Keywords

Introduction

In February 2021, Dominic Ongwen was found guilty by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for a total of 61 cases comprising crimes against humanity and war crimes. Committed in Northern Uganda between 1 July 2002 and 31 December 2005, these crimes included murder, rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, torture, conscription, and use of children under the age of 15 in the armed conflict. Ongwen is a case in point as he himself was abducted at the age of about 9 on his way home from school and became a senior commander in the Ugandan irregular armed group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As such, he is the first person to be convicted by the ICC for a crime of which he was a victim himself. According to a Globe and Mail article from 2008 entitled “The Making of a Monster?” “He [Ongwen] is known as the most courageous, loyal and brutal of the men who serve Joseph Kony, the LRA’s charismatic and ruthless founder.” The ICC verdict comes after a trial that lasted more than four years, was spread across 231 hearing days, and involved the testimony of 130 witnesses and experts, including numerous insiders, and the participation of 4065 victims through their legal representatives. Although for the many victims justice has been a long time coming, the reaction to the verdict among members of the affected communities and the public debate has been mixed in face of Ongwen’s dual identity as victim-perpetrator.

According to Kony, Ongwen is “a ‘role model’ among the child soldiers” (Nolen & Baines, 2008). After this description, the article poses the following question: “How, in 11 years, did Dominic Ongwen turn from a boy too small to walk to the rebels’ camp into one of their fiercest, most senior fighters?” (emphasis added). Incapable of answering it, the newspaper article retains the question mark in its title: Was Ongwen really turned into a monster? Or is he a child victim of war, like other child-soldiers who, as the article tells us, are “hauled into violent conflict before their own moral compass has developed [so that] they become unable to discern right from wrong”? In its decision, the ICC Trial Chamber acknowledged that the LRA abducted Ongwen as a child and that he experienced significant suffering in his childhood and youth as a result. However, the Court made a clean break between Ongwen’s victimhood in early life and his perpetration of atrocity crimes as an adult: “this case is about crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a fully responsible adult and as a commander of the LRA in his mid to late twenties” (emphasis added). As Nortje argues, “He [Ongwen] was a victim of crimes under international law for the duration of his tenure as a child soldier in the LRA until he turned 18. Since then, he has become a perpetrator, a feared man across Uganda” (2017, p. 197; emphasis added).

The story of Ongwen’s childhood that we know is very similar to the narratives about (mostly) African boys holding weapons taller than themselves, like AK-47s. These narratives have attracted enormous media attention and have also become a priority in the humanitarian field. Although the constructions and imageries vary, the representation of the child-soldier, especially as articulated in the humanitarian field, produces a relation between extremes with a clear message: childhood is facing a serious crisis. Graça Machel, in her report on the impact of wars on children, defines warfare in postcolonial states, where the majority of child-soldiers are found, in terms of the “abandonment of all standards” and a “sense of dislocation and chaos” (Machel, 1996, p. 9). As well as the armed conflict in Uganda, the war in Liberia is used as an illustrative example to emphasize the abandonment of standards that has brought human rights violations against women and children, including the recruitment of children into armed forces and groups. In February 2004, BBC News published a story about the need to disarm and rehabilitate child-soldiers in Liberia, which was understood as a critical step toward establishing peace in the country. The photograph posted next to the text was of a boy pointing a weapon toward the viewer: he was alone or abandoned, without family or state support, and he was not wearing a military uniform, but old clothes and flip-flops. Also, he was carrying a pinky fluffy backpack in the shape of a teddy bear, whose contents were unknown to us, the viewers: might it be food, clothes, toys, or bullets to reload the weapon? The single caption, placed underneath the image, read: “The prolonged civil war has damaged a whole generation.” According to the journalist, “entering the world of Liberia’s child soldiers is a disturbing experience. Normal moral values are put to one side” (emphasis added).

