Discovering Childhood in International Relations [1st ed.] 9783030460624, 9783030460631

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Discovering Childhood in International Relations Edited by J. Marshall Beier

Discovering Childhood in International Relations

J.  Marshall Beier Editor

Discovering Childhood in International Relations

Editor J. Marshall Beier Department of Political Science McMaster University Hamilton, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-46062-4 ISBN 978-3-030-46063-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For the young people actively remaking our world

Acknowledgments

My deepest and sincerest gratitude is owed to each of the contributors to this volume. Not only have they been wonderful to work with at all stages of the project but they have taught me much and have given me pause to reflect anew on matters of shared interest in ways exemplary of the best of all we hope for in collegial relationships and from collaborative work. The contribution they collectively make herein offers exceptional insight, deeper and more engaging than I could have imagined at the outset of our work together, into what thinking about children and childhoods means for and about disciplinary International Relations. I look forward to continuing the conversations they open here and to all that we still have to learn from them. In this and other work, I continue to gain much in the way of encouragement from members of the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. In particular, I would like to thank the superbly engaged undergraduate students who have made my fourth-year seminar, “Child/Youth Rights and Security in Global Political Perspective,” among the most stimulating and thought-provoking (and, happily, ongoing) experiences of my professional life. They and the many excellent graduate students with whom it is also my privilege to work are ever pushing my thinking in new ways and inspiring deeper contemplation on issues central to this volume. Likewise, my colleagues in the International Relations field, Peter Nyers, Robert O’Brien, Tony Porter, Alina Sajed, and Lana Wylie are fonts of intellectual energy and constant sources of inspiration. Together with others in our Department, we all depend as vii

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well on the administrative support provided by Manuela Dozzi, Rebekah Flynn, and Wendy Ryckman, for which I am also always grateful. At Palgrave, Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg were supportive of the project from our earliest discussions and their enthusiasm did much to underwrite confidence that the way the volume was framed would make the most of its potential. In later stages, Rachel Moore guided the completed manuscript through the production process. I could not be more appreciative for these efforts or for the time and talents of all the others who work behind the scenes to see this and other projects through to print. Many thanks are due as well for the valuable and supportive feedback from the reviewers for Palgrave that played an important part in strengthening the volume and in urging its most interesting and original contributions to the fore. Finally, I extend my thanks to friends too numerous to list and, of course, to my family. These are the relationships that sustain us and which, therefore, are requisite to all that we do. My mother, Carole Beier, my late father, Ron Beier, and my aunt, Myra Hurst have all been present through the span of this project, discussed aspects of it with me when I was still thinking them through, and forgave me for completing the editing lakeside on a family vacation. As always, I am grateful to my daughter, Kaelyn Beier, for her many contributions to my thinking along the way and for continuing to teach by way of example on the indispensability of young people’s daily contributions to the social worlds we all inhabit. Hamilton, ON, Canada January 2020

J. Marshall Beier

Contents

1

Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood in International Relations 1 J. Marshall Beier

2

Decolonizing Childhood in International Relations 21 Katrina Lee-Koo

3

Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework for Engaging Images of Children in IR 41 Helen Berents

4

Children as Agents in International Relations? Transnational Activism, International Norms, and the Politics of Age 65 Anna Holzscheiter

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Doing IR: Securing Children 89 Helen Brocklehurst

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A Tale of a (Dis)Orderly International Society: Protecting Child-Soldiers, Saving the Child, Governing the Future 115 Jana Tabak ix

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From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child Soldier: How the Martial Regulation of Children Normalizes and Legitimizes War 135 Victoria M. Basham

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Toying with Militarization: Children and War on the Homefront 155 Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter

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Between Borders: Pop Cultural Heroes and Plural Childhoods in IR 179 Siobhán McEvoy-Levy with Cole Byram, Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus Perry, Trinity Perry, Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore

10 Revisiting ‘Womenandchildren’ in Peace and Security: What About the Girls Caught in Between? 199 Lesley Pruitt 11 Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security and Resilience 219 J. Marshall Beier 12 Centralizing Childhood, Remaking the Discourse 243 Alison M. S. Watson Index 263

Notes

on

Contributors

Victoria M. Basham is Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations at Cardiff University, Wales. Her research interests lie in the field of critical military studies at the intersections of feminist international relations, critical geopolitics, and international political sociology. Her research explores how war, and war preparedness, shape people’s daily lives and how daily life can, in turn, influence and facilitate war and other geopolitical outcomes. She is particularly interested in how experiences of gender, racialization, sexuality, age, and social class intersect with the prioritization and perpetration of military power. Victoria is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Military Studies and Co-Editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series, Advances in Critical Military Studies. Between 2017 and 2019 she served as the President of the European International Studies Association. J. Marshall Beier is Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. His publications include Childhood and the Production of Security, ed. (Routledge, 2017); The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014); Canadian Foreign Policy in Critical Perspective, ed. with Lana Wylie (Oxford University Press, 2010); Indigenous Diplomacies, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); International Relations in Uncommon Places: Indigeneity, Cosmology, and the Limits of International Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2009). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security and his work has appeared in journals including xi

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Children’s Geographies, Contemporary Security Policy, Critical Military Studies, Global Governance, Global Responsibility to Protect, International Political Sociology, International Politics, International Studies Review, Journal of Human Rights, Security Dialogue, and Third World Quarterly. Helen Berents received her Ph.D. (International Relations) from the University of Queensland, Australia in 2013. She is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her research draws on peace studies, feminist international relations, and critical security studies to consider representations of children and youth in crises and conflicts and engagements with lived experiences of violence-affected young people. Her work has been published in journals including International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Political Sociology, Critical Studies on Security, and Signs. Her first book, Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia, was published by Routledge in 2018. Helen Brocklehurst is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the University of Derby. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Aberystwyth University and teaches in the areas of conflict, gender, and global politics. She has published a number of articles and chapters exploring the relevance of children for studies of security and is still working on a second book. Her ongoing interests include contributing to the reframing of juvenile informational material on war, terrorism, and politics, and related to this, exploring how the publishing industry and digital media companies might mitigate risk and social harm in their management of photographic images of (young) people in adversity. Cole Byram graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis, USA in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and Accounting (double major). He was a member of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab student think tank in 2018–2019. He began study at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Bloomington in the autumn of 2019. Sean Carter is Associate Professor in Political Geography at the University of Exeter. He has a particular interest in the ways in which cultural and geopolitical practices are mutually constitutive, particularly the interrelation between geopolitics and various forms of popular culture. This has been pursued through a number of research projects that

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examine how the geopolitical world is framed, visualized, and performed. These have included studies of the geopolitics of diaspora communities, film and cinema, photojournalism, and most recently, play. Sean’s recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, seeks to more fully understand the ways in which play and geopolitics are intertwined, especially in the everyday lives of children, and the ways in which an attentiveness to “play” can reframe cultural and political geographies more generally. Anna Holzscheiter  is Professor of International Politics at TU Dresden and Head of the Research Group‚ Governance for Global Health, at WZB Social Science Center in Berlin. Prior to taking up her position at TU Dresden, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy, Freie Universitaet Berlin (2006–2015). She has held fellowship positions at Harvard University (2014–2015), the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2007–2010), and the European University Institute (2004). In her research, she has been focusing on interorganizational dynamics between governmental and nongovernmental organizations in international politics and institutions as well as the emergence, consolidation, contestation, and collision of international norms, particularly in the fields of (children’s) human rights and global health. Katrina Lee-Koo is Associate Professor of International Relations and Deputy Director of Monash Gender, Peace and Security at Monash University. Katrina teaches and researches in the areas of critical security studies and feminist international relations. Her research examines the protection and participation of civilians in conflict-affected areas and during peace processes (focused upon women, youth, and children) as well as the implementation of UN Security Council agendas on these issues. Katrina is coauthor of Children and Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2015), with Kim Huynh and Bina D’Costa; Ethics and Global Security (Routledge, 2014), with Anthony Burke and Matt McDonald; and, editor of the forthcoming Young Women’s Leadership in Asia and the Pacific (Routledge), with Lesley Pruitt. Katrina is an associate editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and is on the editorial board for the Australian Journal of Politics and History, the Australian Journal of Political Science, and Politics and Gender.

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Jaimarsin Lewis  is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, USA. He has worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center. In that capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.” Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference. Siobhán McEvoy-Levy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Political Science at Butler University in Indianapolis, USA and Director of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab, an innovative think tank for undergraduate students interested in peace and justice research, education, and activism. Her research focuses on children and youth in international relations and critical studies of political violence, peace(building), and memorialization. She is the author of numerous books, articles, and book chapters on children and youth, including the results of in-depth interviews and focus groups with young people in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. Her most recent book is Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (Palgrave, 2018). Karaijus Perry is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, USA. He worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In that capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.” Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference. Trinity Perry  completed her HSE (high school equivalency) diploma in 2019 and is based at the Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. She worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In that capacity, she contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.” Together with her coauthors, she presented the results of this paper at Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference. Lesley Pruitt is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Lesley’s research focuses on recognizing and supporting young people’s

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participation in politics and peacebuilding and advancing gender equity in efforts aimed at pursuing peace and security. Lesley’s books include Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender & Change (State University of New York Press, 2013); The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Policing & the UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit (University of California Press, 2016); Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combatting Civic Deficit? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), with Mark Chou, Jean Paul Gagnon, and Catherine Hartung; and, Dancing Through the Dissonance: Creative Movement & Peacebuilding (Manchester University Press, 2020), with Erica Rose Jeffrey. Jana Tabak is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her publications include: a forthcoming co-edited special issue of Childhood: Journal of Global Child Research; a forthcoming book entitled, The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (University of Georgia Press); Organizações Internacionais: História e Práticas, 2nd edition, ed. with Monica Herz and Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann (Elsevier, 2015); and, Modernity at Risk: Complex Emergencies, Humanitarianism, Sovereignty, with Carlos Frederico Pereira da Gama (Lambert Academic, 2012). She is the author of articles in the journals Contexto Internacional, Cultures et Conflits, Global Responsibility to Protect, and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. She has taught in the areas of international organizations, peace and conflict studies, and children and war. Julio Trujillo  graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis, USA in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and Criminology. He served as the Neighborhood Youth Liaison for the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019. He led a youth research team to conduct interviews with young people in the community about the barriers to the career and college aspirations of racial and ethnic minority youth. He has also worked as a community organizer with the Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. He has received awards for ­servant-leadership and social justice advocacy and is a member of the Alpha Kappa Delta Honor and Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Societies. Alison M. S. Watson is Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews and Managing Director and Co-Founder of the Third Generation Project, a think tank focusing upon the human rights implications of climate change. Her work has largely focused upon

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examining the human rights of marginalized communities, with a longterm specialization in considering the place of children in the international community and the politics of childhood. More recently, she has been co-developing, with Bennett Collins, a research approach that is collaborative and “community”-led, as well as a teaching approach that aims to provide students with practice-based as well as theoretical skills. Her most recent article examines the meaning of ‘home’ and its importance as a site of political agency. Mikayla Whittemore  is a sophomore student in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University, majoring in Political Science, International Studies, with minors in Peace Studies and Spanish. She interned with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019 focusing on mass incarceration and food justice. She is studying abroad at Valparaiso University in Chile in the autumn of 2019. Tara Woodyer is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research examines how childhood is entangled in the (re)production of wider sociocultural processes. She has a particular interest in ludic—or playful—geographies, advancing theorizations of play and childhood agency through attention to embodiment and affect. Tara’s recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, has explored play as a critical lens for addressing conflict and militarization. This has focused on using ethnographic, child-centered techniques to examine how children express and enact contemporary geopolitics through everyday domestic practices of play. This work interrogates militarization beyond areas of actual armed conflict and highlights childhood political subjectivity through consideration of embodiment.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood in International Relations J. Marshall Beier

