‘Understanding and Addressing the Phenomenon of Child Soldiers’ by Ah-Jung Lee, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers, is now available online.
In the past 10 years, the phenomenon of ‘child soldiers’ has attracted enormous media attention and has also become a policy priority in the humanitarian field. In the global policy discourse, a ‘child soldier’ is commonly defined as ‘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, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members’ (Cape Town Principles). The central thesis of the global discourse is that children have no place in war under any circumstance and that child soldiering is an unambiguous violation of universal children’s rights. With this belief, humanitarian organisations have lobbied for various international legal instruments that prohibit the military recruitment of under 18- year-olds and hold adults who recruit children criminally culpable for war crimes. At the same time, the images and tales of child soldiers have proliferated in such a way that ‘child soldiers’ has almost become a moral and emotional issue, with activists and organisations taking it on with almost missionary zeal.