Invisible Stakeholders. Children and War in Africa, Angela McIntyre (ed)

African children and youth have been absorbed into liberation struggles,political campaigns and insurgencies as surely as they constitute the majority of African citizens. Yet explanations for the presence of young people in battlefields have tended to be simplistic and overlook the political significance of this phenomenon. Children who participate in war are often represented as victims and forced to fight under the influence of drugs and brainwashing: a collective of irrational killing machines that is unaware of the moral implications and consequences of its actions. Alternately, young people have been glorified as the vanguards of African liberation struggles and as voices against colonial oppression and injustice.