Stopping the use of child soldiers has become an emblematic crusade for the international community since the 1990s when the ‘child soldier crisis’ seized humanitarian attention, iconically represented by a small African boy wielding an AK-47. Today SDG 8.7 specifically demands an end to the ‘recruitment and use of child soldiers’. Yet recent UN reports and Global Slavery Index bemoan the ‘limits of existing data’ for tackling child soldiering. A lack of historical data inhibits policy responses and longitudinal assessments. This project will provide usable data for practitioners and interdisciplinary scholars working on children in armed conflict with the first comparative historical analysis of patterns of children’s use in African warfare from c.1940-2000. African and international organization archives provide evidence of children’s involvement in African conflict from colonial armies to anti-colonial liberation struggles, from Cold War proxy wars to civil wars, and from youth political mobilization to targeted child militarization. This project provides a broad cross-continental overview of key trends, bringing together Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone literatures. To provide more granular analysis, comparative case studies are being undertaken on Uganda, Angola, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia. The project argues for a gen[d]erational analysis of warfare that focuses on age, alongside gender, to highlight the significance and ‘age-ential’ nature of youth involvement in conflict.
Summary
Children are integral to contemporary humanitarian and human rights campaigns, both as subjects of intervention and as humanitarian icons. In the 1990s one form of child victim came to prominence: the child soldier. Global estimates posited that over 300,000 child soldiers were fighting or had recently been demobilized, 120,000 of those in Africa. The iconographic image of ‘the child soldier’ was overwhelmingly African. Humanitarian campaigns in 1990s raged against this new ‘child soldier crisis’, depicting child soldiers as traumatized victims of adult abuse and the ‘barbarism’ of new hyper-violent, civilianized forms of contemporary warfare. However, contrary to these campaigns, child soldiering was not a new phenomenon: this project examines significant the presence of children in African conflicts throughout the twentieth century, alongside their involvement was linked to wider patterns of warfare, child labour and modern slavery, and youth mobilization.
The ‘child soldier crisis’ emerged in late 1980-90s not because children suddenly appeared on global battlefields, but because changing notions of childhood, child rights, human security and war made them objects of humanitarian concern. This project traces the evolution of humanitarian responses to children’s involvement in war from their absence in 1949 Geneva Additional Protocols to the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention of the Rights of the Child. We offer a phenomenological study of shifting ideas of ‘the African child soldier’ in both African and global knowledge systems. We analyse the legal and discursive emergence and expansion of the category of ‘child soldier’, highlighting tensions between local and global norms of childhood and youth. The project shows how the object figure of the child soldier as victim was framed by racialized and paternalistic tropes of African/global South societies. Our evidence base is comprised of colonial, international humanitarian, and African archives, alongside oral history interviews, visual materials, human rights reports, news media, popular culture, and child soldier memoirs. We welcome input on the project development and what outputs would be most useful from stakeholders, practitioners, teachers or impacted communities.
Aims
Child soldiering today remains a significant issue of humanitarian concern, but there is a lack of historical data available, particularly for Africa. This project is driven by three core, interconnected research problems:
- why and how do age and generation influence warfare and military recruitment?
- how have forms and levels of child and youth recruitment into Africa conflict evolved from colonial to contemporary eras? In essence, what constitutes a ‘child soldier’ in Africa?
- how do local and. global ideas of childhood shape the production of knowledge about child soldiering? In particular, how might they shape the development of humanitarian campaigning and action against child military recruitment?
Together, we deliver the first rigorous historical account of the development of child soldiering in Africa, with a comparative analysis of children’s involvement in warfare stretching from the colonial to contemporary eras. Wo do so by tracing children’s involvement in war from the Second World War to anti-colonial insurgencies, through civil wars and Cold War proxy conflicts to the ‘new wars’ of the 1990s that made the ‘African child soldier’ the poster child of global humanitarian advocacy. Our key case studies are Uganda, Angola, Ethiopia, and Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to provide comparisons across time, region, forms of warfare, and varying forms of child recruitment and military use. The project analyses both gender and generational dynamics, across three levels of child soldiering: youth as able-bodied force multipliers; as liminal covert agents; and symbolic militarized ‘children’, looking at direct and indirect participation throughout.
The ‘child soldier crisis’ of 1990s resulted from shifts in rhetoric and strategic framing as well as empirical realities, with changing ideas of childhood, child rights and war bringing child participants in armed conflict to international attention. Child soldiering is not solely or intrinsically an ‘African’ issue. But the ‘child soldier crisis’ of the 1990-2000s was constructed as a global South, and particularly African, problem, making Africa an essential focus for historical analysis. This project therefore provides phenomenological analysis of shifting concepts of ‘the child soldier’, tracing the evolving humanitarian calculus of concern that generated action on children’s involvement in warfare in Africa, and globally. To balance global norms of child rights that underpin humanitarian policy, the project will highlight various local African understanding of childhood and youth.
There is a tension between historical analysis, which stresses constructivist and contingent facets of ‘(African) child soldiering’ and the universalist, transhistorical understandings of childhood that underpin much advocacy. This project seeks to alleviate this tension by demonstrating how historical approaches can help practitioners develop more effective humanitarian campaigns and interventions through understanding how context and temporality impact their actions.