African Child Soldiers and Humanitarian Consumption

“Disturbing Memoir Outsells Literary Comfort Food at Starbucks,” The New York Times reported on March 10, 2007. Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, a memoir of the author's experiences as a child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone that lasted from 1991 to 2002, and the second selection in Starbucks' book program, sold over 62,000 copies in its first three weeks there. Although child soldiering itself is not a new phenomenon, since the adoption of the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the Organization of African Unity's African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990, 1999), UNICEF's publication of Gra&#x00E7a Machel's The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, and the UN's adoption of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2000), research in the social sciences and international humanitarian law on child soldiers has increased significantly.