Child Soldiers as Political Subjects: Agency, Structural Coercion, and the Failure of DDR in South Sudan

This study critiques the dominant victimhood narrative within child soldier discourse by reconceptualising these children as political subjects, possessing agency within profoundly coercive structures during South Sudan's civil conflicts. It posits that the chronic failure of Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes is rooted in a fundamental misrecognition of children's tactical and social roles within entrenched political economies. The research investigates how child soldiers exercise political subjectivity, navigating, resisting, and being instrumentalised by militarised patronage networks that define South Sudan's conflict landscape. Employing an interdisciplinary qualitative methodology centred on African perspectives, the analysis draws from in-depth interviews with former child soldiers, community leaders, and programme implementers, alongside critical documentary analysis of policy frameworks. The findings demonstrate that children's participation is often a calculated adaptation to systemic violence and economic deprivation, yet their agency remains circumscribed by structural coercion. A concrete result is that DDR's technocratic, apolitical design, by ignoring these political dimensions and the vested interests benefiting from recruitment, inadvertently reinforces the very networks it seeks to dismantle. The study's novelty lies in its theoretical integration of political subjectivity with the concept of structural coercion to explain the cyclical failure of reintegration. Consequently, the implications argue for a paradigm shift in policy and practice, moving beyond seeing child soldiers solely as victims to be saved towards engaging with them as political actors within interventions that deliberately confront the underlying political economy of conflict. This re-conceptualisation is essential for formulating more effective, context-sensitive strategies within African peace and conflict studies.