@article{ref1,
title="The ethics of child-soldiering in the Congo",
journal="Young",
year="2010",
author="Hoffmann, K.",
volume="18",
number="3",
pages="339-358",
abstract="In cutting-edge conflict theory, ‘young men’ are framed as a potential source of violence and insecurity in underdeveloped countries, especially in the so-called ‘failed states’. Supposedly, ‘young men’ bereft of socio-economic opportunities constitute a dangerous sub-population which can easily be recruited by ‘Spoilers’, or warlords when the pursuit of personal gain through the use of violence is rational; that is, in situations where the state has failed and therefore has no monopoly over the means of violence. Drawing on fieldwork among the Mai-Mai of South Kivu, I challenge the notion that the young fighters of the Mai-Mai were easily lured into the militias because they lacked other exit strategies. Recruitment actually followed a much more complex pattern. The young Mai-Mai fighters were either forcefully recruited or joined voluntarily for one or more of the following reasons: in order to exact vengeance on the ‘enemy’, for personal protection; to fight for national liberation; to protect a given community; for the right to enjoy the spoils of modernity; and to recast a disempowered and humiliated self into a vigorous and virile subject. In this article, therefore, I argue that recruitment into a non-state armed group was a question of ethics instead of the machinations of a universal instinct secretly at work.<p />",
language="",
issn="1103-3088",
doi="10.1177/110330881001800306",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/110330881001800306"
}