These children, who were not born criminals or agitators, were victims of impulse, inducement and intimidation, but nevertheless had become terrorists fully capable of murder and devoid of any sense of moral responsibility.
———Government of Cyprus Report on Youth “Corruption”Footnote 1Children and youth were among the main casualties of insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency, both directly and indirectly. They were forcibly displaced during resettlement and villagization, detained, and separated from their families during urban clearances. They were killed or maimed during battles and beaten by security forces, or watched such violence happening to friends and family. But not all children were victims or passive witnesses to liberation struggles: many became active participants. When the Cyprus Emergency erupted in 1955, “The British were baffled to find that the enemy throwing bombs was a sixteen year old schoolboy, or that those distributing revolutionary leaflets were ten-year-olds from the primary school,” with children and youth involved in every activity from painting slogans to sabotage and assassinations.Footnote 2 So why were children and youth so prominent in Cyprus, and were they as prominent or common in other liberation struggles? Were they politically aware patriots, or duped and coerced children “corrupted” by various insurgent groups? And how did different colonial states respond: to what extent did children and youth become targets of counterinsurgency strategy, both enemy-centric and population-centric?
Recent comparative studies of colonial warfare have reevaluated the extent and targeting of violence within counterinsurgency strategies, downplaying the significance of “hearts and minds” and stressing the centrality of coercion, but they have yet to fully analyze how strategies of both violence and development impacted upon different sections of “pacified” populations.Footnote 3 Insurgencies have been studied as ethnic, sectarian, and split by class and political ideology. More recently, feminist scholars, in particular, have applied a gendered lens to the study of counterinsurgency, arguing that the nature of conflict and people's reasons for participating need to be read through gender norms and tensions, as well as race, class, and religion.Footnote 4 One vector of (counter-)insurgency has been neglected in these revisionist analyses however: age. The relative neglect of children and youth in studies of colonial insurgency and counterinsurgency is somewhat anomalous considering the firm linkages drawn between youth and nationalism in the decolonization era, and between youth and violent revolution in the twentieth century.Footnote 5 This article will adopt a generational lens, deploying age as an organizing principle of its comparative analysis and focusing on the experiences of children and youth. The recruitment and utilization of children should be viewed not as a binary contrast to the recruitment of adults, but rather within the context of the wider mobilization of youth and the generational hierarchies that shaped independence struggles. As David Kilcullen has written, among the core principles of contemporary counterinsurgency is the need to “engage the women, beware the children.”Footnote 6 But when did concern about the need to “beware” children appear? This article will compare child and youth involvement in decolonization-era insurgencies and counterinsurgency responses across the British and French empires, taking Kenya and Cyprus as key case studies due to visibility of youth in these conflicts and the resultant greater depth of archival evidence on their surveillance, detention, and rehabilitation available, particularly following the release of the Migrated Archives.Footnote 7 Comparing the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya (1952–1960) and the Cyprus Emergency (1955–1959) allows analysis of different cultural, racial, rural and urban, and juvenile reform vectors that shaped the emergence and treatment of youth insurgency. This article argues that children and youth played a significant role in anti-colonial liberation struggles. It represents the first step in a larger research project on late twentieth-century global histories of child soldiering and serves to outline the broad patterns of child and youth insurgency and colonial responses. No single analytical framework explains the recruitment and use of child and youth soldiers in liberation struggle across multiple conflicts since their experiences and motivations varied widely, but key trends can be identified. Children and youth were mobilized through a combination of deliberate recruitment strategies, established social structures and networks, and their own variable levels and notions of agency. They seem to have been most numerous, or most visible, in totalizing insurgencies where whole communities were mobilized, in urban spaces, and where educational and social networks were sufficiently dense to facilitate targeted youth recruitment.
Archival research reveals that there was little expectation from colonial authorities of children and youth being prominent in insurgencies in early security responses to colonial emergencies, but that awareness of their involvement rose after urban riots, curfews, and mass detention brought children and youth into emergency courts and militarized spaces. Security forces, administrators, and judges from Indochina to Ireland all became alert to the increasing numbers of teenagers who emerged shouting slogans, throwing bombs, and shooting guns, which forced a recognition of youth political and (para-)military capacities as well as the development of specific counterinsurgency spaces and sanctions to combat them. This article argues that there was no coordinated (trans-)imperial response to these youthful insurgents and little comparative discussion of policies toward youth within British or French colonies. Shaped by wider counterinsurgency strategy, colonial responses to insurgent youth combined violence and reform. As insurgencies progressed, children and youth became prime targets of development and social engineering within broader “hearts and minds” campaigns in addition to being targets of security force violence. Attempts to “rehabilitate” detained youth fighters were based on existing juvenile reform technologies that had been shaped by imperial and transnational penal and social welfare networks, creating common responses. Juvenile “terrorism” was read predominantly through existing analytical frameworks of “delinquency” rather than securitized lenses, with young insurgents being placed under the remits of social welfare and community development departments rather than military or prison officials.
