Allons-Y, Vol. 4 (2020)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/85649

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Title Page and About the Cover Art (Allons-Y, Vol. 4 (2020))
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Dustin Johnson
Access status: Open Access ,
Letter from the Editors (Allons-Y, Vol. 4 (2020))
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Catherine Baillie Abidi; Dustin Johnson
The Vancouver Principles on Peacekeeping and the Prevention of the Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers has rapidly been endorsed by states around the world, demonstrating the global desire for peacekeeping to address the use of children as soldiers. Co-created by the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative and the Canadian Government, the Vancouver Principles are a set of political commitments endorsed by states and are focused on “the need to prioritize and operationalize the prevention of the recruitment and use of child soldiers in areas of operations of peacekeeping, noting the critical role of such prevention to the achievement of peace and security, and taking into account the differential impact of conflict on girls and boys.” The seventeen Principles range from the prevention-oriented planning, to the inclusion of child protection focal points in command structures, to the commitment to share best practices among states. For this volume of Allons-y, we asked contributors to focus on the implementation of the Vancouver Principles, with each article focussing on practical aspects of one of the principles and the current status of research in the area of focus. The contributors are researchers and practitioners in the field of Children, Peace and Security and offer their perspectives on current literature as well as field-based experiences in relation to the goals of the Vancouver Principles. The preface, commentary and six papers in this volume illustrate the complexities of contemporary armed conflict, the increasing and evolving impacts on children, and the importance of prevention. The volume opens with Commentary by Valentina Falco and Alec Wargo who provide an overview of the UN protection framework for children affected by armed conflict and the accompanying monitoring mechanisms. Shelly Whitman and Catherine Baillie Abidi lay the foundation of the concept of prevention and the increasing need to take preventative actions to break cycles of armed conflict. Victoria Bryce and Dustin Johnson build on this foundation and further explore how prevention can be operationalized within security sector structures to dually enhance the protection of children and improve operational effectiveness. In relation to improving protection, Dustin Johnson and Allyssa Walsh explore the role of gender in recruitment prevention, emphasizing the gendered dimensions of recruitment and use of children, and the need to better understand how the gender of peacekeepers affects child protection. Laura Cleave and William Watkins offer insights into early warning systems and the opportunities to embed child-specific indicators as a measure to prevent or disrupt recruitment processes. Marion Laurence explores the function of monitoring and reporting grave violations of children‘s rights in light of the move towards better and more coordinated use of data in UN peacekeeping. And finally, Jo Becker examines the alarming trend of the detention, rather than the release and rehabilitation, of children associated with armed groups. Given the unprecedented and increasing number of children living in conflict-affected areas, it is vital that the international community prioritizes children‘s rights and rallies toward building peaceful communities. The creation of the Vancouver Principles in 2017 has added vital momentum to this agenda, and with this and future issues of Allons-y we aim to contribute to this momentum with research, experiences, and practical guidance that will be critical to improving the protection of children during armed conflict and ending their recruitment and use as soldiers.
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Preface (Allons-Y, Vol. 4 (2020))
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Roméo Dallaire
The ways in which child soldiers are used in modern conflicts has become ever more sophisticated and prominent, with shifting capabilities and a focus on generational warfare, compared to when I faced them during my command of the UNAMIR mission in Rwanda twenty-six years ago. To confront this challenges, we need to keep our focus on the fact that the recruitment and use of children as weapons of war is the worst thing that we can do to children. We need to focus on the significance of bringing an end to the era of the expectation that children should participate in conflict. If we want to stop the use of warfare, we need to start developing a worldview where adults do not think that children should be involved in war. There needs to be no wavering in our view that use of child soldiers is the worst aspect of modern war. Children are a weapons system that have no place on the battlefield or in the world‘s security apparatus. How is it possible that we are prepared to let children be used as weapons when we are horrified by the use of biological and nuclear weapons? The Vancouver Principles are a critical part of meeting this challenge, and as we enter a new decade they are the culmination of the work of the international community that began in 1996 with Graça Machel‘s report on the impact of armed conflict on children. The VPs build on all the work that we have been doing at the Dallaire Initiative, and the work of the international community expressed in the Optional Protocol, the Paris Principles, Security Council Resolutions, and the initiatives to protect children and civilians. The VPs provide a higher level of strategic guidance that link all of these efforts to rally states to take action, and the immense amount of work that went into creating the Implementation Guidance is absolutely critical to this endeavour. It is one thing to set up the Principles, but another to turn them into practice guidance on how they can be carried out. We now need to shift our focus onto turning the guidelines into training guidelines and the development of new capabilities for our forces. With this in mind, the articles in this issue of Allons-y provide an important complement to the Principles and the Implementation Guidance, and will be of great use to policymakers, academics, and security sector actors working on this issue. In our work over the past several years, we have seen how hungry the security sector have been for something tangible to base their training on and upgrade and professionalize their forces on to confront the challenge posed by child soldiers. They see problem in peacekeeping of using force against children, and want to reduce casualties on their side and become more effective. With the Vancouver Principles we have taken the work of the Dallaire Initiative global, and we need to ensure that we use this tool effectively. To do so, we need to develop a central secretariat to help states take the Principles and the guidance and operationalize them into capabilities for their forces, and work with the UN to make sure that states have the required knowledge to do so. We also need to start thinking regionally to have more effective, coordinated, and rapid implementation of the Principles. The Dallaire Initiative has started this with our regional office for East Africa in Rwanda. Further work is needed to develop regional capabilities in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in South and East Asia. From our headquarters in Canada we can then assist with capacity building and strategy. With this direction, over the next decade we need to have this operational capability within every troop and police contributing country, and have every contingent going to UN missions qualified in this capability. This global engagement will aid in the reform and modernization of peacekeeping in order to end the use of children as weapons of war. In an era where human rights came to the fore in the 1970s through the 2000s, with our abilities to document, communicate about, and punish international crimes, it has not resonated enough with people that using children for adult work is wrong, and the use of child soldiers is the worst form of it. You cannot just look at a child as someone in need of food and education, but as a future adult. If we nurture children in war, then we normalize war for the future. It is illogical to want to prevent and end war without addressing the role that child soldiers can play in perpetuating conflict. In a practical sense, we have not been able to connect this in people‘s heads, only in the law. To eliminate a major instrument of war, we have to make the use of child soldiers unthinkable.