In the end, what do we know about Dominic Ongwen and the Liberian boy? Despite repeated references to the fact that Ongwen was recruited by the LRA on his way home from school, nothing is said to give a hint about what experiences he had while engaged in war besides the crimes he committed and how his life was as a child before being abducted by the armed group. Regarding the Liberian boy, the readers are none the wiser about him either: who he was, his age, how he became a soldier, what experiences he had while engaged in war, or if he was still alive. We know that both children were in an extremely vulnerable situation—they were “out of place,” not protected, but, rather, subject to violence—but we are not able to glean anything about any specific circumstances. And yet, from that it becomes clear that, while we have been told very little, we actually know quite a lot—they were just a “child-soldier” or, in other words, a “child without childhood,” for when being a soldier begins, the child drops out of childhood,Footnote 1 understood and promoted as a carefree, secure, and happy phase of human existence.

If, on one hand, according to the BBC story, the Liberian boy-soldier does not so much stop being a child, but loses his childhood—something rather more abstract and, arguably, somewhat more precious, that must be saved with the help of international organizations. On the other hand, Ongwen, according to the ICC verdict, is a soldier, not a child anymore, who was, first, “robbed of childhood,” but then, as an adult, was capable of making voluntary choices in full cognizance of dangers, evaluating the risks and of committing violent acts that children are not. In both cases, the “child” can be rescued from the pathological child-soldier. That is, the idea of the child is still kept in the role of the irrational, innocent minor incapable of taking responsibility for his/her actions. Specifically in the case of Ongwen, the idea of the child is saved when the Ongwen-adult is found guilty. Both narratives—as a “child, not a soldier” and as a “soldier, not a child” respectively—are authorized by and, at the same time, reproduce the representation of the child-soldier as an international emergency, essentially deviant and pathological, understood as “exceptions to normal social life and global order: sudden, unpredictable, and carried strong moral imperatives for immediate action” (Calhoun, 2008, p. 96). As I argue throughout this chapter, the logic of opposite extremes—to be a child-soldier is to be an innocent victim and/or to be a feared irrational perpetrator—operates to (re)produce children as targets of international intervention (or, protection) with no chance of autonomous decision-making. Child-soldiers are either the objects of exploitation or the objects of salvation.

To consider these representations of the child-soldier, this chapter is divided in three parts. The first two parts explore the two main discourses that articulate and authorize the limits that (re)produce the child-soldier as an international emergency, setting boundaries within which only certain subjects, narratives, and responses are admitted: (1) the discourse of the law, that is, international practices that articulate children’s participation in war as something that is wrong and must be banned under international law; and (2) what I call the “discourse of the norm,” which is analyzed through the three contrasting images of the child-soldier as dangerous and disorderly, the hapless victim, and the resilient redeemed hero, as identified by Myriam Denov (2010) (Tabak, 2020). The discourse of the norm, in particular, makes visible child-soldiers as a pathology, excluding their aspects of disorder, dysfunction, and risk from the accepted boundaries of what is to be a child and its childhood. In this case, it is not only that children’s participation in wars is wrong, but it is absolutely abnormal once every quality applied to a “normal,” civilized childhood are absent in the lives of child-soldiers. In the third part, by challenging the idea of vulnerability, understood as victimization and invariably a site of inaction, I offer some reflections that aim to provide an alternative to framework for exploring children as political subjects (Marshall Beier, 2020) whose everyday lives within conflict zones destabilize the pervasive representations of both the child-soldier and the ordered world which claims to save him/her.

Within Boundaries: Banning the Use of the Child-Soldier

In 1996, Graça Machel, an expert appointed by the Secretary-General of the UN and a former Minister of Education of Mozambique, presented a report to the United Nations General Assembly entitled the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children: Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. In it, she indicates the inclusion of the issue of child-soldiers on the international agenda as a matter of concern:

It is unconscionable that we so clearly and consistently see children’s rights attacked and that we fail to defend them. It is unforgivable that children are assaulted, violated, murdered and yet our conscience is not revolted nor our sense of dignity challenged. This represents a fundamental crisis of our civilization […] Each one of us, each individual, each institution, each country, must initiate and support global action to protect children. (Machel, 1996, p. 73; emphasis added)

