African Children at War: Representation, Ethnopolitical Conflict, and Humanitarian Discourse

In this talk on his book, Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines popular depictions of African children at war (child soldiers) against the backdrop of some African ethnopolitical conflicts and humanitarian and human rights discourse. Adesola makes a case for an alternative interpretive engagement of literary recreations of African child soldiers since critical discussions of African child soldier accounts have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian and human rights discourse, which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa.