 |
Chapter 5 “Double victims: The recruitment and treatment of child soldiers in Chechnya” by Karina V. Korostelina and Juliia Kononenko analyze the reliance by martial forces on child soldiers in two wars in Chechnya: the mechanisms of involvement of children by the self-proclaimed state of Chechnya and their treatment by Russian federal armed forces and mass media. The authors show that parties from both sides of the conflict nullified the norms familiar in peacetime by casting children as potential combatants, subjecting them to responsibilities that are suitable for adult soldiers, and, as a result creating risks that include the possibility of inhumane treatment and torture. This characterization of children in the affairs of modern warfare reinforces a set of normative assumptions about the placement and perils of children, revealing the collective axiology for parties on both sides of this conflict.
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.
Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.
Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.
This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.
