Child soldiers as contemporary slaves: A human rights approach

Abstract

Despite surging attention to child soldiers and modern slavery over the past decades, their links remain politicized and neglected. This study develops a human rights approach that deepens application of international slavery law; exposes child soldiering as a neglected slavery issue; and confronts underlying legal, political, and ethical challenges. It addresses challenges of using slavery law to identify contemporary cases, then analyzes global data on child soldiering specifically, revealing patterns and trends with robust equivalencies to slavery. Ethical challenges are addressed by confronting slavery myths that distort legal discussions and intersectional elements of child soldiering. These legal, empirical, and ethical arguments reveal international law on child soldiering as deeply insufficient and support a paradigmatic shift in thinking toward antislavery rights as appropriate legal, moral, and programmatic tools to end child soldiering. This, in turn, demonstrates how a rights-based approach helps fulfill the promise of anti-slavery law even in politicized cases.

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Lisa S. Alfredson

Lisa S. Alfredson is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Kabak Faculty Fellow in Human Rights at the Global Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching center on human rights, NGO advocacy, gender, human development, and human security. She is the author of Creating Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press), which explores advocacy and rights creation by women refugees seeking asylum from gender persecution, and she has published on a range of other topics, including gender violence, child sexual exploitation, child soldiers, modern slavery, coalition advocacy, and social movements. She has worked with international human rights NGOs around the world building research and advocacy networks.