The essential quality of child-soldiers, according to Graça Machel, is their vulnerability once they are dependent, exploited, and powerless. In order to internationally deal with the child-soldier emergency, there has been a high investment in the construction of international legal standards, which aims to build an insurmountable barrier between child and soldier, making the military recruitment of children wrong—or an international crime (Drumbl, 2012; Tabak, 2020). This section focuses specifically on the “response” to the child-soldier problem via the rights-based approach—or what I call the discourse of the Law. To use Holzscheiter et al.’s (2019) classification, the child-soldiers’ protection and regulation, identified through children’s rights, may be associated with the idea of child rights governance. As such, throughout this section, the discourse of the law must be understood as “an explicit instrument, not only to protect and emancipate children from oppression, but also to govern, regulate, and control children and childhoods” (Holzscheiter et al., 2019, p. 272).

Specifically, I analyze here how international legal standards articulate children’s participation in armed conflicts as wrong and something that must be outlawed internationally. The discourse of the Law includes the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the 1998 Rome Statute, the 1999 International Labor Organization Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, and the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (hereinafter Optional Protocol). In addition, there are two international instruments adopted by UNICEF that have a key role in the debates on the definition of the category child-soldier—the 1997 Cape Town Principles and the Paris Principles.

Although children have always been present in the battlefields (Marten, 2002; Rosen, 2005), their international treatment has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. The high number of state ratifications of the UNCRC and the World Summit for Children in 1990 has inaugurated a time in which the protection of children has come to occupy a central place in the international human rights and security agendas alike. In addition to that, the accumulation and publicization of atrocities, such as the murders, mutilations, abductions, and rapes committed in the so-called “New Wars” (Kaldor, 1999), has done much to lend urgency to the expansion of the international movement toward the elimination of the participation of children in any kind of regular or irregular armed group (Macmillan, 2011). The first systematic attempt to directly address the issue of child combatants can be found in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. Since then, the governance of child’s rights regarding children’s participation in armed conflicts has been sustained by two main pillars, which articulate the ban on the involvement of children in armed conflict. First, there is the idea of “militarization,” which can be understood in a more restrictive sense, considering only children’s direct participation in hostilities, or, from a broader perspective, embracing not only combatant children in state and non-state forces, but also non-combatant children’s involvement in supporting roles, working as spies, cooks, porters, messengers, and so forth. Secondly, there is the age of the child, which serves as a parameter for defining whether they are capable of playing certain social roles. Specifically, on the age issue, it is important to explore how this is also related to contemporary debates on the possibility of children taking responsibility for their actions versus their presumed ignorance, either because they are too young to commit such violent acts or because they just do what they are told to by adults. In one sense, it takes us back to the ICC verdict about Dominic Ongwen that excludes the “boy that is too small to walk the rebel’s camp” in order to make its case against the “fiercest most senior fighter.”

In regard to the first pillar, the militarization of children, the UNCRC (specifically, Article 38), and the Optional Protocol reproduce the 1977 Additional Protocols present the exact same vocabulary by affirming that children should “not take direct part in hostilities”, which means active combat, but excludes other military activities, such as spying, supply transportation, and cooking. However, the Optional Protocol actually parallels Additional Protocol II insofar as its strongest restrictions are directed against non-state armed groups: “armed groups, distinct from the armed forces of a State, should not, under any circumstances, recruit or use in hostilities persons under the age of 18 years” (United Nations General Assembly, 2000, Art.4; emphasis added). In this sense, this particular agreement reproduces two conceptions of the child-soldier: children cannot participate directly in hostilities as combatants on the behalf of State parties, while irregular armed groups are prohibited to use children “in hostilities” (Tabak, 2020).

For its turn, the Rome Statute, which is considered one of the most significant recent legal developments in limiting the use of child-soldiers, adopts a broader idea of militarization by abandoning the use of the term “direct.” Specifically, Article 8 defines the use of children to “participate actively in hostilities” as a war crime. In the same vein, the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention includes, in its Article 3, among the worst forms of child labor the “forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict” regardless of the child’s role in an armed conflict. However, the ILO convention is not as far-reaching, as its focus is only on children’s forced involvement in hostilities.

