terribly, somehow managing to survive brutal experiences of forced recruitment, then agonizing periods of frontline battle and associated labor. Much of my own work in the DRC in 2006–7 and again in 2009 involved the monitoring of recruitment cases and advocacy to ensure the release of children from the armed groups, and the investigation of alleged child recruitment to establish command responsibility for eventual punitive measures through the UN Sanctions Committee.4
Yet as I became more involved in the lives of young former combatants, the complexity of the child recruitment phenomenon began to reveal itself. I learned about the conditions of hardship that led to their recruitment, the limited choices available to them, and their experience during and after armed group engagement. One young man named Joseph eventually became a key informant of my doctoral research. His personal narrative offered rich insights into how young people navigate the extreme complexity of active conflict, how they deal with its aftermath, and how international programs to support the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of children had done little to achieve their stated aims to improve demobilized children’s life outcomes.
In 1996, Joseph had joined the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo–Zaire (AFDL in French)—the main rebel alliance of the First Congo War—when he was just seven years old. He explained the circumstances of his initial recruitment as follows: “In 1996 the war came to [my town]. My family fled to Bukavu, where we stayed for three months. When we returned [home], we didn’t know who was in charge, though Mzee [Laurent] Kabila was leading recruitment efforts. I joined the AFDL with all the other boys I grew up with. We were taken to the Plains of Ruzizi and trained for five months in how to use guns. After the training we were given arms and uniforms and started fighting. By the time Mzee Kabila took Kinshasa, my battalion had returned to [the base near the airport].”
While the AFDL rebellion was successful in toppling Mobotu Sese Seko in May 1997, the configurations of the national and regional war soon altered, compelling Joseph to navigate the shifting front lines of an increasingly complex regional war. He continued his narrative:
When the RCD [Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie] entered Bukavu in 1998, they took over our base and killed all but six of the AFDL officers. The soldiers who remained were forced to carry the bodies, they were then forced to douse [the bodies] in petrol and set them on fire. The soldiers were then shot and killed. Other soldiers who had gone to the police seeking refuge were also shot and killed. Six of us managed to survive and we escaped. Two of us hid with our commander. Two weeks later Bukavu was taken by the RCD, so we began our journey on foot to Goma, where we stayed with the family of our commander. He negotiated for us to be integrated into the RCD.
Notable in Joseph’s narration was the admiration and appreciation he maintained for his AFDL commander. In contrast to the dominant international narratives about nefarious commanders who violently manipulated the children under their command, Joseph portrayed his commander as his protector and carer and the man who had saved his life.
Four years later, Joseph experienced what he described as the greatest loss of his life, one that led him to decisive action in a landscape of severely limited choices: “One day I was given some days of leave to visit home. Once there I went to visit my grandfather in the nearby village. When I returned home late that day, I found that the RCD had surrounded my house. They were accusing people of being Mayi-Mayi sympathizers. I saw my father as he was being beaten by the soldiers. He was beaten to death. To take vengeance for my father’s death, I decided to leave the RCD and to join the Mayi-Mayi.” By 2002, at thirteen years of age and having already served on the front lines of active conflict for almost seven years, Joseph was separated from the Mayi-Mayi group as it entered a demilitarization process negotiated during one of the peace accords—one of a series of DDR processes that would be repeated in various iterations over the following decade. He would benefit from the children’s DDR program, which included psychosocial support and education programming that aimed to assist his reintegration into civilian life.
Unfortunately, the war in the Kivus continued, and by 2004 Joseph was again left with few alternatives but to join another Mayi-Mayi group. During the infamous battle for Bukavu in May 2004, Joseph found himself once more on the front lines battling the RCD. Yet, rather than remembering this gruesome operation with anguish, Joseph recounted his involvement in this particular battle with pride: “I participated in the war in 2004 when the RCD attacked Bukavu. We managed to chase them back into Rwanda.” Most crucially for Joseph, by playing a part in the victory against the RCD forces, he had been able to avenge the death of his father. This knowledge helped him to deal with what he considered to be his life’s greatest loss and allowed him to maintain a sense of self-worth in subsequent years.
When I first met Joseph in 2010, he was twenty-one years old. He was struggling to earn the money he needed to survive each day. Although he had again been enrolled in a children’s DDR program after the 2004 conflict and had once more received “reintegration” training to become a mechanic, he could not find a job. Instead, Joseph was subsisting through daily wage labor, transporting heavy loads from the port up the long climb into town. It was grueling work that might earn him the equivalent of one US dollar per day. As I came to know Joseph better, I would learn that it was not his history as a “former child soldier” that distressed him but his inability to effectively surmount the challenges of daily survival.
Without the capacity to meet his basic needs, Joseph had stopped thinking about any kind of prospect for a more positive future. What surprised me about this was that Joseph had been a full “beneficiary” of two phases of children’s DDR programs, yet neither of these programs had made any significant difference in his life in the longer term. While in the first instance, in 2002, it was clear that “reintegration” could not happen due to the persisting conflict, the failure of Joseph’s second passage through the children’s DDR process required deeper investigation.
When Joseph had entered the second DDR program in 2008, a robust international normative framework had been firmly established to protect children from recruitment into and use by armed groups. As defined by the 2007 Paris Principles—or the Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups—a “child soldier” was any person younger than eighteen years of age and included “children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities.”5 International law had criminalized the recruitment and use of children, and the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court listed it as a war crime: “Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.”6
Children’s rights to full DDR support had thus been enshrined in internationally accepted principles, and a generic approach to children’s DDR had emerged. At that time, the process was generally organized in three key phases. First, for disarmament, children would be identified among an armed group, usually through monitoring reports by UN observers, NGOs, and other local actors. Child protection actors would usually then engage in advocacy with the armed group commanders to ensure that any children under their command would be released. Once separated, children would be taken to transit care centers to begin the second stage of the process—“demobilization”—which was a transitional period that might last several weeks or many months and usually involved social, psychosocial, educational, and recreational activities conceived to support children’s eventual readaptation to civilian life. Once “demobilized,” children would be given certificates confirming their status and then returned home, thus beginning the third and last phase of the DDR process: “reintegration.” Children would be enrolled in one of a selection of reintegration programs that might include schooling, vocational training, or an income-generating activity.
Over the years of my work in conflict-affected contexts, I repeatedly witnessed the weak conception and poor implementation of children’s reintegration programs. The Paris Principles define reintegration
