I would like to write about recruitment of child soldiers, but can´t find any framework which I could apply on some region. I need some categorization with good criteria, so it will be not difficult to apply on for example middle east.
I would like to add to Roos' answer. Your question is indeed ambiguous.
At an individual level, children recruited to armed groups can be categorized in many ways, including: abduction vs. voluntary recruitment, age, gender, or in terms of other individual characteristics. Individual data on children actively participating in an armed group will no doubt be difficult to obtain. Such data for the most part is country specific and comes from surveys of demobilized individuals.
The alternative is to consider the armed group as the unit of analysis, whereby the mode of recruitment or the focus of recruitment activity could be categorized.
What is most important is that you have a theoretical reason for considering the categorical distinction.
Check out the work of Chris Blattman
here's one here...
http://chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2013.LogicOfChildSoldiering.IO.pdf
First of all, thank you for answers.
Well, my vision is to do some analysis of in which ways is the recruitment happening. Like manners or maybe strategies of rebel groups?
But I was told, that to do so, I need some paper, which was already done about this problem. So in the end of my paper, I could say, yes, the recruitment is happening in this manners, but the groups did not use some other manners...
It is not anything special, but I cannot find list of manners or anything like that yet.
To put it differently, it seems as if you want to differentiate between recruitment methods on the group level. There are only few quantitative datasets available that capture for instance, the difference between voluntary joining vs. abduction of child soldiers on this level. Check Christopher Blattman and Bern Beber’s article. Besides their dataset, I do not know of any other one on child soldier usages that have information recorded on the ways in which these children are recruited.
This lack of comparative information is due to the fact that gathering this particular information is rather complicated; the abduction rate (versus those who join voluntarily) might change over time in one particular group. Moreover, there is a huge discussion going on whether we can actually argue that children join “voluntarily” or not. Some authors, like Wessells 2006, make the argument that children cannot consciously choose to join the group voluntarily.
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