Applying the definition of child soldier given by the Paris Principles – “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes” – backwards into time is revelatory. I now see them everywhere and wonder why I didn’t before.
I see them in the war memories of my grand-father, who used to tell me how, when he was 14 or 15, he transported messages for his father who had joined the resistance in the Vercors in France during the Second World War. Above all, I see then in the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970) that I studied between 2009 and 2014. Focusing on the relief operation that took place during the conflict, I had never realized to what extent they were part of the picture, being conscripted in the army or involved in support roles (https://childrenofwar.exeter.ac.uk/2025/02/03/children-and-the-nigerian-civil-war-looking-beyond-the-humanitarian-gaze/). This was due to the fact that they were not part of my main research questions at the time, as I was primarily interested in the responses provided by humanitarian actors to conflict and the famine it generated. In addition, in the archives and documents dealing with the relief action, there are few mentions of the situation of young people or “ado-combattant” to use the terminology forged by Manon Pignot (Pignot, 2012). Why did their situation did not attract humanitarian organisations’ attention at the time, unlike what happened in the 1980s (Hynd, 2021)? What does this tell us about the conception and perception of young combatants’ involvement in armed conflicts?
There are several reasons that can explain the absence of young combatants from the preoccupations of humanitarian actors. The most obvious one was the presence and the visibility of younger children, whose situation of malnutrition required an emergency response. They generated compassion as icons of the ‘innocent victim’. Compared to them, the situation of teenagers involved in military work might have gone unnoticed as they were probably not considered as in dire need. Their presence along military forces might also have been perceived as acceptable, as in other contexts. While the presence of young people in combat was noticed in 1960-70s, particularly during decolonisation struggles, it was tolerated to a certain extent. The discussions that led to the introduction of an age limit of 15 in the 1977 Additional Protocols reveal the factors that some countries believed justified the involvement of teenagers in the armies: their patriotic sentiments and their ability and willingness to defend their nation (Hynd, 2021).
Thus, the relative acceptability of teenagers involved in Biafran military forces may have stemmed, in part, from the rhetoric employed by Biafran authorities, who framed the conflict as a struggle for national survival in the face of genocide. This narrative justified the need for full societal mobilization. In the early stages of the war, Biafran leaders made significant efforts to present their cause through the lens of self-determination and nation-building. While this argument failed to secure broad international support, it nonetheless shaped how journalists and humanitarian workers on the ground conveyed the conflict to broader audiences. This raises the question of whether the presence of young soldiers was tolerated as long as it took place in conflicts framed around notions of patriotism and nation survival. As the conception of children rights evolved, their presence progressively became unacceptable. The fact that their involvement occurred in conflicts that were more and more depicted as chaotic power struggles between armed groups or warlords rather than noble patriotic struggles, was also probably part of this evolution.