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.
In 2024, as part of the Children of War project, I visited Burundi to conduct oral history interviews and archival research. With the first interviews, it became clear that, nearly twenty years after the end of the civil war (1993-2005), the knowledge and memories of child soldiering in Burundi had slowly receded. For several key informants, including a political scientist and the coordinator of a prominent child protection organisation, child soldiering was no longer a problem in Burundi. It was presented as a past phenomenon mainly developed during the Burundian civil war. For many, the issue had disappeared with the post-conflict Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes in the 2000s. In 2024, child soldiering was thus seen as having little relevance in today’s Burundi: it was not a priority in the issues affecting Burundian children. For the coordinator of the largest network of children’s rights organisations, the main problems that they dealt with were violence against children, children living in the streets and human trafficking.
Knowledge about child soldiering in Burundi before the civil war is scarce. For instance, whether children were involved at any level in the various ethnic massacres that took place in Burundi remains to be researched. A report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, examining the massacres/ genocide of Hutu in 1972, maintains that some students in secondary schools were responsible for identifying students considered as ‘Hutu’, who would then be arrested by the military. Although it has been widely reported that some members of the Jeunesse Révolutionnaire Rwagasore (JRR), the youth wing of the party-state Union pour le Progrès National (UPRONA), participated in the repression against Hutu in 1972, they are generally believed to have included young adults who were over 18 years old. The discussions during my research in Burundi also raised the question of who is included or not in the category of ‘child’, which will be explored in future publications.
This lack of memory needs to be understood within the broader context of the contested histories and narratives amongst Burundians around the origins, developments and consequences of the various ethnic massacres and conflicts that the country has experienced since 1962. The Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement, which officially ended the civil war in Burundi in 2005, had provisions for the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), intending to shed light and establish the ‘truth’ about violent events that the country faced since the colonial era. However, there were delays in creating the TRC, and some observers have criticised its work and findings as partial.
Even when looking at more recent events, such as the 1993-2005 civil war, knowledge and public memory of child soldiering is slowly disappearing. There is a lack of reliable quantitative data about child soldiers in Burundi. The difficulty of remembering is compounded by the disappearance of local NGOs who were involved in issues pertaining to child soldiering in Burundi. As in many other post-conflict countries, the continuing existence of NGOs depends on external funding, and when the funding ends, NGOs often adapt by shifting focus, or some even cease work. Understanding the patterns of recruitment of children in the past, however, can contribute to the prevention of child soldiering in future, making the Children of War research timely.
As I write this blog, the M23 rebel group has captured the city of Goma (DRC) since January 27th, 2025. There is a risk of the conflict spreading throughout the DRC and spilling over to neighbouring countries, including Burundi. Burundi has troops in the DRC, and they are now involved, alongside the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), in countering and preventing the progress of the M23. The intensification of the conflict in eastern DRC increases the risk of child soldiering throughout the region, as has happened in the past. Given the transnational dimension of the conflicts in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, children could be recruited and fight beyond their national boundaries, as in the past. For instance, in 2004, Amnesty International reported that Burundian children had fought in their country during the civil war and in the DRC. With the continuing politicisation of young people in Burundi (see: Ibiswi vy’inkona blog), there is a need to shed light on the use of children in conflicts in Burundi and its neighbours so that lessons can be learned from the past to avoid present and future violations of children’s rights.
A few months ago, I came across a series of videos of ibiswi vy’inkona, that is children, adolescents and young people associated with the current main political party, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD). Ibiswi vy’inkona means ’eaglets’. An eagle is one of the three party’s symbols, which also include a sword (inkota) and a cassava leaf (ibabi ry’umwumbati). These symbols are represented on the party’s flag. According to the rules governing the CNDD-FDD, the raven means strength (inguvu), agility (ububangutsi) and perseverance (kutarambirwa). The videos show ibiswi vy’inkona’s parades during CNDD-FDD ceremonies and events. The parades have a military air. The ibiswi vy’inkona are also described as abana b’ abahoze mu rugamba, which can be translated as ‘children of former combatants’ or ‘children of war veterans’. The videos show boys and girls, some who are kindergarten school age (3-5 years old), marching like soldiers.
At these festive public events organised by the CNDD-FDD, ibiswi vy’inkona shout political slogans, which ruling party members applaud. A certain militarism characterises their catchphrases. Words such as urugamba (struggle) are used several times. A slogan, which particularly, struck a chord with me says, ‘igihugu ntigitorwa, kirarwanirwa!‘ (‘you can’t just pick up a country; you fight for it!’). The slogan seems to refer to the ruling party’s military origins, which it has not yet completely shed off, twenty years after the end of the conflict. Underpinning these slogans is also a fear that the gains of the civil war might be at risk, within a context characterised by a multisectoral crisis in Burundi and regional instability in the Great Lakes region.