Childhood and youth are not universal categories but are rather historical and cultural constructs, sites of contestation between, and within, different colonial states and local communities.Footnote 8 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, middle-class Westernized models of childhood were exported across the colonized world, models which themselves had been co-constructed partly in response to racialized ideas of childhood imported back from the colonies.Footnote 9 Whilst there were differences between British and French ideals of childhood, these models generally read children as innocent, nonsexual beings requiring protection from labor, sex, and too rapid a transition into adulthood: a status that bore little resemblance to the lived realities of many colonized children, particularly those from poorer families.Footnote 10 Constructions of childhood varied across ethnic cultures, social strata, and positions within families, and were also recast through processes of modernization, with biomedicine, urbanization, and Christianity, and particularly Western education, changing expectations of children and childhood. But beyond these differences, there are sufficient commonalities to suggest that whereas metropolitan societies saw children as protected consumers, children in many African and Asian communities were viewed as producers, expected to provide labor to household economies and to contribute to the support and even defense of local communities in times of need. Military service itself could mark the transition from child or youth to adult. The line between childhood and youth was often blurry, with youth—or jeunesse—being a “shifter category” that is as much political as biological, but which usually denotes someone between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five, and of subaltern or marginalized social status.Footnote 11 In late colonial contexts, youth also carried connotations of progression and modernity, and the challenging of generational authorities, as in the Malayan term pemuda that became synonymous with “revolutionary” during the Emergency there.Footnote 12 It should be noted, however, that youth was implicitly and explicitly coded as male. Beyond puberty, girls tended to be categorized by their gender as “female” rather than by their age.Footnote 13
Comparative analysis of youthful involvement in anti-colonial insurgencies is hindered by the absence of child and youth voices in official archives, and by the mutable and inconsistent usage of chronologically bound colonial categories. The term “boy” in colonial parlance commonly invoked subordinate status rather than biological immaturity and was applied widely to adult males. In territories without standard birth registration, captured insurgents often provided only vague ages. Sometimes age was roughly determined by applying imprecise biological aging techniques, such as judging teeth, musculature, or bone growth.Footnote 14 Child and juvenile status varied between colonies and departments. In British colonies, the upper age limit for “child” status varied between twelve and eighteen years across labor, education, and legal categories. “Juvenile” was a legal category denoting someone under fifteen or sixteen years of age, but it could be used bureaucratically for those under the age of eighteen or sometimes nineteen, while as a moral category it became synonymous with “delinquent.”Footnote 15 Moreover, in Malayan records, the age categories for “students” were variously given as twelve to twenty-five years, fifteen to twenty-five years, or sixteen to thirty years.Footnote 16
Due to the slippery nature of these categories and imprecision in colonial records, this article will analyze the involvement in anti-colonial insurgencies of individuals described as “child,” “juvenile,” and “youth” in colonial archives but focus on what Pignot terms “ado-combatants”: teenage or adolescent fighters, who appear across those colonial categories.Footnote 17 Under current international humanitarian norms, “any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity” is categorized as a child soldier.Footnote 18 However, since many youthful insurgents did not identify as “children” and were not regarded as such by either colonial authorities or their own communities, this article will instead adopt the terms “youth soldier” and “youth insurgent” to refer to individuals who were active in anti-colonial insurgencies between the approximate ages of twelve and twenty, the upper age limit being extended as many youth joined insurgent groups as under-eighteens but aged beyond that category during the conflict. Reflecting the fluid and clandestine nature of many insurgencies, analysis will not dwell solely on armed fighters and formal or oathed members of insurgent groups but will include activist and militarized children who engaged in illegal activities in support of insurgencies. Youth soldier will refer to those directly involved in armed violence and auxiliary roles with an affiliation to an armed group, youth insurgent to those involved more informally or in support roles or where the evidence regarding their level of involvement is unclear. The article will also, where appropriate, analyze the smaller cohort of children under the age of twelve who acted in support of insurgencies, although their involvement suggests different agential qualities and they were a lesser concern for colonial security forces. Category slippage and a lack of firm data on the ages or membership of most insurgent groups makes it difficult to quantify exact figures for youth soldiers/insurgents to show where they were most numerous, but inferences about the relative extent of youth soldiering in various insurgencies will be drawn from detention and court data.
Child and youth voices rarely appear directly in these archives, which instead reveal bureaucratic discourses of counterinsurgency and colonial imaginings of youthful insurgency. The focus of this article is therefore both on adult representations of childhood and youth as legal categories and social concepts and on youths’ own experiences of liberation struggles, which will be drawn where possible from the memoirs and interviews of former youth insurgents. The article does not claim that child and youth participation in anti-colonial insurgencies was as intensive as that which marked the “child soldier crisis” of the 1990–2000s, when developing human, and child, rights-based arguments and transnational politics of age recast the involvement of children in war as a rights abuse.Footnote 19 However, their participation was more significant, in terms of numbers and impact, than has been acknowledged in public memory or the existing historiography, and contemporary child soldiering has deeper historical roots than is often recognized.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE YOUTH SOLDIER AS A CATEGORY OF CONCERN: YOUTH POLITICIZATION, MOBILIZATION, AND THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY
When child soldiering became a major humanitarian issue in the 1990s, it was depicted as a symptom of the “synchronous failure of ecological, political and economic systems of modern postcolonial states,” and of brutal and criminalized “new wars” and insurgencies.Footnote 20 It was not, however, a new problem. Children and youth have fought in wars throughout history, but it was in the 1970s that this involvement became the object of international condemnation, with concern driven by developing human, and child, rights discourses.Footnote 21 It was then conceptualized as a result of the forms of civilianized warfare deployed in anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. The use of children in war was first formally prohibited within international humanitarian law in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention, in articles proposed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), whose expansion into Africa and Asia brought youth insurgents to its delegates’ attention.Footnote 22 Diplomatic negotiations over the Additional Protocols therefore explicitly linked the increasing use of children in war to “national liberation struggles with a legitimate defense or guerrilla warfare.”Footnote 23 The opinions of national delegations were clearly molded by their political ideologies and experiences of anti-colonial insurgencies. The North Vietnamese delegate, Mr Van Luu, insisted that the use of children in conflict was “a result of colonial and neo-colonial wars,” and that they were “capable of acts which were inspired by noble feelings of patriotism or non-submission to a foreign occupying army.” Mrs. Mantzoulinous of Greece was likely referencing Cyprus when arguing that “children under fifteen could hardly be expected to remain passive when confronted by aggression and the invasion of their country,” and that governments should be allowed to accept children serving in “auxiliary roles.” Whilst ICRC and many developing world countries supported defining “children” as anyone under age eighteen, Britain joined Greece and Vietnam in arguing that fifteen to eighteen-year-olds “have the mental and physical capacity to fight and will wish to serve their country in time of need,” reflecting domestic military recruitment policy and colonial experiences.Footnote 24 After extensive debate, the Additional Protocols outlawed the recruitment and use of children under the age of fifteen in conflict in line with existing international legal and rights-based definitions of childhood.Footnote 25
To understand why teenagers became discursively and materially significant to decolonization conflicts, the political, military, and moral economies of insurgency that contributed to the recruitment of youth soldiers in these liberation struggles need to be assessed, as do the intersections between shifting ideas of childhood and developing trends in insurgent warfare that drove new logics of youth mobilization. Studies of child soldiering have frequently suggested that societies where children are economically productive contributors to society are more likely to see children drawn into armed groups, but we still lack quantitative evidence to support such claims.Footnote 26 Similarly, “youth bulge” demographic structures are frequently viewed as contributing to contemporary civil war and youth violence, but while colonies were youthful populations, the significance of youth to insurgency was less a function of demography than a result of youth politicization.Footnote 27 A more significant vector of youth soldiering in liberation struggles was the politicization of childhood and youth common across late-colonial governance and the consequent mobilization of younger generations by anti-colonial forces.
