Richards writes that youth were so heavily involved in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighting that these wars were dubbed a “crisis of youth”. Young fighters are defined under international law as people less than 18 years of age (Wessells, 2009). According to Richards (1995), many of these rebel movements comprise young people as fighters. Most of the civil wars have been dominated by rebel movements, with a total of 74 civil wars since the end of the Cold War (Byman, Chalk, Hoffman, Rosenau, and Branna, 2001). According to Stedman (2002), civil wars in Africa have been among the world’s worst, ranging from those in Rwanda and Somalia to the conflicts in Angola to Liberia, each resulting in between 250,000 to 1,000,000 total deaths. In 2002 alone, there were 21-armed conflicts in 19 different locations throughout the world (SIPRI, 2003), five of which were in African nations. Since the end of World War II, most wars have occurred within, rather than between, states, and most of these wars have taken place in countries that were once controlled by imperial powers (Henderson and Singer, 2002). George Mason University – Fairfax, Virginia
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