The case of ibiswi vy’inkona illustrates the continuing politicisation and militarism of young people in Burundi. The remnants of a culture of militarism continue to be spread to new generations of Burundians. This phenomenon is not new. During the party-state era, the Union for National Progress (UPRONA) (1966-2003), the party had a youth wing, the Jeunesse Révolutionaire Rwagasore (JRR), made primarily of young adults. UPRONA also had a children’s section, composed of school-age children named ‘Pioneers’, who would march in during official events. Some members of the JRR have been accused of participating in the repression and massacres of Hutu that took place in 1972. While the ruling elite has changed in post-conflict Burundi, past governance practices have been perpetuated. For instance, the CNDD-FDD has relied on the Imbonerakure also called the CNDD-FDD Jeunesse (Youth) in the repression of political opponents, particularly since the political crisis of 2015 in Burundi. Since 2016, an Imbonerakure Day is celebrated throughout the country.
Pioneers and ibiswi vy’inkona are not ‘child soldiers’. However,they raise questions around the links between the normalisation of children’s militarism and politicisation in periods of negative peace and the phenomenon of child soldiering during violent conflict within a specific context. What does a continuation of a culture of militarism within the wider society and transmitted to children through the ruling party mean for sustainable peace and reconciliation in Burundi?
When I embarked on a journey in 2024 to conduct oral historical and archival research in Burundi for the Children of War project, the country was going through what Professor Julien Nimubona, a political scientist from the University of Burundi, has referred to as a major multisectoral crisis at the political, economic, and institutional levels. While so much can be said about this research trip, in this piece, I reflect mainly on some socio-economic challenges and how they affected my research journey.
Although I had lived in and visited Burundi regularly before 2015, I found significant changes upon returning to conduct research for the first time. Burundi has been undergoing a substantial and unprecedented socio-economic crisis. The reasons for the current socio-economic crisis are complex and disputed, but one factor is the economic sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States of America from 2015-20. These sanctions were a result of political violence and widespread human rights abuses by the regime. The sanctions had a tremendous effect on the post-conflict country, which was worsened by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis is also associated with mismanagement of public resources, the privatisation of the state, and corruption (See: Iwacu; RFI).
The socio-economic crisis is visible in daily life and heavily impacts most Burundians. In the last years, there has been a shortage of foreign currency and fuel, rising prices of essential goods, and inflation (see: Iwacu, TV5 Monde). An emblematic image of this crisis has been the long queues of vehicles waiting, sometimes for days, at petrol stations in Bujumbura to get fuel.
The situation has particularly affected vulnerable categories, such as children. The lack of fuel has worsened inequality in access to schools. Well-off parents have been able to buy overpriced fuel on the black market to ensure their children reach school on time, while some less well-off parents have had their children change school or leave education. The challenges of getting to school have impacted the well-being and learning of children, as some children arrive at school tired, having woken up early and walked long distances. Another worrying trend is the perceived rise of children living in the streets. These children often find themselves in this situation because of the poverty they face in their families (see: Iwacu; Iwacu; Yaga-Burundi; SOS Medias Burundi; UNICEF).
3. Reflections
During my research in Burundi, the lack of fuel impacted and sometimes stopped the data collection. Rising fuel and taxi prices put pressure on grant budgets. The need to be careful with fuel was compounded by the fact that I had to return to places several times before meeting the people I was looking for or gaining access to documents.
In other instances, employees had to leave earlier than usual to find transport home. One day, I was in an office consulting fascinating archival material. A few hours before the official closure of 5 PM, an employee told me she had to close the office to catch her bus. She apologised and said that it had taken her several hours in the morning and that she had to get home to look after her young children. As in many societies worldwide, women and girls in Burundi carry out most of the unpaid household and care labour. The crisis might have worsened gender disparities, but this is a topic for future research.
Many people in Burundi shared with me their perception that the socio-economic situation in Burundi had deteriorated. They felt powerless and were disappointed by the rise in commodity prices, the lack of fuel, the poor purchasing power and the lack of foreign currency. While no informants asked for financial rewards, there were instances when people asked me for a bit of money. An example would be a Librarian who was very helpful and asked me, once I left Burundi, to help him financially.
Like during my doctoral research on policing pluralism in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I felt torn between the ethical imperatives of not giving rewards and the moral dimension of asking people (including those going through a difficult situation) for their time and information, which would mostly benefit the research, for free. How I navigated the long-standing and complex debates around the ethics of payment and rewards for research participants will be developed in future publications.