In a much-cited 1997 contribution to the New Internationalist, moral philosopher Peter Singer described a thought experiment posed to his students in which he asked them to imagine that, along their route to the university, they happened upon a child drowning in a shallow pond. In the scenario he sketched for them, the students could easily and safely wade into the pond to perform a rescue but would have to weigh saving the child against soaking their clothes and missing class. Unsurprisingly, Singer’s students assessed the child’s life to be of greater value than the comparatively inconsequential cost of wet clothes and a missed class and, accordingly, they were unanimous in saying they would opt to perform the rescue. The point of the exercise was to prompt reflection on the ethical question of “what we owe to people in need” and, extending the exploration, Singer found that the majority of his students felt they would have the same obligation to a child far away whom they also had the ability to save from death at no risk or significant cost to themselves (Singer 1997). Of course, the ability to aid others in need routinely

J. M. Beier (*)  Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_1

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fails to ignite that very sense of obligation and the apparent disconnect between ethical reflection and lived experience, revealed in the experiment, is Singer’s entre to making some weighty propositions on reconciling ethics and self-interest as a route to the ethical life. Beyond the particular insights Singer urges us to draw from his experiment, though, it is interesting too for what it leaves unexplored: ironically, the child at the center of the scenario. What do we know about Singer’s child? On first gloss, it might seem precious little. Despite repeated references to her/him/them in the first paragraphs of the essay, nothing is said to give even the slightest hint about, for example, age or gender or any other identity characteristic. Indeed, no physical description of any sort is offered and the child is not placed in a broader social context. We know that the child’s immediate situation is urgent but are not able to glean anything about any circumstances more generally or apart from that specific plight. And, while Singer’s students are positioned as both the subjects of ethical deliberation and hypothetical would-be rescuers, the child is imbued with no agency whatsoever. In fact, the only thing said of the child is that he/ she/they is/are drowning. This, however, describes the child’s predicament rather than the child, who is rendered utterly one-dimensional as, simply, ‘child.’ The ostensible focal point of the scenario seems, paradoxically, to warrant no further ascription or elaboration. And yet, from this it becomes clear that, while we have been told very little, we actually know quite a lot—so much so, in fact, that the intelligibility of Singer’s experiment depends on it. Singer’s child is the quintessential person in need, understood at once as the very embodiment of helplessness. Deployed as a rhetorical device, the child in need of rescue or protection draws on inveterate ideas about innocent, vulnerable, and precious childhood so pervasive and so deeply held that they need not be explicitly described. ‘Child’ functions as the byword of these qualities, which are customarily and reliably taken to be its defining features, and therefore invites no dithering on questions of the need for or propriety of intervention. Nothing of the widely varied subject positions or complex intersectionalities of actual lived childhoods is held visible in this formulation, nor does Singer reflect on how they—or, more particularly, their omission—might bear consequentially on the responses of his students. It matters to the purpose of his scenario that the object of rescue is the one-dimensional child of hegemonic imagining and it matters too that Singer’s students will undoubtedly

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have brought the cultural competencies to decode ‘child’ as embodied helplessness and vulnerability. Nothing more than ‘child’ is said because nothing more need be said. And this is revealing of how much is already ‘known’ about childhood as well as of the cultural traction of the deferred meaning behind the signifier ‘child.’ Children figure similarly in myriad narratives of global politics and in the disciplinary stories we tell in International Relations. Though seldom framed as political subjects in their own right, images of children in abject circumstances have long been made potent political resources with the potential to mobilize international political action and move shifts in global policy. They likewise make fleeting cameo-like appearances in IR textbooks in connection with entries on security, development, and more, subtly populating conceptual propositions like liberal progress or the ubiquity of threat with relatable “emotional scenery” (Brocklehurst 2015: 32). Half-noticed and rarely heard, they are nevertheless important to global politics and to IR in the same way the nondescript ‘drowning child’ is important to Singer’s lesson in ethical responsibility. And yet, like Singer in his scenario, IR has paid almost no attention to children and childhoods, per se, and has been similarly inattentive to the important ways in which they are bound up in and bear upon issues of rights, diplomacies, conflict and security, global political economy, and other areas of traditional disciplinary focus. If IR’s failure to take notice of these things belies the significance of children and childhoods to the worlds of global politics, it is also out of step with important developments in other fields of study. In parallel with the rapid expansion of what began as a ‘new sociology of childhood’ in the 1980s and which gave rise to a burgeoning interdisciplinary Childhood Studies since the 1990s, associated research programs have emerged within and across a number of traditional arts disciplines. While disciplinary International Relations has been something of a laggard in this regard, slow to recognize the relevance of these developments for its own subject matters and its ways of approaching them, there are encouraging signs that this is beginning to change. In particular, recent years have seen the emergence of an engaged and growing community of scholarship problematizing IR’s omission of children and childhoods. Looking to sources of the field’s failure to theorize childhood and to take children seriously as political subjects in local and global contexts, these interventions have revealed how International Relations is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of

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childhood as, perforce, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity. These investigations thus have much to tell us about our field itself as well as beginning to equip us to productively approach what has been a neglected area of study. Responding to the growing interest in this developing area of research, a new network of interested scholars has begun to take shape, drawing together and establishing connections between emerging and earlier contributors and giving rise to collaborative projects. With opening interventions on children and childhoods in International Relations reaching back well over a decade now and as interest in this scholarship is gathering, there is a need for more thoroughgoing reflection on problems and prospects for doing work in this area in a specifically disciplinary International Relations context. Spike Peterson’s Gendered States (1992) answered an analogous need in the early 1990s as interest in feminist theory and Gender Studies was ascendant in the field. In retrospect, it would have been good to have had such a collection of reflections on thinking about indigeneity in International Relations at the fore of the marked increase in work in that area in recent years. Together, the contributors to Discovering Childhood in International Relations bring a constellation of research experiences, conceptual commitments, and points of intervention to, in sum, give readers a sense of the terrain of problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects of/for thinking about children and childhoods in International Relations—specifically in International Relations and with an International Relations readership foremost in mind. As with any emergent area, these explorations, though animated by specific curiosities and commitments, are carried out against the backdrop of a host of much larger questions. How should students and scholars of International Relations approach this sort of research? What are those problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects alluded to above in the more specific undertaking to make sense of, draw upon, and speak issues of children and childhoods in IR? Where and how should we look to ‘discover’ children and childhoods and what might we perhaps have to discover about our discipline (and ourselves) first? Thinking about a readership already inclined to take this work seriously but also those who situate themselves and their work in International Relations more broadly and who might simply wonder why they ought to think about children/childhoods, what can or should be said to both the former and latter categories of colleagues?

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With these questions in mind, contributors aim to speak to International Relations quite broadly. Though some chapters land closer than others to questions of, inter alia, security, or rights, or the contours of the discipline itself, all turn on those four Ps (problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects) of taking children and childhoods seriously in International Relations, informed in each instance by contributors’ own research projects. Thinking in terms of a collective disciplinary enterprise of ‘discovering’ captures something of the four Ps as well as the senses in which International Relations variously performs children and childhoods (and the bounds of their possibilities) into being and is itself performed into being through the manner of its inclusions, exclusions, renderings, and deployments of children and childhoods. It also pulls on the ways in which ‘discovering’ has been undertaken in other disciplinary literatures, with reference to, variously, gender, race, culture, class; likewise citizenship, discourse, aesthetics, among others. Similarly, ‘discovering’ is here intended to help draw out the ways in which children and childhoods are not at all new to International Relations but merely newly noticed. The task contributors to Discovering Childhood in International Relations have set for us in the chapters that follow, then, is both to think about how to approach this as a ‘new site of knowledge’ (Watson 2006) as well as to reflect on what it demands of the discipline and what it tells us about how we might imagine International Relations differently. Most fundamentally, this book is something of a preemption against ‘add children and stir’ projects of the sort previously seen (and rightly problematized) in those initial moments when scholarship on women, Indigenous peoples, or even research methods (ethnography) and conceptual borrowings (resilience) emerged in International Relations.

Discovering Childhood Even without inquiring too deeply, it seems odd that IR should need to be called on to discover children. More than a quarter of the world’s human population, after all, is aged fourteen years and under, rising to nearly one third when all those under age eighteen are counted (United Nations 2017). What is more, despite having received little in the way of focused attention from IR, the governance of children—from rights regimes, to regulation of bodily autonomy and security, to the social spaces they (may) occupy, and more—is nevertheless a key constituent

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of global political order. It is just as curious, then, that IR scholars have shown so little interest in those global political processes and practices involved in the governance of children and childhood. This is especially so where these things otherwise dovetail with issues traditionally regarded as well within the usual disciplinary remit. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to take but one example, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world and suggests a number of intriguing puzzles that ought to be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations. Among these, the fact that the United States, which played a central role in the framing of the Convention, remains the sole holdout on its ratification would seem fertile ground for investigations on the interplay of norms, interests, and more. Intriguing too is that many of the most celebrated aspects of the UNCRC remain poorly implemented even where they are strongly endorsed in rhetoric. International Relations is not at all well-equipped, however, to make sense of these and other puzzles without, as the contributors herein show, first discovering children and childhoods not as incidental to global political worlds but everywhere and always integral to them. But what does it mean to discover? In its most literal sense, the combined Latin prefix ‘dis’ (a removal or reversal) and root word ‘cover’ (in the present context, a shrouding, cloaking, obscuring from view) point to something revealed, not introduced. Discovery is a coming to awareness of that which was already present but previously unknown, unrecognized, or perhaps differently understood. The title of this volume, Discovering Childhood in International Relations, thus resists suggesting that childhood be brought to the discipline. Like the child in Singer’s thought experiment, childhood has always been present, indeed indispensable, to discourses of global politics, ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ alike. The call to consider children and childhoods in International Relations must begin, then, with the recognition that there is much that is already ‘known’—and a readiness to unlearn a great deal also. Discovering childhood, in this sense, demands critical interrogation of hegemonic ideas that prefigure imaginable spaces for and renderings of children in IR. And this already alerts us to some of the problems and pitfalls of which it is necessary to build and sustain awareness. To the extent that they have traditionally been visible, the children populating conventional IR discourse are thoroughly objectified. Whether as referent objects of security summoning the responsibility

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of other subjects, hapless victims allegorical of atrocity, sentimentalized metonyms of imagined futures, or some other like framing, they are situated in discourses and projects not of their making wherein they function as rhetorical devices in the same manner as Singer’s innominate and one-dimensional ‘child’. It is as yet still rare to find them positioned in IR’s stories about itself and its subject matters as complex and consequential actors in and of the social worlds they occupy. Even in what might seem exceptions where, figuring as child soldiers for example, children may be read as performing roles to substantial political effect, their agency still tends to be eclipsed by that imputed to those understood to have manipulated or coerced them to these roles. Left unexamined are the myriad ways children the world over participate in the (re)production of global order in conflict, peacebuilding, moral entrepreneurship, labor (waged and unwaged), caregiving, and in countless other circumstances and settings that include both the spectacular and the mundane. They are among the agents of status quo politics and of movements of resistance. And yet they are relatively absent as such from IR. Elsewhere, new developments in Childhood Studies over the last few decades have fueled burgeoning and dynamic growth areas of specialization in a number of established disciplines. Broadly, this work has turned on issues such as children’s locations in citizenship, contributions to knowledge practices, and participation in myriad facets of the social words of which they are part. It has critically investigated the ideational bases of their disenfranchisement from social power and challenged deeply held developmentalist ideas (Burman 1994) that, approaching children less as human beings than as ‘human becomings’ (Uprichard 2008), work to delimit recognition of agency and efface subjecthood. Attentive to the real and significant ways children participate in and affect social life, research programs in Children’s Geographies, the Sociology of Childhood, and others have given rise to specialized journals, new sections in professional associations, and lively communities of scholarly research and exchange. These developments reflect the actively interdisciplinary nature of Childhood Studies (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016) as well as a growing sense that the neglect of childhood in studies of social life impoverishes all social inquiry, including all that may reside beyond those spheres traditionally associated with children. In this sense, childhood, like race, gender, class, and other social systems of identity and difference is seen as always relevant.

