ABSTRACT
The different stories we are told of the child combatant invite us to a double movement: to interpret and explain according to particular ideas about childhood, war, and the soldier, and to respond through familiar repertoires of political action that vary between mechanisms of protection and control of the child-soldier and celebration of the brave soldier to be. By exploring the representations of the ‘junior soldier’ in the United Kingdom as a promising and heroic young citizen and of those often referred to disparagingly as child-soldiers in Africa, articulated as a symbol of illegitimacy and an emergency in need of international salvation, the chapter focuses on how stories of the imagined childhood are mobilised, making these (contradictory) representations possible, in which children’s agency is overlooked: they are either the tools of state or the tools of war, depending on when and where war is discussed. These representations matter not only to how the stories of war and of the soldier are told, but also how the uneven distribution of power and value that define the Global North–Global South Relations are organised and reproduced.