As part of the broader research on histories of child soldiers in Africa, we are engaging with the existing monitoring of children in armed conflict internationally, including the reports of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict. We anticipated that this would be a good way to link our historical project with contemporary prevalence data. We have found that the prevalence data is also useful for revealing the processes of humanitarian knowledge construction and norm evolution. This blog series contains methodological reflections and critiques founded in our unfolding attempt to construct our own historical dataset of children in armed conflict.
The main data page, where we discuss the mapping methodologies and sources, is here.
This map shows the number of years with reported child soldier use, 1970-2022.
The first phase of our mapping project is based on numbers and data reported in human rights and humanitarian monitoring and advocacy documents (see the Methodology). With this first blog in the series on data and numbers, we discuss the mapping source material and the evolution of monitoring violations against children in armed conflict.
The office of the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict was created in 1996, reflecting the growing focus on children and youth as categories of particular concern in humanitarian response and governance structures, as seen in the 1996 Machel Report on ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children’. The first Secretary General report on Children and Armed Conflict (2000) included the widely-cited ‘zombie number’ (Hynd 2021, 273) of 300,000 ‘children under the age of 18 who have been coerced or induced to take up arms as child soldiers’ (SecGen 2000, para. 2). The UN Secretary General reports built on two decades of transnational advocacy that had tracked developments in child soldiering but faced challenges in securing quantitative and comparative data.
Evolution of UN Monitoring
1998: First Open Debate on Child and Armed Conflict held at the UN Security Council
1999: UN Security Council Resolution 1261 (identifies long-term consequences of children affected by war for ‘durable peace, security and development’). Also identified ‘six grave violations’: recruitment & use, killing & maiming, sexual violence, abduction, forced displacement and attacks on objects protected under international law (schools/hospitals).
2000: Resolution 1314 urges all parties to armed conflict to respect fully international law applicable to the rights and protection of children in armed conflict; underlines the importance of giving consideration to the special needs and particular vulnerabilities of girls affected by armed conflict, including those heading households, orphaned, sexually exploited and used as combatants.
2001: Resolution 1379 requested the Secretary General attach to his report a list of parties to armed conflict that recruit or use children.
2004: Resolution 1539. Called for comprehensive reporting mechanism. In response to that, the secretary-general’s fifth report included an action plan for the establishment of a mechanism to monitor the six grave violations of children’s rights in situations of armed conflict: (1) killing or maiming of children; (2) recruitment or use of child-soldiers; (3) attacks against schools or hospitals; (4) rape or other grave sexual violence against children; (5) abduction of children; and (6) denial of humanitarian access for children, the last of these being the only violation that is not a trigger for listing.
2005: Resolution 1612 called for immediate implementation of the MRM (Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism) established for situations that lead to state or nonstate parties being included in the list of shame.
2008: Shift in reporting period, [September 2007-December 2008; January-December 2009]
2009: Resolution 1882 added two new criteria for listing/delisting parties: parties who kill & maim children and who commit rape/sexual violence against children in armed conflict situations
2011: Resolution 1998 – added attacks against schools and hospitals.
2014: Resolution 2143 and launch of ‘Children, Not Soldiers’. Representatives from Afghanistan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen attended the launch event and pledged their full support in reaching the objectives of the campaign.
2015: Resolution 2225 expanded on the triggers for listing by including the abduction of children in situations of armed conflict (post Boko Haram abductions).
Since the first report in 2000, the Secretary General and Special Representative reports have monitored the use of children in armed conflict, including tracking negotiated agreements and progress on commitments to demobilize or not use children. If you read the most recent Secretary General ‘Annual report on children and Armed Conflict’, you would be forgiven for imagining a standardized and systematic reporting procedure. The reality, of course, is that the reports are the end result of a long process of observations, allegations, diplomacy, reports, meetings, consolidations, and debates over what constitutes evidence. As such, these reports offer a window into the construction of humanitarian knowledge and legal-political norms. The numbers which appear with increasing frequency in the report – from the institution of the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism in 2005 – are a more accurate reflection of growth in humanitarian infrastructure around knowledge and monitoring than a depiction of the actual numbers of children and youth involved in armed conflicts across the world. This reflects the challenges of documenting and verifying numbers of children and youth involved in conflict.
The problem of quantifying child soldiering/violations against children in humanitarian data was immediately revealed when we began building our dataset from the Secretary General reports. These reports contain few concrete datapoints, overlap categories and duplications, and tend to describe rather than quantify violations.
