A comprehensive, up-to-date presentation of how children and young people are affected by and respond to situations of armed conflict and postwar reconstruction. War and Children: A Reference Handbook looks at one of the most wrenching aspects of armed conflict, ranging across the globe to examine the different ways armed conflict and postwar reconstructions affect children and young people, and how they have responded to both war and efforts to alleviate war's destruction. While war has always affected children, the nature of that impact has changed in the last half-century. Civil conflicts break out in mostly poor, developing countries with large populations of young people, and combatants are less hesitant to turn civilian areas into battlegrounds. War and Children explores these phenomena by focusing primarily on recent conflicts worldwide, with case studies dramatizing important issues and controversies—including the considerable number of children soldiers throughout the world.

The armed conflict in Sierra Leone and the extreme violence of the main rebel faction the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) have challenged scholars and members of the international community to come up with explanations. Up to this point, though, conclusions about the nature of the war and the RUF are mainly drawn from accounts of civilian victims or based on interpretations and rationalizations offered by commentators who had access to only one side of the war. The present study addresses this currently incomplete understanding of the conflict by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists, paying special attention to the hitherto neglected, and often underage, cadres of the RUF. The data presented challenges the widely canvassed notion of the Sierra Leone conflict as a war motivated by greed, not grievance. Rather, it points to a rural crisis expressed in terms of unresolved tensions between landowners and marginalized rural youth an unaddressed crisis of youth that currently manifests itself in many African countries further reinforced and triggered by a collapsing patrimonial state.