“I Didn't Want to Die So I Joined Them”: Structuration and the Process of Becoming Boy Soldiers in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Child soldiers are generally portrayed either as victims of structural forces that are beyond their control and comprehension or as knowing agents of mayhem in search of revolutionary change or personal gain. Yet these singular perspectives are bedevilled by their dialectical limitations, the one overlooking capacities of individual will, the other prone to discounting historical and socioeconomic contexts. In this paper, through the lens of structuration theory that postulates the interconnectedness of structure and agency, we examine how boys were transformed into armed and organized combatants in Sierra Leone's recent civil war. Drawing from a series of interviews with a cohort of boys who fought with the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), we map out their experiences and perspectives in a way that highlights the juxtaposition of profound social forces and the capacity for personal agency that underlay the process of becoming child soldiers. We conclude by ruminating on the challenges of rehabilitating and reintegrating former child soldiers in the impoverished circumstances of post-war Sierra Leone.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 108 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.