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In many jurisdictions, the criminal responsibility of adults is demarcated from pre-adults (adolescents, pre-adolescents, and children) based on a threshold criterion – one is either an adult or a pre-adult, and different levels of responsibility are accordingly inferred and imputed. But in a world where complexity is growingly acknowledged, and by that token, nuance and variety, there has been a predilection for the spectrum over the binary – or the scalar over the threshold. In the context of juvenile justice, this has manifested in a move away from the binary demarcation between adults and pre-adults through a growing faith in brain developmental science, which in turn, focuses on the developmental stages of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In pre-adults, especially in adolescents, immature PFCs account for impulsiveness, volatility, and influence by peers, which in turn impact judgment and decision-making. These findings have been introduced in a few state and federal US courts trying juveniles, and recently, in the ICC trial and appeal of Dominic Ongwen, a child soldier. This paper assesses the nature, scope, and treatment of neuroscientific evidence, and lays down guidelines about its anticipated application in international trials involving vulnerable perpetrators such as juveniles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In echoing Obioma Nnaemeka's fluid understanding of the war front and her insistence on the need to expand the notion of war as armed conflict to incorporate the idea of war as a figure of violence against humanity and human dignity, this article examines witness narratives by and about former female African child soldiers in Uganda and Eritrea. A critical reading of China Keitetsi's Child Soldier (2002), Senait Mehari's Heart of Fire (2006), and Evelyn Amony's I AmEvelyn Amony (2015) reveals that the girl child is continually in/at war, regardless of whether she is at home or on the battlefield. Adopting Judith Butler's strand of precarity and her notion of framing, the article teases out the nodes of African female livelihood in the militarised patriarchal cultures related in the memoirs, emphasising how the female African child soldier's body occupies, inhabits, and lives through spaces of combat and domestic violence. The study also examines the feminist critique of otherness and aggressiveness towards those whose lives are considered less grievable and the authors' agentive paradigm in their writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the short film "Best Man Corner" directed by Jaremey McMullin, which explores the lives of motorcycle taxi drivers in Monrovia, Liberia. These drivers, many of whom are former child soldiers, rely on hustling as a means of survival and peacebuilding in the aftermath of the country's civil war. The film gives voice to these young men, allowing them to share their stories and challenges. It also highlights the negative stereotypes and prejudices they face, particularly as young men in post-war societies. The film offers a unique perspective on the complexities of post-conflict life and the agency of young people in shaping their own futures. [Extracted from the article]

The recruitment and use of children by armed groups continue to threaten the effective protection of children. Preventive approaches to child protection, call for robust early warning mechanisms that do not only focus on the recruitment and use of children, but capture the root causes and vulnerabilities of both boys and girls for recruitment. A comprehensive early warning mechanism for prevention requires a gender-sensitive approach. This paper seeks to examine the gender dynamics of the recruitment and use of children by armed groups, and how that can inform a gender sensitive data collection and analysis to improve early warning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In America, there is a pervasive social force constantly at work, reinforcing the norm that children should be soldiers. With the U.S. case, we see that it takes a society to produce children on the battlefield, and that American culture is weakening the global norm against child soldiering. American schools, summer camps, and media are generating narratives that help soldier the minds of children. The U.S. case highlights the importance of looking before the battle erupts at the everyday practices of child militarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early warning systems purport to help decision makers act more effectively. But what does it take to develop, deliver and use warnings or predictions for rare and uncertain events in data-poor and rapidly changing environments? What key lessons can be learned from teams who have confronted these challenges over the last 10 years? The paper answers these questions using in-depth analysis of the experiences of teams developing and applying early warning systems (EWS) for coups, organised violence, mass atrocities, and child soldier recruitment. The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of the development and use of conflict-related EWS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recruitment of children to be used as soldiers by conflict actors continues to be a regular occurrence globally and is associated with numerous negative effects. The debatable efficacy of current efforts