The child soldier is the most famous character of the end of the 20th century.
—AHMADOU KOUROUMA, Allah n’est pas obligé1
The recruitment and employment of child soldiers is one of the most flagrant violations of the norms of international human rights. Besides being contrary to the general practices of the last four millennia of warfare, there are a number of treaties that attempt to prohibit it today.
At the international level, these treaties have been codified into law. They include the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Additionally, the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the UN Commission on Human Rights, and the International Labor Organization are among the international bodies that have condemned the practice. There has also been a global grassroots efforts against it, embodied in the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, an umbrella group of nongovernmental organizations based in more than forty countries. At the regional level, the Organization of African Unity, the Economic Community of West African States, the Organization of American States, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Parliament have also denounced the use of child soldiers.
In May 2000 the UN General Assembly adopted a new “optional protocol” to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, further illustrating the growing global sentiment against the use of child soldiers. This measure specifically targeted the phenomenon by formally raising the minimum age of recruitment and use to eighteen (the old convention limit was fifteen, which most armed groups would still be in violation of anyway). It has since been signed by more than a hundred states.
Unfortunately, the growing and global practice of using child soldiers illustrates just how extensively this long list of conventions and laws is ignored. The recruitment and use of child soldiers is a deliberate and systematic choice currently being made the world over. Simply put, children fighting on the battlefield has become normal practice in current warfare. Thus, rather than compliance, these prohibitive norms have been turned inside out. That is, going by actual behavior, the new standard is child soldiering, not the banning of it.
The underlying causes behind these deliberate violations of international standards are complex. They involve three critical factors that form a causal chain: (1) social disruptions and failures of development caused by globalization, war, and disease have led not only to greater global conflict and instability, but also to generational disconnections that create a new pool of potential recruits; (2) technological improvements in small arms now permit these child recruits to be effective participants in warfare; and (3) there has been a rise in a new type of conflict that is far more brutal and criminalized. These forces have resulted in the viability of a new doctrine of how to operate and succeed in war, particularly in the context of weakening or failed states. Conflict group leaders now see the recruitment and use of children as a low-cost and efficient way for their organizations to mobilize and generate force.
The desperate position in which many children around the world find themselves is almost unimaginable. While positive in some terms, the developments of globalization that dominated the last quarter century have left many behind, as well as rending many traditional societies and mores. The developed world saw great prosperity from the opening of economies, but this certainly did not produce a homogeneous world economy or culture with affluence for all. Indeed, three billion people, roughly half the world’s population, currently subsist on $2 or less a day.2
The ensuing magnitude of global human insecurity is stunning in all its measures:
SECURITY: More than 1 billion live in countries in civil war or at high risk of falling into civil war.
INCOME: More than 1.3 billion in developing countries live in poverty, 600 million are considered extremely poor; in industrial countries 200 million live below the poverty line.
LITERACY: More than 900 million adults are illiterate.
HOMES: More than 1 billion rural people are landless or near landless; more than 400 million in developing countries live on degraded, ecologically fragile land. Another 1 billion live in urban slums.
WATER: More than 1.3 billion in developing countries lack access to safe water.
FOOD: More than 800 million in developing countries have inadequate food supplies; 500 million are chronically malnourished.3
Each of these measures of quality of life and hopes for the future is worsening.