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Working through the implications of these insights, a new International Relations literature speaks to a discipline that has paid very little attention to childhood and its relationship to status quo circulations of power, to children as possessed of bona fide political subjecthood, and to the under-interrogated ideational commitments that have made these exclusions appear relatively unproblematic. Early contributions (see, for example, Watson 2004, 2006, 2009; Brocklehurst 2006; Holzscheiter 2010) spoke both to IR’s silence on children and their paradoxical importance to so much of what is normally taken to be its disciplinary ambit. Besides doing essential ‘ground-clearing’ work in creating a space for thinking about children and childhoods in a discipline that has been late to take notice, initial contributions have inquired along lines of their implications for various spheres more readily associated with International Relations scholarship. This has included explorations of children’s indispensability to particular ways in which security is practiced (see Brocklehurst 2006) and how childhood is constitutive of security discourses and practices, enabling some political possibilities while simultaneously foreclosing others (see Basham 2015; Jacob 2015; Berents 2016, 2019; Beier 2018). Others look to how childhoods intersect and are bound up in the reproduction of militarized global politics (see Beier 2011; Woodyer and Carter 2018). Another current plies ways in which taking childhood seriously challenges accustomed ways of thinking about human rights (see Holzscheiter 2010, 2018; Linde 2016; Beier 2019). Unsettling simplistic renderings of child victimhood (see Rosen 2005; Hart 2008; Baines 2009; Gilligan 2009), still other contributions have highlighted how subject positions are instantiated in respect of political projects, often benevolent in their founding, that reduce young people to objects of protection in often highly problematic ways (see Macmillan 2009; Lee-Koo 2011, 2013; Jacob 2014; Brocklehurst 2015). Recovering a more complicated and nuanced picture of lived childhoods, a number of works reveal the complex entanglements of childhood, peace, and conflict and the ways in which children affect and are affected by them while simultaneously engaging in forms of resistance and producing possibilities for alternate futures (see McEvoy-Levy 2006; Huynh et al. 2015; D’Costa 2016; Berents 2018; Martuscelli and Villa 2018; Tabak 2020). In keeping with the shift in Childhood Studies from developmentalism to approaches attentive to agency (see, for example, James and Prout 1990; Matthews 1994; Qvortrup 1994; Jenks 1996) and centering capabilities (see Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2003; McNamee

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and Seymour 2013), these resist renderings of children’s disempowerment as a force so powerful that it may be seen to overwrite subjectivity, producing only objects of protection or oppression and obscuring the innumerable ways in which children are meaningfully engaged in civic life (see Chou et al. 2017). Aligned with the aesthetic turn and the increasing interest in popular and material culture in critical International Relations but tending also to theorizing childhood, a number of important contributions reveal circuits of everyday political participation that raise a significant challenge to children’s reduction to passive objects. This includes revealing explorations of subjecthood expressed in youth cultures (McEvoy-Levy 2018) or activated through music (Pruitt 2013). Investigations into young people’s interaction with and through online gaming give a more complicated picture of adult game developers’ influence than is sometimes imagined, finding gamers’ interventions evince significant resistances to themes of the adult world as well as, and even concomitantly with, participation in their reproduction (Crowe 2011). The significance of these insights is that they alert us to how a focus on adult agency alone misses much of what is interesting and important. And in these and other contributions, this is exposed only by learning how young people fashion their engagements with and through their socials worlds and how they understand and situate themselves in relation to them. What this brief representative survey of the existing literature sketches are the contours of a vibrant new community of scholarship taking shape to address International Relations’ relative silence about children and childhoods and raising both challenges and opportunities for how we think about the discipline and its subject matters. Coming at a time when interest in this new area of research is growing, this volume is, among other things, a goad to further inquiry. Without any particular pretense to agenda-setting, it is inspired by a collective desire to widen and deepen conversations in International Relations around issues concerning children and childhoods. As an edited collection, it brings together a range of areas of experience and expertise developed through contributors’ own pioneering curiosities, conceptual commitments, and programs of research. Together, they explore issues and offer new insights that build on initial treatments of childhood in International Relations while shedding light on the unique problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects that inhere in taking up this area of research in IR’s specific disciplinary milieu. More broadly still, they contribute also to

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scholarship on the importance of children and childhoods in global political contexts that has likewise been ascendant in other disciplinary contexts (see, for example, Benwell and Hopkins 2016) and thus highlight openings for potentially fruitful interdisciplinary conversations as well.

Structure of the Volume Challenging the dominant thinking about childhood as it is still expressed in prevailing commitments and common senses, in Chapter 2 Katrina Lee-Koo brings children’s agency into relief through a critical examination of the paradox of children’s and childhood’s simultaneous invisibility in and indispensibility to both global politics and disciplinary International Relations. Arguing that the narrative politics through which childhood is deployed reflect investment in ­developmentalist-inspired ideas about children that play a crucial part both in enabling action and sustaining status quo relations of power for the discipline and the worlds it makes its subject matter, Lee-Koo shows how constructions of childhood and the lived realities of children bear in consequential ways on how we (might) practice global politics and disciplinary IR alike—and how this figures vis-à-vis possibilities for children’s emancipation. Tending directly to the problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects implied in explorations inspired by this critical insight, she reveals what is at stake and for whom in the growing interest around this emergent area in International Relations. In so doing, she shows how attention to children and childhoods produces a fuller account of global politics as well as a unique vantage point from which to reflect critically on IR as social practice, shot through as it is with unequal relations of power. Taking a view of children as consequential makers and bearers of knowledge, the chapter concludes with a call for IR to be not only inclusive of children but responsive to them as well. In Chapter 3, Helen Berents takes up a key dimension of the challenge to imagine children differently, proposing a critical framework for the way we literally see them. Calling on us to critically consider the purposes behind the deployment of images of injured, suffering, and threatening children, she interrogates the framings of ‘victims,’ ‘delinquents,’ and ‘icons’ in reflecting on how IR scholars ought to consider such images. Arguing that they “are not always about the child,” Berents urges us always to ask ‘what,’ ‘how,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘why’ when confronted with images of children. Doing so points not only to

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a potentially more ethical practice of engaging with the photography of children in circumstances of danger, abjection, or in which they may be deemed exceptional, but also to a potentially deeper appreciation of how unequal global power relations, more than merely being reflected in the publication, sharing, and viewing of images of children in conflict and crises, are reproduced in these practices also. Above all, we are urged to read these images as always political and to locate ourselves in the relations of power they narrate. Looking to the IR literature concerned with international norms, transnational advocacy, and social movements, in Chapter 4 Anna Holzscheiter inquires into the failure—even where children and children’s rights are at the ostensible center of policymaking agendas—to see children as agents who shape international institutions and contribute to the building, contestation, and transformation of international norms. Beyond what IR misses out on for itself when it fails to theorize children and childhoods in these contexts, she points up the more profound implication that the invisibility of children’s agency in International Relations scholarship may play a part in reproducing children’s exclusion from political circuits of global governance—reduced to, at best, an issue area. Holzscheiter finds the framing of young people as especially vulnerable is once again key to the sorts of protective practices that efface their agency—and, with it, their participation rights—as well as to the institutional parceling off of children-as-issue-area from international rights regimes. Alerting us to the dangers of an ‘add children and stir’ approach while bringing another dimension to our understanding of why it matters that the discipline has not concerned itself with thinking in a focused way about children and childhoods, this stands as an important reminder that IR is a potent social force in its own right, at least partly constitutive of the world which it presumes to have ‘found.’ In Chapter 5, Helen Brocklehurst moves from how we see (or do not see) children to reflections on a long journey in efforts to find them made visible in IR. Recalling how the discipline proved an inhospitable terrain—even in moments of benevolence—for initial ­turn-of-the-millennium efforts to draw insights and inspiration from the new sociology of childhood, she looks to sources and determinants of International Relations’ lack of interest in children and childhoods, save for the very limited and objectified presence they have been permitted as child soldiers, objects of protection, or homogenized ‘faces’ of abjection. Less concerned with what children and childhoods might bring to

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IR, however, the chapter pushes us to think about what IR has to offer children. This calls for but also goes beyond IR’s own discovery of them. Probing more deeply on the question of what disciplinary International Relations has to offer children, Brocklehurst asks in what ways children might find IR amenable to aiding in their own discovery of international relations (that is, the worlds of global political life) and International Relations (the discipline itself). This suggests a direction and projects that IR would, as yet, find unfamiliar indeed, but for which we are by now well-positioned to begin preparing more hospitable ground. Revisiting what is, for IR, the more familiar issue of child soldiers (understood primarily as a phenomenon of the Global South), in Chapter 6, Jana Tabak brings new critical insights to bear in ways that are instructive as to the investments bound up in dominant discursive framings and the particular kinds of political responses they underwrite. Reprising an approach elaborated in earlier work (Tabak 2020), she employs the hyphenated “child-soldiers” as a way of foregrounding the disruption effected for the boundary between ‘child’ and ‘soldier’ by subjects who are simultaneously both and neither. That is to say, child-soldiers reside “between” a child subject position that cannot be reconciled with the commission of political violence and a soldier subject position that is similarly irreconcilable with prevailing conceptions of childhood. Framing child-soldiers as ‘emergency,’ Tabak argues that they are not simply a humanitarian crisis, but a crisis of socio-political order writ large, and this is revealing of how they are not actually the most important referent object of the desire to emancipate them and rehabilitate not only their childhoods but ‘normal’ childhood itself together with the ‘normal’ governance of children. We are thus able to glimpse how, without taking a more critical lens, investigations of child soldiers as simply an issue area, reproduce governance regimes of childhood and of modern society wherein recourse to political violence is the preserve of adults, state institutions aver and regulate the legitimacy of such violence, and children, as objects of protection, are excluded from political life. In Chapter 7, Victoria M. Basham takes the focus to the making of child soldiers of the Global North. Delving deeply into the martial politics intersecting particular renderings of childhood and youth in the historical example of Nazi youth organizations and in contemporary military recruitment practices in the United Kingdom, she shows the pivotal role of ideas about children and childhood in the literal and symbolic

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practices and performances that make war possible. While acknowledging the significant differences between these regimes, Basham draws attention to the underlying childism of a shared subordination of children’s wellbeing and life chances to political exigencies of an adult world that monopolizes political power and authority. Noting that the Nazis recognized the agency of children but also how particular kinds of political subjects could be made of them in ways befitting the adult-world projects of state and Party, the analysis developed in the chapter also signals the importance of coming to a nuanced view of children’s agency in our efforts to recover it—one that does not lose sight of children as complex social actors who, like all human subjects, are co-constituted with the social worlds of which they are part. There is thus an important lesson for IR to be read from the militarization of the lives of children of the Global North wherein there exists a tension between subject positions amenable to status quo and resistance politics, respectively. In the context of this tension, theorizing their agency as both potentially autonomous and a valued object of capture by other actors reveals it to be in itself a site of geopolitical struggle both by and about children. Chapter 8 also turns on the militarized aspects of children’s lives in the Global North. Extending their collaborative Ludic Geopolitics research project, Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter assess the militarized meaning of a toy action figure licensed by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence and having palpable correspondence with contemporaneous wars in which the UK was directly involved. Led in this exploration by the ‘research puzzle’ posed by the action figure—as opposed to established theories or disciplinary habits and convention—they take care to bring the insights of their work to IR such that the former are not made to conform to spaces and predilections mapped out in advance by the latter. In so doing, they reveal how the entanglement of childhood with geopolitics finds children more engaged as political subjects than even critically-inspired assumptions about children as ‘passive skin’ for the ascriptions of militarism might appreciate. This leads Woodyer and Carter to press for child-centered methodological approaches, arguing for a multi-sited research perspective centering children and children’s agency, which they elaborate together with advice on the need to keep sight of the ways in which power circulates and children remain vulnerable in subjecthood. Thus, they advocate for an understanding of children not merely as having internalized but as engaged in encounters with militarism, wherein they are active in interpreting, negotiating, and resisting.