As Richard Waller has argued regarding Kenya, colonialism relied on co-opting youth for its future, but it also enabled youth access to globalized cultures, educational resources, and social spaces that allowed them to challenge both colonial authority and the gendered hierarchies that underpinned colonized societies.Footnote 28 Late colonial states sought to harness the potentialities of childhood and youth, constituencies “identified as integral to nation building and the very project of becoming modern.”Footnote 29 Colonial institutions like schools, youth clubs, sporting organizations, and scout troops were designed to socially engineer children and youth into disciplined colonial subjects but created new forms of generational identity and horizontal infrastructures that provided easy vectors for the spread of nationalist sentiment and subsequent mobilization.Footnote 30 The figure of youth then was “inherently doubled as both peril and promise.”Footnote 31 The 1920–1940s saw a global trend toward youth mobilization, with Fascist and Communist youth movements highlighting the political potential of mobilizing younger generations to overturn existing structures of power, inspiring anti-colonial parties to co-opt youth's rebellious energies to their causes.Footnote 32 From the 1920s youth radicalism established a pattern for the political mobilization of (particularly urban) colonial students and youth, from the pemuda of Malaya to the Algerian jeunesse, and by the 1940s youth were increasingly contesting the more moderate politics of older anti-colonial activists.Footnote 33
For insurgencies which erupted during the early stages of decolonization, particularly those in Palestine, Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesia, the Second World War left significant legacies of youth mobilization and militarization that shaped children and youth's involvement in insurgency. Children and youth were widely involved as soldiers and partisans in that war, including many who fought for colonial armies.Footnote 34 Giorgios Grivas, leader of EOKA (the National Organization of Cypriot Struggle), explained his deliberate recruitment of teenagers by stating, “I had some experience of working with the young during the occupation, and later during the civil war in Greece, when time and time again, boys of sixteen and seventeen proved themselves equal or superior to mature men.”Footnote 35 Total warfare established patterns of utilizing children as force multipliers during periods of increased manpower demands. Moreover, it established the significance of youth mobilization to sustaining colonial regimes, creating horizontal networks of association that could be hijacked or subverted by anti-colonial forces. French colonies in particular invested in youth organizations as part of social engineering efforts. In Cochinchina, Vichy youth and sport networks were transformed into a “region-wide paramilitary Vanguard Youth,” which in August 1945 was assimilated into the Viet Minh.Footnote 36 Japanese occupying forces in Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesia similarly sought to harness the energies and loyalties of youth, establishing youth and paramilitary organizations like the Giyu Gun and Patriotic Youth, providing pathways for later youth mobilization by anti-colonial insurgents.Footnote 37 For children who grew up under Japanese occupation, war and violence became normalized.Footnote 38 Colonial authorities in Malaya attributed youthful insurgency there to “many hundreds of young detained persons spen[ding] their formative years without normal education during the Japanese occupation of 1942–5” or suffering the loss of their parents, leading to a “problem of delinquency.”Footnote 39
The breakdown of generational authority and resultant juvenile delinquency became key explanatory frameworks for colonial officials seeking to understand, and counter, youth insurgency, particularly in British colonies. The postwar years established the figure of the delinquent as a major object of global welfarist concern and a metonymy for the fears of colonial officials, local elites, and community elders about the deleterious impact of urbanization, detribalization, and modernity on colonized youth.Footnote 40 Parallels were drawn discursively between the newly-emerged category of adolescence as a stage of psychological and of national life, the “liminal category that marked the threshold between childhood and adulthood [being] a perfect metaphor for the political and social transformation from colony to independent nation,” although administrations generally retained the terminology of juvenile and youth rather than adolescent or teenager.Footnote 41 In Kenya, officials such as Thomas Askwith and Louis Leakey argued that Mau Mau was driven by a breakdown in tribal discipline and traditional socialization caused by too-rapid a modernization of Gikuyu society: “A whole generation has disintegrated.”Footnote 42 Historically, as today, Western constructions of childhood served as a global disciplinary tool and moralizing practice, blaming “violent” or “vulnerable” children on the failings of indigenous social structures and cultures.Footnote 43 Juvenile delinquents, “young toughs,” “thugs,” and “hooligans” were thereby identified as “strong recruiting grounds” for anti-colonial groups in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus; discursively, colonial language shifted from “child” to “juvenile” or “youth” when it sought to deny young insurgents access to the political category of childhood and its connotations of innocence and to justify security measures against them.Footnote 44 Rather than recognizing the legitimate grievances of youth, officials preferred to explain child and youth militancy as the result of a breakdown of generational authority and failed parenting.Footnote 45 The Cyprus government openly blamed a lack of “parental control” for children's participation in anti-colonial actions.Footnote 46 Youthful militancy there was not seen as stemming from inherent criminality or “anti-social behavior,” but from a “complete lack of discipline at … a difficult age.”Footnote 47 But juvenile delinquency was both a cause and a consequence of colonial counterinsurgency: newspapers in 1954 described Nairobi in the wake of Operation Anvil as being “invaded by child gangsters.… Thousands of African children, their lives disrupted by the terrorist struggle, are flooding into Nairobi to live as criminals.”Footnote 48 As Burman argues, for children in conflict situations, “If the price of innocence is passivity, then the cost of resourcefully dealing with conditions of distress and deprivation is to be pathologized.”Footnote 49
Youth politicization and radicalism was driven by growing socio-economic grievances, as well as political repression.Footnote 50 Colonialism generated unprecedented levels of tension between the young and gerontocratic power structures, tensions driven by the contradictory ramifications of globalized modernity and the colonial project, and these inevitably shaped anti-colonial movements. Particularly after 1945, many young people found themselves struggling with access to education and unemployment or underemployment and were consequently unable to marry and establish their own households. In Kenya, Ocobock argues, avenues for coming of age stalled in the 1950s, leaving many youth trapped between childhood and adulthood.Footnote 51 This period of what Summers has termed “waithood” created a moral economy of civil war that hinged on generational as well as ethnic and anti-colonial tensions.Footnote 52 Generational tensions are historically recurrent; from precolonial to contemporary eras, communities in Kenya, as elsewhere, have seen a reluctance of elders to grant agency to youth and fears that youth were attempting to usurp elders’ power and responsibilities and subvert generational hierarchies. As Lonsdale argues, the Mau Mau Rebellion was regarded by many Kikuyu elders and the colonial state as the epitome of “youth gone bad.”Footnote 53 From the perspective of the forest fighters themselves, joining Mau Mau marked the beginning of a new, alternative form of manhood as existing pathways were blocked by colonial or elder authorities.Footnote 54
