Vicious gift? Types of external support and child recruitment by rebel groups

ABSTRACT

Existing research on child soldiering has largely neglected whether external support affects the decision of child soldiering by rebel groups. This paper shows that rebel groups’ levels of engagement in child soldiering depends on the types of support that rebel groups receive. I argue that territorial support is associated with increased child recruitment, while troop and monetary support are associated with less child soldiering. This research has crucial implications for our understanding of the relationship between rebel groups’ engagement in human rights violations and support from external actors. Furthermore, this research highlights previously overlooked roots of the use of child soldiers, so policy makers can pay more attention to these issues in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Armed conflict
• rebel group
• child soldier
• external support
• territorial support
• troop support
• monetary support

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisors at the University of Essex, Zorzeta Bakaki and Brian J. Phillips for providing their valuable advice and support to write this manuscript. Also, I appreciate my board member, Tobias Böhmelt and my viva examiners, Han Dorussen and Scott Gates who gave me crucial comments and suggestions. My sincere thanks also go to all participants in the “Human Rights Doctoral Research Triangle” on the 31st of April 2021 and “Network of European Peace Studies (NEPS)” on the 29th of June – 1st of July 2021 for their helpful advice to brush up this work. I would also like to thank all the IR workshop members at the University of Essex. Finally, I am grateful for the feedback and suggestions of the editor of Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict and the anonymous reviewer.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17467586.2023.2218894.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Faulkner (2016) mainly focused on monetary and social endowment based on Weinstein’s previous research in 2017 and developed the argument by using qualitative analysis. Also, although Haer et al. (2020) examined the relationship between each type of external support and forced child recruitment, their main interest was whether having natural resources affect rebel groups’ coerced child soldiering. They also checked the impact of the external support model in their appendix but did not expand the discussion on how and why certain types of external support affect rebel groups’ forced child recruitment. Both Faulkner (2016) and Haer et al. (2020) focused on forced recruitment even though there is always a possibility of voluntary recruitment. This research tries to highlight the impact of external support on both voluntary and forced recruitment.

2. Article 1: “States Parties shall ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 18 years are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces”

Article 4–1: “Armed groups that are distinct from the armed forces of a state should not, under any circumstances, recruit or use in hostilities persons under the age of 18 years.”

3. Children may seek revenge on their government or rebel groups. During a conflict, children may lose their family or friends and those events can make children join conflict as soldiers.

4. There are additional types of support that this research does not cover in the main manuscript such as intelligence, infrastructure, and training. It is important to develop a further discussion of how different types of external support affect rebel groups’ child recruitment by comparing other support types. Check appendix G to see the result when testing all types of external support that UCDP External Support Data covers. The statistical results suggest that rebel groups who have territorial support and infrastructure support are likely to recruit children actively.

5. In the Appendix H, I control the number of refugees and child migration. Although access to refugee camps is part of my arguments to support the idea that rebel groups who have territorial support are more likely to recruit a higher volume of children, it is important that the statistical result is constant even after I control the number of refugees. Regarding the child migration, it was challenging to collect a number of child refugees, therefore, I control child migration instead of it. The statistical results support my main argument that rebel groups are more likely to engage in child soldiering when they have external territorial support even after I control these two variables. Check appendix H for further explanations and the statistical results.

6. Government is connected to one rebel group in a particular conflict period (Haer et al., 2020).

7. Not forced recruitment which their research mainly focuses on.

8. Existing studies suggest that there are children who voluntarily participate in armed groups. For the purposes of this, I do not distinguish between voluntary and forced recruitment in my research.

9. Haer et al. (2020) provide year information on the dependent variable, however, the dependent variable changes across conflict periods. Therefore, this model should be necessarily examined for verifying the statistical importance is keep remained even after changing the unit of analysis.

10. In the appendix, I included several different models to check the robustness of my results. Even after I include extra variables or lagged the independent variables to reduce endogeneity issues, my arguments were supported. For more detailed explanations and the results, please check the appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yun Jung Yang

Yun Jung, Yang finished her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Essex in December 2022. Her main research interests are child soldiering, human rights violations, and non-state armed groups’ tactical selections.