Review: They Fight like Soldiers, They Die like Children <i>The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THEY FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, THEY DIE LIKE CHILDREN The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers Romeo Dallaire Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010. 308pp. $34.95 cloth ISBN 978-0-307-35577-5In 1994, then- Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), witnessed one of the century's worst atrocities as approximately 800,000 Rwandans - mostly ethnic Tutsis as well as a number of moderate Hutus - were killed. Dallaire offered his own account of his experience in Shake Hands with the Devil. His time in Rwanda spurred him into taking action not only on the issue of genocide prevention, but also in working to stop another horrific practice of modern-day warfare: the use of child soldiers by both government and rebel armed forces in conflicts around the world. Dallaire first encountered child soldiers during his service in the Great Lakes region, and UN peacekeepers elsewhere in Africa have witnessed the same practice, notably in Liberia and Sierra Leone.Dallaire's latest book is a blend of memoir, fiction, and advocacy and awareness -raising, reflecting his work with the Child Soldiers Initiative, which he founded in 2004 in an effort to end the use of children in combat. He reviews much ofthe recent research on how child soldiers are recruited and trained, the functions they serve in rebel groups, and the demobilization process. Throughout, Dallaire pays special attention to the situation of girl soldiers, who have been largely ignored during demobilization processes and who are often overlooked by the research. He draws on the recent explosion of research into child soldiers in order to educate his authence about why armed groups find young combatants useful.The book does not add much to our understanding of why and how young people are recruited into armed groups or the challenges of demobilizing them. But Dallaire's purpose is not, of course, to conduct original research. Instead, he aims to bring attention to the problem of child soldiering. He argues that child soldiers must be viewed as a sustainable, low-technology weapon system of choice, in that they have vital military capabilities, net operational advantages, and tactical effectiveness (149). These are qualities that armed groups value highly. These groups use child soldiers for many reasons: they are more expendable than adults, are very loyal, serve key functions within the armed group (such as providing domestic labour and reconnaissance), and are cheap to maintain. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".