Abstract
The focus of this edited collection is on the impact of wars, mostly civil wars, on the human security of children viewed through the lens of political science. Many of the chapters display the crossing over of rational choice theory from economics to political science so favoured by liberal analysts. There is a good deal of discussion of ‘supply and demand’, ‘marginal utility’ and cost-benefit analysis. Although the editors claim that ‘child soldiering provides an interesting and potentially rewarding avenue into understanding the dynamics of political and economic development and civil conflict’ (p. 7) it is far from clear that this collection does advance our understanding of that dynamic. The collection aims to ‘contribute to the development of a credible, foundational basis for the promotion of novel, feasible policy proposals’ (p. 9). Principally these turn out to be education, increased security for refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, control of ammunition markets and enhanced international legal measures. The last they contend, rightly, will only work with great power engagement and they make a plea for the US to use the ‘supply of military aid, as well as trade and financial sanctions, to get states to reduce their use of children or to get them to negotiate more earnestly with rebel forces on the issue’ (p. 254). To this reader these policy proposals for education and great power intervention do not seem particular novel and given the USA’s intransigence on the International Criminal Court (ICC), the regulation of small arms and the Optional Protocol, nor do they seem particularly feasible. Given the outcomes of recent great power interventions, that may be a blessing.
The collection has five parts: an overview; ethical, legal and international dimensions; alternative explanations of child recruitment; empirical assessments of child soldiers; and policies to stop the recruitment of child soldiers.
In common with most of the policy approaches to child soldiering the editors take a broad view of the ‘child solider’. Even within an expansive definition, as they acknowledge, the population of child soldiers is far smaller than the population of war-affected children. They acknowledge that despite the proliferation of legal instruments to address the protection of children and youth in conflict there have been few tangible results (p. 4). Unfortunately an entire chapter is then devoted to setting out the UN legal framework for children in armed conflict. This is preceded by a rather odd inquisition into the philosophical justification to not kill a child soldier.
The collection obviously aspires to being innovative. However the section on ‘Alternative Explanations of Child Recruitment’ discusses the well-known phenomenon of child recruitment. The points covered in Peter Singer’s chapter will be well-known to anyone familiar with his widely cited Children at War (2005). Another chapter simply argues that armed groups use child soldiers because they are cheaper than adult soldiers and this ‘compensates for their (potentially) lower military efficiency’ (p. 81). Gutiérrez Sanin’s explanation of why children volunteer to join the FARC, that to do so is ‘an explicit recognition of their status as adults’ (p. 140), while hardly novel, is perhaps insufficiently acknowledged in the literature. Becker’s chapter on child recruitment in Burma, Sri Lanka and Nepal identifies three aspects of child soldiering specific to the region: the use of quotas, forced recruitment by government forces in Burma and ‘indoctrination’.
The fourth section on empirical evidence in fact demonstrates only that there are insufficient data available. A chapter on child soldiers in the DRC points to being internally displaced as making children more vulnerable to recruitment than being in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The chapter on Liberia analyses data from a United Nations Development Programme commissioned survey of adult ex-combatants. Although this was a randomized sample of ex-combatants it is not a random sample of former child combatants and it is questionable if reliable inferences can therefore be made from the data. Nonetheless this chapter does offer some new insights, in particular that children largely join armed forces for similar reasons to adults and that differences between the experiences of adults and children surface when data are disaggregated by fighting factions. Michael Wessell’s chapter draws on qualitative interviews to give a fairly detailed picture of girls’ roles in the armed forces in Angola. Most of the findings are similar to that found in other studies except for the exceptionally high level of invisibility of formerly abducted girls and that very few girls in the Angolan study were combatants.
The collection concludes with three chapters on how to stop recruitment. In what seems like a re-hashing of modernization theory, Vargas-Baron proposes parental education will mean that children will ‘avoid falling prey to the enticements of armed groups offering a better life’ (p. 211). The chapter on deterrence, agency and education has some useful points to make about the importance of attending to the psychic impacts of war on child soldiers and of combining education with strategies for managing trauma, and the role of peer and other social networks in supporting children at risk of recruitment. The final chapter in this section suggests that the international community should address itself to the task of ending wars through third-party mediation. The concluding chapter recognizes that the current strategies of deterrence, ‘naming and shaming’ and criminalization are having little impact on rebel forces’ use of child soldiers and proposes instead that the international community should focus on securing refugee and IDP camps, provide education before and during conflicts, strengthen ammunition control and enhance the reach of international legal bodies like the ICC.
This collection does present some new data but it does not offer new ways of theorizing child soldiering or novel policy recommendations, as it aspires to do. The title promises an analysis of how fractured states produce the phenomenon of child soldiers that is not followed through in the text. Instead the focus of this collection is largely on a liberal conception of market forces shaping the demand and supply of child soldiers.