteristics of “the” child - that is children are supposedly more easily indoctrinated and intimidated than adult conscripts.

Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient soldiers. (Human Rights Watch 2004)

Both governments and armed groups use children because they are easier to condition into fearless killing and unthinking obedience; sometimes, children are supplied drugs and alcohol. (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers 2004)

Most reports dealing with these issues include child soldiers’ “voices,” represented as a separate, personal narrative (i.e., in a textbox) or as “sound bites” punctuating a report. In this sense at least former child soldiers may be afforded more opportunity to speak than other children affected by war. The critical factor here may be these young children’s relative isolation from family or group “politics.” Hart, for example, has written of the near ventriloquism of refugee children within established refugee communities whose adults cannot imagine that “the young say anything better” (2004, p. 175). Their narratives typically illustrate the horrors of what it is to experience war as a child (let alone actively take part in it), the deep traumas war evokes, and the subsequent need for demobilization and reintegration support for ex-child combatants (and subsequently the need for funding).

In contrast with the spirit of child-centered initiatives (including the UNCRC), the extent to which children directly inform or even challenge their representation is still being realized (Boyden 2003). With few examples of southern counter-discourse (Martins 2011, p. 444), child soldiers of Anglophone and Francophone Africa have arguably become a “perpetual reinscription of the ‘backwardness’ of child soldier societies, of their victimhood, instability, and amorality in the unjust wars they partake in and in their use of children to fight them” (Macmillan 2009, p. 45). In turn, the widely mediated war-portraits of underage combatants still “belie a much more sublime, humanistic and granular reality of resilience, agency, potential, and globality” (Drumbl 2012b, p. 2). The sheer volume of humanitarian information about child soldiers is ironically suggestive of certainty about their presence and war’s impact but arguably fails to illuminate the complexity of child soldiers’ experiences. Child combatants have thus yielded powerful advocacy material albeit from finite resources, selective sympathies, and adult standpoints.

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