Despite worldwide reports of former child recruits engaging in post-conflict criminal activity, no one has sought to systematically analyze whether this turn of events was a consequence of their...Show moreDespite worldwide reports of former child recruits engaging in post-conflict criminal activity, no one has sought to systematically analyze whether this turn of events was a consequence of their child soldiering past. In fact, any attempt to empirically verify this would have to address the lack of theoretical foundations on which to rest. Indeed, theories about adult post-conflict crime cannot help mapping juvenile crime in the same context, as they are bound by age-specific assumptions. This thesis therefore addresses, and contributes to filling, both these empirical and theoretical gaps. I hypothesize that wartime child soldiering increases post-conflict juvenile crime through two complementary mechanisms – the long-term effects of a full socialization into violence and relative economic grievances – and further suggest that both are mediated by gender. Running a negative binomial regression using existing datasets enables me to glean supporting evidence for this hypothesis, as well as preliminary evidence speaking to the socialization mechanism. Yet, overall, the findings remain somewhat inconclusive due to limitations in the data. I thus call for more research – including qualitative work and original data collection – to ground them.Show less