A broader concept of child-soldiers in terms of “militarization” is finally articulated by the two international agreements regarding the interdiction of the involvement of children in armed conflict: the Cape Town Principles (1997) and the Paris Principles (2007). As the result from a symposium organized by UNICEF and the NGO Working Group on the UNCRC, the Cape Town Principles expanded the concept of “child-soldier” and adopted a more inclusive terminology of “children associated with armed forces or armed groups,” which refers to “any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity” (1997, p. 12; emphasis added). Then, a decade later, UNICEF organized a review of the Cape Town Principles, which resulted in the Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Force and Armed Groups, which serves as the basis for the programs developed by the UN. The Paris Principles formally abandoned the concept of child-soldier in favor of the concept of a “child associated with armed group or armed force” in order to include all children who were military recruited regardless of taking direct part in hostilities.

Regarding the second pillar—the issue of age—we might say that the definition of the child-soldier contradicts somewhat the internationally accepted definition of the child established under the terms of the UNCRC. Although the UNCRC defines the 18th year of life as the transition point to adulthood, its Article 38 repeats the language of Additional Protocol I, establishing the temporal threshold for military recruitment at the age of 15. As such, Article 38 is the only provision of the Convention that does not contain the general age limit of 18 years. The Optional Protocol is, then, adopted as a way of fixing what was considered a major flaw in the treaty for those advocating against the use and recruitment of child-soldiers. However, the Optional Protocol does not eliminate the contradiction surrounding the age of child-soldiers as it raises the age to 18 of possible recruitment by irregular armed forces at the same time that states, in Article 3, that children who are 15 or over may be voluntarily recruited into the armed forces of a nation-state, provided that “such recruitment is done with the informed consent of the person’s parents or legal guardians.” The so-called “straight-18 position” was strengthened by the adoption of the ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, which defines children as all persons under the age of 18 (Article 2). Also, according to the UNICEF principles, the age limit to participate in war must be 18. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that international humanitarian law is still guided by the Rome Statute, which defines, in Article 8, “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years” as a war crime.

Over the course of 40 years, the participation of children in armed conflicts has been transformed from a practice loosely regulated and focused on children’s role as combatants to one that is problematized and subject to greater control. While an international legal consensus about the age and military activities that define the child-soldier has yet to be reached, the way children’s participation in wars is internationally governed produces—and at the same time is legitimized by—certain narratives about a correct idea of childhood and how a normal process of child development must be lived outside war. As such, child rights governance has become an integral part in the governance and regulation not only of the child-soldier, but also of their families and societies around the world (Holzscheiter et al., 2019).

Within such a formulation, there is no room left for considering children’s own motivations, or their ability to understand their own circumstances and express their own views regarding their participation in hostilities or the local social constructions of the roles suitable to children according to their gender and age. After all, the view of the child-soldier as “out of place” is (re)produced through the same mechanisms that are meant to protect them. As such, the next section turns to the assumptions and categories that give social coherence to the representation of child-soldiers not only as a practice to be banned by the Law, but as an apparent pathology that needs to be kept under control. Through the analysis of three images or “frames” (Berents, 2020) that permeate and articulate the bounded category of the child-soldier as deviation—the victim, the monster, and the exceptional and resilient redeemed hero—I explore the multiple ways in which this normative discourse circulates.

The Governed Childhood and Its Many Exclusions: (Re)presenting the Pathological Child-Soldier

In her article “Human Rights, Child-Soldier Narratives, and the Problem of Form,” Maureen Moynagh (2011) argues that “There is, it seems, a place already prepared in the Western imagination for the African child soldier as a subject of violence in need of human rights intervention and rehabilitation—intervention that threatens to mimic colonial infantilizing of Africans as needing the ‘protection’ of European powers” (p. 41). The boundaries of this “place” mentioned by Moynagh (2011), I contend, are articulated by particular frameworks that represent child-soldiers as an international emergency, whose life experiences—narrated through static, but not fixed, images of victim, monster, and redeemed hero—challenge the limits of the childhood’s spaces per se, that is, home, school, and recreational centers (Rasmussen, 2004). These narratives, combined with the discourse of the Law, compose a general discourse, which is dominated by a problem-solving logic that defines children’s participation in armed conflicts as both wrong and abnormal and because of that in urgent need of a solution.