“Children were recruited between May and July 2006, in Khartoum, Jonglei and Bahr al-Ghazal by the Sudan Armed Forces and SPLA. For example, on 16 May 2006, the Sudan Armed Forces, SPLA and the new Joint Integrated Units were all reported to be involved in recruiting children in Nasser, Upper Nile State. In the same month, child soldiers were seen in a newly incorporated Sudan Armed Forces unit near Nasser, and there were reports of approximately 50 uniformed and armed SPLA soldiers aged between 14 and 16 years in the same area.” (Para 73: Secretary General Report 2007).
This quote demonstrates the complexity of reporting sources, tracking multiple armed groups, balancing sightings and reports with confirmed incidents of recruitment across large spans of time and space, and attempting to assess age categories based on scant evidence. Documenting and verifying these reports and sightings sufficiently for inclusion in Secretary General reporting is a difficult task. The Secretary General reports attempt an annual monitoring – leaving them at the whim of shifting access, politicization of allegations and reporting mechanisms, and the complexity of conflict dynamics. These reports, and how they change across years, reveal the challenges of monitoring and enumerating the involvement of children in conflict.
In contrast, the pre-2003 data – drawn from advocacy documents, archives, and secondary conflict datasets (see methodology) – was largely drawn from media reporting and anecdotal evidence and gives only broad ranges for child soldier numbers sometimes as wide as 5,000 – 20,000. This captures the breadth of allegations but little in the way of detail. Numbers are also estimated cumulatively across the duration of a conflict, eclipsing nuances of recruitment drivers or sub-national variation. Reporting was frequently retrospective, generated by advocacy groups and researchers at the conclusion of a conflict on the basis of demobilization observations, or even years after the end of fighting.
Work with these available numbers to undertake any quantitative visual analysis of the patterns and trends in children’s military recruitment and use has proven challenging. The inconsistency of recruitment and use estimates makes using these numbers as ‘fact’ unreliable – as discussed in our blog on intensity of recruitment and use. Instead we have found that the data is most effective at illustrating the breadth and longevity of use, as we have attempted in the map below. This visual representation highlights longstanding recruitment sites such as in Sudan and South Sudan, with allegations corresponding to 42 out of the 52 years captured in the data.
This map shows the number of years in which there is reported recruitment and use of children in conflict, 1970-2022. This does not account for the number of children used.
Mapping the numbers produced by these humanitarian and advocacy sources illustrates glaring gaps in the data – particularly silences in southern and northern Africa to start. There were conflicts in many of these countries, as well as documented examples of cross-border recruitment and training, within the period of analysis yet they are absent in the data. This highlights limitations of the initial dataset, as well as problems with mapping along contemporary national demarcations which are contested and have shifted during the period of analysis.
We aim to engage with questions of cross-border and (trans)national dynamics, and with shifting patterns and trends over time in other blogs and publications. In subsequent blogs in this series we will dig in on specific areas of the data – around the lack of quantifiable data, demobilization, observations and age categories, categories of violation – which help us tell different kinds of stories.
Phoebe Shambaugh & Chessie Baldwin
References
Stacey Hynd, ‘Constructing the Child Soldier Crisis: The Development of Transnational Advocacy and Humanitarian Campaigns against the Recruitment and Use of Children in Conflict, c.1970-2000’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12.3 (Fall 2021), 265-85. doi.org/10.1353/hum.2021.0017
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (Switzerland), The use of children as soldiers in Africa: a country analysis of child recruitment and participation in armed conflict (UNESCO digital library, 1999)
Swarthmore College Peace Archives, Dorothea E. Woods Collection, SCPC DG 213 series.
Rachel Brett and Margaret McCallin, Children: The Invisible Soldiers (Radda Barnen, 1996)
Vera Achvarina and Simon F. Reich, ‘No Place to Hide: Refugees, Displaced Persons, and the Recruitment of Child Soldiers’, International Security, 31, 1 (2006); 127-164
As part of the broader research on histories of child soldiers in Africa, we are engaging with the existing monitoring of children in armed conflict internationally, including the reports of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict. We anticipated that this would be a good way to link our historical project with contemporary prevalence data. We have found that the prevalence data is also useful for revealing the processes of humanitarian knowledge construction and norm evolution. This blog series contains methodological reflections and critiques founded in our unfolding attempt to construct our own historical dataset of children in armed conflict.
The main data page, where we discuss the mapping methodologies and sources, is here.