Whilst colonial authorities and adults feared youth agency and desires for personal advancement and independence, some insurgent leaders sought to capitalize on youth psychology, viewing them as naturally rebellious and mentally pliable.Footnote 55 The most deliberate and strategic recruitment of youth was undertaken in Cyprus, where, with staunch support for the Orthodox church and some 90 percent of children receiving elementary education, schools, churches, and youth organizations became prime vectors of recruitment.Footnote 56 As French notes, “the outstanding feature of EOKA's rank and file was their youth,” with the most active members being between sixteen and twenty-five.Footnote 57 This was due to Grivas’ decision to “turn the youth into the seedbed of EOKA”; “above all, I concentrated on the young.” For Grivas, the active and rebellious nature of youth predisposed them to insurgent action: “It is among the young people that one finds audacity, the love of taking risks, and the first great and difficult achievements,” and he claimed responsibility for their involvement.Footnote 58 Colonial narratives frequently depict youth as objects of adult indoctrination, exploitation, and intimidation rather than as active recruits and volunteers, denying their agency. Colonial authorities in Kenya and Cyprus typically described juveniles as being either “kidnapped or coerced” into joining armed groups or indoctrinated into supporting anti-colonial causes.Footnote 59 Certainly in Kenya, urban youth gangs, family networks, and oathing ceremonies by Mau Mau gangs were key pathways for youth to join the rebellion, pathways that could shade from voluntary to coercive depending upon individual and circumstance.Footnote 60 A 1957 report on the “corruption of youth” in Cyprus lambasted the “grooming” and “seducing” of Cypriot youth by EOKA, and decried that teenagers had been “perverted from a natural abhorrence of crime … only to be abandoned when they have served their purpose—with every prospect that their lawless generation will become an easy prey to communism.”Footnote 61 Youth became a key politico-ideological battleground in the Cold War and colonial states repeatedly expressed concerns about Communist infiltration of youth groups, a phenomenon that was present in the Malayan emergency but wildly exaggerated in colonies like Cyprus.Footnote 62
Agency is a problematic concept to apply to children and youth, particularly from the traces that exist in colonial archives of colonized youths struggling to build their own identities and futures amidst the fight for their communities’ own independence.Footnote 63 Reading against the grain of the racialized generational hierarchies of power that suffuse archival texts and accessing former youth soldiers’ accounts, however, suggests that many youths, particularly older teens, displayed political resistance and determination to join liberation struggles. Many of their narratives are expressly politicized, stressing that their political consciousness was central to their voluntary enlistment.Footnote 64 With no children, households, or careers of their own, youth faced fewer obstacles to entry into armed groups. Some even acted as radicalizing agents for militant groups and pushed “adults into higher levels of activism, rebellion and terrorism.”Footnote 65 What might appear to be a clear example of agency and a rational decision to enlist, however, was likely influenced by post-conflict memory and experience, and undergirded by multiple motivations “that exceed rational action and articulated intention to include collective fantasies, psychical desires and the struggle just to get by.” These could include wanting to avenge mistreatment of their families, peer pressure and a desire to belong, pursuit of personal advancement, or the influences of (ethno-)nationalist or communist ideologies.Footnote 66 Other youth soldiers demonstrate what has been described as tactical or circumscribed agency: unable to escape involvement in conflict, they volunteered for certain roles while resisting other duties. Younger children notably had a more restricted capacity for independent action, socially and psychologically.Footnote 67
LOGICS OF YOUTH SOLDIERING: TROOP FORTIFICATION, TEENAGE LIMINALITY, AND SYMBOLIC CHILDHOODS
Youth soldiers served in multiple capacities throughout anti-colonial insurgencies, from frontline to intelligence collection and auxiliary roles depending on the nature of the insurgency. They often graduated from the latter to the former: as one Special Branch officer in Cyprus noted, “schoolchildren are enlisted in their teens into leaflet groups and receive progressive promotion to bomb, sabotage and killer groups.”Footnote 68 Multiple, sometimes overlapping logics underpinned this diversity of roles, shaped by the variable tactics and strength of insurgent groups. On one level, children and youth served simply as troop fortifiers increasing or sustaining the manpower of armed groups and movements. Youth soldiering here was a function of asymmetrical warfare, with an instrumental use of children and youth as a significant population resource in ways that were not determined or classified by their age. This was particularly the case in insurgencies characterized by peasant political economies and mass mobilization, like Malaya and Indochina, where teenage boys and girls were recruited as physically capable violence workers. Children and youth often functioned as force multipliers, serving in auxiliary capacities before being mobilized as combatants on the frontline during more protracted conflicts. Teenagers and students, both male and female, played a significant role in the Algerian revolution, where tensions between Islamic and French notions of modern generational and gender norms shaped ideological battlegrounds.Footnote 69 Girls and young women were rarely accepted in frontline roles as National Liberation Front (FLN) armed combatants, due more to their gender than age, but these mujahidat performed important logistical support capacities for rural maquis, as couriers, cooks, washerwomen, or nurses.Footnote 70
In prolonged conflicts, the use of youth soldiers increased as the war dragged on and new recruits were needed to sustain manpower. David Anderson has shown that as insurgency intensified in Kenya, those conscripted into Mau Mau ranks were appreciably younger than those who had joined at the start of the Emergency.Footnote 71 By late 1956 Special Branch officers in Cyprus recorded “youths being up-graded to killers at a much earlier age,” from fifteen years old.Footnote 72 By the time of the Second Indochina War, separate units had been established for teenagers, such as the Youth Guerrillas, Ho Chi Minh's Child Pioneers, and the Youth Shock Brigades who “went in first and returned last,” opening roads and burying the dead. Guillemot estimates that the Youth Shock Brigade had a total membership of 220,000–350,000 during the first and second Indochina wars, most of whom were fifteen to twenty years old with around half Brigade members being female. Some eight thousand children are thought to have been involved in the battle of Dien Bien Phu.Footnote 73 In South Vietnam, Vichy-era colonial youth projects were transformed from 1960–1963 into an armed force by the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Republic Youth programs, with their female auxiliaries, and the Combat Youth mobilized rural youth to become community self-defense groups, “acting as guerrilla forces to place the Viet Cong on the defensive,” guarding strategic hamlets, and receiving military training.Footnote 74
On a second level, children and youth were utilized in a manner that exploited their youthful liminality: physically able to undertake roles normatively fulfilled by adults, but culturally and discursively categorized as “civilian/child” rather than “combatant/adult” and therefore less likely to draw the attention of security forces or be exposed to the full force of colonial law. Tactical flexibility was key to the success of insurgent forces, and youth liminality was a significant force fueling this flexibility. Youth soldiers offered significant tactical advantages in intelligence activities such as scouting, spying, and couriering, during which they replicated normative childhood duties or behaviors to avoid drawing enemy attention, such as playing, housework, or running errands. Memoirs from Pham Thang and Phung Quan highlight how the Viet Minh exploited the small stature and presumed innocence of children to deploy boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen as messengers and scouts.Footnote 75 In Algeria, children were similarly used by revolutionary forces as messengers or spies, with girls and young women operating as part of urban networks, exploiting assumptions of female innocence and the inviolability of female bodies in public to smuggle goods, bombs, and intelligence, as in the battle of Algiers.Footnote 76 For boys, the Scouts Musulmanes Algeriens (SMA) was a nationalist youth movement that became a key recruiting ground for the FLN, with thousands of routiers (Rover Scouts, usually seventeen to twenty-five years old) using their training to join the maquis. This prompted French military intelligence to assert the SMA was in effect a “clandestine army.”Footnote 77 Scouting proved to be “both an instrument of colonial authority and a subversive challenge to the legitimacy of empire” in both French and British colonies.Footnote 78