The brunt of these socioeconomic problems has fallen on the youngest segments of the population, as we are now in the midst of the largest generation of youth in human history. Unprecedented numbers of children around the world are undereducated, malnourished, marginalized, and disaffected. Almost a quarter of all the world’s youth survive on less than a dollar a day. As many as 250 million children live on the street, 211 million children must work to feed themselves and their families, 115 million children have never been to school.4 A third of all children in Africa suffer from severe hunger. By 2010, this figure may rise to as many as half of all African children.5
These desperate and excluded children constitute a huge pool of labor for the illegal economy, organized crime, and armed conflicts. In describing the concurrent risks, Juan Somavi, secretary general of the World Social Summit, notes, “We’ve replaced the threat of the nuclear bomb with the threat of a social bomb.”6
As the world population continues to swell from the present six billion to nine billion by 2025, these pressures will worsen. With the depletion of nonrenewable energy stocks, high-quality agricultural land, water resources, and fisheries, resource scarcities are growing at the same time demand is rising by greater amounts. For example, estimates are that, by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population will face severe shortages of water.7 As these social, economic, environmental, and political problems come together, some analysts worry that the problems will feed off each other. They fret about a cascading breakdown of our increasingly complex ecological, political, and economic systems, and have even come up with a new term for it, “synchronous failure.”8
While this may be the ultimate nightmare scenario, it is clear that the disconnect between growing population needs and supplies sharply increases the general demands on state and society, while simultaneously decreasing their ability to meet them. Research indicates that the result is invariably socioeconomic fragmentation, a weakening of the state’s legitimacy, and ensuing violent conflict.9 Indeed, one survey found that countries with poor environmental scores are more than twice as likely to sink into civil war.10 Conflict groups are well aware of these gaps and sometimes seek to exploit them. They can widen the gap by intentionally undermining social stability or even seek to gain strength and support by serving as surrogates for the social services that healthy societies and capable governments would normally be able to deliver. For instance, in war-ravaged Lebanon, the Hezbollah group offers the entire realm of social services, from running hospitals to schools. It not only aids its popularity but also creates a reliance on the armed group.
Other catastrophes, such as famine and disease outbreaks, underscore this broad trend of disconnection and distress among growing numbers of youth around the world. Of particular worry is the enduring nature of the AIDS epidemic in the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Not coincidentally, this is where the centrum of the child soldier phenomenon lies.11 The disease, currently infecting 4.8 million people a year, is altering the very demographics of the region, with terrifying consequences for both stability and security.
AIDS does not strike with equal weight across age-groups. In a “unique phenomenon in biology,” the disease actually reverses death rates to strike hardest at mature, but not yet elderly adults.12 The consequence is that population curves shift (eliminating the typical middle-aged hump), almost in direct opposite to the manner of previous epidemics. Such a shift in demographics is fairly worrisome. Recent research has found a strong correlation between violent outbreaks, ranging from wars to terrorism, and the proportion of young males to the overall population.13 Once the ratio of young males grows too far out of balance, violent conflict tends to ensue. AIDS will likely cause this in several states already close to this dangerous threshold.
This process is known as “coalitional aggression.” Young men, who are considered psychologically more aggressive, naturally compete for social and material resources in all societies. When outnumbering other generations, however, there are inevitably more losers than winners among the youth in this process. Moreover, the typical stabilizing influences of elders are lessened by the overall mass of youth. These lost youths are more easily harnessed into more pernicious activities that can lead to conflict. For example, demagogues, warlords, criminals, and others all find it easier to recruit when a large population of angry, listless young men fills the street. Riots and other social crises are also more likely. In a sense, it is conflict caused from the bottom up, rather than the top down. While such a correlation is certainly a simplistic explanation of violence, the disturbing fact is that the pattern has held true across history. Outbreaks of violence from ancient Greek wars and the Hundred Years’ War to recent societal breakdowns in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and the Congo (DRC) were all presaged by similar demographic patterns.14 Indeed, during the 1990s, countries with these population patterns (40 percent are of adolescent age or below) were 2.3 times more likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict than those with lower proportions.15
There is also a more direct way in which the new demographics of AIDS can heighten security risks. The disease is gradually creating a new pool of orphans, a group especially susceptible to being pulled into child soldiering. By 2010, more than 43 million children will have lost one or both of their parents to AIDS, including 33 percent of all children in the hardest-hit countries (the normal percentage of children who are orphans in developing countries is 2 percent). Among them are 2.7 million in Nigeria, 2.5 million in Ethiopia, and 1.8 million in South Africa.16 India alone already has 120,000 AIDS orphans. That only six of the forty countries hardest hit by AIDS have any plans to assist orphans makes the situation only worse.17
This cohort represents a new “lost orphan generation.”18 Both the stigma of the disease and the sheer number of victims will overwhelm the communities and extended families that would normally look after these orphans. Their prospects are heartrending, and dangerous. Besides being malnourished, stigmatized, and vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse, this mass of disconnected and disaffected children is particularly at risk of being exploited as child soldiers. Having watched their parents die and been forced to fend for themselves, many will consider they have nothing to lose by entering into war.