As we explored in the first blog of this series of humanitarian data, attempts to quantify the number of child soldiers and other related grave violations have produced data categories that are inconsistent and numbers that are sometimes speculative. In the 2000s, reporting often relied on qualitative language – ‘reportedly’, ‘observed, ‘widespread’, ‘systematic use’ or locations and events to create an evidentiary assessment that did not require quantification. The pre-2000 advocacy documents in particularly reveal the challenges of gathering accurate quantitative data, with sources providing gross estimates and wide ranging approximate figures for the same conflict or series of events.
We have attempted to address this inconsistent and approximate data by creating a scale of ‘intensity’, on the basis of estimates and qualitative descriptors, which can help us visualize the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict in different ways. This scale – which plots years of the reported conflict from 1-5 based on estimated prevalence of children used in conflict roles – enables us to bring quantitative and qualitative data types together in one map. Here we only address data on children’s military ‘recruitment and use’. Other blogs will address data on other violations, particularly in relation to ‘abduction’.
Scale
1 “Tens” (1-99)
2 “Hundreds” (100-999)
3 “Thousands” (1000-9,999)
4 “Tens of thousands” (10,000-99,999)
5 “Hundreds of thousands” (100,000+)
Methodology
For early advocacy reporting, which estimated total numbers of child recruits across all years of a given conflict, we have divided the highest estimated total by the number of years. Example: Angola, 1998-2002, estimated 16,000 children divided by 5 years = 3,200, assigned ranking of 3, “Thousands”. Data from UN monitoring (Secretary General Reports, 2002-2022) was coded on the basis of verified numbers per calendar year. In cases where verified numbers were conclusively inaccurate (such as no verified cases but the report documented observed use of children in military roles by armed groups), a default coding of 2 (“Hundreds”) was applied.
Map 1 is our first effort at mapping the intensity of child soldier usage, based on humanitarian monitoring data produced by the emerging and evolving coalition to aid children in armed conflict from 1970-2022. The colour gradient reflects the sum of the scale – enabling us to account for both the intensity of reported recruitment and the duration of reporting.
This map uses the same grading scale but averages the grades across years rather than aggregates them.
In contrast, Map 2 uses the same grading scale but averages the grades across years rather than aggregating them. This gives a different insight into patterns of children’s military use in conflict. This map visually identifies humanitarian reporting ‘hot-spots’. These are the countries where underage recruitment was most reported, and which therefore shaped the construction of the category of the ‘African child soldier’. Liberia, Uganda, Somalia, and Mozambique all stand out for their intensity, while the DRC and South Sudan, where child soldiering was more protracted but often less high profile, are somewhat eclipsed. When we disaggregate the data over time, such as in the 10-year segments visible in the map series below, we can start to visualize trends in recruitment and use across time.
In a subsequent blog series, we will explore these trends further across conflict registers – decolonial war, cold war conflicts, ‘new wars’ and the war on terror to consider the evolution and spread of child soldiering as a tactic across African conflicts. In a separate thread, we will consider how numbers and language intersect in the data through the lens of ‘abductions’.
The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, also known as the Biafran war, was a turning point in the history of modern humanitarianism as well as Nigeria’s modern history.[1] This was a highly civilianised conflict, with some four million refugees enduring ethnic massacres, aerial bombing, and military incursions. With the Nigerian Federal government imposing a blockade on the secessionist Biafran state, famine spread across the population. Women and children suffered intensely in this war. By the wars end in January 1970, between one to three million people are estimated to have died of starvation and disease, the majority of them children.
The ’starving Biafran child’ became integral to Biafran propaganda and humanitarian iconography.[2] Children became the visible face of Biafran suffering, in what Lasse Heerten describes as the ‘post-colonial politics of pity’.[3] The moral figure of the child became a ‘sacred icon of global civil society’ and a dominant signifier of death’ in the twentieth century, their salvation legitimating transnational humanitarian intervention.[4] The child as famine victim was key to generating international sympathy and action for Biafra, leveraging powerful affective economies around notions of childhood innocence and protection.[5]
But this is not the whole story of children’s experiences of the Nigerian civil war. Biafran children were more than just starving famine victims: they also contributed to their families’ survival and to the Biafran war effort more broadly. The Biafra children in humanitarian photography are overwhelming young – mostly infants, represented in isolation from their families and society. Older children however contributed to household and community economies of survival by growing, foraging and hunting for food, fetching water and firewood, caring for siblings and carrying supplies. Some worked in relief camps and hospitals. Girls were involved in ‘attack trading’ for food and other resources across front lines.
Such agency and resilience did not neatly fit the idea of children as innocent victims requiring salvation that dominated humanitarian discourses, so these children do not appear much in humanitarian campaigning. Children are also marginalized and largely silenced in the remaining archives of the war. They are however often visible in war reportage and photography. But where their actions and experiences become most visible is in the recent published writing and interviews with former Biafran children (see below). Some of these memoirs are explicitly framed as ‘child soldier’ memoirs to draw parallels between historical and contemporary experiences of children’s recruitment and use in war.