to combat child recruitment gives rise to the idea that scholars and policymakers should cultivate preventive tools, including the development of early warning systems. However, such development has been hampered by the difficulties associated with collecting precise and systematic large-scale data. In this study, we discuss three important pitfalls related to data collection and provide several potentials for overcoming these challenges in the development of early warning alerts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We typically see child soldiers as not morally responsible because of their age and/or because they are victims of adult exploitation. Work on child soldiers and their moral responsibility is relatively sparse within just war thinking and political philosophy (Thomason in Ethical Theory Moral Pract, 19:115–127, 2016a; Thomason in Seeing child soldiers as morally compromised warriors [Online]. The Critique. Available: http://www.thecritique.com/articles/seeing-child-soldiers-as-morally-compromised-warriors/ [Accessed 2 April 2020], 2016b), and instead focuses mostly on whether child soldiers are liable to attack (McMahan, in Gates, Reich (eds) Child soldiers in the age of fractured states, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2010; Vaha in J Military Ethics, 10:36–51, 2011). This paper brings these two areas together. Many of us have the intuition that combatants should exercise at least some constraint when fighting against child soldiers. I will argue that, contra McMahan (2010), exercising restraint in this way is a requirement of justice. I will argue that agents can be more or less liable to attack (liability to attack is on a spectrum) in defensive killing cases depending on how morally responsible they are for the threat they cause. I will outline how, whilst child soldiers are not wholly responsible for the threat they cause to combatants, their responsibility is also not completely diminished. I will argue that child soldiers are therefore liable to attack, but to a lesser extent than fully responsible agents. I will show that combatants fighting against child soldiers are therefore required, as a matter of justice, to use the most proportionate method of attack which may not always be to kill the child soldier. I will conclude that combatants are therefore required, as a matter of justice, to exercise a degree of restraint when fighting against child soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way conflicts are remembered is crucial for the prevention of future violence, and digital technologies play increasing roles in processes of remembering. This article looks at memory work conducted in a YouTube video featuring two former child soldiers in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia, and their story from mutual hatred and war to friendship and peace. Analysing and comparing the video and the related English and Indonesian video commentaries, this article asks how the Moluccan violence is remembered, how that memory travels and how it is translated and received among different audiences. It investigates how connectivity and creativity open up new memory spaces and how, within these digital spaces, transcultural memory tropes and political and cultural contexts of social media users can both solidify hegemonic memory narratives and transform traumatic memories into hope and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of the importance of gender as a salient factor for understanding the impact of genocides is a relatively new phenomenon. This shift in approach — an understanding of genocide as entailing gendercide — is particularly important for an understanding of the Yazidi genocide that ISIS undertook in northern Iraq beginning in June 2014. To explore these different gendered impacts, we conducted semi-structured interviews during the summers of 2019 and 2021 with seventeen female and fifteen male Yazidi survivors who currently reside in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq. These transcribed narrative interview texts reveal significant differences in how the female and male survivors narrate the experience of their traumatization. The core of the Yazidi female survivors’ traumatization was their experience of defilement as sabaya or slaves, most often sexual slaves. Yet even in the face of this social death, the female survivors’ narratives relate how they were able to enact strategies for protecting their human dignity, including engaging in various forms of resistance during captivity. Conversely, the core of the Yazidi male survivors’ traumatization was their experience in religious education camps where they were indoctrinated with ISIS ideology and enrolled in physical and combat training for their ultimate deployment as ISIS child soldiers. Precisely because the boys were offered an alternative mujahadeen ideal of manhood, their captivity narratives remain in limbo, ambivalently caught between the seeming failure of the Yazidi male code of honor and ISIS’s hyper-masculinized and violent jihadist identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the lived experiences and roles of children under Boko Haram's two factions. Unlike case studies of Islamic State "cubs," children in Boko Haram have been neglected in the literature. Filling that gap, this article analyzes more than thirty videos and photograph sets from the two factions. Visual