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Chapter 9 is both an exploration of and an exercise in agency, voice, and participation, bringing Siobhán McEvoy-Levy into conversation with a group of young colleagues—Cole Byram, Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus Perry, Trinity Perry, Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore—all with responsible roles in the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab. Even before its substantive contribution, then, this chapter is an engaged practice of young people’s presence, recognizing them as already bearers and producers of knowledge. Exploring their individual childhood experiences of and identifications with pop culture icons or heroes, these contributors make the links between affinities felt and influences rooted in their own relationships, identities, and experiences. Connecting to and participating in knowledges about world politics via popular culture, their personal experiences of violence as well as in collective action peacebuilding and justice struggles are situated in global context in ways that contribute to everyday meaning-making about world politics. Thus, through personal accounts of the use of pop culture narratives and artifacts in the course of everyday struggles, we can see how children’s interactions with and through popular culture are also a sphere of their participation in global politics. Not least in the very structure and approach of the chapter, adopting a “‘world’-traveling” perspective on conversation, mindful of a plurality of selves across time, space, and encounters, these explorations also address important issues around the ethical dimension of doing work on childhoods in IR. Leslie Pruitt’s contribution in Chapter 10 calls for a deeper curiosity about girls and why it has seemed all too easy for them to be forgotten. Pointing out that the risks and vulnerabilities that confront children in conflict zones—and elsewhere—are compounded for girls, she notes the inadequacy of theoretical treatments of childhood and of gender to accessing girls’ marginalization, leaving them “caught in between.” Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia, the chapter reveals complex subject positions of girls in the (post)conflict zone, paradoxically written out of political participation in dominant discourses but identified in peacebuilding projects as sites of potential for the transformation of their societies—all without reflexive attention to the formidable structural barriers they face via the dual exclusions of age and gender. Accordingly, Pruitt argues for a feminist intersectional approach which, eschewing adult-centric renderings of agency implied in existing critiques of women’s conflation with children, avoids inadvertent marginalization of girls. Tending to the complexities of intersectionality offers a means by which to arrest the subjugation of girls’ unique social locations without

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losing sight of what they share in common with/as women and children when we consider them in analyses of peace and security. Chapter 11 is offered as a caveat on the trope of the resilient child. Resilience, which has gained conceptual prominence in a range of contexts and across multiple disciplines, including IR, has considerable promise as an opening for the recovery of the subjecthood of marginalized groups, children among them. At the same time, it entails the risk of deactivating responsibility toward the vulnerable by the comparatively privileged and powerful. Working through the example of the unique social location of children of military families in the Global North, this chapter inquires into complicated circumstances of vulnerability in the midst of relative privilege, the interplay of power and subjecthood, and how resilience work by children is also the work of sustaining and reproducing militarized status quo politics. Still seeing value in the idea of resilience, the chapter argues for holding it visibly in tension with security while linking children’s subjecthood and vulnerability, rather than treating them as mutually exclusive. Finally, in Chapter 12, making reference to themes identified in her 2006 call for disciplinary International Relations to approach childhood as a “new site of knowledge,” Alison M. S. Watson reflects on the achievements of the last decade and a half of work on children and childhoods in IR and on the critical work that remains to be done. Combining conceptual insights and key tenets developed in childhood research of recent years with the disappointingly poor pace of progress on material matters of children’s rights and wellbeing across multiple global contexts, Watson turns to the rising currency of decolonizing knowledge practices both to suggest how IR might be made more hospitable to children and childhoods and what children and childhoods have, in turn, to contribute to decolonial projects in IR. The chapter concludes, in light of all that is weighed, with a reprised call for children to be recognized among the most important actors in respect of issues of current concern to IR scholars, including climate change, development, displacement, and post-conflict reconciliation—not merely as political subjects in projects, mobilizations, and resistances, but in the knowledge practices by which these come to be made intelligible as well. * * * Building from the new IR literature on children and childhoods, the contributors to this volume offer a range of points of entry to wider conversations. They reveal the important senses in which we have been

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doing work on childhood in International Relations all along: children appear as scenery, metonyms, objects of value and of security. Not to be overlooked, children the world over are, at the same time, ‘doing’ international relations in myriad ways and contexts of everyday life. Others are engaged even more purposively in activism and mobilizations around political projects both status quo and counter-hegemonic in nature. And yet, despite the importance of the contributions made to date, the IR literature around these issues remains quite marginal to disciplinary preoccupations and childhood is conspicuous only by its absence from the accustomed subject matters with which International Relations concerns itself. In addressing this omission, how should we think about childhood in IR if we hope to avoid ‘add children and stir’ approaches? What are the implications of children’s (in)visibility in the academic and broader everyday worlds of global politics? How might we work to make possible children’s audibility in IR, including as bearers and producers of knowledge with a contribution to make to our disciplinary knowledges? These are among the bigger questions addressed by contributors in the pages that follow. And if they, in turn, raise further questions, then the ultimate aim of the volume to inspire more and wider curiosities about the discovery of children and childhoods in IR will have been fulfilled. Acknowledgements   Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2019-0009).

References Baines, Erin K. 2009. “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen.” Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (2): 163–191. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0022278x09003796. Basham, Victoria M. 2015. “Telling Geopolitical Tales: Temporality, Rationality, and the ‘Childish’ in the Ongoing War for the Falklands-Malvinas Islands.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/2162488 7.2015.1014698. Beier, J. Marshall, ed. 2011. The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beier, J. Marshall. 2018. “Ultimate Tests: Children, Rights, and the Politics of Protection.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 164–187. https://doi. org/10.1163/1875984x-01001009.

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Beier, J. Marshall. 2019. “Binding Gestures: A Customary Norm Regarding the UN Convention on the Rights on the Child?” Children’s Geographies 17 (3): 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1495315. Benwell, Matthew C., and Peter Hopkins, eds. 2016. Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Berents, Helen. 2016. “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (4): 513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.20 16.1207463. Berents, Helen. 2018. Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia. New York: Routledge. Berents, Helen. 2019. “Apprehending the ‘Telegenic Dead’: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics.” International Political Sociology 13 (2): 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly036. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood— Insecurities of Children.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 29–46. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014679. Burman, Erica. 1994. Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London: Routledge. Chou, Mark, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Catherine Hartung, and Lesley Pruitt. 2017. Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combating Civic Deficit? London: Rowman & Littlefield. Crowe, Nic. 2011. “‘We Die for the Glory of the Emperor’: Young People, Warhammer, and Role- Playing War Online.” In The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, edited by J. Marshall Beier, 153–173. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Costa, Bina, ed. 2016. Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Faulkner, Joanne, and Magdalena Zolkos, eds. 2016. Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child. Lanham: Lexington Books. Gilligan, Chris. 2009. “‘Highly Vulnerable?’ Political Violence and the Social Construction of Traumatized Children.” Journal of Peace Research 46 (1): 119–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343308098407. Hart, Jason. 2008. “Displaced Children’s Participation in Political Violence: Towards Greater Understanding of Mobilisation.” Conflict, Security and Development 8 (3): 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678800802323308. Holzscheiter, Anna. 2010. Children’s Rights in International Politics: The Transformative Power of Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

18  J. M. BEIER Holzscheiter, Anna. 2018. “Affectedness, Empowerment and Norm Contestation—Children and Young People as Social Agents in International Politics.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 3 (5–6): 645–663. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1600382. Huynh, Kim, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo. 2015. Children and Global Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacob, Cecilia. 2014. Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar. London: Routledge. Jacob, Cecilia. 2015. “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security Studies.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080 /21624887.2015.1014675. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1990. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer Press. Jenks, Chris. 1996. Childhood. New York: Routledge. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2011. “Horror and Hope: (Re)presenting Militarised Children in Global North-South Relations.” Third World Quarterly 32 (4): 725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.567005. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2013. “Not Suitable for Children: The Politicisation of Conflict-Affected Children in Post-2001 Afghanistan.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 67 (4): 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718 .2013.803031. Linde, Robyn. 2016. The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion of Norms and Law Against the Child Death Penalty. New York: Oxford University Press. Macmillan, Lorraine. 2009. “The Child Soldier in North-South Relations.” International Political Sociology 3 (1): 36–52. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00062.x. Martuscelli, Patricia Nabuco, and Rafael Duarte Villa. 2018. “Child Soldiers as Peace-Builders in Colombian Peace Talks Between the Government and the FARC–EP.” Conflict, Security & Development 18 (5): 387–408. https://doi. org/10.1080/14678802.2018.1511164. Matthews, Gareth B. 1994. The Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán, ed. 2006. Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and ­Post-accord Peace Building. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán. 2018. Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McNamee, Sally, and Julie Seymour. 2013. “Towards a Sociology of 10–12 Year Olds? Emerging Methodological Issues in the ‘New’ Social Studies of Childhood.” Childhood 20 (2): 156–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0907568212461037.

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Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 33–59. https://doi.org/10.1080 /1354570022000077926. Peterson, V. Spike, ed. 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2013. Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender, and Change. Albany: State University of New York Press. Qvortrup, Jens. 1994. “Childhood Matters: An Introduction.” In Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Policy, edited by Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta, and Helmut Wintersberger, 1–24. Aldershot: Avebury. Rosen, David M. 2005. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Singer, Peter. 1997. “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” New Internationalist 289. Accessed 20 November 2018. http://www.newint.org/ features/1997/04/05/drowning. Tabak, Jana. 2020. The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress. Athens: University of Georgia Press. United Nations, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2017. World Population Prospects, The 2017 Revision. New York: United Nations. Uprichard, Emma. 2008. “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood and Temporality.” Children & Society 22 (4): 303–313. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x. Watson, Alison M. S. 2004. “Seen But Not Heard: The Role of the Child in International Political Economy.” New Political Economy 9 (1): 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356346042000190358. Watson, Alison M. S. 2006. “Children and International Relations: A New Site of Knowledge?” Review of International Studies 32 (2): 237–250. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0260210506007005. Watson, Alison M. S. 2009. The Child in International Political Economy: A Place at the Table. London: Routledge. Woodyer, Tara, and Sean Carter. 2018. “Domesticating the Geopolitical: Rethinking Popular Geopolitics through Play.” Geopolitics (online in advance of print): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1527769.

