Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone by Shepler, Susan (review)

Susan Shepler’s Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone is a finely crafted ethnography of different reintegration trajectories and programs for child soldiers in the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s. Approaching reintegration as social practice, Shepler traces the local deployment of globally circulating discourses of childhood and child rights. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in different communities and reintegration centers, she brings to the fore the (micro-)political implications for different actors seeking to strategically navigate their everyday in postwar Sierra Leone.

Despite its prima facie disturbing topic, the book is a very pleasant and intriguing read. Shepler’s outstanding firsthand experience of sociopolitical developments in Sierra Leone since the late 1980s paired with a committed yet nuanced analysis make this book an invaluable resource for a wide audience. Undergraduate students in humanities and social sciences will find it easily accessible as will practitioners in post-conflict reintegration or development circles. Shepler’s ethnographic virtuosity, her rich empirical data, and sharpness of analysis make her book likewise a treasure for scholars working on this region, on (post-)conflict societies, or on the global traveling and sedimentation of ideologies.

This potential audience coincides with her agenda. The book certainly contributes to academic discussions within childhood studies or the anthropology of (crisis) interventions and development. More important, however, is Shepler’s political and policy oriented argument. She repeatedly argues for a more prominent role for anthropological methods and writing in policy and development circles concerned with child issues. “Ethnography is still the best approach to studying the lived experiences of children” (p. 14), the intricacies of local models of childhood, and the impacts of culturally insensitive programs, all of which large-scale but short-term quantitative research fails to see. Sensitivity to individual, cultural, and political particularities is arguably the precondition for successful interventions in social environments in the name of a better life for children. Shepler’s book makes the best argument one can think of to substantiate a claim for more attention to ethnographic insights in policy and development circles.

On the book’s last pages, Shepler reflects on policy makers’ difficulties in operationalizing ethnographic insights. Ethnography offers complexity and contextuality, whereas technocrats are looking for simplicity and universality. Shepler consciously refrains from too much specificity and theoretical elaborations on central topics of her book (social practice theory, translation of ideas, “modernity” versus “tradition”) in order to not repel those she targets to read and consider her insights. The reality she describes and her analysis of the social practices and discourses that reposition and remake ideologies of childhood are complex enough. The accessibility of Shepler’s book thus comes at the price of a less pronounced positioning within a more theoretically or philosophically oriented anthropology—a price she is prepared to pay for her higher goals.

Shepler is interested in understanding how reintegration programs for child soldiers based on global ideologies of childhood work when they collide with diverging local ideologies. Western ideologies emphasizing the right of the child often did more harm than good for those targeted by reintegration programs in Sierra Leone, as Shepler states in the introduction. The outcome, though, was not the total breakdown and failure of the programs. Instead, unforeseen opportunities opened up for actors able to flexibly adapt to and appropriate the emerging discourses and practices for their benefits, while many of the targeted beneficiaries of the programs were excluded.

Shepler’s central argument is that discourses about childhood, children’s rights, and programs for the reintegration of child soldiers offer a variety of possible references for diverse actors in Sierra Leone’s postwar social environment. Throughout the book, she reiterates the point that reintegration is about various actors navigating structural constraints and “strategizing” on the best way to participate in society. Her emphasis is therefore on reintegration as...