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Viewing report
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Children at High-Risk. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Sep 2008, Pages: 244
The recruitment of children for war is an issue that
continues to dominate the concern of the
international community. Most scholarly work has so
far dealt with the psychosocial aftereffects of
children’s exposure to war and violence with little
attention to the sociological factors that prompt
participation in the first place. This dissertation
attempts to fill this gap by examining the processes
and mechanisms through which children voluntarily
join the fighting forces. In this vein, I compare
the recruitment of children for war in Iran by the
Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88),
and in El Salvador by the FMLN during its civil war
(1981-92). Based on the findings of my dissertation,
the children’s volunteer participation in war is, on
the one hand, contingent upon their relations to the
state structures and their opponents as a function
of their embeddeness in different networks of
relationships. On the other, it is influenced by the
salience of their identification with the recruiting
organizations’ mobilizational narratives.
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