CHAPTER 2

Decolonizing Childhood in International Relations Katrina Lee-Koo

Introduction Childhood is often invoked to convey meaning in global politics. Conjure up an image of the second Indochina (Vietnam) war of the 1960s and 1970s, the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, the so-called diamond wars of the 1990s, the recent Syrian refugee crisis, or the conflict in Yemen and chances are you will recall a powerful image or statement regarding a child. From the iconic 1972 photograph of ­nine-year-old Kim Phúc running naked down the street after a napalm attack on her Vietnamese village, to the 2015 image of the lifeless body of t­hree-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach, the experiences of children and our understanding of childhood filters our interpretation of global politics. It helps us to cast political actors as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and provides us with a compass that orients us towards what we imagine to be moral, merciful, and humane politics. In particular, where we see that childhood has been lost—because children are carrying AK-47s, have bellies protruding from famine, or are orphaned in refugee camps— we know that there has been an aberration of care in global politics. K. Lee-Koo (*)  Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_2

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This can give us pause to question the direction of global politics, and provide justification for the need to take action. But, of course, children are more than just a series of images and symbols that help global audiences to interpret and respond to global political events. Children—as human beings—are mutually constitutive of every aspect of global politics. They contribute to its operation, and are shaped by its machinations. Like adults, they are witnesses, victims, and agents to every single global event. Children were among the protestors in Tahrir Square on the eve of the Arab Spring, they throw rocks at Israeli tanks in Gaza, they demand gun control in the United States, and agitate for global action on climate change. As such, they shape global politics just as global politics shapes them. Yet the disciplinary study of International Relations pays little attention to the relationships children have with global politics. Instead, the discipline generally prefers to place them apart from adults who are seen as the only legitimate agents of International Relations. In fact, as a discipline, International Relations is only recently beginning to demonstrate a curiosity towards the roles that children and childhood play in shaping global politics and our understanding of it. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the existing body of research that shatters the myth that children and childhood do not meaningfully inform the disciplinary understanding of International Relations. In doing so, the goal of the chapter is to demonstrate the value of considering children and childhood as relevant and useful in the study of IR. To do this, this chapter begins by making two important distinctions: the first is between the disciplinary study of International Relations and the practices of global politics; the second is between the discursive constructions of childhood as something that may be quite different from the lived experiences of children as embodied actors and agents in global politics. These distinctions are necessary in exploring what the chapter identifies as three inter-related, but nonetheless quite distinct, sets of politics: the lived experiences of children in global politics; the discursive construction of childhood in global politics; and, the consideration given to both in the discipline of International Relations. With these distinctions in mind, this chapter argues that there is a dualistic approach to ‘the child.’ Quite simply, this duality exists because children can be simultaneously powerful and powerless. As suggested above, children shape global politics. With 26% of the world’s population under the age of fifteen, how could they not? Children demonstrate both positive and negative agency in every crisis point around the world;

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their ordinary and extraordinary actions shape the course of complex politics in their local, and global, communities. But they are also powerful because of what they represent. The imagery and symbolism of children—particularly children that are under threat—has an emotive power that shapes global attitudes and political decision-making. However, at the other end of the spectrum children and childhood are frequently rendered powerless and invisible. Children have been virtually ignored by the discipline of International Relations and largely considered as only ever victims of global politics. The persistence of this dualism—where children are influential but not recognized as such—does the discipline of IR a disservice. Addressing this ongoing blindness by the discipline provides opportunities for an inclusive and complete account of global politics, as well as pause for a critical reflection on how the discipline conducts its analysis. The project to render children visible to the discipline of IR is accompanied by problems, pitfalls, and promises. The chapter begins with an examination of how and why the discipline has come to neglect children and childhood in its theorizing. It suggests that the problems lie with how dominant notions of childhood are constructed by the liberal tradition, and how this, in turn, has encouraged the marginalization of children and childhood in IR’s theorizing. Second, the chapter details how and why this miscalculation generates pitfalls for children. Assumptions regarding children allow for their political manipulation in global politics in ways the study of International Relations fails to scrutinise. However, the capacity of critical approaches to IR in particular to demonstrate how the concept and experiences of childhood shape global politics can challenge the discipline to take children seriously. This offers a promise that children can be emancipated from the enslavement they have experienced at the hands of the discipline. Finally, the chapter assesses the realistic prospects of emancipating children from both the disciplinary study of IR, and the practice of global politics.

Problems: Failure to Recognize the Social Construction of Childhood The dominant approaches to International Relations do not see childhood as a relevant or useful concept in explaining global political action, nor do they see children as meaningful political actors capable of shaping

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global political events. This—quite simply—is at the heart of the problems regarding why children are marginalized by IR. This is not to say that the discipline ignores children, or sees them as worthless, but rather that the discipline does not see them as either actors or units of analysis that can explain the course of global politics. This attitude largely stems from two traditions in IR theorizing. The first is the biases inherent in liberal political theorizing about political actors and action, and the second is the dominance of the Realist tradition in IR. As a concept, dominant views of childhood draw upon the Western liberal philosophical tradition. The liberal approach relies heavily upon a rights-based, legally-oriented, and individualist framing of childhood (see Brocklehurst 2006; Watson 2006). This encourages a universal approach to childhood which seeks to identify all children through a common set of characteristics. The primary characteristic is age, but it also assumes that children must be seen as separate from adults because of less developed social, cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities. Tamar Shapiro (1999: 716) notes that “our basic concept of a child is that of a person who in some fundamental way is not yet developed, but who is in the process of developing.” In this sense, children are the negative space that is unoccupied by adults and can be defined in part through what adults are not. Accordingly, children are typified by their absence of adult rights such the right to vote, the right to stand for public office, and the right to join the military, among others, but also by their absence of responsibilities in liberal societies which may include legal and moral obligations to one’s community through taxation or providing care and financial support for family members. In return, children are afforded their own unique set of rights which is specifically designed to ensure their protection, allow for their development, and preserve their ‘innocence’ for as long as possible. Globally, these are most well-recognized in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), with currently 196 parties signed to it. Under the Convention, children’s rights include the right to an education (Article 28), the right to adequate care (Article 19) and where possible parental care (Article 7), and the right to play (Article 31). While these are couched in the language of rights, they are nonetheless animated by an overall ethic of protecting and separating children from what is considered to be adult politics, expectations, and behaviours. There are undeniably benefits to the liberal imagining of childhood. The universal approach enables the codification of rules regarding the

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treatment of children which, when enforced, can ensure their consistent and equal protection from the physical, emotional, and structural harms present in the adult world. For liberals, benefits to an overarching global convention also lie in its potential to trump localized practices which the broader global community may consider an aberration of children’s wellbeing. According to the liberal approach, issues such child marriage, the genital mutilation of female children, and child labour can be challenged at local levels through appeal to a universal liberal imagining of what childhood should be. For liberals, this is a powerful weapon that can set a pragmatic and common set of standards for child protection. However, despite the appeal offered by its claim to be both universal and objective, it remains, nonetheless, an arbitrary definition of childhood that stifles the suggestion that childhood is a subjective experience. After all, as Jason Hart and Bex Tyrer (2006) argue, childhood is not a lived experience that follows a universal sequence in accordance to biological forces. It is, instead, a complex interplay of biological, individual, social, and cultural factors. The biological and individual factors see human beings develop at different rates while the social and cultural factors shape local conceptualizations of children’s experiences and when children become adults. Therefore, despite the liberal promise, there is no universal or common point at which a child unequivocally becomes an adult. If childhood is a social construction, then this means that there are many imaginings of what it means to be a child beyond the liberal conception outlined above. Helen Brocklehurst (2006: 11) notes that non-Western societies conceptualize childhood in ways that bear little resemblance to the liberal model. These include approaches where children’s lives are full of responsibilities and expectations to families and communities, and where the transition from childhood to adulthood occurs following a biological event (such as puberty) or community ceremony (such as marriage or initiation ceremony). In such circumstances, childhood is not an individual, legal, universal, or obligation-free state of being, and can be a subjective experience attached to specific children and contingent on local experiences. Even within liberal approaches, there is space to recognize that the concept of childhood is socially constructed. How liberal societies ‘see’ a child, and the points at which children develop those qualities that are associated with adulthood can change significantly within liberal societies and over time. This is even evident in legal frameworks where liberal nations (and states or territories within nations) might differ on the appropriate ages by which children

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can marry, consume alcohol, drive, join the army, be charged with a criminal offence, or have sex. The difference in legislation cannot be explained by biology but rather by the values and experiences of the society, including socio-economic class, religion, ethnicity, or gender. Despite there being widespread acceptance that childhood is a fluid concept, the liberal approach has remained dominant. Consequently, it has shaped how childhood has been imagined in the West, and strongly influenced the model that has been developed globally through documents like the UN Convention. While the potential benefits of this were outlined above, Vanessa Pupavac (2001) argues that this has had a negative impact upon other ways of practicing childhood. She claims that it has not erased or consumed other concepts of childhood, but rather set a Western standard (which has assumed strong moral weighting) against which other conceptions of childhood will be judged and ultimately found wanting (Pupavac 2001: 102). In fact, there has been widespread critique of the liberal-inspired UN Convention on the grounds that it establishes culturally and politically specific experiences of childhood as the norm. Alison M. S. Watson (2006: 231) notes that, “in many ways, then, the existing body of international law adheres to an idealised notion of childhood, which employs an (affluent) Western view of it, as opposed to one that could manage to incorporate an actual portrayal of (poor) children in the South.” According to this critique, children whose experiences are outside this standard are seen as aberrations and their childhoods marked as abnormal or even immoral. Similarly, societies which are unable or unwilling to practice the liberal model of childhood are marked as uncivilized or undeveloped (see, for example, Pupavac 2001; Cheney 2005: 38; Watson 2006; Carpenter 2009: 39; Beier 2018: 181). As will be discussed in further detail below, David Campbell (2012) and others argue that this creates the foundation for metaphors by which cultures, nations and even entire regions are depicted as either being child-like, or barbaric because of their failure to maintain ‘normal’ childhood. Critiques of the liberal vision of childhood also argue that it confuses the idealized perception of children as apolitical beings with a belief that this is their inherent nature. In this sense, it has encouraged a vision that children should not just be free of political obligations, but are actually incapable of undertaking them (see Huynh 2015: 37–42). Further feminising their identities, it securely locates them in the private, or

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domestic sphere, outside the realm of public political action. The cultural attitude within liberal states is that children should be protected from, rather than exposed to politics, and that politics is beyond their comprehension. This was demonstrated, for example, in November 2018 following a n ­ ation-wide protest by Australian school students for action on climate change. In response to their calls, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared in Parliament that children should undertake more learning and less activism in school. Such statements reinforce ideas that children’s age and apolitical status render them incapable of usefully contributing to political life. J. Marshall Beier (2018: 174) argues that “constructed outside of political subjecthood and therefore outside of political life, children are positioned as the quintessential innocents…”. As will be discussed further below, the labelling of innocence—and even defencelessness—makes children powerful, evocative, and unquestionable symbols in global politics. Closely aligned with the idea that children are innocent of politics, is the notion that children are also victims of politics who are in need of protection. If the liberal goal is to separate children from the political realm, then any engagement that children have with global politics—such as during times of conflict or crisis—renders them vulnerable. This is why images of children in political crisis can instigate the often-problematic politics of protection. Campbell (2012: 82) argues ­ that “the efficacy of the child as symbol flows from a number of associated cultural assumptions: children are abstracted from culture and society, granted an innate innocence, seen to be dependent [and] requiring protection.” Indeed, it is difficult to deny that children who become entrapped in conflict, forced migration, slavery, or poverty are victims of global politics and should be afforded some kind of protection. However, the constellation of innocence, victimhood, and protection denies children agency by setting an all-encompassing image whereby children are only ever victims. This blanket portrayal masks any claims they may make to political agency. Watson (2015: 47) describes victimhood as a totalizing concept whereby one cannot reasonably be considered a victim and simultaneously enact rational agency. Similarly, Beier (2018: 166–167) notes that “notwithstanding what may oft-times be quite conspicuous performances of agency, inscriptions of victimhood have an inherently objectifying effect, reducing those so inscribed to

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passive skin on which the centred subjecthood of the perpetrators of violence is performed and, in consequence of which violence, the imperative subjecthood of would-be protectors is mustered.” In addition to liberal theorizing, the Realist tradition has had a significant impact upon the way that the study of IR has developed, particularly in relation to state behaviour in the international system (see Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008). The dominance of the liberal approach to childhood, and its influence upon Realist theorizing, has collectively encouraged the discipline of IR to consider children and childhood as apolitical and therefore irrelevant analytical units. This explains why children have been silenced by the Realist tradition. This tradition, in its classical, neo-realist, defensive, and offensive formats, responds to power as the primary shaper of global political life. Realist approaches see the major trends and shifts of global anarchy typically moving along the currents of hard power and state action. This is far from the everyday actions of children who—we are told—are located in private space and without agency or intent to affect the macro-machinations of global politics. In seeing no evidence that children routinely determine the fate of states, they are dismissed as irrelevant units of analysis. This does not mean that children are completely absent from the tradition’s zeitgeist. It is not that Realists do not care about the fate of children or consider them wholly irrelevant. On the contrary, the Realist tradition identifies the raison d’être of the state (and, indeed, its theorizing) as being the provision of state security and global stability. The very purpose of the accumulation of power and geo-strategic advantage is to enable the state to provide for—among other things—the wellbeing and safety of children. For Realists, the best way for states to be able to feed, clothe, educate, and care for children is through its own strength ­vis-à-vis other states within the international system. In this sense, children are not wholly absent from traditional IR theorizing, they are just not visible as powerful or meaningful actors or agents in public and political life. Conceptualizing childhood as a state without agency or political subjecthood undermines any curiosity that IR might have about the relationship between children and global politics, whether mediated by the state or not. This has allowed the discipline to become blinded to the ways that children and global politics/International Relations are mutually constitutive of one another.