To critically analyze these three images, this section is based on Denov’s work (2010) in exploring the way the world’s media and policy discourse construct child-soldiers in largely contrastive ways. According to Denov, “While these children are frequently constructed through the logic of extremes (as either extreme victims, extreme perpetrators or extreme heroes), in reality, the lives, experiences and identities of these children fall within the messy, ambiguous and paradoxical zones of all three” (Denov, 2010, p. 2). Furthermore, instead of understanding these images through static categories, I follow Berents’ argument (2020) in working with these narratives as frames, which “allows the unpacking of the assumptions and stereotypes that inform images (…) Understanding these as frames allows a critical questioning of how we see what is framed as victimization or delinquency” (pp. 48–49; emphasis in the original). When it comes to images of children in context of wars, there is no doubt that it is the frame of the exploited victim that prevails. This representation revolves primarily around forced recruitment or abduction; children being forced to kill or slaughter, especially a family member; children witnessing extreme acts of violence, especially against other children; children being the object of humiliation, brutal beatings, rape, sexual slavery, slave labor, and hunger; and children unprepared for involvement in combat. Most of the reports by humanitarian organizations end up stating that all that these children want is to get back their “lost childhood,” of which peace and school are crucial ingredients (Martins, 2011). As such, the correspondence between childhood, vulnerability, and victimhood is clearly articulated. For example, a Human Rights Watch report (re)produces this frame through children’s testimonies:

Early on when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA explained to us that all five brothers couldn’t serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was nine years old. (2003, p. 2)

Paralleling these accounts, Roméo Dallaire, a distinguished human rights activist, depicts the child-soldier as an “end-to-end weapon system” and a “tool”; what is more, children are “vulnerable and easy to catch, just like minnows in a pond,” while the adults involved are described as “evil” (2010, p. 3, 12, 15, 150). Children are, thus, depicted as hapless victims who are essentially irrational and are thus unable to understand or identify the risks of entering combat. Terms like “used as/for,” “forced to,” “brainwashed,” and “manipulated” appear frequently in these narratives, articulating and authorizing this idea of the child whose agency is completely silenced. Considering Dominic Ongwen’s case and his verdict, it is worth noting the former UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy’s argument when the Optional Protocol was adopted: “even when children behave like ‘adults’ during war their emotional and psychological vulnerability and the forced nature of their acts should be taken into account” (2010, p. 545). As a child-soldier, Ongwen was an exploited victim, but as an adult-soldier, he was mature enough to voluntarily adopt certain types of corrupt and destructive behavior. Another element that plays a major role in the articulation of the child-soldier as a hapless victim is the use of drugs and how this relates to children’s irrationality. In a report on the armed conflict in Mali, the NGO Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict emphasized that armed groups gave illicit drugs to children, who, according to one witness, behaved in a “‘high’ manner, including shooting their guns up in the air ‘just for fun’” (2013, p. 19).

At the end of the day, as Lee-Koo (2013) summarizes, the frames of the child-soldier as a hapless victim revolve around three themes: protection/rescue, innocence, and degeneracy. As such, not only are child-soldiers constructed as passive objects within this international gaze, but their communities and nation-states are pathologized as dysfunctional and are politically delegitimized for their supposed inability to protect their most “precious resource.” Together, Lee-Koo argues, “these three themes provide a moral foundation for conflict and project a familiar yet powerful metaphor for the claim that international order is the product of strong states, which protect vulnerable populations from abusive and ultimately illegitimate states” (2013, p. 483).

