The different stories we are told of the child-soldier invite us to a double movement: to interpret and explain according to particular ideas about childhood, war, and the soldier, and to respond through familiar repertoires of political action that vary between mechanisms of protection and control of the child soldier and celebration of the brave soldier to be. By exploring the representations of the “junior soldier” in the United Kingdom as a promising and heroic young citizen and of those often referred to disparagingly as child soldiers in Africa, articulated as a symbol of illegitimacy and an emergency in need of international salvation, the lecture focuses on how stories of the imagined childhood and war are mobilised, making these (contradictory) representations possible, in which children’s agency is overlooked: they are either the tools of state or the tools of war, depending on when and where war is discussed. These representations matter not only to how the stories of war and the child are told, but also how the uneven distribution of power and value that define the Global North-Global South Relations are organised and reproduced.
Jana Tabak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of the "The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress" (University of Georgia Press, 2020) and co-edited "Childhoods in Peace and Conflict" with J.Marshall Beier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She has taught in the areas of international organizations, peace and conflict studies, and children and war.