الفهرس 
Theoretical BackgroundOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
If war is a very harsh experience to grownups and adults, what about children? Throughout history, children are the ones who suffer the most during wartimes. Instead of enjoying the supposedly most peaceful time in one’s lifetime, war children have to suffer and face horrible situations. Moreover, not only do they have to experience war, some of them have to take part in it. In other words, they have to act like grownups and be bloody soldiers who shoot and kill at a very young age; those children are called “child soldiers”.
In the pamphlet entitled ”Cape town Principles and Best Practices”, which was published by the UNICEF in April 1997, a child soldier is defined as follows: “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, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers and anyone accompanying such groups, other than family members”. The definition also includes girls recruited for sexual purposes. Thus, the definition is not restricted to the children who carry arms.
There is no more perfect way to understand war than listening to the stories of people who were there. In other words, the ones who own the first-hand experience are the ideal holders of truth. The thesis aims at examining the development of the child soldier’s ideology and psychology starting from the innocence phase, moving on to the recruitment phase, ending with the rehabilitation phase through analyzing three memoirs of former child soldiers: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) by Loung Ung, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) by Ishmael Beah, and War child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009) by Emmanuel Jal. The analysis is in the light of Althusser’s theory of ideology and the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s views on the social construction of the self, in addition to contemporary trauma theory. Hence, the thesis will reflect the problem of child soldiering in three countries, which are Cambodia, Sierra Leon, and Sudan, from the point of view of real ex-combatants: Loung Ung, Ishmael Beah, and Emmanuel Jal.
The thesis tackles a growing political and social global problem. Nowadays, people live in a time of new wars, so they need to understand the culture of those new wars through true stories. In other words, there is a need to be introduced to wars in the other part of the globe. Moreover, memoir, as a genre, is more effective in achieving social and political attention, because they are supposed to be authentic as far as the memory permits. It also proves that the recruitment of child soldiers is a global problem and that its effects are common across different cultures: Cambodia in Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, Sierra Leon in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Sudan in Emmanuel Jal’s War child: A Child Soldier’s Story.
The thesis answers the following questions: What is a child soldier? How is he a child and a soldier at the same time? In other words, how the identity of the protagonists Loung, Ishmael, and Emmanuel: is reflected as a child soldier? How the ideology of the three protagonists is constructed from the phase of innocence and inexperience of war to being bloody monstrous children who seek revenge, till the rehabilitation phase and coming to terms with their trauma as suggested in Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”? How could Michel Foucault’s theory of the social construction of the self be applied to the memoirs in question? What are the effects of trauma on child soldiers? How the views of contemporary trauma theory critics: Cathy Caruth (1955), Judith Herman (1942), and Dominick LaCapra (1939) can be applied to the three texts in question? How trauma symptoms affect the writing process?
The thesis depends on Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology as represented in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) to analyze the development of child soldiers’ mind from an ideological perspective. In other words, the thesis explores the ideological development of the three writers and how their identity is constructed. Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuse” (1970) builds on the contributions of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Lacan to introduce a more elaborate redefinition of the theory. The thesis makes use of Althusser’s views to analyze the way the identity of child soldiers is constructed under the power of the army. Moreover, it also tackles Michel Foucault’s theory of the process of the subject production as an interplay of various “technologies which human beings use to understand themselves”. Foucault reveals the nature of those technologies and their interaction that frames the process of national identity construction. Furthermore, the thesis applies the features of the contemporary trauma theory with special focus on the views and contributions of critics: Cathy Caruth (1955), Dominick Lacapra (1939) and others to analyze the psychological effect of war trauma on the writers of each memoir.
The thesis is divided into an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The introduction presents the topic of child soldiers in general; it will provide a background of the phenomenon and its history. In addition, the introduction summarizes the three memoirs and present the biography of the three writers: Loung Ung, Ishmael Beah, and Emmanuel Jal. Chapter one is devoted to the theoretical framework drawn from Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and Michel Foucault’s views on the social construction of the self, in addition to the contemporary trauma theory. Chapter two addresses the identity construction of the protagonist of each memoir in the light of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and how this identity is socially constructed according to Michel Foucault. Chapter three tackles the trauma of child soldiers in detail, applying the features of contemporary trauma theory to the three memoirs. The conclusion presents a summing up of the thesis as a whole in addition to its findings that grow from the analysis of the chapters. It also provides sufficient answers for the raised questions.