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Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and TerrorismPublisher:New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Copyright:2005
Pages:xi + 199
Review:
'In the mid-1990s anthropology and sociology of childhood, scholars raised the question, what impact have universalizing human-rights discourses with their liberal notions of “the child” and childhood had in shaping culturally relative beliefs and practices? In his 2005 monograph Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, David M. Rosen tackles a version of this question. He devotes the entire book to an examination of three cross-cultural cases of wars waged with the assistance of very young warriors to critically examine three assumptions underscoring humanitarian organizations’ stance that “war is evil and should be ended; children are innocent and should be protected” (p. 1).
In the introduction, Rosen summarizes the three “conceptual pillars” of humanitarian narratives: (1) there is a qualitative difference between “traditional” forms of warfare (wars with rules) and postcolonial wars that are seen as irrational, chaotic, and morally degraded; (2) the widespread availability of small arms has increased children’s direct participation in combat; and (3) all child soldiers are ultimately the victims of manipulative adults who either pressured or forcibly conscripted them into service.
In the book’s core, Rosen provides powerful challenges to each of these assumptions. He draws on history, ethnography, and memoir to delve into the experiences of Jewish child soldiers in World War II (Zionist and Socialist youth’s participation in partisan warfare in the Jewish ghettos and forests of eastern Europe), child soldiers in Sierra Leone in the 1990s (members of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and ethnic militias), and Palestinian child soldiers of the al-Aqsa Intifada.
I especially appreciated how, in each of these cases, Rosen goes to great lengths to paint a broad historical portrait of the kinds of youth participation that existed at a societal level prior to the children’s incorporation into organized acts of violence (either war or terrorism). He attends to the social institutions, economic conditions, and forms of social dislocation that contributed to children and youth becoming active combatants, often of their own choosing. In the case of Sierra Leone, Rosen argues that the atrocities and violence perpetrated against and by youth during peacetime (colonial and postcolonial eras) are what fostered the radicalization of youth and the subsequent civil war in 1991. He chronicles Sierra Leone’s historic role within the Atlantic slave trade and in diamond mining and how this involvement helped foster a political culture of corruption and violence in which different parties increasingly incorporated disenfranchised young initiates from male secret associations (poros) into symbolic and real acts of violence for personal gain. Although it is clear that the RUF forcibly conscripted young recruits, youth’s narratives regarding why taking up weapons made them feel safer than remaining civilian resonates with those of child soldiers from Guatemala’s civil war. The final chapter, “The Politics of Age,” situates the Sierra Leone and Palestinian case studies within current humanitarian debates concerning who should be deemed a child soldier and how child soldiers should be treated in international law, especially when many have been involved in acts of terrorism. Here Rosen is especially critical of the total eclipse of critical discussion in some UN forums regarding Palestinian militant groups’ willful incorporation of children and youth. One weakness is that Rosen is not able to achieve a balanced emic representation for all case studies. This is in part because he is only able to make powerful use of memoir to represent the voices of Jewish partisans, as parallel representations are not available for the other two cases. Rosen does use media and ethnographic interview selections when available, but these are really very different kinds of narrating events than written memoirs. This results in the youth having very different degrees of control over framing how their words will be heard by the reading audience. I also feel ambivalent about the moral ordering and naming of the chapters: “Fighting for Their Lives,” “Fighting for Diamonds,” and “Fighting for the Apocalypse.” I think that, although they provide powerful thumbnail sketches of Rosen’s analyses of his case studies, they neaten too much the ambiguity and gray areas that he worked so hard to achieve in each chapter’s account. Overall, I found Rosen’s treatment of the topic to be provocative. It will be useful for classroom debate and discussion concerning the tensions inherent in universal rights claims and culturally relative positions within societal contexts of extreme social inequality, exploitation and violence. Whether one entirely agrees with him or not, Rosen provides a strong example of an ethical and engaged treatment of the topic. [notes, selected bibliography, index.]
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