Summertime — the chance to finish manuscripts and working papers that should have been ready four months ago. Or four years ago.
I have ambitious plans for two or three new ones to be ready next month. But first, one must attend to the revisions and resubmissions.
Here is what I hope is the last version of “The logic of child soldiering and coercion”. Abstract:
Why do armed groups recruit large numbers of children as fighters, often coercively? The international community has tried to curb these crimes by shaming and punishing leaders who commit them—in short, making the crimes costlier. Are these policies effective and sufficient? The answer lies in more attention to the strategic interaction between rebel leaders and recruits.
We adapt theories of industrial organization to rebellious groups and show how, being less able fighters, children are attractive recruits if and only if they are easier to intimidate, indoctrinate and misinform than adults. This ease of manipulation interacts with the costliness of war crimes to influence rebel leaders’ incentives to coerce children into war.
We use a case study and a novel survey of former child recruits in Uganda to illustrate this argument and provide hard evidence not only that children are more easily manipulated in war, but also how—something often asserted but never demonstrated.
Our theory, as well as a new “cross-rebel” dataset, also support the idea that costliness matters: foreign governments, international organizations, diasporas, and local populations can discourage child recruitment by withholding resources or punishing offenders (or, conversely, encourage these crimes by failing to act).
But punishing war crimes has limitations, and can only take us so far. Children’s reintegration opportunities must be at least as great as adults’ (something that demobilization programs sometimes fail to do). Also, indoctrination and misinformation can be directly influenced. We observe grassroots innovations in Uganda that could be models for the prevention and curbing of child soldiering and counter-insurgency generally.
At the outset of my PhD, if someone told me that idea to publication can take eight years, I might have never have ventured this far.
2 Responses
Chris, on stopping child soldiering, there is one approach you don’t canvas.
The most direct path to ending the practice may be to seek to end the conflicts rather than addressing the child soldier issue directly. This isn’t a argument against attacking the culture of impunity or educating children in ways to escape–these are surely useful. But if you look at the big (though uncounted) decline in the number of child soldiers since the 1990s, it’s clear that it has been due primarily to the fact that most of the big wars that employed very large numbers of child soldiers have stopped——it hasn’t been due to efforts to stop child soldiering directly.
Of course you’d never know there had been such a big decline from the NGO estimates of global child soldier numbers which have been stuck at 300,000 to 250,000 for well over a decade while war after war that employed large numbers of children came to an end.
The evidence suggests that peacemaking works — not very effectively, but effectively enough to reduce conflict numbers appreciably. The number of peacemaking initiatives jumped dramatically from the ’80s to the ’90s and beyond. So even though the efficacy of these initiatives is low, the absolute number peace agreements has increased appreciably. And when the wars end the children get demobilised.
AM
If it can cheer you up somehow: I began working on my job-market paper in the summer of 2002 by doing a review of the literature on sharecropping. I collected my dissertation data in Madagascar in 2004. I think you must’ve seen the initial version then at the SSRC conference, or did you see the pre-fieldwork version?
In any case, I then presented it when giving job talks and attending conferences in 2006-2007 and… It was only accepted in January 2011 and will be published in the February 2012 issue of Land Economics. I really wish someone had told me this at the beginning, and I hope this can show younger folks that there is value in not giving up.