P.W. Singer. 2006. Children at War. University of California Press: Berkeley

This is Singer’s second book, the first being Corporate Warriors, a study of the rise of Private Military Corporations. Singer, an analyst at Brookings (I think), extends his reasoning about the changes in warfare that gave rise to PMCs to engage with the issue of child soldiers. This issue has gotten a fair amount of attention of late, with the popularization of both African conflicts (Blood Diamond, Darfur) and memoirs of former child soldiers. However, as Singer observes, that attention tends to lead to a particularized narrative about the specific conflict and parties involved. Singer’s book is a welcome departure from this mode of analysis, in that he steps back and addresses child soldiers as a global phenomenon, which is most assuredly is: “Of ongoing or recently ended conflicts, 68 percent (37 of 55) have children under eighteen serving as combatants. Eighty percent of these conflicts where children are present include fighters under the age of fifteen.” (29)

Since the phenomenon is global, Singer looks for global causes, and settles on three: “(1) social disruptions and failures of development caused by globalization, war, and disease have led not only to greater global conflict and instability, but also to generational disconnections that create a new pool of recruits; (2) technological improvements in small arms now permit these child recruits to be effective participants in warfare; and (3) there has been a rise in a new type of conflict that is far more brutal and criminalized.” (38) The last of these is the most interesting, as it employs a rational actor model to connect a human intentionality to the structural conditions described by the first two causes. Singer suggests that “The strategy of using children as an alternative source of fighters has proven appealing to many groups, not only because it is cheap and easy to implement, but also because the costs are outweighed by the benefits so far. It provides an easy means for organizations, even the most weak and unpopular, to generate significant amounts of force with almost no investment. On the other side of the equation, the costs of using children in this manner are considered quite low. Moral opprobrium is the only major risk to a group that uses child soldiers. However, any group that contemplates using children as fighters has already shown itself unwilling to be limited by prevailing moral codes. The lesson from this is that prohibitive norms are quite weak whenever they are not underscored by substantive penalties for violating them.” (52-53)

To combat this phenomenon, Singer calls for an explicit criminalization of the practice (153), so that leaders of organizations that employ child soldiers would be liable for their behavior (153, 156), states would be more easily pressured to cut ties to those groups (156), and would-be employers of child soldiers would be dissuaded (160). He also suggests that also advises that training for Western forces be expanded to include child combatants (165), as child soldier formations are especially vulnerable to shock tactics (rolling barrages or killing adult leaders) (172) but are still quite formidable, esp. as the children become older and the unit has been together for quite some time (175). He concludes with a chapter on the particular needs of child soldiers during demobilization, which have historically been neglected and may be sowing the seeds for future conflict.

Overall, this is another very effective, efficient piece of writing by Singer, and, of course, I like it cause it fits well with the way I arrange facts and think about the world. It is however, a really difficult thing to read, because the text is interspersed with the narratives of child soldiers, and their little 2-3 sentence snippets are a window into the darkest recesses of the human soul – I literally cannot think up more fucked-up, repugnant shit that one human being could do to another, and after 180 pages, it gets pretty emotionally draining.