Not the Usual Suspects: Making Child Soldiers in the Gunsight

ABSTRACT

Questions prompted by a 2010 U.S. drone strike in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan bring to light an underappreciated dimension of the making of child soldiers. Turning on a readiness to presume some children as threatening when they are held in the gaze of the drone’s-eye view and the crosshairs of the gunsight, childhood as a proxy of non-combatant status is at times dismissed or even repudiated, thereby inscribing particular children as combatants, qua soldiers. The Uruzgan strike and the tactical decision-making that unfolded in the lead-up to it recommend thinking beyond the ‘usual suspects’ in the making of child soldiers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Document: Transcripts of U.S. drone attack’. https://documents.latimes.com/transcript-of-drone-attack/. Appended to Cloud (2011).

2. Arriving at a more precise average age is confounded by a number of factors, including differences across geographical contexts, demographic changes among child soldiers trending younger in some regions, uncertainty as to the number of children under arms in particular areas, and a lack of consensus on who may or may not be counted as a child soldier (with those recruited in Minority World settings routinely omitted). A commonly cited average recruitment age is in the range of twelve to fourteen years (see Rosen 2007, Singer 2010, Martuscelli and Bandarra 2020), though this would be pulled further towards the upper threshold of juridical childhood (that is, under age eighteen) were forms of cadet recruitment common in advanced (post)industrial states of the Minority World to be included in estimated global totals.

3. One thinks, for example, of discourses infantilizing subordinated (relative to hegemonic subject positions) Others along lines of gender or race (see Burman and Stacey 2010, Rollo 2018).

4. None of the travellers targeted in the Uruzgan strike, child or adult, turned out to have been part of a hostile armed group, but once they were assessed as such the net effect was the same as if they had been.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2019-0009].

Notes on contributors

J. Marshall Beier

J. Marshall Beier is Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. His current research turns on issues of children’s political subjecthood and imagined childhood as a social technology of governance.