Why do governments and rebel groups employ child soldiers in some internal armed conflicts but not in others? This study argues that child soldiers can be viewed as a military innovation that governments and rebel groups have differing costs and incentives in employing. It is hypothesized that longer, bloodier conflicts, disputant capacities, and the presence of democratic institutions significantly influence whether child soldiers are used by one or both parties during internal armed conflicts. The effects of these factors are statistically analyzed, uncovering new insights into global patterns of child soldier usage by governments and rebel groups.

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The nation-state of Sierra Leone crumbled during the 1990s. A decade-long civil war destroyed the state and brutalized the national imaginings. Despite the lack of institutional structure, some members of its society chose to keep the nation alive through discourse on a listserv, an email forum called Leonenet. Using a multi-methodological approach that incorporated content analysis, interviews with cultural informants, ethnography and participant observation, the findings of the study reported in this article indicate that list members had created a virtual nation, defined as any community that communicates in cyberspace, whose collective discourse and/or actions are aimed towards the building, binding, maintenance, rebuilding or rebinding of a nation. Leonenet was a diasporic communicative space where Sierra Leone's state-related symbols were generated and then held in conceptual escrow, waiting for the institutional structure to return.

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At first, the Proud Boys were a seemingly innocuous white boys club that sprouted from the banter and riffs of online talk show host, Gavin McInnes. But the far right group grew into a nation-wide white supremacist organization. The group came about, thanks to McInnes and his The Gavin McInnes Show (TGMS). The Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes are a prime case study of the problem of free speech and the Internet. Here we see hate speech hiding behind the protective cloak of free speech. The conundrum becomes: How do we deal with fascist politics in the democratic space of the internet? The study conducts a frame analysis of over 32 hours of TGMS, utilizing Stanley’s (2018) rubric of fascist politics. By analyzing McInnes’s online discourse — his hate machine — we obtain a deeper understanding of how fascist politics gently slides into the mainstream and becomes a threat to peaceful political action.