1. CHAPTER I: Introduction
“I am a girl. I have rights. I have been denied my life because of this war; I will not be
denied my role in peace”1
.
While the subject of child soldiers has captured the attention of academics,
humanitarians, the United Nations, NGO's and the public at large (most recently through
the KONY 2012 Campaign2
), the focus has been primarily on boys and young men. To
the western gaze, Africa's female child soldiers personify helpless, dependent
victimhood. Depicted as passive players in combat, the true dimensions of their
experiences have been overlooked by the international community, and as a result have
been excluded from post-conflict peace-building and reintegration services. When girls’
experiences are mentioned, they are defined solely as victims, oversimplifying the
significant roles females have played in combat, marking them only as “camp followers,”
and subjects of sexual abuse.
But upon a closer look, as this thesis will explore, by focusing specifically on the
girl soldiers of the warring factions -- the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO)
and the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO)-- both leading up to and during
Mozambique’s Civil War, girls’ experiences in combat are far more complex and multi-
dimensional. Girls as young as 10 years old served as porters, spies and even combatants
1
Jessica Lenz, “Women in Conflict” (Women in Conflict: Child Soldiers Panel,
Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs New York City, 2012).
2
KONY 2012 was a viral media campaign that revolved around capturing Lord
Resistance Army’s leader, Joseph Kony.

2. in both forces and accounted for approximately 40% of the Civil War’s child fighters3
.
While many girls were indeed subject to sexual abuse or assigned as “wives” to
commanders, this is but one piece of their stories -- girls carry all the human rights
violations boys carry and the burden of gender based violence. Despite girls’ active roles
in combat, they were mostly overlooked in Disarmament Demobilization and
Reintegration (DDR) programming in Mozambique, and a mere one percent of girls went
through reintegration programming post-conflict, compared to 40% of their male
counterparts4
. Given the significant number of female child warriors in Mozambique and
the diversity of their roles in combat, there is a shocking dearth of scholarship about their
experiences, and the rights implications of their lack of visibility in programming post-
conflict are yet to be explored.
The purpose of this thesis is to go beyond western narratives of girls at war by
gaining a holistic understanding of Mozambique’s female fighters’ experiences, and the
rights violations they endured both during and post-conflict. Doing so with an eye
towards the social constructs that define childhood, gender and ethnicity within
Mozambique’s prevailing cultural attitudes -- as well as the United Nations system and
international community -- will further illuminate the various rights violations girl
soldiers face, and the barriers that are consistently put in place by the very international
mechanisms that serve to protect them. Girls who have served as soldiers are not one
undifferentiated mass; their experiences of violence will vary based on the particular
3
Dyan Mazurana and Susan McKay, “Where Are the Girls? Girls Fighting Forces in
Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of
Peace & Psychology 8, no. 2 (2002).
4
Ibid.

3. context and conflict in which they find themselves. Dealing with their experiences
generically necessarily impedes the international community from understanding the true
dimensions of a given conflict as well as their ability to rebuild society in the post-
conflict environment. In Mozambique, former girl soldiers who were denied DDR
services and could not reintegrate into their communities once the war had come to an
end, could not access their social, economic, or political rights. This was to the detriment
of the society at large, and has left scars that still impact Mozambique to this day. Thus,
ultimately I will demonstrate that only when we are able to transcend the social
constructs that define childhood, gender and race and accept that girls display signs of
agency and violence and involve them in the post-conflict rebuilding, will the
international community be able to secure sustainable peace in post-conflict situations,
and protect the rights of girls at war.