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Pitfalls: International Relations as a Constraint Upon the Rights of the Child Putting aside traditional approaches to thinking about IR, this chapter now turns to examining two ways in which the mutual constitution of children and global politics takes place. The first is the ways in which the concept of childhood—through discursive construction—is mobilized as a narrative feature of global political life. The second is an examination of how the failure to afford children agency blinds the discipline to the ways that children do in fact shape global politics. As argued above, both liberal and Realist approaches position children as in need of protection from the excesses of global politics. It is the same mechanism that allows the concept of childhood to become simultaneously powerful. As suggested in this chapter’s introduction, the discursive positioning of images, accounts, and symbols regarding children and childhood can play a central role in narrating global politics and conditioning state behaviour. It does this in a number of ways. First, it provides casting notes on who are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors in global politics depending upon how they are seen to treat children. This facilitates metaphoric tropes that can create what Campbell (2012) refers to as imagined geographies. These are easily recognizable political binaries that distinguish between those who hurt children (even if it is unintentional), and those who protect them. For Campbell (2007: 358) these binaries emerge in International Relations around distinctions between East/West, North/South, civilised/barbaric and developed/undeveloped. This is why, as Laura Suski (2009: 202) argues, “children sit at the centre of many appeals and programs deemed ‘humanitarian’.” Similarly, Beier (2018: 182) argues that “childhood continues to circulate through the visual economies of humanitarian disaster in predictable ways, reinforcing the hubristic mappings of North/South, protector/protected, subject/object, and adult/child.” In this way, the ‘imagined geographies’ and ‘visual economies’ are not really about children, their suffering, and their rights. The value of children’s suffering is in scripting state identity and emboldening state action. For example, in her research on babies born of wartime sexual violence, R. Charli Carpenter (2009: 28) argues that narratives developed around ‘rape babies’ are not used with the intent to invoke children’s rights, but rather used to build a narrative about the Bosnian war that revealed it as “simultaneously horrific and distant from the ‘civilised’ industrialised West.”

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Similarly, discursive deployments recounting the abuse of children are central factors in providing moral justifications for military intervention. This technique can be routinely seen in liberal Western discourses that rely upon messaging about child abuse to support military action against those deemed to be violent and immoral. For example, on the eve of the 2001 U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, then-First Lady Laura Bush addressed the nation, noting the manner in which the Taliban engaged in the savage denial of children’s rights. She described her radio address as “kicking off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban” (Bush 2001). In her persistent references to children (and women and children), Bush highlighted points of contrast between the Taliban’s and our own treatment of children in terms of their access to healthcare, education, and the right to play. Demonstrating why the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is a humane rather than strategic or vengeful response to 9/11, Bush noted “all of us have an obligation to speak out. We may come from different backgrounds and faiths – but parents the world over love our children.” In April 2017, current U.S. President Donald Trump similarly invoked the defence of childhood innocence in justifying U.S. military strikes against Syria. In response to Syria’s alleged chemical weapons attacks—while less scripted than Mrs. Bush—Trump stated: “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal – people were shocked to hear what gas it was. That crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line, many, many lines” (Calamur 2018). The abuse of children has been used throughout history to lend moral justification to political action. However, the power of these discursive constructions relies upon the condition that the children themselves remain static and mute—seen but not heard. The discourses are powerful in part because the children remain wholly subjected. Their suffering is presented to global audiences as packaged politics, with the meaning pre-determined and self-evident (see Butler 2005: 822–827). Moreover, the children are ­ presented as small and helpless, in contrast to the politics that surround them ­(Lee-Koo 2018: 53). This is particularly the case with images, where children are static and can appear wholly dominated: the threeyear-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi is tiny against the wide ocean that has expelled him; Palestinian boys are dwarfed by the tanks that bear down on them, and the famine stricken child is no match for the waiting

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vulture.1 These children have no capacity to speak and instead need to be spoken for. Yet, long after the action is over, there is little consistent evidence that children’s rights have been successfully defended. Despite Mrs. Bush’s pleadings, children in Afghanistan continue to face major barriers to their education (see Lee-Koo 2013; UNICEF 2020) and, despite President Trump’s outrage, in excess of 40% of those displaced in Syria are children. The above discussion shows how the discursive construction of children can influence the practice and understanding of global politics. Yet it is not just the construction of childhood that should matter to IR scholars, it is also the experiences of childhood that can be insightful. The second way in which children shape IR is through their everyday actions. In every subfield of International Relations, the ordinary and extraordinary actions and experiences of children shape events and outcomes. Encouragingly, recent research by IR scholars has begun to build a rich literature that evidences the ways in which global politics is shaped by the actions of children. This action comes in a variety of forms, from overt activism to subtle and everyday forms of resistance or engagement. Regardless of the form, scholars have begun to trace the impact that these actions have upon the course of all areas of global politics, including peace, conflict, the operation of the international political economy, action for the global environment, and others. Central to this project is re-opening the question of what constitutes agency in global politics. John Vasquez argued in the mid-1990s that the value of the post-positivist turn in IR was a questioning of the supposed objective laws that had dominated the discipline. He noted that for much of traditional IR, what posed as “truth” was actually “choice” (Vasquez 1995: 220). This came with the acknowledgement that the structures and issues—in short, the politics—that we face are in fact the product of choices that were made either consciously or unconsciously by participants in the international order. When translated to thinking about children, there is nothing natural about children’s marginalization from political life, it is rather a consequence of political choice. Nonetheless, the question of what constitutes political agency in International Relations and the role that it plays in determining political outcomes remains contested (see Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008: 21), not least of all when it comes to children. For the purposes of this chapter however, agency will be defined quite simply as “the capacity of individuals to make independent decisions about one’s life, and to seek to enact

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those decisions in ways that shape that person’s life trajectory and—in this way—also shape their environment” (Lee-Koo 2018: 61). This understanding acknowledges agency in ‘everyday’ decision-making but at the same time recognizes the roles that relationships, structures, and constructions of identity (as outlined above) can play in limiting, enhancing, or manipulating this agency. In this context, the concept of agency is central in re-thinking the relationship that children have with International Relations. To extend Vasquez’s (1995: 221) analysis, acceptance of the idea that children make choices in the face of global politics de-constructs traditional thinking that lies at the heart of the Enlightenment’s stranglehold upon the discipline. Watson (2006) has made this argument explicitly, noting that once children’s choices are recognized, the experiences of childhood becomes an important site of knowledge for the discipline. However, like all political actors, agency is rarely something that is pure and uninhibited, it is generally circumscribed by a range of factors; in the case of children, age has become an important factor. Beier (2015: 6) writes that where children are seen to act, “they cannot be read as the autonomous authors of their actions in the same manner as an adult political subject.” For children, then, their agency is rendered suspect because they are seen as developmentally incapable of making informed or independent decisions. Age may, in some cases, be a factor in making ‘good’ and ‘independent’ choices but it is hardly determinant of them. The more fruitful route is to ask—quite simply—‘Do children demonstrate the capacity to make choices that shape their own lives and that of their communities?’ And the simple answer to this is ‘yes.’ For children, this agency might be practiced in a number of different circumstances where they are able to manoeuvre themselves and manipulate their circumstances to enact or resist change. It might be demonstrated—for instance—through going to school in a conflict or crisis zone. In some contexts, this simple act may constitute an act of defiance, determination, resistance, resilience, or resolve. In the case of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, her advocacy for girls’ education culminated in her being the target of a Taliban attack in 2012, and then the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Like all cases, Malala’s experiences demonstrate the complexity of considering agency in International Relations. As Beier (2015: 3) points out, Malala’s long-standing activism rose to international prominence only after she was rendered a victim by the Taliban’s decision to board her

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school bus and shoot her in the face. In this sense, her agency cannot be separated from (and is in some ways produced by) the efforts to take that agency from her. The question of Malala’s agency becomes similarly complex when we critically investigate the power relations that play roles in manipulating her global standing. It is unlikely to be solely the fact that she was both an activist and a victim of violence that positioned her as a Nobel prize winner. After all, she is far from alone in these experiences. Instead, Malala was to some extent caught up in broader global political narratives about the conflict between the ‘West’ and the Taliban where both her resilience and her ‘lost childhood’ became important discursive anchors to discuss the conflict in Afghanistan and South Asia. In those discussions, the global championing of Malala rendered the actions of the U.S. and its allies morally righteous. Helen Berents (2016) argues that her identity was appropriated by social advocacy campaigns in ways which had the ability to deny and displace, rather than enhance, her agency. This demonstrates the difficulty in attempting to either account for, or demonstrate, the impact or independence of any individual’s agency—because at the end of the day, not only does an individual’s agency have the capacity to shape global politics, it is shaped in its turn. This perhaps encourages a compromise position in IR where the constraints and capacity of all actors—including children—must be interrogated. While Malala’s case is undeniably unique, in other cases ‘everyday’ acts have the capacity to shape the behaviours, actions and attentions of others within global politics. In doing so, these acts have the potential to create ripple effects upon broader constituencies and communities. Furthermore, it provides direct evidence that children are neither absent nor free from global politics, or passive in the face of it. Promoting a better understanding of the ways in which children move in global politics (and vice versa) provides early promise for emancipating children from the confines in which International Relations has placed them.