The dissonance between constructions of youthful innocence and the realities of youth capacity for action was starkest around incidences of armed violence. Youthful liminality was exploited to the full in situations such as the arrest of a sixteen-year-old boy in Paphos for carrying a loaded submachine gun in his violin case, or when the Pancyprian Academy for Girls was closed after demonstrating schoolgirls decoyed security forces into a bomb ambush in which one soldier and one policeman were killed.Footnote 79 Insurgent groups sought to exploit the gap between violent youth action and legal accountability by deploying teenagers for lethal assaults. In both Kenya and Cyprus authorities asserted that insurgents were deliberately using adolescents to conduct assassinations “knowing full well that they would not be hanged by reason of their age,” with colonial legislation forbidding the execution of anyone under the age of eighteen.Footnote 80 The Cyprus government repeatedly argued that “teenage bomb throwers and assassins were preferred” by EOKA.Footnote 81
The use of children and youth as troop fortifiers and the mobilization of youth liminality both held historical precedence in conflict, most recently with the “boy soldiers” and partisan groups of the Second World War.Footnote 82 Anti-colonial insurgencies, however, inculcated a new logic of youth soldiering: that of the symbolic mobilization of childhood as a psychological tactic of warfare. In 1950–1960s anti-colonial insurgencies became increasingly internationalized and colonial counterinsurgency evermore subject to human rights critiques. Humanitarian and human rights groups increased their engagement with Africa and Asia, and although humanitarian groups remained primarily focused on infants and young children as the objects of aid rather than teenagers, the mistreatment of youth insurgents by security forces and in detention did attract attention from ICRC delegates and others. The political mobilization of children in support of insurgent campaigns through involving school children in protests and riots became an effective guerrilla tactic, leveraging colonial constructions of childhood against colonial regimes. It occurred mainly in urban guerrilla conflicts, enacted by insurgent groups like EOKA and the FLN with international support and propaganda strategies, and was consequently notably absent in Mau Mau.Footnote 83 Colonial interventions into childhood had historically been justified as part of the “civilizing mission,” raising children from the “primitiveness” and “barbarity” of indigenous cultures.Footnote 84 But in the 1950–1970s, insurgent groups harnessed modern media technologies and exploited Western notions of the innocence and passivity of children to highlight the barbarity of colonial state violence targeted against school children, the purported beneficiaries of colonial modernity who were now driven to protest against its inequities. With insurgencies increasingly being fought via public relations and media as well as on the ground, children became important sources of propaganda.Footnote 85 School children made ideal demonstrators because they were assumed in popular and international media discourses to be innocent and naturally apolitical, with any action against them “rais[ing] the cry of brutality.”Footnote 86 EOKA deliberately deployed schoolchildren as part of their urban clashes with British forces, knowing that images of government troops “beating schoolboy rioters” would generate significant international outcry, especially because the schoolboys were white.Footnote 87 Many demonstrations in Cyprus involved up to 1,500 school pupils, with politically-active older pupils and siblings encouraging younger ones to participate, and others drawn in by group mentalities and the chance for excitement.Footnote 88 The participation of secondary and elementary schoolchildren served both symbolic and strategic purposes simultaneously, showing the world “that the whole of Cyprus, from the smallest schoolgirl to the Archbishop himself, was in the battle” for freedom, whilst at the same time alleviating pressure on EOKA mountain gangs by focusing security force attention on the towns.Footnote 89
Child and youth soldiers also assumed particular cultural and symbolic significance during the first Indochina War. As Goscha argues, this was one of the most “socially totalizing wars” in modern history.Footnote 90 As the war raged on, children in Communist Vietnam became considered “citizen-soldiers capable of making great sacrifices and deserving of honour and praise.”Footnote 91 Child and youth soldiers became particularly important as “new heroes” and martyrs for patriotic emulation campaigns designed to promote revolutionary warfare and mass mobilization. One such was fifteen-year-old Ly Tu Trong, executed for killing a French secret agent, who proclaimed at his trial that “there is only one true path to adulthood, and that is the revolutionary one!”Footnote 92
COLONIAL COUNTERINSURGENCY RESPONSES: MILITARY, LEGAL, AND DEVELOPMENTAL ACTION
Children and youth were not regarded as security threats at the outbreak of hostilities, as security forces and political elites were culturally conditioned to equate “combatant” with “adult,” so initial security orders identified them as civilians who were not legitimate targets of direct violence.Footnote 93 However, as conflicts deepened and the lines between civilian and enemy combatant became increasingly blurred, state targeting of children and youth by security forces emerged. In Kenya, by mid-1954 juveniles had been identified as a “social menace” and “serious security risk.”Footnote 94 Security personnel reported juveniles in Nairobi being used as Mau Mau couriers, scouts, and “active agents,” leading Special Branch to “interrogate them at length” in screening centers: a process that usually involved physical and/or psychological violence.Footnote 95 Branche posits that in the early stages of the Algerian war French military forces did not consider women or children to be military targets, but by 1957 increasing numbers of teenagers were being detained, most commonly in Constantine province and Petite Kabylie, where separate Centre de Triage et Transit camps were built for young detainees. As in Mau Mau, many Algerian youths were detained for minor infractions and officials often typecast young children not as “the enemy” but rather as victims led astray by their parents. Captured youth insurgents were sent to Youth Education camps. As the conflict wore on, though, military forces drew fewer distinctions between child/adult and civilian/military, and juveniles were held in the same conditions as adults and those over fourteen could be arrested and tortured like an adult.Footnote 96 Colonial archives contain little direct evidence of children and youth serving in colonial security forces as informers, agents, or soldiers.Footnote 97 Traces do emerge in media, humanitarian accounts, and memoirs, however, in patterns replicating children's auxiliary use in insurgent forces. Ujana Park juvenile detention camp in Kenya was reported to hold “some orphans who have worked for the security forces in minor roles.”Footnote 98 Loyalist paramilitary or Home Guard units are likely to have included local youth as armed fighters, with recruitment undertaken along clientelist and patrimonial lines.Footnote 99 Some juvenile insurgents were flipped by security forces to work for them, providing local intelligence and necessary skills, such as Saïd Ferdi, whose memoirs recount his experiences as a chouf (sentry) for the FLN before being arrested by a French patrol at age thirteen, detained and tortured, and subsequently agreeing to work as a translator for French forces.Footnote 100
What really drew colonial authorities’ attention to the emergence of youth as a significant presence in anti-colonial insurgency was the appearance of children in courts which, particularly in Cyprus and Kenya, generated sufficient concern to be separately recorded in legal and administrative archives. In Cyprus, children and youth were among the first people arrested on Emergency offences.Footnote 101 French notes that 32 percent of individuals brought to trial were high school students.Footnote 102 Judges and police certainly complained that juvenile offending was “daily demonstrated” in Special Courts.Footnote 103 Annual reports establish that, between 1955 and 1959, 1,073 juveniles under age sixteen were charged with Emergency offences and 894 of those were convicted, primarily for breaking curfew, illegal strikes, unlawful assemblies and riots or other offences “against social order,” and violating firearms laws.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, in 1955 alone there were 2,571 convictions of juveniles under Mau Mau Emergency regulations.Footnote 105 The sanctioning of these juvenile insurgents was shaped by tensions between punishment, deterrence, and reform that were characteristic of late colonial penalties, where notions of judicial leniency and welfarist reform that dominated the rhetoric of colonial governance clashed with the reality of continued penal violence and the brutality of Emergency detention.
