The Rites of the Child: Global Discourses of Youth and Reintegrating Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone

Abstract

This article describes how the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and other international child rights instruments are implicated in the postwar reintegra- tion of child excombatants in Sierra Leone. Data are based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork throughout Sierra Leone from 1999 to 2001. Various actors, including children, their families, communities, teachers, nongovernmental organizationworkers, and the state, use the CRC and theWestern construction of childhood as innocent and apolitical for strategic purposes. Child rights discourse and practice eases the rein- tegration of child excombatants by buttressing discourses of abdicated responsibility in childrens narrations of their war experiences, thereby facilitating forgiveness and acceptance. However, this model of innocent child is in conflict with an earlier model of youth as hardworking and humble. In the struggle to reintegrate child soldiers, a new model of youth emerges in Sierra Leone, a model informed by the global human rights regime but created in everyday practice at the intersection of the global and the local.