Child Soldiers

Deepening readers’ knowledge of armed conflict in Africa is a common purpose of the books discussed in this essay. Each author advances beyond the established explanations of the conflicts and combatants’ involvement in these conflicts. All provide the political, economic, and cultural-historical and contemporary context that allows readers to understand better these armed conflicts and the affected populations. The authors make the point that without careful examination of these context-specific issues, policies and programs will be ineffective.

Christine Ryan focuses on child soldiers in Southern Sudan during the second civil war. She argues that because “child soldiers” are conceptualized through a Western perspective of childhood, they are rendered incapable of making informed decisions and are politically voiceless. Through qualitative interviews the former child soldiers reveal their decision-making related to involvement in the war. NGO staff members’ interviews reveal the discrepancy between their own perspectives and those of the former child soldiers, particularly on whether child soldiers demonstrated agency in their participation in this war. Ryan explores the element of agency in former child soldiers’ choices and the ineffectiveness of reintegration programs that failed to take their individual and collective agency into consideration.

Krijn Peters takes an anthropological approach to the subject, basing his study of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, its rise and attraction to rural youth, and its longevity as a movement on nearly one thousand interviews. He examines the role of corrupt state systems, village elders, and chiefs in the breakdown of traditional rural socioeconomic structures that left no space for youth to become educated, acquire farmland, and assume expected adult male responsibilities. This “crisis” of rural youth was a major factor contributing to the RUF’s becoming a powerful option for disenfranchised youth. Peters also explores when and how the RUF lost this revolutionary focus and perpetrated the mass atrocities with which they became associated. While there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for this violence, his analysis of the phases of war and structure of the RUF movement provides a useful understanding of the dynamics that led to these atrocities.

The wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia are the subject of Danny Hoffman’s ethnography. He discusses these wars together because the political and economic events in one country influenced events in the other. Hoffman follows the lives of the men who were a part of the Kamajors and Civil Defence Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone and Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) in Liberia. He moves beyond describing in rich depth the events of these wars for each group and employs a deep Marxist analysis of what these wars produced and how they were waged. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “war machines,” Hoffman examines how young men were mobilized for violent labor whether as soldiers or workers—on battlefields or in mines and plantations—and as vulnerable, involuntary conscripts in different phases of the same struggles.

Wojciech Jagielski’s first-person narrative takes readers on a journey to a town in northern Uganda at the center of the armed conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). His relationships with three individuals propel this story, each one a composite of several real people: a program director of a rehabilitation center for formerly abducted children, a former...