Higgs, Johanna. Militarized Youth: The Children of the FARC. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020, 233 pages

Children’s involvement in armed groups is far from a new phenomenon in Colombia. After all, child soldiers participated in combat during the Thousand Days’ War at the beginning of the twentieth century (33). Still, more than half of the people who joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) did so before they turned eighteen. However, little is known about the stories, the lives, the emotions, and the agency of these child soldiers. Johanna Higgs fills this gap. These children are often framed as victims of armed conflicts, and yet their political agency and violent actions are still understudied. Without putting aside the need to understand child soldiers as war victims, Militarized Youth looks into the process of their militarization in an innovative manner. Johanna Higgs is an anthropologist whose work has centered on the lifeworlds of child soldiers. In this book, she analyzes the life scripts of the children recruited by the now extinct Marxist-Leninist guerrilla of the FARC-EP. The author demonstrates how their militarization is bound by cultural and social factors in which the war takes place: continuously exposed to violence, children come to embody the military at early ages. The book, Militarized Youth, offers two major contributions to the field of anthropology. First, it proposes a compelling year-long ethnography in multiple sites in Colombia, where violence has profoundly affected social landscapes. Second, it provides an epistemological shift in the comprehension of the involvement of the child soldiers. Instead of following a common humanitarian approach, Higgs goes beyond this narrative and “delves deeper into the specific social and cultural aspects of the Colombian conflict to give a contextualised, culturally relevant understanding of the process of militarisation” (v). By using a theoretical framework borrowed mainly from the phenomenological perspective and mobilizing lifeworlds as a central category, Militarized Youth is concerned with the shaping forces of child militarization in Colombia. Consistent with her theoretical framework of lifeworlds and militarized scripts of engagement, the author’s focus is on the transitions between the “civilian” and the “militarized” worlds. Militarization is conceptualized as a “process of becoming a soldier and being a soldier” and a “moving between different spheres of social reality where the values, norms and ideas differ” (3–4). As such, this ethnography shows how child soldiers face structural and cultural factors that lead to their militarization, and how they are inscribed in a continuum from their household to their time within the FARC-EP, and then to their reintegration to civilian society. What is particularly important is how the book weaves together constant reference to participants’ narratives, even in the chapters referring to methodology and theoretical frameworks. It leaves a deep feeling of immersion, and a profound sense of the embodied experience of violence. The book begins with a contextualization of children’s involvement in the FARC-EP, a general portrait of violence in Colombia, and a global perspective on child soldiers in armed conflicts. Chapter 1 exposes the multiple deployments of militarization—the shaping of masculinities and femininities, the intergenerational tensions, and the hostile and violent social and cultural environments of children’s educational and affective systems. Chapter 2 turns to child soldiering as a global phenomenon, demonstrating the centrality of each local context in understanding why children participate in armed actions. Exploring other armed conflicts in the world, Higgs deconstructs the concept of childhood and insists on the necessity of de-universalizing what it means to be a child, and what it means to be a soldier. A key point here is to understand the “diversity of children’s experiences and motivations in wartime” (38). Criticizing the “humanitarian approach to children in war,” Higgs …