Children and youth were also part of militarization and mobilization of Biafran society. Teenagers joined local militias and civil defence units to protect their communities. Among the most visible militarized children however were young boys who formed ‘Boys Companies’, or ‘Boscompi’. These were not formal military units but mimicked the Biafran army and often fed into its ranks. Boys, usually between the ages of six and fourteen, would drill and parade in public, sometimes in homemade uniforms and with wooden guns.
Teenagers served in significant numbers as part of the Biafran army, in increasing numbers as the war continued. Whilst many were rejected as too young when trying to patriotically volunteer at the start of the war, by 1968 boys as young as thirteen were being conscripted and forcibly recruited. Some received only a few days training before being sent to the front lines. Many were killed or captured, some became disabled veterans before reaching adulthood. Where children perhaps played the most significant role, however, was in the Biafran Organisation of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). BOFF deliberately recruited and trained young children as spies, usually aged ten to fourteen, to operate behind enemy lines and gather intelligence. Their youth allowed them to infiltrate Federal camps without suspicion, acting lost, traumatized, or undertaking domestic services for Nigerian troops. Their memoirs reveal their pride at their skills and successful operations, and the camaraderie that many found among their peers.
Biafra’s children fought and laboured, as well as suffered, during the war. Their roles and contributions have been neglected in the writing of Nigeria’s civil war. But their own writings and interviews [6] are now giving voice to their contributions to Biafra’s war effort, and facilitating a reappraisal of both Biafra and of the broader histories of child soldiering and children in armed conflict in African’s history.
By Stacey Hynd
Selected Writings of Former Biafran Children and Child Soldiers:
John Mozie, Charles Spiropoulos, Edozie Ezeife (eds.), Through the Eyes of a Child: Anthology of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Scribble City Publications, 2021)
Okey Anueyiagu, Biafra: The Horrors of War: The Story of a Child Soldier (Atlanta: Brown Brommel, 2020).
Emmanuel Iduma, I am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance and History (Glasgow: William Collins, 2023).
Chioma Talent Mundy-Castle, A Mother’s Debt: The True Story of An African Orphan (London: Author House, 2012).
Arua Okereke, The General’s Orderly: An Autobiography of a Biafran Child Soldier (Bloomington: Life Rich Publishing, 2018).
Ike Ude-Chime, Warchild of Biafra: Memoir of a Boy Soldier (self-published, 2021)
Egodi Uchendu, ‘Recollections of Childhood Experiences during the Nigerian Civil War’, Africa 77 (30) (2007).
Ewa Unoke, Dear God, Never Again: Memoirs of a Different Child Soldier: Reclaiming the Dreams of a Forgotten Nation (Mustang, OK: Tate Publishing & Enterprises, 2014).
Alfred Obiora Uzokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Lincoln, N.E.: Writer’s Advantage, 2003).
[1] See Michael Gould, The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria (IB Tauris, London, 2013).
[2] Nicholas Ibeawuchi Omenka, “Children in the Nigeria-Biafra War”, in Chima J. Korieh (eds), New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War: No Victor, No Vanquished (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 181-203.
[3] Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism, pp. 9, 152; Desgrandchamps, L’humanitaire en guerre civile, pp. 87-118.
[4] Nieuwenhuys, ‘Keep Asking’, 294; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 179.
[5] See Aviva Sinervo and Kristen Cheney, ‘NGO Economies of Affect: Humanitarianism and Childhood in Contemporary and Historical Perspective’, in Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification, eds. Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3.
Rafaela Tasca and Carlos Latuff, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons
Current humanitarian norms, as outlined in the 2007 Paris Principles, define child soldiers as “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”.[1] This project reads this definition backwards in time, applying it to conflicts and individuals across twentieth century Africa, to trace historical patterns of children’s military recruitment and use. This methodology reveals the tensions around and challenges to the label of ‘child soldier’.
Firstly, childhood is not a universal category: it is historically and culturally contingent, with marked differences between global norms and local African understandings of childhood.[2] It also overlaps with the category of ‘youth’. Youth is as much a social and political as chronological category, but commonly applies to those between the ages of 14 to 40: as the majority of ‘child soldiers’ are 15-17 years, many claim the label of ‘youth’, thereby highlighting their political agency. Gender can be as significant as age in shaping children’s military experiences.