Promises: Emancipating Childhood in International Relations There is now mounting evidence in IR regarding the extent to which children demonstrate political agency, particularly in times of crisis. This began with investigations into child soldiering, which is a very visible manifestation of children’s agency in IR. This research examined the

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breadth and nature of child soldiering in the so-called ‘new wars’ of the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century (see Brett and Specht 2004; Gates and Reich 2010; Özerdem and Podder 2011). In addition to providing individual case studies, this literature sought to understand why and how children are recruited, why they are thought to make good soldiers, how children can be effectively demobilized, and the short and long-term implications it has for children and for conflict. As critical theoretical approaches were adopted to ask these questions, further issues were highlighted. Research began to debunk the commonly accepted belief that children are always coerced into soldiering. Rachel Brett and Irma Specht’s (2004) work highlights, for example, that there are a variety of reasons why children might choose to volunteer for armed forces. Research also began to highlight the gendered aspects of the issue. Mary-Jane Fox (2004) argued that child soldiers are often assumed to be male when in fact around half of all child soldiers are girls. Moreover, girl soldiers are more likely to have different roles and responsibilities from boys and may require different programs for de-mobilization. Similarly, the adoption of a post-colonial lens demonstrates how child soldiering is presented as a problem facing the Global South, and used by some to evidence their barbarism (see Manzo 2008; Lee-Koo 2011; Campbell 2012). This has led to a more general curiosity regarding the experiences of children in conflict and crisis. Early work by Watson (2004) and Brocklehurst (2006) opened this discussion by confronting the discipline about its lack of curiosity towards children, and opening the door for questions to be asked about the different sites and issues where children and IR interacted. More recently, there has been a growing literature— both interdisciplinary and within the discipline of IR—that addresses issues relating to children in crisis. This includes Bina D’Costa’s (2016) and Cecilia Jacob’s (2014) work on children’s experiences in Asia, Marc Sommers’ (2012) account on young people in Rwanda, and Berents’ (2018) research with children in Colombia, among others. Issues such as the forced migration of children (Ensor and Gozdźiak 2016), children born of wartime sexual violence (Carpenter 2010; Seto 2013), and children in the political economy (see Watson 2004) are also expanding the scope of enquiry. Of particular interest in recent research is the role that children play in post-conflict peacebuilding. The 2006 edited collection by Siobhán McEvoy-Levy introduced this question in the relation to

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youth, and is expanded upon in work by Pruitt (2013), Berents and ten Have (2017), and others. In addition to building a strong empirical base for evidencing the relationship between children, childhood, and global politics, this literature has also begun to develop the theoretical tools needed to render children’s lives visible and meaningful in International Relations. Much of this work draws upon the methodologies developed within Critical Security Studies where work by Brocklehurst (2006), Beier (2015), Jacob (2015), Lee-Koo (2015), and others has articulated the opportunities to adapt critical tools for this endeavour. However, it is important to note that Critical Security Studies itself has demonstrated an ageist blind spot with regards to seeing children as security actors or agents of emancipatory politics. Emerging in the late 1990s as part of the post-positivist turn in International Relations, Critical Security Studies sought to broaden and deepen (Booth 2007) the concept of security. Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause (1997: xi) described this process of reconceptualizing security as a return to basics: “an analysis of the claims that make the discipline [of Security Studies] possible – not just its claims about the world but also its underlying epistemology and ontology, which prescribe what it means to make sensible claims about the world.” However, these efforts were not inclusive of children. Despite a commitment to reconceptualize security for the insecure and the powerless (rather than the strong), this prying open of spaces and emancipatory opportunities did not extend to children. In his critique of traditional security practices Ken Booth (2007: 14) noted that “children’s lives are just one of the monitors of a world that is not working” however it was some two decades before it was suggested that children’s roles should be agents of global change rather than passive indicators of global problems. Nonetheless, critical approaches to security (and IR more broadly) offer the best hope of integrating children as complex actors in the discipline. While it initially failed to do so, it nonetheless provides the tools and the ethic to render children visible in IR’s theorizing. Importantly, it offers at least three opportunities of intervention: the first is through the deconstruction of knowledge claims that shape the current dominant relationships between children, childhood, and knowledge. As already demonstrated in this chapter, this begins with critical examination of

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the discursive construction of key concepts such as children and childhood. Understanding the intellectual antecedents of dominant theorizing with regards to children (as demonstrated earlier in this chapter with regards to liberalism and Realism) helps to understand and question the accepted knowledge claims about children’s place in the world, and the power relationships that keep them there. The addition of p ­ ost-colonial and feminist lenses (see Pupavac 2001; Manzo 2008; Lee-Koo 2011; Campbell 2012) reveals the ways in which children are used to transmit racialized, colonial, and gendered tropes about global politics. Identifying the ways in which children are rendered as simultaneously powerful symbols and powerless beings is the first step to re-negotiating the power dynamics that shape children’s place in the discipline. In the second instance, the centring of children as actors within global politics has encouraged the establishment of an evidence base that demonstrates the breadth of experiences of children in global politics. Rather than assuming that the activities of children are irrelevant to IR, this approach asks straightforward questions about how children engage with global politics. This not only sees children as actors, but traces their activities as victims and agents whose decisions and activities shape conflict, crisis, peace, and the global economy. In contrast to IR’s tradition discussed earlier, this approach avoids universal conceptualizations by working with children to understand their everyday lives. This leads to the third contribution offered by critical approaches: that of taking children’s voices seriously in IR. This requires the adoption of a grassroots and grounded approach that accepts children as the ‘experts’ in providing accounts of their lives and their experiences of the world around them. Berents (2018) adopts this methodology in her analysis of children’s experiences of the security in Colombia and in doing so finds that children are both cognizant of the politics around them, and active in navigating and negotiating for their own safety and security. Such work demonstrates that critical approaches not only render children’s experiences and voices visible in IR, but can allow children themselves to construct knowledge about global politics.

Prospects: What Needs to Change? At the end of 2018 and into 2019 school students from every continent (except Antarctica) held protests and rallies demanding that world leaders take action on climate change. At the helm of this movement has been sixteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg who began by skipping school every Friday to protest outside of the Swedish

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Parliament about the lack of governmental action. She was invited to speak at the 2019 UN Climate Summit where she told the assembled audience that: “You say you love your children above all else – and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.” Her activism has clearly inspired other children, and gained the attention—if not the desired response—of world leaders. In doing so, this child has built a social movement that has been joined by hundreds of thousands of children around the world. In ways that are grand, and in ways that are small, children are contributing to, and shaping the everyday course of global politics. This example alone shows that the discipline of International Relations needs to be more responsive to the multiple roles that children play in shaping the course of global politics. Without a consideration of this, accounts of global change remain incomplete and wanting. Without an agenda that is inclusive of children, the discipline lacks the depth needed to explain and describe change in global politics. But this agenda needs to be more than inclusive of children, it needs to be responsive to them, their voices, and the perspectives that they bring to global politics. This is an important piece of the puzzle that will not only change how the discipline engages with children, but has the potential to change the practice of global politics itself.

Note 1. This is a reference to the 1993 Pulitzer prizewinning photograph by Kevin Carter known as “The Struggling Girl” which depicts a vulture watching over a famine-stricken child in Sudan.

References Beier, J. Marshall. 2015. “Children, Childhoods and Security Studies: An Introduction.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1 080/21624887.2015.1019715. Beier, J. Marshall. 2018. “Ultimate Tests: Children, Rights, and the Politics of Protection.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 164–187. https://doi. org/10.1163/1875984x-01001009. Berents, Helen. 2016. “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (4): 513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.20 16.1207463.

38  K. LEE-KOO Berents, Helen. 2018. Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia. New York: Routledge. Berents, Helen, and Charlotte ten Have. 2017. “Navigating Violence: Fear and Everyday Life in Colombia and Mexico.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 6 (1): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i1.373. Booth, Ken. 2007. Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brett, Rachel, and Irma Specht. 2004. Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight. Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bush, Laura. 2001. “Radio Address by Mrs Bush.” George W. Bush Online Archives. Accessed 18 March 2019. https://georgewbush-whitehouse. archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117.html. Butler, Judith. 2005. “Photography, War, Outrage.” PMLA 120 (3): 822–827. https://doi.org/10.1632/003081205x63886. Calamur, Krishnadev. 2018. “Another Strike on Syria Could be Coming.” The Atlantic, 8 April. Accessed 18 March 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2018/04/syria-chemical-attack/557480/. Campbell, David. 2007. “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict.” Political Geography 26 (4): 357–382. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.polgeo.2006.11.005. Campbell, David. 2012. “The Iconography of Famine.” In Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, 79–93. London: Reaction Books. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2009. “‘A Fresh Crop of Human Misery’: Representations of Bosnian ‘War Babies’ in the Global Print Media, 1991–2006.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (1): 25–54. https://doi. org/10.1177/0305829809336256. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2010. Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheney, Kristen E. 2005. “‘Our Children Have Only Known War’: Children’s Experiences and the Uses of Childhood in Northern Uganda.” Children’s Geographies 3 (1): 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280500037133. D’Costa, Bina, ed. 2016. Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ensor, Marisa O., and Elżbieta M. Goździak, eds. 2016. Children and Forced Migration: Durable Solutions During Transient Years. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fox, Mary-Jane. 2004. “Girl Soldiers: Human Security and Gendered Insecurity.” Security Dialogue 35 (4): 465–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106040 49523.

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Gates, Scott, and Simon Reich, eds. 2010. Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hart, Jason, and Bex Tyrer. 2006. “Research with Children Living in Situations of Armed Conflict: Concepts, Ethics and Methods.” Refugees Studies Centre Working Paper No. 30. University of Oxford. https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/ files/files-1/wp30-children-living-situations-armed-conflict-2006.pdf. Huynh, Kim. 2015. “Children and Agency: Caretakers, Free-Rangers and Everyday Life.” In Kim Huynh, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Children and Global Conflict, 35–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacob, Cecilia. 2014. Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar. London: Routledge. Jacob, Cecilia. 2015. “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security Studies.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080 /21624887.2015.1014675. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2011. “Horror and Hope: (Re)presenting Militarised Children in Global North-South Relations.” Third World Quarterly 32 (4): 725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.567005. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2013. “Not Suitable for Children: The Politicisation of Conflict-Affected Children in Post-2001 Afghanistan.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 67 (4): 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718 .2013.803031. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2015. “Children and IR: Creating Spaces for Children.” In Kim Huynh, Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo. Children and Global Conflict, 65–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2018. “‘The Intolerable Impact of Armed Conflict Upon Children’: The United Nations Security Council and the Protection of Children in Armed Conflict.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 54–74. https://doi.org/10.1163/1875984x-01001004. Manzo, Kate. 2008. “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood.” Antipode 40 (4): 632–657. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00627.x. McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán, ed. 2006. Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and ­Post-accord Peace Building. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Özerdem, Alpaslan, and Sukanya Podder, eds. 2011. Child Soldiers: From Recruitment to Reintegration. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2013. Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender, and Change. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2001. “Misanthropy Without Borders: The International Children’s Rights Regime.” Disasters 25 (2): 95–112. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-7717.00164.

40  K. LEE-KOO Reus-Smit, Christian, and Duncan Snidal. 2008. “Between Utopia and Reality: The Practical Discourses of International Relations.” In The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, 3–37. New York: Oxford University Press. Seto, Donna. 2013. No Place for a War Baby: The Global Politics of Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence. Abingdon: Routledge. Shapiro, Tamar. 1999. “What Is a Child?” Ethics 109 (4): 715–738. https://doi. org/10.1086/233943. Sommers, Marc. 2012. Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Suski, Laura. 2009. “Children, Suffering, and the Humanitarian Appeal.” In Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, 202–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNICEF. 2020. “Education: Achieving Results for Afghanistan’s Children.” Accessed 2 May 2020. https://www.unicef.org/afghanistan/media/4406/ file/Programme%20briefs%20(Education).pdf. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. Convention on Rights of Children. https://www.ohchr.org/documents/professionalinterest/ crc.pdf. Vasquez, John A. 1995. “The Post-positivist Debate: Reconstructing Scientific Inquiry and International Relations Theory After Enlightenment’s Fall.” In International Relations Theory Today, edited by Ken Booth and Steve Smith, 217–240. Cambridge: Polity Press. Watson, Alison M. S. 2004. “The Child That Bombs Built.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27 (3): 159–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100490 438228. Watson, Alison M. S. 2006. “Saving More Than the Children: The Role of Child-Focused NGOs in the Creation of Southern Security Norms.” Third World Quarterly 27 (2): 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590500 432267. Watson, Alison M. S. 2015. “Resilience Is Its Own Resistance: The Place of Children in Post-conflict Settlement.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014687. Williams, Michael C., and Keith Krause. 1997. “Preface: Toward Critical Security Studies.” In Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, edited by Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, vii–xxi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 3

Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework for Engaging Images of Children in IR Helen Berents

Introduction There is a predictable ubiquity to the use of images of children to ­illustrate conflicts, crises, and disasters around the world. There are some images of specific children that have captured the world’s attention at the time of a particular event, and then endured as ‘icons’ (Hansen 2014; Berents 2016). These include the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ at the borders of Europe being captured in the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi in 2015, or the consequences of the Vietnam War through the agony of Kim Phúc, naked and running from flames in 1972, or Kevin Carter’s photo of the staving child and vulture in Sudan in 1993 capturing the crisis of famine sweeping the region. There are also more ‘generic’ images which stand in for particular political crises or issues. Images of young boys holding oversized AK-47s became ubiquitous in reporting on several civil conflicts in Africa in the 1990s, while refugee camps are frequently visualized through seemingly more generic images of “womenandchildren” (Carpenter 2006).