At the same time, the factors that disconnect the children from the structure of society also debilitate the very institutions needed to solidify the state and prevent conflict. For example, estimates of HIV infection rates among regional armies in Africa include 50 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Angola, 66 percent in Uganda, 75 percent in Malawi, and 80 percent in Zimbabwe.19 This devastates their ability to maintain the peace or resist new rebel and warlord groups. Similar hollowing-out is occurring in many other government agencies and parts of the economy in AIDS-hit regions.
Added to these socioeconomic trends is the continuing prevalence of global conflict; the result is an often dangerous mix. While many hoped for a “new world order” after the end of the Cold War in 1989, the real order that came about was embodied in the quip of “peace in the West, war for the rest.”20 A particular outgrowth was the dramatic increase in the number of internal conflicts. The incidence of civil wars has doubled since the Cold War’s end, and by the mid-1990s was five times as high as at its midpoint. The broader number of conflict zones—that is, places in the world at war—has roughly doubled since the Cold War, with the present number holding firm over fifty.21
About half the ongoing wars in the world are entering their second generation of prospective fighters. In such extended conflicts, children have grown up surrounded by violence, and often see it as a permanent way of life. These children are also valued as a potential source of new recruits. For example, the head of a Karen rebel training camp in Myanmar describes how he brought his own twelve-year-old son into the fight. “I took him out of school in the third grade to turn him into a military man. I thought that if he studies now, he’ll just have to fight later. Better to fight now, and learn later when there is time for it.”22
In addition to witnessing fighting and bloodshed, children who grow up in the midst of war usually lack basic necessities (schools, health care, adequate shelter, water and food), face disrupted family relationships, and even experience increased patterns of family violence.23 The totality of this environment makes it difficult for communities to foster healthy cognitive and social development. A weakened social structure is then generally unable to steer their children away from war.
Children are also typically forced from homes and stable environments during fighting. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are some twenty-five million uprooted children in the world, having become either cross-border refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). Each day, five thousand more children become refugees.24 Children tend to remain in this situation an average of six or seven years, making them highly vulnerable to recruitment.25
The situation in Angola encapsulates the hopelessness that many children face. Over the course of its twenty-five-year war, some 300,000 children served in either the government army or with UNITA rebel forces. About one million children lost one parent and 300,000 lost both parents to the war. Seventy percent of Angolan children of school age are illiterate, and UNICEF judges the broader population to be at great risk of death, malnutrition, abuse, and development. That 45 percent of the population is less than fifteen years old only raises further worries for the long term.26
The perils of growing up during war are in no way unique to Angola. For example, surveys in Sri Lanka reveal similar dynamics. In the provinces where conflict has taken place, 40 percent of children between the ages of nine and eleven reported that either their houses had been attacked or shelled or that they had personally been shot at, beaten, or arrested. Fifty percent reported that a family member had been killed, abducted, or detained. The effects on children can be traumatic. Of this survey group of children, 20 percent exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.27
It is estimated that one out of every two hundred of the world’s children suffers from a war-related psychological malady.28 The impact of this is only starting to be understood. War is thought to have an all-encompassing impact on child development. It envelops children’s attitudes, relationships, moral values, and the framework through which they understand society and life itself.29 Having been exposed to horrible violence during key developmental stages of their life, many children come to accept it as a perfectly normal part of their existence. As one child in northern Uganda describes, “If you are under 20 and living here, you have known virtually nothing else your whole life but what it is like to live in a community enduring armed conflict—conflict in which you are a prime target.”30
All this gives a new meaning to the moniker “the lost generation.” The overwhelming majority of child soldiers are drawn from the poorest, least educated, and most marginalized sections of society, who have been forced to grow up in what one writer aptly termed a “roving orphanage of blood and flame.”31
I don’t know where my father and mother are. I had nothing to eat. I joined the gunmen to get food … I was with the other fighters for eight months. There was nothing good about that life.
