Child Soldiers and the Contested Imaginary of Community after War

This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.