‘New Wars: Forgotten Warriors’: Why Have Girl Fighters Been Excluded from Western Representations of Conflict in Sierra Leone?

Since the end of the cold war, the way we talk about war has changed. Instead of talking about ‘noble ’ inter-state warfare, as was common in the past, there is a new Western vocabulary depicting modern conflict as cha-otic and callous. Child soldiers are seen as emblematic element of the ‘new wars’, yet the presence of girl fighters has been continually ignored by the international community and neglected in academic writing. When girls have attracted attention, it has been purely as victims. Using a case study of Sierra Leone, this essay analyses how the Western representation of girls as victims plays into the Western construction of Africa as a place needful of military and humanitarian intervention. By looking at discourses of gender and youth, I examine how the construction of the girl child is integral to maintaining the myth of the young ‘aggressive ’ African male and the white ‘saviour’; both essential for ‘new wars ’ and the humanitarian industry. The conflict in Sierra Leone has been considered by many academics as a prime example of a ‘new war ’ (Kaplan 1994; Kaldor 2001) and thu