Military service itself is regarded in many cultures as a marker of adulthood, and therefore underage soldiers who are chronologically under 18 often consider themselves as ‘adults’ rather than children due to their military status and experience. In other cultures however, such as in South Sudan, communities may still regard chronologically and biologically-adult former underage recruits as ‘boys’ because they have not undergone then required processes and rituals of initiation to be regarded as adult men, where these initiations were interrupted by war.[3] Before the mid-1990s the ‘child soldier’ was almost universally coded as male, but it is now recognised that around a four in ten of underage troops are ‘girl soldiers’ .[4]
Secondly, the category of ‘soldier’ itself does not fully address children’s participation in armed conflict and violence. Many children do not bear arms, and are instead involved in support roles, or move between front line and auxiliary roles. However, communities and individuals still commonly ascribe the label of child soldiers only to those with guns. Categories of war and armed forces or groups also require interrogation. Teenagers fighting the apartheid regime in South Africa, particularly in the African National Congress’ armed wing, are not regarded ‘child soldiers’ but broadly fit current definitions. Many young African anti-colonial ‘insurgents’ or ‘freedom fighters’ from the 1950-80s would today be classified as ‘child soldiers’.
Thirdly, the ‘child soldier’ as a humanitarian category has acquired particular connotations that can drive individuals to claim or reject it. Some avoid it due to potential stigmatization where this global label has come locally to hold connotations of violent perpetration and human rights abuses, as with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Instead, they lay claim to alternative identities, as ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘veterans’, to gain social status or access support. Concerns about stigmatizing current and former underaged soldiers led many advocacy and child/human rights groups to drop the label ‘child soldiers’ in favour of ‘child [formerly] associated with armed forces and armed groups’, or CAAFAG. The lack of transparency of this acronym however means that the term ‘child soldier’ remains common outside of these circles.
Wenhan Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
For many people, the primary image of a child soldier, is of a small African boy, in ragged clothes, wild-eyed and carrying an AK-47. Such images have proven powerful in shaping action against children’s military recruitment. But they do not tell the full story. There has been significant debate over who and what should be classified as a ‘ child soldier’, in law and across conflicts, militaries and individual perspectives. David M. Rosen traces the evolution of international humanitarian law in child soldiering, arguing that a new “transnational politics of age” shaped the concept of childhood and therefore that of child soldiering.[1]
When the military use and recruitment of children was first proscribed in international humanitarian law as part of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention in 1977 state parties and armed groups were required to ensure that: “children who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities and, in particular, they shall refrain from recruiting them into their armed forces”.[2]
Behind the scenes, during diplomatic negotiations on the protocols, opinions had sharply varied over who should be designated a child for the purposes of this protocol. Delegates noted that the ages of majority ranged from 12 to 21 in different countries. Brazilian delegates proclaimed that a minimum age of recruitment of eighteen was necessary ‘as a general condemnation of the policy of using minors for military purposes’, whilst Britain joined Greece, Canada, Japan and North Vietnam in arguing that 15 to 18 year olds ‘have the mental and physical capacity to fight, and will wish to serve their country in time of need’.[3]
Humanitarian dissatisfaction with the minimum age of fifteen and a focus only on children’s direct participation in hostilities led to a protracted campaign to extend the definition of ‘child soldiering’, with many organisations taking a ‘Straight 18 position’ and arguing that 18 should be the minimum age for military recruitment and use.[4] The campaign failed to secure a change during the negotiations on the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child which maintain the minimum age of fifteen years for recruitment into armed forces.[5] The 1998 International Criminal Court similarly declared “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years” into armed forces or groups as a war crime.[6] However, as the campaign gathered momentum the International Labour Office’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention of 1999 Art 3(a) listed “forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict” as a worst form of child labour, taking eighteen as the definition of a ‘child’.[7] Reflecting the centrality of Africa in actions to combat child soldiering, the 2000 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child art 22(2) became the first and only regional rights charter to prohibit the state recruitment and direct participation of any child in armed conflict, also defining a child as ‘below the age of 18 years’.[8]
In 2000 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict was signed, establishing that “persons who have not attained the age of 18 years are not compulsorily recruited into [state parties] armed forces” or armed groups, and that those states that permit voluntary recruitment under that age were to ensure “such recruitment is genuinely voluntary’, with full knowledge of the duties and consent of family or guardians.[9]
With growing acceptance of the ‘Straight 18’ position, attention turned from definitions of ‘child’ to ‘soldier’. Advocates strove to expand understandings of child soldiering beyond simply children bearing arms, to reflect the reality that children served in multiple military roles, both direct and auxiliary. In 2007 the Paris Principles extended the definition of a ‘child soldier’ in terms of role to include “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”.[10]
These instruments highlight the evolution of the category of ‘the child soldier’ in international humanitarian law, which was both shaped by – and shaped in – turn transnational advocacy, popular cultural and local understandings of childhood and war. The label of ‘child soldier’ however remains contested, bearing different meanings and different contexts, as is explored here.
