Introduction

Abstract

‘Is a child still a child when pressing the barrel of a gun to your chest?’ asks Lieutenant-General (Ret’d) Roméo Dallaire (Dallaire 2010: 2). Dallaire served as Force Commander of the peacekeeping United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), where he was first confronted with child soldiers during the genocide of 1994. He then went on to found the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative to end the use of child soldiers in conflict. Children should not know or be involved in war. With his question, however, Dallaire points to an important and disturbing concern in conflict and in post-conflict social reconstruction: child soldiers are a paradox that confuses our understanding of terms like childhood, perpetrator, and innocence. This paradox makes the issue of post-conflict justice even more complex: when children do participate in conflict, when they commit horrific acts of violence, when they later come face to face with the victims of their violence, when they themselves are likely victims of abuse and violence, when they need to reintegrate into a peaceful and well-ordered society, and when they are needed to contribute to its rebuilding and to flourish as members of the society’s future, how should child soldier perpetrators of abuses be perceived and treated?