—M., age twelve32
Children who are forcibly recruited are usually from special risk groups: street children, the rural poor, refugees, and others displaced (those most vulnerable to efficient recruiting sweeps). Those who choose to enlist on their own are often from the very same groups, driven to do so by poverty, propaganda, and alienation. The combination of unimaginable misery many children face and the normalization of violence in their lives can lead them to search for a sense of control over their chaotic and unpredictable situations. Research on child development indicates that they will then be more likely to seek out and join armed groups that provide protection or adhere to ideologies that provide this sense of order, regardless of the content.33 Those who find themselves to be victims often construct their identity along such lines. Such “victim motivation” can also become a motivation to commit acts of violence of their own, in a bid for pre-emptive protection or revenge.34 The tragic result is that these coping strategies further place children in danger and feed cycles of violence.
Concurrent with this global trend of socioeconomic disconnection has been the proliferation and technological advancement of personal weaponry. This development is a key enabler, without which the earlier trend would not matter. Technological changes are what allow this broadened pool of potential recruits to be turned into able soldiers.
When thinking about military operations, we typically focus on the most complex and expensive weapons systems, such as missiles, tanks, and aircraft carriers. For most conflicts around the globe, however, this picture is inaccurate. Instead, the weapons that shape contemporary warfare are the ones that are the simplest and least costly.
These “small arms,” or “light weapons,” include rifles, grenades, light machine guns, light mortars, land mines, and other weapons that are “man-portable” (a term often used by the military). Even though they represent less than 2 percent of the entire global arms trade in terms of cost, small arms are perhaps the most deadly of all weapons to society.35 They are the weapons most often used both in battle and in attacks on civilians and have produced almost 90 percent of all casualties in recent wars.36 In just West Africa alone, more than two million people were killed by small arms in the last decade.37 Indeed, modern small arms can rend the fabric of civil society like no other weapon; with them, a small, relatively weak group can easily turn a peaceful country into a man-made humanitarian disaster.
Technological and efficiency advances in these weapons now permit the transformation of children into fighters just as lethal as any adult. For most of human history, weapons relied on the brute strength of the operator. They also typically required years of training to master. This was obviously prohibitive to the effective use of children as soldiers. A child who was not physically matured could not bear the physical burdens of serving in the phalanx of the ancient Greek hoplites or carrying the weight of medieval knight’s armor, let alone serve as an effective combatant. Even until just a few generations ago, personal battlefield weapons such as the bolt action rifles of World War II were heavy and bulky, limiting children’s participation.38
However, there have been many recent improvements in manufacturing, such as the incorporation of plastics. This now means that modern weapons, particularly automatic rifles, are so light that small children can use them as easily and effectively as adults. They are no longer just “man-portable” but are “child-portable” as well. Just as important, most of these weapons have been simplified in their use, to the extent that they can be stripped, reassembled, and fired by a child below the age of ten. The ubiquitous Russian-designed Kalashnikov AK-47, which weighs 10½ pounds, is a prime example. Having only nine moving parts, it is brutally simple. Interviews reveal that it generally takes children around thirty minutes to learn how to use one. The weapon is also designed to be exceptionally hardy. It requires little maintenance and can even be buried in dirt for storage (something guerrilla groups often do, as a sort of insurance policy, in case a ceasefire breaks down).
Along with these improvements in simplicity and ruggedness, vast strides have been made in the lethality of personal weapons. The weapons that children can now fire with ease are a far cry from the spears of the phalanx or the single bolt rifle of the GIs. Since World War II there has been a steady and multiplicative increase in the destructive power of small arms. With just one pull of the trigger, a modern assault rifle in the hands of a child can release a burst of thirty bullets that are lethal more than four hundred yards away. Or they can shoot off a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) whose explosions can tear down buildings or maim tens at a time.
Thus, a handful of children now can have the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleonic infantry. When targeting unarmed civilians, the results are doubly devastating. Hence, with only a few hours’ training, a youngster can be taught all he or she needs to know in order to kill or wound hundreds of people in a matter of minutes.