Colonial courts struggled to determine what the most effective and appropriate sanctions were for deterring and punishing youth insurgents. Generally, colonial legal officials were reluctant to sentence juveniles to imprisonment, fearing that they would be radicalized and corrupted (or sexually exploited) by adult insurgents. Other normative peace-time sanctions—fining and being bound over—referred responsibility onto families, but as Governor Hardy bemoaned in Cyprus, “It is clear that neither their parents nor the school authorities are able to control them.”Footnote 106 To provide a more forceful response, a “unanimous” decision was taken to allow corporal punishment of boys up to the age of eighteen charged with Emergency offences on the grounds that “whipping” was an “appropriate” and “humane” punishment for disciplining boys.Footnote 107 Corporal punishment had long been regarded as an effective and culturally-appropriate sanction for disciplining colonized bodies within the British Empire, and for male youth in particular.Footnote 108 The Migrated Archives in Kew record ninety-six whipping sentences between December 1955 and September 1956, with between eight and twelve lashes inflicted.Footnote 109 In total, some 154 boys were sentenced to be caned by the end of 1956, sixty of them younger than sixteen.Footnote 110 But with Greece bringing a case to the European Court of Human Rights over the Cyprus Emergency, Britain became wary of potentially scandalous forms of counterinsurgency violence, and carefully monitored its use against juveniles. In this context, caning boys proved counterproductive and was greeted with revulsion by Greek and Greek-Cypriot communities for whom it was not a culturally-normative sanction.Footnote 111 It also caused concern in American media and diplomatic circles, leading the Foreign Office to request Cypriot authorities rebrand the practice as “caning” to render it more palatable to international opinion.Footnote 112 Due to such controversy the power of Special Courts to impose corporal punishment was revoked in December 1956.Footnote 113 Outrage over the physical punishment of youthful insurgents was distinctly contingent and racialized, however: no concern was raised over the simultaneous and more widespread use of corporal punishment against juvenile offenders in Kenya, where 3,197 young persons were caned for Mau Mau-related offences in 1955 alone.Footnote 114
Whilst youth soldiers were frequently physically sanctioned through corporal punishment, they were at least largely spared the threat of capital punishment since laws forbade the execution of anyone under eighteen, something insurgent forces exploited. In Kenya, where the use of capital punishment was most extensive, with 1,499 Emergency-related capital sentences handed down and 1,090 executions, 151 male juveniles and between two and seventeen females were sentenced to death for Mau Mau offences but had their sentences commuted due to their age.Footnote 115 In Cyprus, between April 1955 and February 1957, 136 under-eighteens were prosecuted for what had become capital offences, with a further 474 suspected of committing such offences.Footnote 116 Concern about “an increase in terrorist activity by youths between sixteen and eighteen, whom EOKA are now employing to shoot people” led senior police and legal officers to oppose metropolitan proposals to raise the minimum age for the death penalty from sixteen to eighteen years, with the Chief Justice stating that anyone between those ages convicted of murder “should hang.”Footnote 117 Although London forced the minimum age to be set at eighteen to avoid international condemnation, it is significant that the nine Cypriots who were executed for terrorist offences were all aged nineteen to twenty-three—their hangings were intended to deter youth violence.Footnote 118 The youthfulness of these hanged men drew international diplomatic condemnation. When Evagoras Pallikarides was hanged, the Greek ambassador to the United Nations called the act “an unprecedented political murder, with a teenager as its victim.”Footnote 119
For many youth insurgents, their seizure by colonial security forces ended in detention or imprisonment. To contain them, colonial administrations consequently developed a mix of detention camps, approved schools, youth camps, and juvenile reformatories. These were run by a combination of probation officers, former military personnel, prison officers, welfare workers, humanitarians, and missionaries, which meant juvenile detention and reform were shaped by competing logics of violence and welfare. Numerous studies have revealed the violence and brutality inherent in colonial detention, and youth were not exempt from such treatment.Footnote 120 In Cyprus, of the 1,118 men in detention in June 1957, 20 percent were nineteen or younger.Footnote 121 ICRC files note concerns about the “extreme youth of a large number of detainees,” many of whom could “physically, be considered as children,” and their poor treatment in detention. Delegates conducting prison visits wrote in confidential reports to Geneva that detention had the “same psychological effect on these youths as joining the army in times of war” and “after this experience they are not morally prepared to return to school.”Footnote 122 Accounts were submitted of young detainees being kicked and beaten with batons, to the point of requiring hospitalization.Footnote 123 In corroboration, colonial records detail “young terrorists” participating in riots and hunger strikes over poor conditions.Footnote 124
In Kenya, by mid-1955, some 67,000 persons were detained or imprisoned for Mau Mau offences.Footnote 125 They included over two thousand boys under eighteen and nearly a thousand girls.Footnote 126 Juvenile detainees were originally held alongside adults, where “they spent their entire day sitting with their feet in a drain, their bodies shrouded in blankets or sacks, and their minds and hearts revolving in wicked circles.”Footnote 127 Medical, moral, and ideological concerns soon drove the segregation of juvenile detainees, following overcrowding, fear of radicalization by hardcore adult detainees, and reports of “improper sexual relations [with] young uncircumcised boys having been procured.”Footnote 128 Quaker social worker Eileen Fletcher and her supporters raised alarm in parliament and the media about the abuse and neglect of children, particularly girls, in detention.Footnote 129 While the British government attempted to discredit Fletcher and manipulate the age of girls to deny they were “juveniles” deserving of protections, evidence from Kenyan archives supports her claims of maltreatment. Young girls detained in Kamiti petitioned the government concerning their treatment, questioning whether “a child of you aged 12 years carry a stone weights 2½ by 10” taking little food like that. Besides that we are beaten by order of a chief warder [sic].”Footnote 130
WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS—REFORMING YOUNG “HEARTS AND MINDS”
As it became clear that coercion and punishment were insufficient to deter youth insurgents, and that insurgencies could not be ended through violence alone, children and youth became significant targets of development and social engineering in “hearts and minds” campaigns across both British and French empires. Yet developmental interventions were consistently under-funded and under-resourced, and consequently failed to capture either the hearts or the minds of child and youth populations.Footnote 131 Villagization, the forcible resettlement and concentration of civilian populations to combat rural insurgency, formed a key pillar of counterinsurgency strategy in Malaya, Kenya, and Algeria, and had a strong youth focus since children were the largest demographic of the resettled population and the most vulnerable, with high mortality and morbidity rates reported in Kenya and Algeria.Footnote 132 In Kenya, non-governmental organizations including the British Red Cross and Save the Children were heavily involved in supplying humanitarian aid and developmental support for villagized communities, with a particular focus on infant and child healthcare.Footnote 133 After 1955, colonial officials increasingly viewed the Mau Mau Emergency as a social welfare problem, and sent probation and community development staff to the Kikuyu reserves to oversee the “rehabilitation” of the Kikuyu family by instituting communal confessions to “purge” families of Mau Mau adherence, and readying them for home craft, child care, and agricultural classes.Footnote 134
