Beyond the Passive Victim Paradigm: Child Soldiers as Political Subjects in South Sudan

This article develops political subjecthood under structural coercion as an analytical lens for understanding how the passive-victim paradigm obscures the political subjectivity of children recruited into war. Rather than treating the topic as a descriptive case note, the manuscript positions child soldiers as political subjects: agency, structural coercion, and the failure of disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration in south sudan within wider debates on African political order, state formation, and institutional design. The paper is anchored in South Sudan, Uganda, and South Sudanese diaspora communities, and it uses the topic brief's theoretical architecture to ask three linked questions: how do the structural conditions of poverty, displacement, family dissolution, and ethnic mobilisation rather than individual predation constitute the primary drivers of child combatant recruitment in the south sudanese context? In what ways do DDR frameworks designed around adult male ex-combatants systematically fail child soldiers particularly girls, those with children born of conflict, and children associated with government forces rather than rebel groups? What do reintegration outcomes reveal about the relationship between community-level social repair mechanisms, customary justice practices, and the psychological recovery of former child soldiers in South Sudan's diverse ethno-linguistic communities? Methodologically, the article translates the proposed design into a publication-ready strategy built around longitudinal qualitative research with former child soldiers in south sudan, uganda, and diaspora communities; life history interviews; critical discourse analysis of ddr programme documentation (unicef, iom, unmiss); participant observation in reintegration programm