This work studies the concepts of the body in East and South Asian bodily religious practices and the role of human body in religion. However, the reintegration of these children into post-war society features only infrequently in popular stories about child soldiers, which this paper suggests in its concluding remarks is an undervalued concept to further debates about asymmetrical warfare. The award-winning story of nine-year-old commander general Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game suggests that genocide in today’s world is equivalent to child’s play, while female child soldiers have become synonymous with emancipatory, feminist identities.

The ingenuity of children and their simplified sense of justice and retribution also serve to foreground as a narrative device the moral politics and discursive appropriation of unconventional warfare combatants. Yet it is the adult world around them which profits from the child soldiers’ mutilation, posttraumatic stress disorders, and, oftentimes, deaths. From Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games to Dumbledore’s Army in Harry Potter, child soldiers who take up arms against the enemy triumph over evil warlords, insane despots and corrupt regimes. The status of the child solider is that of the reluctant combatant, and, according to UNICEF’s 2016 peace report, a sign of the rise of extreme violence around the world.1 This paper uses a popular culture studies paradigm to highlight the damaging physical and emotional trauma of child soldier characters such as Melody Pond in Dr Who and Naruto Uzumaki in Naruto.

An increasingly visible topic in a worldwide discourse on popular culture, the recruitment, use, and exploitation of children by armed forces and military leaders also features heavily in contemporary literature, popular television, and film productions. The involvement of child soldiers in war has attracted global outrage through social awareness campaigns in the new century.

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