Unmaking a Child Soldier: Towards a Female Conscious DDR Programme

The inclusion of child soldiers in DDR programmes is not a new area to the researchers and various aspects have been already explored in literature. This article aims to provide a qualitative analysis into the current literature on the eligibility criteria for female combatants to join DDR programmes, their underrepresentation in existing programmes, and finally on the need for a feminist conscious DDR. As the research requires analysis of existing data on the matter, document analysis and secondary data analysis constitute the key methodology in this work. The social identity is a self-perceived notion from the social cognition which shapes according to the surrounding and its influences. Hence the Social Identity theory (SIT) is also applied to understand the discrepancies in the DDR narrative of the girl child soldiers. The review also identifies the different forms of masculinities emerging in violent conflicts and the type of constraints that are to be enforced in conflict zones.