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Civil Wars | 2010

Identity, Ideology and Child Soldiering: Community and Youth Participation in Civil Conflict – A Study on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Mindanao, Philippines

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder; Eddie L. Quitoriano

The cessation of the governmental offensive to eliminate key figures of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in 2009 imparted fresh impetus to the peace process in Mindanao, Philippines. Recent clashes have resulted in large-scale and ongoing displacement. This stalemate, together with the end of Gloria Macapagal Arroyos Presidential term, has revived concerns about the future dynamics of the Bangsamoro struggle. An important dimension in this is the ‘voluntary’ nature of the participation of children and young people in the ranks of the MILF, sanctioned and often encouraged by their families and community. This presents an interesting contrast to the predominant literature on child soldiering that seems overly aligned with the coercive recruitment and related trauma-healing axis. In this article we examine the role of identity, ideology, the family and community in this presumed voluntary participation of children and youth in the MILF, in order to refine the linkage between recruitment experience of children and youth and their reintegration outcomes, and prescribe more appropriate reintegration interventions for youth in scenarios of participation sanctioned by family and community.


Archive | 2011

Child Soldier Recruitment in the Liberian Civil Wars: Individual Motivations and Rebel Group Tactics

Sukanya Podder

Involvement of children and youth in civil confict is a multidimensional theme for disaggregating experience of conflict processes and its impact on participants and broader civilian communities. This chapter will analyse field data on individual experiences of war and fighting to identify two sides of the recruitment and mobilization spectrum for child soldiers in the Liberian civil wars. First, it provides an overview of the conflict, the main actors and armed groups, before examining the various push and pull factors behind recruitment of children and youth to glean individual motivations and compulsions. It then focuses on the recruitment strategies of six main armed groups: the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and Independent NPFL (INPFL), the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy Kromah faction (ULIMO-K), the Liberian Peace Council (LPC), the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), the Taylor militia elements, the Government of Liberia (GoL) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) to explore inter-group variance. The chapter concludes by de-coupling how individual and group level motivations relate in the Liberian context to present a more nuanced understanding of recruitment and mobilization dynamics in instances of high incidence of youth participation in civil confict.


Archive | 2011

Neither Child nor Soldier: Contested Terrains in Identity, Victimcy and Survival

Sukanya Podder

Elaborating on the theoretical position underlying this study, the discursive and conceptual engagement presented here takes issue with the contemporary image of the child soldier. The label of ‘child soldier’ is mired in conceptual inconsistencies, vacillating between innocence and agency positions; this is confounded by more populist images propagated in the media and journalistic writings. Child soldiers in the Western media are commonly portrayed with qualities which children and societies ‘ought not to have’ as Utas suggests later in this volume. Cumulatively the Western media has advanced and popularized a pejorative, wasted image of youth in conflict, and tended to portray a dramatized and sympathetic account of the processes and experiences involved in the life of a child soldier. For a practitioner, academic or humanitarian worker who has lived and worked with child soldiers these are far from the truth. They seem to revolve around a coercive recruitment and vulnerable axis, with most youth voices and lives embedded in ‘neglect’, as part of the vulnerable group, that is, women, disabled and children. This creates a problematic, often incomplete categorization/definition.


Strategic Analysis | 2007

The Politics of Gun Control and India's Internal Security

Sukanya Podder

In the past two decades, security has come to be one of the most contested and debated concepts within the domain of international relations. Its state-centred contours interpreted narrowly as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of nuclear holocaust, have today made way for a new security understanding that includes economic, environmental, cultural sectors and new security referents—societies, nonstate actors, individuals. This conceptual widening has been complemented at a practical level by a growing focus on conflicts and security challenges that stem from within states and which trace their roots to non-traditional sources such as drugs, terrorism, small arms, cyber war and trafficking in human beings.


Archive | 2011

The Long Road Home: Conceptual Debates on Recruitment Experiences and Reintegration Outcomes

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder

This volume is about the important processes involved in young people’s participation in civil conflict. It seeks to define the trajectories of children’s lives in war zones, and highlights the inter-linkages, connections and mediated impacts of recruitment into rebel groups, in-group socialization, training and indoctrination. In particular, the authors show how these can influence post conflict return and reintegration outcomes for youth who live through conflict. Immersion into the fighter’s world is an important disjuncture in the ‘normal’ prewar life of children who become part of armed groups. On account of children’s incomplete socialization and maturation process within family settings, in-group experiences are important processual influences which impact on young minds, involving elements of identity transformation, and rebirth into the world of being a rebel or child soldier. Relationships within these groups with commanders and peers create a semblance of regularity and stability in a world where every moment is insecure. Children adopt new norms and ways of life in the fighting world with little resistance, developing deep loyalty for commanders who maltreated and abused them, in a radical inversion of values. Irrespective of whether recruits enter an armed organization with homogeneous or disparate norms and beliefs, socialization processes after induction provide the glue for group cohesion, reorienting cultural norms and beliefs through a mix of violence, submission and selective incentives. Rebel groups vary in their socialization practices, from using mass killing, ceremonial induction, ritualistic initiation to gang rape, to reinforce the public image of ‘rebel’ as a killer, as destructive and dissociated from the norms of community in which these small soldiers grew up as children.


Archive | 2011

How Voluntary? The Role of Community in Youth Participation in Muslim Mindanao

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder

Three major insurgent groups have waged armed struggle against the forces of the Philippine military since the 1960s. These are the communist-oriented New People’s Army (NPA), the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and its breakaway faction, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The latter two groups were organized by Muslim revolutionary leaders, convinced that armed struggle is the only way to express the right to self-determination for the Bangsamoro Muslims in Mindanao. Late in the 1980s, a group of ragtag armed youth, mostly from the Yakan and Sama ethnic groups based on the island province of Basilan emerged to become the country’s foremost bandit and kidnap-for-ransom group. The group, known as the Abu Sayyaf (‘Bearer of the Sword’) has lately been reported to have recruited several minors into their fold.


Archive | 2011

Mapping Child Soldier Reintegration Outcomes: Exploring the Linkages

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder

This volume has attempted to bring together academics, practitioners, policy makers and analysts across a wide spectrum to share their narratives and research findings on mode of child soldier recruitment, motivations behind children’s participation and their reintegration outcomes from a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspective. These empirical cases and narratives were used to illustrate certain theoretical propositions that are developed in this work and to present a culturally sensitive, empirically rich and theoretically viable thesis on the nuances and functioning of reintegration processes for child soldiers in postwar transitions by relating these to their recruitment experiences and participation processes.


Strategic Analysis | 2008

Doctrinal Challenges, Nation Building, Terror Tactics and the Power of the Child: A Tale of Three ‘Sites’

Sukanya Podder

Issues of power and agency within the domain of international relations (IR) have, for a long time, been couched in the language of realist scholarship. This received wisdom survived unscathed for a long time. However, constructivist and critical security thinking have lately created the necessary intellectual space within which entities so far relegated to the fringes have come to be reconceived. One such entity is the child. To illustrate the complexities of this ‘kindered’ space, three recent books, Singer (2005), Brocklehurst (2006) and Rosen (2005), are of great relevance and value. Their discursive thrust and narrative content engage in an interesting tug of war covering structuralist, historical nationalist and global political ‘sites’. These at once intersect and overlap, presenting a broad canvas for theorising the power of the child.


Archive | 2011

Child Soldiers: From Recruitment to Reintegration

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder


Journal of Strategic Security | 2011

Disarming Youth Combatants: Mitigating Youth Radicalization and Violent Extremism

Alpaslan Özerdem; Sukanya Podder

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