Child-saving or child rights: depictions of children in international NGO campaigns on conflict

This paper analyses images of children in international NGO fundraising campaigns on children and conflict in Africa, with a particular focus on the Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It identifies the key impacts of contemporary civil war in Africa on children and the role of children and young people in these conflicts. The campaigns analysed here use different discursive and rhetorical devices: from melodrama to dispassionate expert. Despite these differences, the academic literature on why children get involved in fighting and the psycho‐social impacts of both forced and voluntary participation are elided by these NGOs who frame war as an assemblage of discrete issues that can be made the target of specific interventions. Despite the commitment of these NGOs to human rights and to the idea of the child as a rights‐bearing subject, child rights are deployed as a supplement rather than an alternative to established discourses of child saving