British Academy Lecture: Child Soldiers: Coming of Age in Atrocity | Queen's University Belfast

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Speaker: Mark A. Drumbl, Washington and Lee University Chair: Professor Luke Moffett, Queen’s University Belfast International law defines children as persons under 18 and affirms their entitlement to special protection. Yet significant numbers of young people around the world continue to be drawn into armed conflict and are designated as child soldiers, a term shaped by the prevalent assumption that they are solely passive victims. Despite sustained international attention, efforts to end the recruitment and use of children in hostilities have struggled to achieve lasting success, and in some settings the practice is even intensifying. This persistence highlights the need for reimagined approaches that are more nuanced, empirically grounded, and contextual. This lecture investigates how dominant portrayals may obscure the complex pressures, coercive environments, and constrained choices that shape children’s trajectories into armed groups and considers how a more refined understanding might strengthen prevention, reintegration, and justice processes for the harm’s child soldiers endure and at times bring upon others. The lecture further examines how children become implicated in other forms of collective violence, including criminal and violent extremist organisations, and how contemporary conflict also unfolds in digital domains and in the context of climate disruption and public health crises. It reflects on the shifting boundary between political activism and political violence, the cultivation of juvenile rights cultures that honour both agency and vulnerability, the persistent tendency of adults to speak for rather than listen to young people, the structural limits of international law, and the broader question of what it means for children to come of age amid pervasive violence and instability. About the Speaker Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. His work has been relied upon by national and international cour