ethnography is utilized to examine material depicting children in both "staged" and "unstaged" roles in Boko Haram, and in ways to maximize impacts on viewers. The four main activities of the children in videos and photographs include combat and training with weapons as well as participating in Islamic education; gathering for prayer; using technology to create media content, including filming battles; and, in the case of the Chibok schoolgirls, being filmed as hostages or, eventually, as loyal members. The videos of the Chibok girls also reveal how children are gendered in Boko Haram. Child soldiers is an issue at the forefront of the paper's framing. Given the depictions of children in our data, we move beyond labeling child soldiers as all those under eighteen and differentiate between those under fifteen and those between fifteen and eighteen years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do armed organizations perpetrate conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV)? One prominent explanation focuses on the need to sustain group solidarity following the introduction of new combatants, a phenomenon referred to as combatant socialization. In this article, I revisit recent quantitative research suggesting that rebel groups recruiting children as soldiers engage in CRSV to facilitate combatant socialization. I argue that child soldiering without coercive recruitment does not, ipso facto, degrade internal cohesion and resilience; it is the use of coercion during recruitment that decimates intra-group solidarity and thereby necessitates CRSV for combatant socialization. Consequently, child soldiering per se should not induce rebel-perpetrated CRSV, whereas forced child recruitment does patently increase it. Zero-inflated ordered logit analysis confirms the differential implications of distinct modes of child recruitment for rebels' combatant socialization via CRSV. This article highlights the centrality of coercive recruitment in CRSV occurrence and advances knowledge about combatant socialization and CRSV estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a biographical-reconstructive approach, we examine the interplay between the symbolic representation of spirit possession and healing forms of ritual purification in the context of the war-related trauma of former Lord's Resistance Army child soldiers in Uganda. We illustrate how these former child soldiers articulate their trauma and resilience and how their communities deal with forms of spirit possession, what the role of religious communities is, and how rituals function as a coping mechanism for war-related trauma. The narrative approach is used to analyze 12 digital reports of different nongovernmental organizations and five digital testimonies of former child soldiers. The results provide relevant knowledge for a successful reintegration of returnees into society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of the child is one that, at least in the Westernised imagination, is entangled with notions of innocence, naivety, and freedom. But what of the child who is unfree, who has been stripped of innocence, and for whom naivety is a danger? One expression of this iteration of the figure of the child is the child soldier, which has been a centralising figure in various narratives set during and concerned with African experiences of warfare. This paper is concerned with the figure of the child soldier as it is staged in both Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond (2006) and Cary Joji Fukunaga's filmic adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala's novel, Beasts of No Nation (2015). In turning to Ashis Nandy's articulation of the tension held within "the child" as being both emblematic of a fantasy of childhood produced by adult nostalgia—hopeful, joyous and free—and always potentially dangerous, this paper pivots the notions of soldiering and slaving on and around the child as a figure. In doing so, the paper asks what it might mean to think of the condition of being a child soldier as being akin to that of being a child slave, weaponised for political and economic ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals formerly involved in armed groups are positioned in the victim–perpetrator binary by legal systems and societies. Media participates in this process and influences the relationship between law and society by reproducing or challenging legal and social designations. We assess the relationship between the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecution of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier in Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and media representations of Ongwen. We conduct a content analysis of 779 Ugandan, African, and international newspapers' English-language articles published between January 2005 and October 2022. We find that media coverage focuses on Ongwen's adult roles in the group, including as an LRA leader, largely reproducing the ICC's portrayal of the accused. A minority of articles acknowledge a more complex status and increase in frequency once Ongwen's ICC trial is underway. An important faction challenges the ICC's narrative, with non-Africa-based media presenting a more complex depiction of Ongwen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While inclusion, participation and victim-centredness have become catchwords in transitional justice discourse, this rhetoric has not necessarily enabled the articulation of more complex identities and experiences, or the pursuit of varied justice claims. To probe this disconnect, this article engages with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, a mechanism established to reckon with the country's history of internal armed conflict, and hailed for its involvement of vulnerable, disenfranchised and oft-overlooked groups. The article combines expressive theories of justice with an innovative corpus-based methodology to critically examine how the Commission made visible, defined and construed these actors through its language of inclusion. Results from word frequency, co-occurrence and sentiment analyses illustrate how the Commission foregrounded the plight and rights of women and children, and their participation as a vehicle for emancipation, but simultaneously reproduced universalist and static identities, fixation on sexual violence and child soldier recruitment, and subject positions lacking in positive or political capabilities. This duality points to inherent tensions in the expressive messaging of TJ institutions, and rather locates the transformative potential of their inclusionary language in the strategic openings it affords for victims' groups, women and youth organizations in their broader trajectories towards justice and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although different scholars have underscored the inadequacy of the concept of 'child soldier' for various reasons, its inherently discriminatory implications against girl soldiers have not attracted the required scholarly attention. Thus, in this article, I examine two African child soldier narratives with a view to analysing their representations of the idea of the child soldier. The texts I analyse are Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah Is Not Obliged (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to illuminate the alarming phenomenon of child recruitment, recognized as a profound deviation from normative societal behaviors due to its stark infringement on the rights of a vulnerable demographic. Internationally spotlighted in the 1980s, child recruitment in armed confl icts prompted global eff orts aimed at curbing the induction of children into battles by both recognized and unrecognized militant factions. Despite these endeavors, the prevalence of child soldiers has escalated notably in subsequent decades, particularly amid the surge of internal armed confl icts. Such circumstances have relentlessly exposed recruited children to extreme violence and infl icted severe damage, often resulting in either mortality or permanent disability. In response, a unifi ed international initiative has sought to mitigate this distressing trend by establishing numerous international accords and preemptive measures. The prohibition of child recruitment has been enshrined across a spectrum of international legal instruments and endorsed by international criminal tribunals. Yet, despite rigorous legal frameworks and judicial eff orts to eradicate child recruitment and preclude their participation in armed engagements, the practice persists. This ongoing issue underscores a systemic failure among nations to enforce internationally agreed standards designed to combat this grave phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The given text includes reviews of three books related to the Civil War era. The first book, "Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era" by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, explores the presence of underage soldiers in the Civil War and how their enlistment raised questions about family obligations and federal power. The second book, "The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia" by Kristen Brill, examines the role of middle- and planter-class white Southern women in shaping Confederate political culture and their relationship with Confederate leaders. The third book is not summarized in the given text. These books provide valuable insights into different aspects of the Civil War era and are recommended for those interested in the history of the time period. [Extracted from the article]

This article presents a contextualized interpretation of drawings created by former child soldiers of the so‐called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The drawings were generated as part of a collaborative storytelling project in Northern Iraq in 2019 that aimed at identifying the psychosocial needs of these militarized children. The analysis focuses on two distinct groups: Arab‐Sunni and Yezidi boys, each representing different pathways into and experiences within ISIS, leading to varied forms of social stigmatization. The findings reveal significant differences in how violence, agency, and social attributions are represented in the narratives and drawings of the two groups. The study underscores the importance of collaborative meaning‐making in representing marginalized groups and highlights the potential to combine drawings with other qualitative methods to minimize the risk of over‐interpretation. This approach provides nuanced insights into the children’s struggle for agency and interpretative ownership in the face of powerful social narratives. This article contributes to the broader discourse on child soldiers and the use of visual methodologies in conflict‐affected areas.