Access status: Open Access ,
Vancouver Principle 6 and the UN Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism: The MRM as a ‘whole-of-mission‘ responsibility in UN peacekeeping operations
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Valentina Falco; Alec Wargo
The monitoring and reporting of grave violations against children in situations of armed conflict is at the core of the Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) normative and institutional architecture as outlined in twelve United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions since 1999. The child protection mandate in United Nations peacekeeping operations is the key pillar underpinning this architecture. While the role of civilian Child Protection Advisers (CPAs) in identifying and reporting on these violations through the Security Council-mandated Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism on Children and Armed Conflict (MRM) is by now well established and largely codified, the contribution of uniformed peacekeepers to this critical function has been generally overlooked. However, in recent years, a series of UN and non-UN legal and policy instruments have placed increasing emphasis on the role of the UN Military and Police in the MRM.
Access status: Open Access ,
Preventing Recruitment to Improve Protection of Children
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Shelly Whitman; Catherine Baillie Abidi
In order to progressively end the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, the world must focus on effective prevention. The impacts of violence on children affected by armed conflict, and particularly those recruited and used as soldiers, are substantial. Thus, in order to break endemic cycles of violence and achieve peace and security globally, we need to prioritize the prevention of recruitment and the protection of children. This article features examples of effective prevention-oriented strategies, including tangible and practical methods that can be implemented towards the ultimate goal of preventing the recruitment and use of children as soldiers.
Access status: Open Access ,
Security Sector Training on Prevention of Recruitment
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Victoria Bryce; Dustin Johnson
Ensuring that peacekeepers receive suitable and effective training to prepare for deployments has become an important focus for the UN and member states over the past three decades. This is particularly relevant for non-traditional military skills needed in modern multidimensional missions, including child protection. This article discusses the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative‘s (Dallaire Initiative) training and education programming for security sector actors, highlighting its effectiveness in preparing peacekeepers for addressing the presence of child soldiers, the importance of integrating the issue of child soldiers into national curricula, and the necessity of evaluating and learning from training.
Access status: Open Access ,
Gender, Peacekeeping, and Child Soldiers: Training and Research in Implementation of the Vancouver Principles
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Dustin Johnson; Allyssa Walsh
Since the passage of UN Security Council resolution 1325, there has been a growing focus on the involvement of women in peacekeeping operations. Ambitious UN targets, the Vancouver Principles, and the Canadian government‘s Elsie Initiative all aim to support the increased inclusion of uniformed women in peacekeeping missions. This article discusses three areas in which the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative (Dallaire Initiative) is working to support Vancouver Principle (VP) 11 through the training of women security sector actors, training on gendered dimensions of the recruitment and use of child soldiers and SGBV against child soldiers, and through research on how gender matters in peacekeeping operations. Based on these experiences and an engagement with the academic literature, it makes a number of policy recommendations in support of VP 11.
Access status: Open Access ,
Child Soldiers and Early Warning
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Laura Cleave; William Watkins
Early warning of the recruitment and use of child soldiers remains an elusive concept. This is surprising given the number and intensity of conflicts today where child soldiers are used. Yet, there is currently no formal early warning system in this sphere that focuses on recruitment and use. Without formally looking at indicators that precede recruitment, the international community runs the risk of missing important opportunities for data collection and analysis which could help to improve child protection and inform conflict mitigation. This paper will employ a qualitative review of the policy and research domains to examine the current landscape of early warning as it applies to child soldiers. It will consider why it is important to expand the scope of early warning to incorporate recruitment and use, so that children can be prioritized on the international security agenda and, to further understand why some children are more vulnerable to recruitment than others. Ultimately, this paper argues that the development of an early warning system for child soldiers would be important to better inform recruitment prevention from its earliest stages.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Detention of Children in the Context of Armed Conflict
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Jo Becker
In recent years, governments have increasingly detained children for suspected association with non-state armed groups, particularly in conflicts involving violent extremist groups. Between 2012 and 2017, the United Nations recorded a five-fold increase in the detention of children in armed conflict.1 At any given time, thousands of children are imprisoned for suspected association with armed groups, often without charge and in inhuman and degrading conditions.
Access status: Open Access ,
Data-Driven Peacekeeping and the Vancouver Principles: Towards Improved Monitoring and Reporting for Grave Violations Against Children
(Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, 2020) Marion Laurence
This article examines the UN‘s move toward ‘data-driven‘ peacekeeping and its implications for the Vancouver Principles, especially implementation of states‘ monitoring and reporting commitments as outlined in Principle 6. I argue that data-driven peacekeeping presents both opportunities and challenges when it comes to monitoring and reporting. On the one hand, it can improve the quantity and quality of the information available about the recruitment and use of child soldiers. It can thereby foster improvements in responsiveness, performance, and accountability, both within peace operations and among other stakeholders. Yet data-driven peacekeeping also comes with challenges. These include data literacy and ‘buy-in‘ among personnel on the ground, concerns about privacy and confidentiality, and political sensitivities around monitoring and reporting. Together these issues highlight the degree to which the Vancouver Principles are interconnected and mutually reinforcing – each affects implementation of the others, and none can be fully operationalized in isolation.

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