When we arrived at their base, the rebels trained me on how to use a gun. They showed me how to dismantle a weapon and put it back together again. They showed me how to fire the gun and how to clean it. They taught me how to make sure I didn’t get injured when it recoils.
—P., age twelve39
Not only have these weapons become easier to use and far more deadly, but they have also proliferated, to the extent that there is almost a glut on the market. There are an estimated five hundred million small arms on the global scene, one for every twelve persons on the planet.40 The consequence is that the primary weapons of war have also steeply fallen in price over the last few decades. This has made it easier for any willing organization to obtain them and then turn children into soldiers at a minimal cost.
The irony is that this proliferation of small arms partially resulted from the Cold War’s “peace dividend.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, millions of weapons were declared surplus. Instead of being destroyed, however, it was cheaper to dump them on the world market. For example, when the two Germanys combined in 1990, the vast majority of the weapons stock of the East German army was auctioned off, much of it to private bidders. The result was literally tons of light weapons available at cut-rate prices. Light machine guns went for just $60, land mines for $19, and pistols for $8.41 These stocks were added to the masses of weapons that had already been given to superpower proxies during the Cold War. Moreover, many ended up in the hands of arms brokers and gunrunners who had no compunctions about their final destination or use. The result is that as much as 40 to 60 percent of the small arms around the world are now in the hands of illicit organizations.42
Even with this dump of weaponry, however, manufacturing has continued apace for the last few decades, as weapons industries, particularly in the former Soviet bloc, have tried to stay afloat. The result is that there is no place around the globe where small arms are not startlingly cheap and easily accessible. More importantly, they tend to be concentrated in the most violence-prone areas. This phenomenon was so particularly evident with the Soviet AK-47–type assault rifle and its knockoffs that one analyst even coined the phrase “Kalashnikov Age” to describe how the 1990s saw its spread around the world and influence on global conflict levels.43 For example, in just postwar Mozambique, there were around six million AK-47s for a population of roughly sixteen million.44 For a period, they were even used as a form of currency.45 In Uganda and Sudan, an AK-47 can be purchased for the cost of a chicken; in northern Kenya, it can be bought for the price of a goat (the equivalent is about $5).46 In South Africa, AK-47s are just slightly more expensive, valued on the market at $12 each.
The outcome of this proliferation is that not only can any group readily obtain the arms necessary for war, but also that the general presence of combat weapons is now a pervasive part of daily life in many parts of the world. The effect is a militarization of many societies, which further places children at risk of being pulled into the realm of war. As one Afghan warlord lamented, “We have young boys that are more familiar with a gun than with school.”47
While the weapons themselves are not the direct cause of conflict, their proliferation and cheapening is an enabler. It allows any local conflict to become a bloody slaughter. Moreover, an abundance of arms within society takes away certain barriers to civil war. The range of politically relevant actors literally multiplies and any sort of dissent within society can now easily become violent.
This dynamic also reworks the leadership structures within many societies—to dangerous ends. Power and control over the tools of war once tended to accrue with age. In many cases where weaponry has become pervasive, though, it has begun to devolve to what are called “youth elders.” These are often impetuous, armed children, no longer constrained by the age groupings that limited who could participate in warfare and who gained the rewards that went with it. Instead, these youths now dictate the rules to the former heads of their tribes by the sheer dint of their new weaponry. This new authority has come without responsibility, and violence levels have risen. As one Kenyan analyst describes the alteration of tribal warfare in Africa, “Somehow, the seat of authority has moved from the elders to the youth, and that has some very, very bad consequences for managing conflict.”48
Finally, this trend is representative of the general weakening of the state.49 States’ control over the primary means of warfare was once key in their formation.50 With the proliferation of small arms and their centrality in much of warfare, this is lost. Small groups can not only mobilize disaffected children, but also turn them into a force that can quickly overwhelm the capacity of many states in the developing world. Thus the easy availability of inexpensive small arms has the potential to rework the local balance of power and further the risks of failed states. Even after the fighting has ended, the very presence of these weapons also makes it harder for war-torn societies to recover and war easier to reinitiate.51