[1] David M. Rosen, “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007), 296-306. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.296.
[2] Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), Geneva, 8 June 1977, Article 77(2). See also Protocol II, Article 4(3)(c).
[3] ICRC, Official Records of the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, Geneva, Volume XV, CDDH/III/SR.45, (ICRC: Geneva, 1977), 64-75.
[4] See Rosen (2007); Stacey Hynd, “Constructing the Child Soldier Crisis: Violence, Victimhood, and the Development of Transnational Advocacy against the Recruitment and Use of Children in Conflict, circa 1970–2000.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 12, no. 3 (2021): 265-285. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hum.2021.0017.
[5] Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Res. 44/25, 20 November 1989, Article 38(3).
[6] Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted by the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, Rome, 17 July 1998, UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9, Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) and (e)(vii).
[7] Convention concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, ILO Convention No. 182, adopted by the ILO General Conference, Geneva, 17 June 1999, Articles 1 and 3(a).
[8] African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, adopted by the Sixteenth Ordinary Session of the OAU Assembly of Heads of State and Government, Res. 197 (XVI), Monrovia, 17–20 July 1990, OAU Doc. CAB/LEG/24.9/49 (1990), Article 22(2).
[9] Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Res. 54/263, 25 May 2000, Annex I, Articles 2–4, 6(3) and 7
Children with machine guns. Boys with toy guns. Infants slung over armed mothers. The militarization of childhood takes on many different visual forms. During a recent research trip to the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG) [International Institute of Social History] in Amsterdam, I came across all these images. I initially visited IISG at the recommendation of an intellectual collaborator, historian, and friend, Lennart Bolliger. He located previously stumbled upon an image of the father of a mutual friend and coauthor, Dino Estevao, crossing the Angolan-Namibian border in the midst of armed conflict. Beyond searching for this photograph, I entered their photographic archives with an open mind.
As I examined hundreds of images spanning twentieth century Angola, themes of militarism and the militarization of children seamlessly connected materials from colonial to postcolonial rule. In some instances, the imprint of militarization took on subterranean forms. Often not. Given my previous research with former Flechas, San counterinsurgent forces conscripted into the Portuguese colonial forces in the late 60s and 70s, I was unsurprised to see militarized children from the colonial era. Admittedly, even naively, I was caught off guard by the ubiquity of children with or proximate to firearms in images produced by liberation movements-cum-competitors for state power. From Algeria to Namibia, whether through the provision of healthcare or education, liberation movements often tried to present themselves as governments-in-waiting. From today’s vantage point, the presentation of children with or near weapons would seem to run counter to these objectives.
Yet, liberation movements staged and disseminated images of militarized children and youth. For the purposes of illustration, I’ll briefly describe two pre-independence images from the Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika/Mondlane StichtingPhoto Collection at IISG in a folder with images from the armed forces of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola]. Both are noted as originating between 1962-1974. Annotated “MPLA” on the backside, the first image features a mother standing in front of thatch structure, AK-47 in hand, a baby is tucked in the inset under her left arm. The baby’s left hand resting on the gun’s barrel while their right hand, almost mimicking their mother, reaches over the top of the gun, towards the dust cover. The second image, also annotated “MPLA” on the backside, also includes an official stamp from the MPLA’s Departamento de Informação e Propaganda [Department of Information and Propaganda]. This image features a young boy raising what appears to be the party flag in the foreground while behind him, four boys, who appear slightly older, stand upright, in formation, presenting arms.
Each image provokes a wide range of questions in and of themselves. However, I will conclude by reflecting on the ubiquity of such images. Why might a liberation movement pose and stage their children and youth with arms? Today, most observers would view these images as a rejection of the political sovereign—in this case, the MPLA’s—legitimacy. However, norms and with them, strategies, change, and do so rapidly. As these images, and similar material I identified up to the late 1970s suggest, presenting children and youth with weapons offered a mode of legitimation precisely through the cause of popular, anticolonial struggle; in forging a new society, everyone had their role to play. As Samuel Moyn argues, human rights only became a cause célèbre out of the crisis of postcolonialism—as the “final” far more modest utopia left standing in the ashes of unrealized Cold War utopian visions. Thus, the concern over “child soldiers” also emerged in light of this collapse as well. These images constitute artifacts of a time and place in which conscripting children and youth, both militarily and visually, into popular struggle offered a political currency rather than a liability.