Education was a key focus of population-centric counterinsurgency, but one which reflected the ambivalences of the colonial project. Schools intended to train children to be productive and obedient colonized subjects became instead spaces of youth politicization, resistance, and recruitment into insurgency, if not by armed groups directly then by peers seeking to politicize their classmates.Footnote 135 With high levels of school enrollment, Greek Gymnasia schools in Cyprus became a major recruiting ground for EOKA, and Governor Harding viewed them as “a dangerous agency for the organized intimidation and the disruption of society.”Footnote 136 This led authorities to “de-Hellenise” education in an attempt to counteract the cultural nationalism of the Greek schools, prompting a backlash of student agitation. During the “Battle of the Flags” over student attempts to remove British flags from school grounds, the Cyprus government responded to student militancy by enforcing school closures to the extent that Cyprus’ education system almost collapsed.Footnote 137 At any given time during 1955–1956, as many as 419 of 722 elementary schools and 18 of 57 secondary schools were closed. It was noted, however, that school closures merely gave youth more time and opportunity to support EOKA's activities, rather than dissuading them.Footnote 138 Education was also a site of intense conflict during Mau Mau, with Kikuyu Independent Schooling Association schools being forcibly closed following alleged Mau Mau infiltration, while Mau Mau fighters targeted Christian mission schools that failed to support the movement, burning down about fifty in 1953.Footnote 139 School fees were sometimes lifted for Home Guards’ children whereas teenagers suspected of taking an oath were not allowed to leave villages for schooling.Footnote 140 In Algeria, education became a major focus of “hearts and minds” programming following the Constantine Plan, with schools run by the Service de formation de la jeunesse algérienne inside resettlement villages providing a key element of psychological warfare.Footnote 141 Some forty thousand children were enrolled in New Village schools in Malaya by 1952, which were intended “to stand for progress and enlightenment and the development of Malayan national consciousness” to create modernized colonial youth subjects and counter Communist influence, but these were admitted to be poorly run and ineffectual.Footnote 142 British authorities also restricted the transnational movement of students from China to Malaya, and from Greece or Turkey to Cyprus to prevent externally trained activists fueling insurgencies.Footnote 143
Whilst general social welfare and community development interventions sought to prevent anti-colonial forces from capturing young minds, youth insurgents and youth soldiers who had been apprehended by security services required more targeted reform. Rehabilitation programs for those categorized as juvenile detainees blended colonial understandings of local age relations and global technologies of juvenile reform with the aim of constructing productive colonial subjects. Late colonial penal reform had already seized upon juvenile delinquents as a “manageable, malleable” category of offenders whose “rehabilitation” offered a way of reclaiming the future, so these techniques were transferred, with varying degrees of success, to the treatment of young insurgents, who were placed under the control of welfare and probation staff rather than the police or military officials who ran general detention.Footnote 144 In Malaya, male insurgents younger than eighteen were sent to the Advanced Approved School in Telok Mas, Malacca, for “training, education and reform,” which was said to produce good results. Approximately half of the female detainees under a similar regime at the Majeedi rehabilitation center were between fifteen and seventeen years old.Footnote 145 Officials in Malaya “believed that if the Government could compensate for the lack of proper leadership, education, vocational training and family influence, such detained persons would be less susceptible to communist influence.”Footnote 146 Unlike most African and Asian colonies, Cyprus lacked existing juvenile reformatories or borstals, and so establishing youth detention facilities was deemed an “urgent priority,” but one that apparently went unfulfilled due to limited resources.Footnote 147 British Prison Commission officials brought to Cyprus to inspect the emergency detention regime advised on the rehabilitation program for the youth detainees being held at Kokkinotrimithia detention camp. They argued that any regime “must attach first importance to work,” supported by games, hobbies, and education “designed to help individuals after their release.” Even so, their reports reveal a limited belief in the potential for “rehabilitation” under Emergency conditions, and advise that no attempt should be made to force a “change of heart” in the boys since this could provoke a backlash and “a real effort will have to be made to prevent deterioration and further embitterment.”Footnote 148
It was in Kenya that the most developed, and seemingly effective efforts at juvenile rehabilitation occurred, due to a combination of existing infrastructure and innovative leadership. Community development officials working at the main Manyani detention camp for boys dedicated themselves to reforming their charges and securing the necessary support and resources to enable a full rehabilitation program. Roger Owles wrote of his interactions with the boys: “Many could not control their tears. Some [tales] were stunning in their terribleness. I could hardly believe boys so young could be involved.”Footnote 149 Owles was sympathetic to the boys but wrote, “Let no man suggest they are anything other than a collection of Devils!”Footnote 150 Unlike Special Branch who warned that the boys were inveterate killers, Owles and his colleague Geoffrey Griffin believed that Mau Mau juvenile detainees were “reclaimable through school and discipline.”Footnote 151 Colonial ideas of youth intersect with racialized presumptions here: Gikuyu boys were held to be more malleable and susceptible to paternalistic discipline and instruction than were Greek Cypriots. To enact this juvenile rehabilitation, Wamumu Approved School was established in June 1956 to hold 1,200 boys between ages sixteen and eighteen. With its ethos of “truth and loyalty,” and its “indefinable atmosphere of a good boarding school,” Wamumu was the pinnacle of British colonial efforts to combat youth insurgency and became a showcase for rehabilitation, deliberately crafted to counter the “gulag” image of the wider detention pipeline.Footnote 152 It was credited as the only successful rehabilitation program of the Mau Mau Emergency, and Governor Baring granted a full pardon to any boy who graduated from the camp.Footnote 153 That success was due to its combination of juvenile reform techniques and its engagement with Gikuyu concepts of generational authority and initiation. Youth soldiers and “juvenile terrorists” were reconstructed as delinquent, disobedient, but reclaimable children: “We treat them entirely as ordinary schoolboys, never as wrongdoers, and we get a perfect response.”Footnote 154 As Ocobock argues, “Emasculating and infantilizing the detainees in such a way solved the practical problem of trying to rehabilitate boys of varying ages, backgrounds and degrees of Mau Mau affiliation.”Footnote 155 Whereas adult Mau Mau insurgents had been pathologized by the state for their violence, rehabilitation reframed youth insurgents as corrupted innocents who could be restored to a pristine childhood, but in doing so it rendered them passive and denied their political agency.Footnote 156