In stark contrast to the discourse of child-soldiers as victims is framing them as dangerous and evil beings or simply as monsters, permanently lost in an endless cycle of unrelenting violence and irrationality (Denov, 2010). It is as if by failing to meet the criterion of “innocence,” these children are not only marginalized, but actually demonized (Tabak, 2020). Despite their small size and “childish” biological features, the still uncivilized child-soldiers are, according to the former French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, a “time bomb that threatens stability and growth in Africa and beyond” (BBC News, as cited in Denov, 2010, p. 7). A case in point is the framing of Omar Khadr by the international media, which tends to represent him either as an “innocent child” or as a “monster terrorist” (Foran, 2011). Khadr is a Canadian citizen who was held in Guantanamo Bay for eight years for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was fifteen years old. Khadr is the first child in US history to be tried for war crimes, including murder, conspiring with Al Qaeda, providing material support for terrorism, and spying on US military convoys in Afghanistan. Again, the same dilemma as the one in Ongwen’s case: “Who is the real Omar Khadr? Murdering jihadist, victim of circumstance or model-citizen-in-the-making?” (Friscolanti, 2010). Regardless of the ambiguities and complexities of childhood experiences, the Ongwens and Khadrs of the world and countless other “dangerous children”—or, monsters—are only seen for how they differ from the “correct child.” As children who have deviated from the “normal” course of development and have been transformed into fierce combatants, child-soldiers are a threat to social stability.

In one sense, these discourses that articulate the child-soldier either as a victim or as a feared perpetrator take us back to the image of the boy-soldier from Liberia (Doyle, 2004) introduced at the beginning of the chapter: the picture of the “vulnerable child” with no military uniform carrying a pink, fluffy, teddy-bear backpack merges with the picture of the dangerous being pointing a weapon toward the viewer. Together, such accounts stand on and lay claim to a binary relationship between adulthood and childhood, which operates as a symbol and pillar of the modern social order. Hence, when child-soldiers mess up the ordered universalized narrative about the protected territory of childhood and, in doing so, destabilize the boundaries that differentiate adults from children, the stability of a larger social order is threatened by the foreclosure on the child’s future. That is, rather than offering a promise of a peaceful future, children engaged in armed conflict have the potential to put national and international progress in jeopardy by failing to take the steps prescribed in the model of child development. In this sense, it is worth noting how the child-soldier is represented not only as being threatened by war and adult abuse, but also as constituting a threat to the stability of the social order. This particular understanding of the child-soldier is shaped in a very specific way, suggesting that they are an international emergency, an exception to normal social life that disrupts, disquiets, and disturbs the everyday. Within this representation, the need to control them and the desire to restore them to their converse—the “normal” child—becomes, then, a matter of urgency (Tabak, 2020).

Finally, the image of the “redeemed hero” is pinned on a group of children, once victims and/or monsters, who have had the chance to overcome extreme violence and great adversity, survive war, cast off the child-soldier, and reintegrate into civilian life. These children are framed as “exceptional,” who, as Berents has argued, exceed what is expected of them as children (2020): they survived the circumstances of war, were able to overcome their memories of fighting, and were thus able to “reset” their “natural” developmental course as children. An obvious example of this construction—from victimization to the recognition of their exceptionalism and resiliency—is the case of the former child-soldier Ishmael Beah from Sierra Leone: “while Beah’s book has not been viewed as a simple, heroic tale, Beah’s journey in and out of armed violence was documented by some journalists as a heroic transformation from violence to redemption”(Denov, 2010, p. 9).

Within this formulation, one attribute of the child stands out: children’s capacity to recover from adverse situations. For example, Coomaraswamy concludes her statement at the Paris International Conference “Free Children from War,” in 2007, by referencing to Beah’s resilience:

Terrible things have happened to children, but children are also resilient. They need encouragement, guidance and support; and with the proper care they can become outstanding members of society. Ishmael Beah, who is with us today, is a perfect example of this. This young man, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, adopted by an American mother, went to school and university in the United States, graduating with honors.

