Young Soldiers

Reviewed by: Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight Inge Brinkman Brett, Rachel, and Irma Specht . 2004. Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight. Boulder: Lynne Riener. xvi + 192 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Over the past decades, the number of children actively involved in warfare has steadily risen. Hitherto, attempts to reverse this trend have focused on children presumed to have been forced to fight. The vast majority of child soldiers, however, consist of adolescents, quite a few of whom voluntarily joined the armed forces. Rachel Brett and Irma Specht explore the reasons that these young soldiers, who were neither forced nor abducted, give as to why they volunteered. Through in-depth interviews, the perspectives of the young fighters themselves are put at the heart of the study. At times, this approach leads to incongruities. In the first chapters the concept of "voluntariness" is taken for granted, and the authors follow the view of the young soldiers who identified themselves as having volunteered. Many quotes in the book, however, indicate that "voluntariness" is not such a clear-cut notion. Arthur from Sierra Leone, for example, took up arms only after he had seen a friend of his being killed for not joining (p. 73). Throughout the book there are quotes from youngsters who see no other option than the army, because of the violence, threats, poverty, hunger, and unemployment around them. "When it's the war, you don't choose," Christine from DRC explains (p. 13). In chapter six, the authors interpret this problem and come to the conclusion that "the distinction between voluntary and compulsory recruitment is not clear-cut" (p. 112). This conclusion is not brought to bear on the overall analysis, and the authors continue to employ a bipartite scheme of coercion versus consent. Brett and Specht seek to arrive at a regional balance: the interviews deal with conflicts in four African countries, namely Sierra Leone, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, and South Africa; two Asian countries (Afghanistan and Sri Lanka); and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) and Colombia. Additionally, there are quotes from youngsters from East Timor, the Philippines, and other countries. This scope renders possible an understanding of some broad factors leading adolescents to join armed forces. It becomes amply clear that the reasons for voluntary child soldiering cannot be reduced to any one factor. Concerns of war, poverty, education, employment, family, friends, politics, ideology, and the specific features [End Page 104] of adolescence all interact to form a unique set for each individual. The authors see these factors as operating at three levels: a general environmental level, a level that relates to an individual's personal history, and as a trigger: the critical moment that may or may not cause children to join the armed forces. In the narrative as it stands now, it does not become clear in what way the analysis benefits from a distinction among these levels: the occurrence of repetition and overlap in the book renders the model awkward, rather than enlightening. The same arguments are reiterated, some as much as four times. The repetition of quotes strengthens the impression of redundancy. As the authors hardly take into account the specifics of each situation, the reader is left with a feeling of generality. Due to the broad spectrum and the clear, concise style of writing, Young Soldiers forms a good introduction to the subject, but the analysis never moves beyond that. One would have wished the authors to have given a fuller interpretation of the particularities of the conflicts they describe. They acknowledge the importance of what they call "the broad context," but fail to historicize its factors. There is little reason to assume that the word poverty means the same in the United Kingdom and in Sierra Leone. If one wishes to compare factors leading young people to fight in Colombia and Sri Lanka, it is necessary to take into account the very different histories of violence in these two settings. It is often unclear what the youngsters volunteered to do. Only briefly is it mentioned that the source material from South Africa is based on the histories of six people who had joined the Umkhonto wa Sizwe or the

Criminology · Ethnology · Political science · Poverty · Sierra leone · Sociology · Voluntariness · History · Law · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Psychology

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