Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism

Chapter 5: The Politics of Age

132 The Politics of Age Chapter 5 The case studies presented in this book challenge the dominant humanitarian concept that child soldiers are simply vulnerable individuals exploited by adults who use them as cheap, expendable, and malleable weapons of war. These studies only begin to touch the range of circumstances in which children are engaged in combat; but they make clear that no simple model can account for the presence of children on the battlefield or the conditions under which they fight. The specifics of history and culture shape the lives of children and youth during peace and war, creating many different kinds of childhood and many different kinds of child soldiers. Age and childhood are contested domains. Chronological age has no absolutely fixed meaning in either nature or culture. Like ethnicity, age categories such as “child,” “youth,” and “adult” are situationally defined within a larger system and cannot be understood without consideration of conditions and circumstances.1 Societies in which age categories are salient engage in constant struggles over who is a child and over the cultural, legal, and moral dimensions of childhood. Even the legislative determination of age provides only a deceptive appearance of permanence, which belies a constant social and political struggle. The politics of age is part of what Nancy SherperHughes and Carolyn Sargent call the “cultural politics of childhood”—namely, the ideological, political, and social uses of children and the concept of the child.2 What is new is that the struggle over age has an increasingly global dimension. The Agency and Rationality of Children The politics of age informs historical and ethnographic accounts of children and war, which often stand in contradistinction to legal and humanitarian accounts of war. It is as if the only two witnesses to an event could not agree on any of its details. What is the source of this clash of analysis and interpretation ? The answers lie in philosophy, method, and politics. Modern studies of children begin with the premise that it is no longer appropriate to see children solely as undeveloped or incomplete adults. They assert that children have “agency”—broadly, the capacity of children to act and to exercise power, even in situations not of their own making.3 In contrast, humanitarian accounts implicitly or explicitly draw on the orthodox developmental models of childhood set forth by Jean Piaget and his intellectual progeny. Not surprisingly , these models have widespread currency in psychology, education, social work, and other so-called helping professions. Positing that the transition from childhood to adulthood takes place in universal, naturally determined , and fixed steps, developmental models are based on the belief that children are basically immature, incompetent, and irrational. As children grow older, nature—mediated by enculturation and socialization—transforms the child into a competent, mature, and rational adult. In contrast, empirical studies in anthropology, history, and sociology offer a new paradigm for the study of childhood. This paradigm stresses the diversity of childhood and embeds the understanding of childhood in a cultural, historical, and social context. It rejects preconceived notions of children as irrational or prelogical beings. Its starting point is the premise that children are active players in the social order who dynamically shape the world around them.4 Ethnography—particularly the methods of participant observation—has unsettled conventional concepts of childhood and remains the best way to study children. Observing and listening to the voice of the child in natural settings, where children are not disempowered by the regimes of formal interviewing , testing, and measurement, provide the clearest portraits of the competence of children. These methods are the social science equivalent of the revolutionary field studies of primates, which forced zoologists to completely rethink conclusions that had been drawn from the study of animals in zoos and laboratories. Pioneering ethnographic work in the study of children supports the notion that children, even young ones, are far more sophisticated , knowledgeable, rational, and skillful than is assumed in the general culture or in the popular developmental models used in psychology, education , and social work. The Politics of Age 133 134 armies of the young Ethnographic and historical accounts of young soldiers stress the agency, autonomy, and independence of youth and strain to achieve common ground with humanitarian accounts that emphasize the inherent vulnerability and dependence of the young. The conflicts between these accounts are more than just a clash between old and new paradigms of childhood. Instead, for a variety...