Child combatants in northern Uganda: Reintegration myths and realities

At a recent Paris conference on child soldiering, the keynote speaker, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the use of child soldiers is “a time bomb that threatens stability and growth in Africa and beyond.” They are “lost children,” he argued, “lost for peace and lost for the development of their countries.” (BBC, 2007) This lost generation metaphor has become a commonplace in discussions of child soldiers, who are presumed to return from war traumatized, stigmatized, and broken. “They are walking ghosts,” mourns a recent New York Times (2006) editorial, “damaged, uneducated pariahs.” . While such alarming assertions attract much-needed attention and money to the reintegration of former child soldiers, the evidence to support these claims is weak at best. In fact, the evidence to support almost any claim is sadly lacking. Studies of child soldiers—and indeed of ex-combatants in general—are few in number and largely case-based, drawing on interviews with former participants. While such studies have yielded important insights for reintegration of young ex-fighters, the evidence base is still thin. With interview accounts, moreover, one worries that the most sensational rather than the most common experiences find their way into discourse. In the absence of representative data within and across conflicts, we have little sense of the proportionality and generalizability of any findings. This chapter con-