Neither Child nor Soldier: Contested Terrains in Identity, Victimcy and Survival

Abstract

Elaborating on the theoretical position underlying this study, the discursive and conceptual engagement presented here takes issue with the contemporary image of the child soldier. The label of ‘child soldier’ is mired in conceptual inconsistencies, vacillating between innocence and agency positions; this is confounded by more populist images propagated in the media and journalistic writings. Child soldiers in the Western media are commonly portrayed with qualities which children and societies ‘ought not to have’ as Utas suggests later in this volume. Cumulatively the Western media has advanced and popularized a pejorative, wasted image of youth in conflict, and tended to portray a dramatized and sympathetic account of the processes and experiences involved in the life of a child soldier. For a practitioner, academic or humanitarian worker who has lived and worked with child soldiers these are far from the truth. They seem to revolve around a coercive recruitment and vulnerable axis, with most youth voices and lives embedded in ‘neglect’, as part of the vulnerable group, that is, women, disabled and children. This creates a problematic, often incomplete categorization/definition.KeywordsArmed GroupChild SoldierInternational RelationWestern MediumYouth VoiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.