“Children Without Childhood”: Representations of the Child-Soldier as an International Emergency

Abstract

AbstractConsidering the prevailing discourse about the child-soldier, whose most iconic figure is a poor, vulnerable, prepubescent, male African who carries a gun bigger than he is, this chapter investigates how child-soldiers are invariably framed as an essentially deviant and pathological child—and as such a threat to world security—in need of solution. Regardless of many historical examples of children’s participation in war, the child-soldier is assumed to be a new international emergency, an exception to the norm of the child, owing primarily to the outbreak of “new wars” in the post–Cold War era. The focus of this chapter turns to two main discourses that articulate and authorize the limits that (re)produce the child-soldier as an international problem, setting boundaries within which only certain subjects, narratives and responses are admitted: (1) the discourse of the law, that is, international legal standards 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 redeemed hero, as identified by Myriam Denov (Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 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 their childhood has been lost together with any semblance of the “civilized world.” At the end of the day, the logic of opposite extremes—to be a child-soldier is to be an innocent victim or to be a feared monster—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.