This article discusses a special issue of the journal International Research in Children's Literature that focuses on representations of children and war. The selected articles cover a range of topics, including revisionist histories, marginalized texts, and children's voices. The articles explore various perspectives and experiences of children during war, such as the relationships between Poland and Ukraine, child-animal relationships in times of conflict, Yugoslav socialist literature for children, narratives of female child soldiers in Africa, espionage in children's literature during World War I, Jewish refugee child diarists, and the recontextualization of fairy tales to process the Holocaust. The authors argue for the importance of these stories and the need to listen to and record children's experiences and narratives in history. [Extracted from the article]

Background: As armed conflict grows increasingly complex, the involvement of children in armed violence across diverse roles is rising. Consequently, military personnel are more likely to encounter children during deployment. However, little is known about deployment-related encounters with children and their impact on the mental health of military personnel and Veterans.Objective: This study qualitatively examines the nature and impacts of deployment-related encounters with children.Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Canadian Armed Forces Veterans, eliciting rich information on the nature of child encounters on deployment, the psycho-social-spiritual impacts of these encounters, and perceptions of support. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.Results: Six primary themes were identified: types of encounters (i.e. factual aspects of deployment-related encounters with children), contextual factors (i.e. aspects of the mission, environment, and personal context relevant to one’s experience of the encounter), appraisals of encounters (i.e. sensory or sense-making experiences relevant to the encounter), impacts of encounters (i.e. psycho-social, existential, and occupational impacts), coping strategies engaged in both during and after deployment, and support experiences, describing both formal and informal sources of support.Conclusions: Encounters with children are diverse and highly stressful, resulting in impacts pertinent to mental health, including psychological and moral distress, and difficulties with identity, spirituality, and relationships. These impacts are prompted by complex interactions among appraisals, expectations of morality, cultural norms, and professional duties and are amplified by various personal factors (e.g. childhood maltreatment history, parenthood), feelings of unpreparedness, and lack of post-deployment support. Implications for prevention, intervention, and policy are discussed with the aim of informing future efforts to safeguard and support military personnel facing a high likelihood of encounters with children.

Child soldier disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) practice has a strong normative commitment to protect children from harm and violence. However, there exist policy and research knowledge gaps in comprehending the translation of such norms in meeting the social and protective needs of children. In Sri Lanka from 2009, 594 former child soldiers from the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE) underwent a national rehabilitation programme. National engagement with international child protection norms could not materialize from a militarized governance framework implemented at the end of the civil war. This article provides a primary source of data based on 45 semi-structured interviews with former boy and girl child soldiers from the LTTE. The Sri Lankan case-study demonstrates that the DDR programme resulted in the re-calibration of social and political control over child and adult participants. Former child soldiers' social and protective needs therefore remain complex and unresolved because of state generated structural violence related to poverty and militarization. The article advances a framework to account for a generational power dynamic of adult–child relations, and the politics of institutionalized protection to account for children's formal rehabilitation and return experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Summoned by the Earth | A Story of Healing and Protection" is an article that follows Cynthia Jurs' mission to heal and protect the Earth by burying Earth Treasure Vases filled with prayers and offerings in different parts of the world. These vases have brought about positive change in places like Liberia and Congo, where they have inspired peace-building programs and tree planting initiatives. Cynthia's personal journey and connection to the Earth are explored, emphasizing the importance of protection, healing, and restoration for the planet. The article encourages readers to become Earth protectors and highlights the interconnectedness of all living beings. [Extracted from the article]

"Those We Throw Away are Diamonds: A Refugee's Search for Home" is a memoir by Mondiant Dogon, a Congolese Tutsi refugee, detailing his experiences living in refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda for over 20 years. The memoir emphasizes the importance of education in the lives of refugees and explores themes such as child protection, identity development, and the role of aid organizations. Dogon's story challenges assumptions about refugee dependency on humanitarian aid and highlights the need for more inclusive and action-oriented research and programming in the field of Education in Emergencies. The memoir is recommended for those interested in refugee inclusion and education for displaced populations. