We cordially invite you to this event, organised as part of the DIGICOLJUST-2 and 'Rebel Soldiers on Trial' projects, organized in collaboration with the ULB.
BIO
Prof Stacey Hynd is Professor of African and Global History at the University of Exeter, where she is the Dean of Postgraduate Research and the Doctoral College, and co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Research on Africa. She is Principal Investigator on the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council grant ‘Children of War: Evolving Local and Global Understandings of Child Soldiering in African Conflicts, c. 1940-2000’. She gained her DPhil from the University of Oxford and lectured in World and African History at the University of Cambridge. Her monograph Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Africa, c. 1915-60 was published in 2023.
ABSTRACT
Children are integral to contemporary humanitarian and human rights campaigns, both as subjects of intervention and as humanitarian icons. In the 1990s one form of child victim came to prominence: the child soldier. The iconographic image of ‘the child soldier’ was overwhelmingly African. Humanitarian campaigns in 1990s raged against this new ‘child soldier crisis’, depicting child soldiers as traumatized victims of adult abuse and the ‘barbarism’ of new hyper-violent, civilianized forms of contemporary warfare. However, contrary to these campaigns, child soldiering was not a new phenomenon: this paper argues that children were a significant presence in African conflicts throughout the twentieth century, and their involvement was linked to wider patterns of warfare, child labour and modern slavery, and youth mobilization It presents a comparative historical analysis of children’s involvement in warfare from colonial to contemporary eras, analysing thee levels of child soldiering: as able-bodied force multipliers; as liminal covert agents; and symbolic militarized ‘children’, looking at direct and indirect participation throughout. It also presents traces the evolution of humanitarian responses to children’s involvement in war from their absence in 1949 Geneva Additional Protocols to the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, phenomenologically tracing shifting ideas of ‘the African child soldier’ in both African and global knowledge systems.
The lecture is a collaborative endeavour of SHOC, the Faculty Arts & Humanities of VUB, the Faculty Letters and Social Sciences of ULB, the Research group Mondes Modernes et Contemporains (MMC) and the Atelier Genres et Sexualités (AGS) of the ULB. It is organised in the context of the research projects ‘DIGICOLJUST-2. Military Violence and its (Dis)contents in Colonial Congo. Sharing the Records, Writing the History’ (BELSPO, Brain 2.0) and ‘Rebel Soldiers on Trial. Military Agency and its Repression in Colonial Congo (1885-1960)’ (WEAVE FNRS/FWO).