Child Soldiers, published by powerHouse Books, takes as its subject not war in general but one stubborn condition of modern conflict: the recruitment of children by armed forces and militant groups. The book moves through countries with long histories of child combat, following boys and girls from the moment they are drawn into fighting — coerced, deceived, or pushed by poverty and discrimination — into demobilization and the slow, often incomplete work of rehabilitation.

This is a collaboration rather than one photographer’s statement. The images come from an international roster of photojournalists, among them Tim Hetherington, Roger Lemoyne, Cedric Gerbehaye and Ami Vitale; Hetherington’s Liberia photographs and the work of Lemoyne and Gerbehaye are among the sequences the book is built around. Leora Kahn edited the collection, Luis Moreno-Ocampo contributes the introduction, and essays by Jo Becker, Jimmie Briggs, Dick Durbin, Emmanuel Jal and Michael Wessels place the photographs beside legal, political and first-person testimony.

What sets the volume apart is its refusal to stop at the figure of the armed child. Combat occupies only part of the arc; later sections turn to disarmament, return and rebuilding. That arrangement gives the pictures a cumulative weight a single portfolio could not carry, and it sets reportage alongside accounts from people who lived through it.

For a collector, the case rests on argument and construction rather than scarcity. It is a 120-page hardcover in English, in a landscape format of roughly 30.5 by 24 centimetres — wide enough for the horizontal reportage that fills it, and steady enough in its editing to hold a diffuse international subject together. Readers who follow documentary photography of conflict, or who track how the photo-essay form handles testimony and aftermath, will find the book’s editorial logic worth returning to.