The context in which these developments have occurred matters as well. The decision whether to implement a doctrine that uses children now takes place within a period of historic transformation in warfare. In many of the ongoing wars around the globe, the traditional political and strategic rationales behind the initiation, maintenance, and continuation of war are under siege (what earlier was termed a breakdown in the “Warrior’s Honor”).52 While the large-scale military operations carried out by the Western powers have become more technological, this is not the only face of warfare. At the same time, in the majority of conflicts carried out in the developing world, warfare has become messier and criminalized. In many cases, the private profit motive has become a central motivator, equal or greater to that of political, ideological, or religious inspirations.53 Or, as one military analyst puts it, “With enough money anyone can equip a powerful military force. With a willingness to use crime, nearly anyone can generate enough money.”54
Today, the fighting in a number of conflicts around the globe lacks any sort of link to a broader political or religious cause. Instead, they are driven by a simple logic of appropriation, from seizing mineral assets and protecting the drug trade to simple looting and pillaging. As World Bank expert Paul Collier writes, “The key characteristics of a country at high risk of internal fighting are neither political nor social, but economic.”55
While many of these wars are fueled by new conflict entrepreneurs and local warlords that emerged in the 1990s in their individual countries, the broader end of the Cold War also played a part in this shift. When outside superpower patronage ceased, the calculus of many ideological guerrilla groups, including those once motivated by Marxist doctrine, took a more market-oriented direction. Rather than stop fighting, the withdrawal of outside support just made them realize that their war economies had to change. The new rule of insurgency is that if conflict groups want to survive, they have to find their own financial resources.56
In many cases, there is a direct link between the fighting and ready commodities that groups can sell directly. These provide willing conflict entrepreneurs with the incentive to quickly seize what they can.57 In Sierra Leone, the key matter in the ten-year war was not over who was in place in the capital, but who had control over the country’s diamond fields. Similarly, in the war in the DRC, foes and allies alike have battled over coltan mines. Coltan, a little known mineral that is drawn from mud, is a key ingredient for the circuit boards used in almost all cell phones, laptops, and pagers. In short, as one local observer noted, “People are fighting for money. Everything that happens, it’s about money.”58 This stands in sharp contrast to the traditional understanding of war. The classic military philosopher Clausewitz, writing in the early 1800s, thought “Politics is the womb in which war develops.”59 Today, for much of contemporary warfare, economics plays at least as much a part in nurturing and shaping conflict.
Therefore, whether the groups evolved from Cold War organizations or were new entrants into conflict, income generation (pure plunder, the production of primary commodities, illegal trading, etc.) is an essential activity in many wars. And a particularly lucrative area has been the international drug trade. For example, 70 percent of opposition groups’ funds in Tajikistan are from drug income. The estimates are even higher in Colombia, where 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the United States originates. The rebels and their paramilitary opponents are thought to pull as much as 80 percent of their funding from the cocaine trade. Of this estimated $800 million a year, only 10 percent goes to the war effort, while the other 90 percent enriches the individual commanders.60 Other activities are utilized as well. In the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf funds itself through kidnapping, while the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka run a worldwide shipping conglomerate. In Uzbekistan, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, militant groups profit by running protection rackets for opium traffickers.61
Many of these bands continue violent activities long after the original rationale for their formation has lost meaning.62 While they may have started out with some ideological or popular goals, often related to the Cold War, that has fallen by the wayside as they struggle to survive. Far from being irrational or a breakdown in a system, war then becomes an end, not a means. As such, warmaking serves as an “alternative system of profit and power.”63 In such cases as Angola, Sierra Leone, and the DRC, winning the war by defeating the enemy became a secondary goal; instead, the groups ended up competing to profit from the general chaos brought about by the war. The combination of these criminal goals and increasingly less professional, “soldier-less” forces also leads to a variation in strategies toward civilians. Traditional insurgency strategy is to “swim among the people as a fish swims in the sea” (as elucidated by Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader and master of guerrilla warfare). These new or reconstructed groups aim at terrorizing and pillaging the population rather than winning hearts and minds.
