Ild soldiers are incapable victims of adults' abusive compulsion, stripped from

Ild soldiers are incapable victims of adults' abusive compulsion, stripped from legal agency and without any accountability, which does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourse, nor LCZ696 web represent the broad range of child soldiers' own perceptions of their role [9, 10, 13, 18?0]. A second source of the uneasiness about child soldiering is related to the nature of contemporary warfare, which is often marked by fuzzy distinctions between perpetrators and victims. Not only are children forcibly recruited as child soldiers and thus actively participate in the armed conflict, also the frequently ethnic nature of these conflicts, amongst others, can turn every civilian into a potential victim or a perpetrator ready to defend his/her group's interests [21]. Such practices both increase the risk of psychological damage to all civilians [22, 23], and pose particular challenges to the recovery, rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation processes of all affected youth, and (former) child soldiers in particular. This thin line between being a `victim' and a`perpetrator', which becomes utmost clear in the situation of child soldiers, has large implications for general processes of peacebuilding [24] and transitional justice [25], both in the short and the longer run. As the complexity of these phenomena title= journal.pone.0158910 has dramatically increased in recent years, we argue that they can no longer be analysed from one single discipline or field of study, but require a truly interdisciplinary approach. Following Ost ([26]:543), by inter-disciplinarity we mean the attempt to embark upon a `dialogue' among disciplines leading to the (partial) reorganisation of theoretical frames and operational hypotheses. Unlike multidisciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity, the essence of inter-disciplinarity lies in organising the `translation' of one scientific language into the structure and the terminology of the other(s). In this contribution, we look at the victim-perpetrator dynamic in relation to child soldiers from three different disciplines or fields of study, i.e. children's rights law, transitional justice, and psychosocial approaches. Our central research question is how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers starting from these three disciplines. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we aim at opening up narrow disciplinary viewpoints, and contributing to more integrated approaches on the reintegration of former child soldiers into their communities and societies. Apart from its theoretical value in analytical terms, we also argue that an interdisciplinary perspective is indispensable from an operational point of view, as adequate policies, programmes and projects that tackle this difficult issue can only be developed by bringing together insights from different disciplines. The insights and proposals described in this contribution are based on two types of sources: first, an extensive literature review in each of the three fields of study mentioned; and, secondly, a series of sustainable contacts with policy makers and practitioners in the fields mentioned built up throughout the years, by means of workshops, meetings and conferences.1 title= dar.12324 Our contribution is structured in two major steps. We start by reviewing the issue of child soldiers from three different disciplinary perspectives, children's rights law, transitional justice and psychosocial approaches, and list the cross-cutting themes, Mangafodipir (trisodium) site similarit.Ild soldiers are incapable victims of adults' abusive compulsion, stripped from legal agency and without any accountability, which does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourse, nor represent the broad range of child soldiers' own perceptions of their role [9, 10, 13, 18?0].