The implication, however, as Marshall Beier (2020) reminds us, is that those who fail to be resilient or when less successful in withstanding adverse circumstances are framed as “failed subjects.” For Dominic Ongwen, who failed to leave the LRA, the international response was to keep him under control behind solid boundaries of the ICC prison, excluded from “civilized” society.

While some of the former child-soldiers are called upon to be resilient, they are still framed as powerless to resolve the sources of insecurity they experience and because of this continue to be viewed as a target of intervention, but this time one that is envisioned by international actors as being in the “best interests of the child.” Put another way, with “proper care” and international guidance, former child-soldiers are able to recover from war and, like Beah, go to school and graduate with honors. As I have previously argued, while intervention in child-soldiers as victims or/and monsters is read as a form of “exploitation and abuse” by the adult recruiters, for the former child-soldier as the redeemed hero, (international) intervention operates as the only form of redemption and thus offers a rapid solution to the emergency (Tabak, 2020).

Following on these narratives, it is possible to see how this representation of the child-soldier as an emergency is constructed through a process of differentiation that is structured through a dichotomous logic. That is, the child-soldier is constructed through a logic of exception: whatever qualities apply to a “normal,” ordered childhood are absent in the lives of child-soldiers. However, in virtue of the “ambivalence” (Bauman, 1991) of the child-soldier as both the victim and the monster, this international problem cannot be depicted only as a human rights violation, in which there is a clear divide between victim and perpetrator, but, as an emergency that evokes fear, uncertainty, revulsion, horror, and sorrow. Then, against this undecidability, Bauman argues, “we experience ambivalence as discomfort and a threat. Ambivalence confounds calculation of events and confuses the relevance of memorized action patterns” (1991, p. 12). Thus, the typically modern effort of exterminating ambivalence—that is, to eliminate everything that could not be precisely defined (Bauman, 1991)—is put into action. By itself, the child-soldier phenomenon connects the urgency of the crisis triggered by the threat posed by the dangerous armed child with a heightened sense of moral obligation on the part of international organizations, governments, diplomatic corps, and (adult) citizens of the world to “save” the endangered child with arms caught up in these violent situations.

If, on one hand, the last two sections problematized the images of child-soldiers we are seeing, on the other hand, the next—and concluding—section invites us to briefly follow Berents’ proposal to consider the images of children we are not seeing: “when certain images of certain children gain preeminence there are other children whose experiences are marginalized or erased” (2020, p. 53). Between the child-soldier as a hapless victim, the child-soldier as a monster and a risk to the world, and the former child-soldier as a resilient redeemed hero, there are a great many children who participate in wars, whose different stories of oppression and resistance, of who they are and who they might become, do not necessarily fit into the trajectory of redemption envisioned by the international community on behalf of humanity. By insisting in the perpetual (re)negotiations of children’s pasts, presents, and futures, we might find spaces to critically reflect about children not only as the objects of exploitation and/or the objects of salvation, but also as political subjects.

Final Thoughts

The representation of the child-soldier as an international emergency cannot fully understand the complex experiences of “children with guns” who challenge the limits of the “normal” child and of the world that claims to save him/her. In order to consider the persistent everyday lives of those within conflict zones without reducing them to either “victim” or “monster,” I prefer to speak of child-soldiers as “children who soldier,” who are multiple, complex political subjects (Tabak, 2020). As sites of contestation and power, representations offer new avenues of articulating childhoods and children in different, but not essentialized, ways. In particular, this reconceptualization—or representation—of the child-soldier emphasizes “to soldier” as a verb and children as subjects in action. In doing so, I believe it opens room to explore the extent to which children are potentially competent and significant social actors and “active in the construction of their own lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live,”(James & Prout, 1991, p. 8) complicating both the normalized idea of both the child as the generalized form and its negative, voiceless counterpart, that is, the child associated with armed groups.

