Description
According to David Kilcullen, among the core principles of modern counterinsurgency is the need to ‘engage the women, beware the children’.1 Relatedly, child protection mainstreaming and preventing the military recruitment of children has become an imperative for peacekeeping forces, culminating in the 2017 Vancouver Principles. But when did concern about the need to ‘beware’ children appear within counterinsurgency strategy? How have military forces responded to children, who are both prime icons of humanitarian action and, as child soldiers, are potential military targets? This paper explores the relationship between military, police and humanitarian/welfarist arms of colonial counterinsurgency and early peacekeeping strategies by looking at the treatment of children, and particularly child and youth insurgents. The liminality of child and youth insurgents highlights the tensions between military and humanitarian imperatives, and the gaps between them through which individuals could slip. This paper analyses youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency between 1954-65, particularly focusing on Mau Mau forces in Kenya and EOKA in Cyprus, contrasting this with peacekeeping and humanitarian encounters with simbas and Baluba jeunesse in the Congo Crisis. It argues that counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents commonly combined violence and humanitarianism, highlighting the tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were targeted, beaten, detained, and flogged, but also constructed as ‘delinquents’ rather than ‘terrorists’ to facilitate their subsequent ‘rehabilitation’. Similarly, early peacekeeping responses read youths as military actors and targets in the face of humanitarian attempts to render them civilian ‘victims’. Evidence is drawn from archives including the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations (Geneva), National Archives (Kew, London), Save the Children Fund (Birmingham), Oxford Colonial Army and Police Records Project (Oxford), and Kenyan National Archives (Nairobi), as well as Community Development and Welfare Annual Reports, memoirs, news media and photography.
