Child and/or Soldier?: From Resistance Movements to Human Rights Regiments

According to most estimates from the United Nations to children's rights organizations, at least 300,000 children, perhaps as many as half a million, have been actively fighting or otherwise abetting the myriad armed conflicts around the world at the beginning of the second millennium (or twenty-first century, to sound the alarm less apocalyptically), from Myanmar/ Burma to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Iraq, Uganda, Sierra Leone-and on and on. According to Vanessa Pupuvac, their multifaceted but structurally conjoined stories have occasioned a "universal concern for children" that is, Pupuvac claims, "viewed as transcending political and social divides and able to mobilise societies to confront social problems and their right to self determination" (2001, 95).