Child soldiers in Nepal: re-conceptualizing reintegration and identity

Abstract

This article contributes to a critical discussion of practices of child soldier reintegration and scholarship on the topic. Child soldiers' lived experience of reintegration is characterized by an interconnection between their child and adult worlds resulting from their conflict experience, social transition to adulthood and identity. The article provides a primary source of data based on 30 semi-structured interviews with former child soldiers, both boys and girls, from the former Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist. This article makes both practical and theoretical contributions. Firstly, reintegration practices assume that children and adults should be separated based on altogether different needs. However, a child soldiers' reintegration experience is framed by an important social interconnection between their child and adult worlds. Secondly, by theoretically engaging children as both a subject and an agent, this article contributes to a nuanced theorization of identity and agency that defies simplistic categories of victimhood and childhood. Finally, the article advances a new framework called ‘post-conflict identity’ that consists of three interconnected subject positions—victim, participant and political agent—to account for the complex ways that former child soldiers negotiate and respond to different life events and transitions across their conflict and post-conflict lives.

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