The idea of children as political subjects turns out to be very important for this analysis, since it enables us to challenge what Nick Lee (1999) calls the “vulnerability complex” in which children and, more specifically in this study, child-soldiers, are continuously placed. According to Lee, children’s innocence is equated with being inherently vulnerable, which authorizes and legitimates children’s political exclusion and adults’ right to talk on behalf of them. At the same time, children’s exclusion is linked to their lack of voice, taken here as a sign of their incompetence rooted in their biological and psychological immaturity rather than the outcome of any political process. Our aim is not to abandon the concept of vulnerability, but to question who is constructed as essentially vulnerable and what that is taken to mean—after all, “to greater or lesser extents, everyone, child and adult alike, is vulnerable” (Marshall Beier, 2020, p. 236). The alternative suggested here is to expand our political vocabulary to meet the challenge to think about ways of reconciling subjecthood and vulnerability and to reflect about—and with—children as significant social actors. In doing so, we could think of children who soldier as “subjects in (in)security” (Marshall Beier, 2020) whose vulnerability is not understood as its agency’s polar opposite but as constituting a force capable of making these children to resist and to do something about their worlds under varied circumstances of age, race, class, and gender understood as systems of powers that structure their social lives. After all, child-soldiers—as every human being—are many and one and a static representation cannot reflect all that a subject can be. As such, thinking of child-soldiers as “subjects in (in)security” invites us to consider the vulnerabilities, dangers, and risks that limit and structure their lives and autonomy without falling back on essentialized accounts of children and their childhood, for that which there is no surprise because we seem to already know who they are, how they must behave and who they must become.

Within the story of child-soldiers as “children without childhood,” very limited space is left for thinking about and exploring the nuances of children’s agency in conflict once that child becomes the perfect (passive) victim of that “loss,” and responsibility falls upon concerned adults to redeem them and restore the conditions of childhood (Berents, 2019). However, analyzing children’s varied experiences as soldiers—providing care for their family and community members, running households, providing income for their family, joining (and escaping) armed forces, resisting political oppression, mourning and grieving for loss, and building networks with other children across conflict fault-lines—can tell different stories of oppression, participation, and resistance, which offer a more robust and nuanced understanding not only of how children survive in conflicts, but also of their capacities and competencies to navigate insecure contexts and help rebuild their own societies (Lee-Koo, 2018).

Despite this, as it was argued throughout the chapter, child-soldiers’ agency is largely absent in their representation as an international emergency. The logic of opposite extremes—to be a child-soldier is to be innocent or to be feared—and the idea of the “normal” child combine and operate to (re)produce children as targets of intervention with no capacity for rational reasoning. Their undoubted need for protection and support dominates discussions of children’s rights, reproducing the central tension between children’s participation and child protection in the “discourse of the Law,” where children’s capacity to participate in identifying their own concerns and solutions is limited by the normalized and universalized ideas of the child’s innocence, vulnerability, and irrationality.

Finally, labeling child-soldiers as extremely vulnerable is central to this process as it becomes part of the governing of this group (Lind, 2019). Through the “discourse of the norm,” the ambivalent approach to the child-soldier, combining vulnerability and risk, obscures and homogenizes the complexity of the lived experience of children in war. In the two frames—the innocent victim and the dangerous monster—their representation as extremely vulnerable “becomings” authorizes the urgent need of their protection and control: they cannot become a threat to the world. For its turn, the frame of the resilient redeemed hero operates as the promise of a good future, or as the promise of unmaking the child-soldier. Their vulnerability connected to their resiliency articulates the narrative that emphasizes exceptional agency, which reinforces the implied incapacity of other children and strengthens certain expectations that this trajectory of redemption be followed in a specific way (Berents, 2019). Considering insecure contexts, Marshall Beier, then, argues: “In this way the resilience work of children, while highly politicized, is delegated to children who remain relatively powerless and constrained from meaningfully exercising autonomous political subjecthood” (2020, p. 228). At the end of the day, when seeing those images of Ongwen, Beah, Khadr, and the Liberian boy-soldier (whose name we don’t know), we still have very little information about them, but we know quite a lot: as child-soldiers, they are an international emergency that feeds the fear of a world at risk.