Wamumu offered an “alternative, state-sponsored rite of passage—a strange marriage of Gikuyu cultural life, colonial policy and carceral contingency.”Footnote 157 Its rehabilitation program combined the focus on education found in other colonies with an emphasis on discipline and religion that were seen as necessary in the context of Mau Mau. Confession was used to “cleanse” the boys of their Mau Mau oaths and adherence, and an adapted Gikuyu initiation ceremony was used to mark a “reformed” boy's transition into manhood, but with the state rather than community elders acting as gatekeepers of masculine authority.Footnote 158 Owles stressed, “Hard discipline meted out with sound and flawless justice is the best medicine for these boys,” but peer pressure was found to be most effective at combating unwanted behaviors. “Reformed boys” sought to make best advantage of the opportunities offered to them, an agentic expression to comply with adult, colonial norms that for them was a development of, and as valid as, their previous resistance.Footnote 159 Vocational training and basic education were combined with physical training to reform juveniles in mind and body in an attempt to produce economically-productive colonial youth subjects. Perhaps most influentially, however, Wamumu graduates were provided with secure jobs in various trades, farm labor, or the civil service, even Police Special Branch, which provided them with wages and respect and thereby removed the central grievance that had driven many into Mau Mau.Footnote 160 Ultimately, the success of Wamumu came not from its adherence to “hearts and minds” per se, but from its provision of an accessible pathway to successful Gikuyu manhood, supported by committed mentoring and peer socialization. The boys responded to Wamumu's reformative program because it transformed them, not into good colonial citizens, but into respectable and successful proto-adults.
CONCLUSIONS
This article has argued that age and generation should be deployed as compelling analytical frameworks for understanding both insurgency and counterinsurgency; the failure to properly understand local experiences and norms of childhood and youth, and to tackle their motivations for insurgency, weakened colonial counterinsurgency programming, and continues to inhibit contemporary responses.Footnote 161 Youth soldiers were a significant vector of anti-colonial insurgency across the globe, one which emerged in part from colonial states’ own constructions of childhood and attempts to control youth. Their involvement suggests that anti-colonial insurgencies, which were fought over control of colonies’ futures, were supported by many of the generation who would come to inherit those futures. The legitimate grievances of youth were mobilized by anti-colonial groups, who recruited children through colonial youth organizations and as well as family, religious, and social networks. While some teenagers fought through coercion or necessity, others were genuinely politically motivated and willing to risk their lives and freedoms in the struggle for independence. Children and youth served in multiple capacities in anti-colonial insurgencies, in roles that were shaped by multiple and sometimes overlapping logics: the need for troop fortification and sustained manpower, the tactical exploitation of youth liminality, and the symbolic mobilization of children and discourses of childhood innocence. Differences in the level or form of youth soldiering and insurgency were shaped by the availability of networks through which to mobilize youth, the nature of the conflict and armed groups, and by colonial responses. In Cyprus, children became prominent insurgents due to the ease with which they could be mobilized through schools, churches, and youth organizations, and Grivas’ deliberate tactic of youth recruitment. In Kenya, urban youth gangs, family networks, and oathing systems pulled many children into Mau Mau less formally. Child and youth participation in anti-colonial insurgencies established crucial examples of the political, military, and symbolic significance of youth that were later developed across the globe in the armed liberation struggles and civil wars of 1970–2000s. This shaped the phenomenon of contemporary child soldiering: while anti-colonial youth soldiering lacks the dehumanization and deliberate inversion of generational hierarchies that characterized the use of child soldiers in some contemporary conflicts like Mozambique or Northern Uganda, it demonstrates similar patterns of both coercive and voluntary recruitment, and of children and youth fulfilling both frontline and auxiliary roles in armed groups.Footnote 162 In some instances, anti-colonial insurgencies established the tactics and logics of youth recruitment, the military and youth network structures, and the social contexts of youth militarization that helped to drive the systematic and extensive recruitment of children and youth in subsequent civil wars, from Cyprus to Palestine, Angola to Cambodia.Footnote 163
As conflict progressed, children and youth increasingly became regarded as legitimate, or at least necessary targets of colonial violence and key objects of developmental interventions. Colonial counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents across British and French territories were broadly similar in that they combined violence and development, highlighting the tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were beaten, detained, flogged, but also (re-)educated and trained to be economically-productive and politically-acquiescent colonial subjects, (re-)constructed as “delinquents” rather than “terrorists” to facilitate their subsequent “rehabilitation.” But the exact extent and format of these counterinsurgency responses varied according to local socio-political contexts, counterinsurgency infrastructures, and cultures of youth: whereas Wamumu harnessed and “modernized” notions of Gikuyu youth masculinity in juvenile reform, education in Cyprus sought to “de-Hellenize” and thereby depoliticize Greek Cypriot youth, and French traditions of colonial social engineering were deployed to combat the spread both of Communist youth identities in Indochina and notions of Islamic modernity in Algeria.
Yet, there is a methodological tension between the empirical significance of youth soldiers and their relative absence in official and popular histories of liberation struggles. Youth soldiering is most prominent in colonial archives where it was most immediately visible in liberation struggles, due to urban conflict, media coverage and propaganda, and the large numbers of children who were brought into contact with colonial legal and welfare systems, as in Kenya and Cyprus, but also where the problem was identified discursively as “juvenile” involvement, thereby harnessing pre-existing concerns about delinquency and youth revolt that threatened future colonial stability. Children and youth were also involved in other anti-colonial conflicts, and further investigation is needed to establish the extent of their significance in Palestine, Indonesia, and Ireland, and across Southern Africa. This article is a first step towards elucidating comparative patterns of youth soldiering and insurgency in decolonization struggles, and it is hoped intensive future research, particularly in district archives, combined with oral history approaches, will elucidate local variations in youth soldiering and colonial responses, and better recover the voices and experiences of children and youth who risked life and limb to fight for their, and their nations’, independence.