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the challenges associated with recognizing children born of war as victims within the framework of international criminal law. Focusing on the case of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and senior commander of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), it analyses how the criteria established in the definition of victim in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the International Criminal Court have been applied to children born of war. This analysis brings to the fore conceptual challenges to the recognition of children born of war as victims and highlights the risks that the binary victim-perpetrator that characterises the international criminal narrative presents to a comprehensive understanding of the experiences and needs of these children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By providing victims with more space in the Ongwen case, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has significantly contributed to the healing of the trauma and community reconciliation in northern Uganda. That said, this court has also raised issues that could affect local efforts to achieve peace, namely the positioning of victims of child soldiers vis-à-vis criminal child soldiers. Drawing on qualitative data collected through focus group discussions with some community members from locations under investigation by the ICC, this sociolegal study examines the victims' narratives about child soldiers and the different ideas of human rights that emerge. Then, it explores how these ideas may shape future transitional justice mechanisms designed in the global sphere. Finally, it discusses the extent to which they may impact the relevance of current justice initiatives. Overall, this paper analyzes the substantive effect of victim participation in the Ongwen case on local peacebuilding initiatives in northern Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By definition, criminal trials are set to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. In this process, judges are tasked with assessing not only evidence that presents itself in quantifiable forms, but also as personal experiences. In the case of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and commander of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the issue of spiritualism played a significant role, particularly in relation to the affirmative defences of mental incapacity and duress. Assessing such culturally charged evidence, inherently interconnected to local beliefs, through the lens of an international criminal law trial raises a number of challenges. In the construction of the legal truth, such immaterial evidence undergoes a process through which only certain elements, which are deemed relevant in light of specific arguments, are ultimately selected, filtered through the legal framework, contested by the parties and ultimately decided upon by the judges. Spiritual beliefs therefore become patterns, and patterns become certainties. Based on an in-depth analysis of 408 trial transcripts, along with main submissions and decisions, this article sheds light into how framing spiritualism according to the criteria laid out in the Rome Statute has played out in the trial of Dominic Ongwen. It maps the way in which cultural concepts related to spirituality have been introduced into the trial, by which parties and for what purpose. It also looks at how the system of spiritual powers guiding the LRA and its fighters was assessed by the judges and potentially why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As armed conflict grows increasingly complex, the involvement of children in armed violence across diverse roles is rising. Consequently, military personnel are more likely to encounter children during deployment. However, little is known about deploymentrelated encounters with children and their impact on the mental health of military personnel and Veterans. Objective: This study qualitatively examines the nature and impacts of deployment-related encounters with children. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Canadian Armed Forces Veterans, eliciting rich information on the nature of child encounters on deployment, the psycho-socialspiritual impacts of these encounters, and perceptions of support. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Six primary themes were identified: types of encounters (i.e. factual aspects of deployment-related encounters with children), contextual factors (i.e. aspects of the mission, environment, and personal context relevant to one’s experience of the encounter), appraisals of encounters (i.e. sensory or sense-making experiences relevant to the encounter), impacts of encounters (i.e. psycho-social, existential, and occupational impacts), coping strategies engaged in both during and after deployment, and support experiences, describing both formal and informal sources of support. Conclusions: Encounters with children are diverse and highly stressful, resulting in impacts pertinent to mental health, including psychological and moral distress, and difficulties with identity, spirituality, and relationships. These impacts are prompted by complex interactions among appraisals, expectations of morality, cultural norms, and professional duties and are amplified by various personal factors (e.g. childhood maltreatment history, parenthood), feelings of unpreparedness, and lack of post-deployment support. Implications for prevention, intervention, and policy are discussed with the aim of informing future efforts to safeguard and support military personnel facing a high likelihood of encounters with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For societies transitioning from conflict to peace, the phenomenon of child soldiers poses significant challenges. These include quandaries associated with assisting in the reintegration of serving child soldiers, determining how to prevent future recruitment of child soldiers, and pursuing accountability of those who utilize child soldiers. In addition, questions are also raised as to whether and how child soldiers responsible for crimes committed during conflict are to be held to account. While no one mechanism or response can adequately and sufficiently address the multifaceted issues that arise, peace agreements, as foundational documents that serve as the blueprint for peacebuilding and the post-conflict State, can make a useful contribution to some or all of them. Drawing on all references to child soldiers in 77 peace agreements signed between 1990 and 2022, this article examines the ways in which peace agreements address the issue of child soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines figurations of returning to the community in two of Léonora Miano's novels. These novels offer an opportunity to broaden the notion of returning to community that, in philosophical debates, tends to be essentialist and abstract. In Les aubes écarlates and La saison de l'ombre, two clans find themselves confronted with the abduction of community members who become child soldiers or slaves. The physical or spiritual return of those abductees to their communities is at the core of the novels, and it is closely linked to questions of memory. Understanding the dynamics of return as a figuration—both in the literary sense and in Norbert Elias's process sociology sense—helps us look at the concrete interactions that make up a community. This article analyzes the physical, mnemonic, and spiritual dimensions of returning to community and looks at the significance of inventing new rituals and forms of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]