In short, while economics has always played a role in conflict, the last two decades have seen a new type of warfare develop, one centered around profit-seeking enterprises. Conflicts around the globe are increasingly characterized not as temporary outbreaks of instability but rather as protracted states of disorder. Within these wars, resource and population exploitation, rather than mass production, drive the new “economy of war.”64 It may be organized mass violence, but it also involves the blurring of distinctions between traditional conceptions of war, organized crime, and large-scale violations of human rights.65
These trends of socioeconomic dislocation of children, technologic simplification of weaponry, and the broader changes in the nature of much of contemporary warfare were necessary factors to the emergence of child soldiers as a global phenomenon. They not only created the mass availability of child recruits, but also the new possibility that they could indeed serve as effective combatants. They also underscored their utility in the changing context of warfare. In conflict after conflict, this has led to the implementation of a new doctrine of war, one that prescribes the recruitment of children and their use on the battlefield. The key is that this is not something that just happened, but has repeatedly involved deliberate choices among the leaders of local armed organizations. Children would not be used as combatants if the organizations they fight within did not see them as useful.
The strategy of using children as an alternative source of fighters has proven appealing to many groups, not only because it is cheap and easy to implement, but also because the costs are outweighed by the benefits so far. It provides an easy means for organizations, even the most weak and unpopular, to generate significant amounts of force with almost no investment. On the other side of the equation, the costs of using children in this manner are considered quite low. Moral opprobrium is the only major risk to a group that uses child soldiers. However, any group that contemplates using children as fighters has already shown itself unwilling to be limited by prevailing moral codes. The lesson from this is that prohibitive norms are quite weak whenever they are not underscored by substantive penalties for violating them.
It is within this changing context of warfare that the perception of children and their role in warfare also has begun to change. With their ready availability and easy transformation into combatants, children now represent a low-cost way to mobilize and generate force when the combatants do not generally care about public opinion. This creates the doctrine of child soldiers, a new way of enacting violence that prescribes the methods and circumstances of children’s employment in battle.
This new doctrine is particularly well suited for weak or failed states, which have become ever more prevalent because of the trends described earlier. During the Cold War, state failure was not as much of a problem, as the two superpowers competed to prop up their weaker allies and undermine their opponents. However, this created the precursors to today’s problems. Fragile post-colonial structures never solidified, and by the end of the period many Third World countries were states in name only. They lacked any semblance of good governance and were instead shells of what a functioning government should be. In general, they were underdeveloped, financially fragile, patriarchially structured, and without proper systems of accountability and civil-military controls.66 Despite outside aid, most developing militaries remained notoriously weak and brittle, incapable of carrying out any sustained military operations. Their forces were also comparatively small in relation to their overall populations.67
Thus, by the end of the Cold War, maintaining internal order became a near-impossible task for many of these weak states. It is no coincidence that many of the client states, which had received massive amounts of small arms, were the very states that then failed when their patron’s support evaporated.68 As these countries degenerated into violence, often ethnic scars reopened, and state assets went up for grabs. An opening was created for new conflict actors who could hijack the chaos.
Many of the warlords and “conflict entrepreneurs” that emerged had no great political or military background, but were distinguished only by their willingness to break old norms and mobilize force to their own ends. Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone was a former cameraman; Charles Taylor in Liberia was an escaped convict; Joseph Kony in Uganda was just an unemployed young relative of a tribal shaman; and Laurent Kabila in the DRC was a little-known guerrilla leader who had been irrelevant outside his province for the previous thirty years. However, these men, and many like them, realized that arming children could serve as a means to gaining military capacity. Their comprehension of this not only sucked children into war, but also led to the spate of civil wars and state failures that shaped much of global politics after the Cold War.
