Book Review, Rumyana van Ark et al., Children’s Rights, ‘Foreign Fighters’, Counter-Terrorism: Children of Nowhere (2024).

The focus of Children’s Rights, ‘Foreign Fighters’, Counter-Terrorism: Children of Nowhere is on foreign fighters who join terrorist groups, ISIS, and other entities engaged in armed conflict in Syria and Iraq. Counterterrorism measures, and the threats of terrorist attacks, have triggered a degradation and distortion of law. I have noted this following the 9/11 attacks and the concomitant refusal to treat children associated with terrorist groups as protected child soldiers. Whereas child soldiers in distant African conflicts are largely seen in the centers of global power as ‘faultless, passive victims’ of a pathological society, child terrorists taken as disruptive of Western security interests are seen as delinquent, incorrigible, and baleful threats to a salutary security order.