Not the Usual Suspects: Making Child Soldiers in the Gunsight

Questions prompted by a 2010 U.S. drone strike in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan bring to light an underappreciated dimension of the making of child soldiers. Turning on a readiness to presume some children as threatening when they are held in the gaze of the drone’s-eye view and the crosshairs of the gunsight, childhood as a proxy of non-combatant status is at times dismissed or even repudiated, thereby inscribing particular children as combatants, qua soldiers. The Uruzgan strike and the tactical decision-making that unfolded in the lead-up to it recommend thinking beyond the ‘usual suspects’ in the making of child soldiers.