Highly personalized or purely predatory armed groups, such as warlords, which are focused on asset seizure, are particularly dependent on this new doctrine of using children. Small fringe groups that would have found it impossible to mobilize—and thus been marginalized in the past—now can vastly expand their power by using children. In short, they can make children into soldiers and thus transform an insignificant force into an army. As an illustration, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda has a central cabal that numbers as few as two hundred men and enjoys no popular support among the civilian populace. But through the abduction and transformation of fourteen thousand children into soldiers, the LRA has been able to engage the Ugandan army in a bloody civil war for the last ten years.69
Regardless of the ideology behind a conflict, in wartime situations there is always some motivation to assemble added military force. It may be for political or strategic reasons or simply because of the high attrition rates among soldiers fighting in tough situations, such as in disease-ridden jungles. Children now provide a new alternative to adult recruiting pools. State regimes that are fighting unpopular wars, such as in El Salvador or Guatemala, or rebel or ethnic groups that are highly outnumbered or do not enjoy broad support, such as in Myanmar or Nepal, both find this new pool particularly useful. They often first seek to tap it when the adult pool runs dry. In Sudan, for example, it was after a recruiting drive for adult males fell flat on its face that the Khartoum regime began targeting children. For two years (1993–95) it tried to conscript all young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three. However, because of the unpopularity of the war the regime was fighting with the south, only 26,079 of the nearly 2.5 million men in that age bracket turned up for training. As a result, the government began to recruit street children to fill out its forces.70 Likewise, the LTTE in Sri Lanka began using children in the nine-to-twelve age range after it faced a manpower shortage in battles against the Indian peacekeeping force in the late 1980s and could not pull in enough adults because it had lost local support.71
An added incentive is that children are recruits who come on the cheap. While adults usually desire to be paid for their roles, even if they believe in the cause, children rarely are. One survey of child soldiers in Burundi found that only 6 percent had ever received any sort of remuneration. In the eastern Congo (DRC), only 10 percent had ever been paid.72 This can make children very attractive recruits, inducing a turn to child soldiering not just in emergencies but as an alternative, low-cost supply of recruits. For example, in the 1990s, the Colombian FARC group faced the rise of competitive paramilitary groups which paid its recruits $350 a month. Thus, the FARC (which paid no salary) had to find a means to keep pace in the recruiting wars. Its solution was to increase the role of children, and their numbers in the group doubled.73
The overall significance of all this is that children no longer enjoy any of the traditional protections stemming from their underage status. Instead, children are increasingly recruited because of the very fact that they are young. Groups that use child soldiers view minors simply as malleable and expendable assets, whose loss is bearable to the overall cause and quite easily replaced. Or, as one analyst notes, “They are cheaper than adults, and they can be drugged or conditioned more easily into violence and committing atrocities.”74
Thus, the synergy of these three broad, and often interrelated, dynamics led to both the emergence and rapid growth of the child soldier phenomenon. Socioeconomic changes, technological developments, and base avarice within the changing contexts of war have created the circumstances, the opportunity, and the motivation for children to be turned into soldiers. Where once children and battlefield weapons were incompatible, now they combine to create a completely new pool of military labor. Stemming from the combined trends of socioeconomic disconnection and technological efficiency gains in small arms, children now represent an easy and low-cost way to mobilize armed force. The only remaining ingredients required are groups or leaders without scruples. They must be willing only to connect these trends and pull children into war. As the payoffs can be huge, many take this moral plunge. The result is what one analyst describes as a “systematic preference for children as soldiers” among warlords and other new military leaders of contemporary conflict.75
The classic example of the rationale behind using children as an alternate military labor source is that of Liberia. On Christmas Eve 1989, Charles Taylor, a fugitive from the Plymouth prison in Massachusetts, marched across the border with a self-styled “army” of 150 amateur soldiers with only small arms. His “invasion” to topple the Liberian government was barely noticed. Soon, though, he built his force into the thousands by the recruitment and use of child soldiers, most aged in the low teens. While Taylor once claimed that he enlisted children only to keep them “out of trouble,” he was hardly so benevolent.76 His growing forces terrorized the rural regions, exacted tribute, and seized any valuable assets they could lay their hands on. The invasion soon led to the collapse of the Liberian state, which had already been abandoned by its superpower patron. The civil war that ensued killed more than 200,000 people and left another 1.25 million as refugees. Within five years, Taylor was the richest warlord in the country, with “Taylorland” pulling in $300 million to $400 million a year in personal income through illegal trading and looting. A decade later Taylor was Liberia’s president, demonstrating the potential payoffs of this new strategy of mobilizing force. Through child soldiers, he was able to use a small gang to gain a kingdom.