Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

Child Soldiers: Legal Narratives
and Literary Implications

Estimates of child soldiers worldwide published in the 1996 U.N. study by Graça Machel on the Impact of Armed Conflict upon Children and in the subsequent Child Soldiers Global Reports by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, among those issued by other organizations, approximate 300,000 child soldiers participating in armed conflict at any given time. While child soldiers participate in roughly two-thirds of recent or on-going conflicts, they are often associated with unstable and lesser-developed areas of the world and are read as a sign of political failure.⁶ Despite widespread recognition that child soldiering is not new to the history of armed conflict, critics cite trends in contemporary warfare that arguably contribute to the contemporary child soldier crisis. Michael Wessells and Alcinda Honwana cite developments in the technology and distribution of light weaponry, a shift from conventional war between states to war within them, increasingly blurred lines between civilian and military combatants as well as the targeting of civilians in war, difficulty in distinguishing war from criminality, and links between “new” wars and broader social breakdown as the key components of this crisis.⁷ Mbembe emphasizes the economic and political realities at the core of many contemporary conflicts: “their central stake is the control of resources, whose modes of extraction and forms of commercialization feed, in turn, the murderous conflicts and practices of predation” (“On Politics” 322). In place of the anti-colonial rhetoric that galvanized earlier liberation movements, he notes the “preponderance of tropes and dichotomies that draw on ontology, degeneracy, and theologies of health,” concepts that reveal a certain kind of fear that presumably can be mobilized for either humanitarian or violent ends (322). Without mentioning the role of former colonial powers in drawing the boundaries around and manipulating the social hierarchies in many of the current conflict sites, Wessells's examples of the “oppression and injustice evident in many divided societies” remind us of that history (21). David M. Rosen insists on a more nuanced reading of the postcolonial condition and the roots of social