Children at High-risk: a Comparative Analysis of the Case of Child Soldiers in Iran and in El Salvador

The recruitment of children for war is an issue that continues to dominate the concern of the international community. Most scholarly work has so far dealt with the psychosocial aftereffects of children's exposure to war and violence with little attention to the sociological factors that prompt participation in the first place. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap by examining the processes and mechanisms through which children voluntarily join the fighting forces. In this vein, I compare the recruitment of children for war in Iran by the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), and in El Salvador by the FMLN during its civil war (1981-92). Based on the findings of my dissertation, the children's volunteer participation in war is, on the one hand, contingent upon their relations to the state structures and their opponents as a function of their embeddeness in different networks of relationships. On the other, it is influenced by the salience of their identification with the recruiting organizations' mobilizational narratives.