H. Berents (*)  Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_3

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Images of injured, suffering, threatening children demand attention. They rely on commonly-held assumptions about childhood to identify these children as ‘out of place’—they are not protected, safe, private, but rather, are subject to violence, indignity, and politicization. John Berger argues that such photos are “arresting” and we are “seized by them” (Berger 1992: 42). This profoundly affective encounter often precludes meaningful action.1 The call to attend to these images is complex, as such images do not tell the viewer explicitly what they should feel, how they should respond. Thus, they may both simultaneously crystalize an affective response and complicate the discourse around an event. Often, however, such images are not critically considered; they illustrate, indicate, and indict, but the implications of their use are overlooked. This chapter explores what it means to consider images of children in International Relations. It asks IR scholars to more critically consider how they encounter, consider, and use images of children. By denaturalizing images of children as stand-ins for political events, and instead focusing on the work such images do, this chapter outlines key considerations of the potential and problems of engaging with the visual politics of childhood in International Relations. Considering images of children in IR more seriously opens up important avenues for reflection about the construction of political events in public discourse and the enduring way uneven global power relations are created and maintained, as well as for legitimizing children’s experiences of global events as sites of knowledge. There is a tension in arguing for a more reflective use of and engagement with these images. In suggesting there are problematic narratives and frames often associated with images of children, I am not denying the very real and very damaging consequences of conflict, disaster, and other violence experienced by children. Children are disproportionately affected by crisis and conflict, and systems to support and care for them as well as to enable their own efforts and responses are vital. What I am arguing, then, is that images of children be considered critically, in terms of how and when they are used and for what purpose they are deployed. Images can be a powerful mover of public opinion, but they can also be a vehicle for the reinforcement of reductive and limiting narratives about young people in these contexts. This chapter argues that we need to better account for the ways in which children are represented in IR, to more fully understand the events we explore as scholars of global political events. What are the political and affective dimensions of using images of

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children to illustrate and under what circumstances is the active presence of young people made notable? What work do images of children do in IR? How do they come to illustrate global political events but not be seen as part of the event themselves? What are the potential benefits of a more critical consideration of such images, and what are some of the problems inherent in analyzing and using them? To consider these questions, this chapter proceeds in four parts. It first considers the politics of images and the merit in taking images—in this case, photographs—more seriously in IR; to do this it draws on a growing literature in IR on visual politics. Second, it demonstrates the ubiquity of images of children in a range of sites and for a range of purposes to denaturalise the taken-for-granted and often ‘background’ nature of these images, arguing instead the fact of this ubiquity requires more nuanced attention. Third, it critically considers how children are represented in these images: as victims, delinquents, and icons. In this section I make a case for considering these not as fixed categories but rather as frames, which allows for recognition of the political nature of their use and their often-overlapping deployment. Fourth, this chapter presents a reflection on appropriate methods for considering images of children in IR and outlines a critical framework of questions scholars should engage when undertaking this work. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some reflections on the potential and pitfalls of taking images of children seriously as a site of politics in IR. Together, these four sections outline a rationale for a nuanced, reflective, critical framework for engaging images of children in conflict, crisis, and disaster.

Politics of Images Global events are profoundly mediatized. While it is true that images of children are ubiquitous in coverage of global events, it is also true more broadly that our engagement with global politics is saturated in the visual. Griselda Pollock argues that “[m]ediatized culture disseminates images of gross, persistent, dehumanizing agony caused by political violence and economic greed” (2012: 71). Mediatized cultures rely on multiple forms of visual media. While there are many forms of visual media, this chapter focuses on photography and still visual images. Photographs remain a key means by which images of conflicts, crises, and disasters are distributed. As Emma Hutchison et al. (2013) note, they can be shared easily across a range of different media and with a variety of intentions.

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A consideration of images of children in global politics must be situated within a broader understanding of the role of images. Firstly, images are an affective site of politics. An attention to images of children sits within a tradition that recognizes that images are a form of representation and that such representations shape political and social spaces, but are also sites of politics themselves (Shapiro 1988; Bleiker 2001). As Hutchison (2014: 4) has persuasively demonstrated, such representations draw not just on ‘cognition’ or how we think about the world, but are also about affect, “how individuals are emotionally constituted by, and thus situated within and attached to, the world around them.” Thus, I argue that attending to the politics of images of children in IR requires a reflection on how images do political and affective work, and recognition that these two are not distinct. Secondly, discourses concerning images are contested and multiple. Feminist and postcolonial scholars argue for the vital need for attention to self-reflective practices about positionality and privilege inherent in the production and circulation of these images. There are often assumptions made about the subject/object of a photograph and the audience/viewer. Susan Sontag (2003: 6) argues that “no ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” Elsewhere Sontag (2003: 65) notes that photographs of the subjects of violence continue colonial practices of “exhibiting exotic – that is, colonized – human beings” in ways that are “oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence.” Considering the ‘we’ in the context of the contemporary hyper-connected digital landscape raises further complexities: Alan Kurdi’s aunt mourned her nephew on television from her Canadian home. “The frankest representations of war, and of disaster-injured bodies, are of those who seem most foreign, therefore least likely to be known” (Sontag 2003: 55). How these images are produced, circulated, encountered, and re-shared, must be critically evaluated in terms of our own differentiated positions of privilege and positionality (see Berents 2019: 7). Sharon Sliwinski (2011: 21–33) argues, drawing on Kant, Arendt, Woolf, and Sontag, that the viewer of images of atrocities and human rights abuses—what Sliwinski calls the ‘world spectator’—occupies an important position in relation to these images. The affective response of the spectator demonstrates and enables action, it is situated in the tension between intellectual thought and emotional response, and thus it allows a space for discussion about

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responses to such abuses and violences. The contestation of images can be both problematic and productive. Thirdly, images also capture and fix a time. We cannot see what is beyond the frame of the camera lens. While it is generally recognized that photographs are not an objective representation of the world, it is the “illusion of authenticity that makes photographs such powerful tools to convey the meaning of crises to distant audiences” (Hutchison et al. 2013). This apparent “glimpse of the real” can enable a “seductive belief that what we see in a photograph is an authentic representation of the world” (Bleiker 2018: 12). This illusion of authenticity, as Bleiker (2018: 13) argues, “masks the political values that such photographic representations embody.” Rather, images work by “twinning denotation and connotation, matching the ability to depict the world ‘as it is’ with the ability to couch what is depicted in a symbolic frame consonant with broader understandings of the world” (Zelizer 2010: 3). Images of children in global politics are a perfect example of the twinning of the world ‘as it is’ with powerful symbolic frames. Photographs of children in particular reinforce dominant conceptions of children as passive and unable to respond to the events in which they find themselves. As Katrina Lee-Koo (2018: 52) notes, “these children are mute and paralysed, seen but not heard.” The ways in which we can account for children’s presence is limited by the kinds of images of children that circulate. Take, for example, the ubiquity of images of young boys standing with oversized AK-47s as a visual marker of ‘child soldiers’ that reinforces a particular view of what child soldiers are, which does not account for many experiences of child soldiers. This image does not even align with the accepted international definition of child soldiers that was first articulated in the Cape Town Principles and Best Practices in 1997, that includes both children who carry arms as well as “cooks, porters, messengers” and “girls recruited for sexual purposes” (UNICEF 1997). Despite this widely adopted definition of child soldiers, images of children recruited by armed groups are limited and do not visually depict many of the children who fall within this definition. The consequences of this include limited attention to girl child soldiers and to those children who may have been involved in conflict but not holding a gun (Honwana 2006). This limits the capacity and will for solutions to the broader issues at play. The images that circulate have a profound impact both on how children are seen and what responses are made.

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Finally, images of children are not always about the child. Images of children in certain contexts can influence political discourse. This chapter is interested in the ways in which images of children function as synecdoches for broader political events (see Moeller 2002) and how they are deeply complicit in reinforcing certain norms and understandings of global politics. It explores the representational quality of images of children, with all the attendant considerations of the affective dimensions of such images, as well as concern for uneven global power relations and researcher positionality in considering them. Having established the implications of the contemporary mediatized global landscape, this chapter turns its attention to the sites where images of children appear.

Noticing the Ubiquity of Images of Children Images of children are deployed and politicized by a range of actors and have long been used as motivators for political action. While most often this action is a compulsion to intervene, to save, to fix, images of children can also be a prompt for military intervention, condemnation, or sanctions. Thus, images of children function as potentially powerful political and social drivers. In this section I draw attention to the ubiquity of images of children in global politics, from newspapers, politicians, and humanitarian actors, to social media virality, use by terrorist groups, and even our own complicity as IR scholars in using these images. Images of children are used by newspapers to ‘tell stories’ about world events. The image of Alan Kurdi, for example, galvanized efforts by news outlets to convey the seriousness of the so-called migration crisis (Vis and Gourinova 2015; Olesen 2017; Pruitt et al. 2018). In 1938, images of German-Jewish children arriving on trains in the UK as part of the Kindertransport from Germany divided the press, with some coverage concerned about these children ‘overrunning’ the country while others emphasized the assimilationist efforts of the policy in incorporating these children into British life (see Pistol 2017). Similarly, news stories about the separation of children from their parents at the southern border of the U.S. in 2018 were illustrated with photographs of distressed children crying for their parents (see Beaumont 2018). Images of children are used by politicians to justify political actions. In 2017, images of the deaths of children in a sarin-gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to condemn Syrian President Bashar al-Assad because “even beautiful babies

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were cruelly murdered” (Landler 2017) and ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria. The shocking image in 2014 of seven-year-old Australian boy Abdullah Sharrouf standing next to his father, Khaled, in Syria holding the decapitated head of a Syrian soldier prompted widespread condemnation and discussion of strengthening Australian legislation in response to jihadist terrorism (Khaled Sharrouf was the first person to have his Australian citizenship stripped under new laws in 2017). Humanitarian and advocacy organizations have long used images of children to prompt donations and support for causes, often in frameworks that are paternalistic, reductive, and neo-colonial (Burman 1994; Pupavac 2001; Ali et al. 2013; Berents 2016; Dencik and Allan 2017). This is evident through regular donation campaigns that ask people to ‘sponsor a child’. Similarly, other NGO campaigns depict children as decontextualized, suffering victims where poverty and violence threaten and implicitly condemn the children’s home community and country for being unable or unwilling to assist (Burman 1994; Pupavac 2001; Wells 2013; Zarzycka 2016). Images produced by news media also gain traction and virality on social media, often reproducing but also exceeding the original frames in which such images first appeared. Social media sharing of images of Alan Kurdi, for example, reveal the affective dimensions of the images as well as contradictory calls to help asylum seekers, condemnation of Kurdi’s father for bringing his family by boat, and scepticism of the truthfulness of the image (Olesen 2017; Pruitt et al. 2018). They can also be used by parties to a conflict and terrorist groups themselves. Amy-Louise Watkin and Seán Looney (2019), for example, explore a range of magazines produced by different terrorist groups to identify the use of images of children as either child-perpetrators of violence or victims of Western-backed warfare. Finally, images are also used by IR academics. Even when not focusing on the image itself, scholars choose to use these images in teaching practice and in presenting academic material. Illustratively, at an International Studies Association annual convention when the so-called ‘Mediterranean migrant crisis’ was a popular topic of papers, I saw the image of Alan Kurdi used in four different presentations, either as an illustrative photo or, in one case, as the literal background for the slideshow presentation (although the image was only directly referenced by one presenter who, while pointing to it, noted that those of us in the audience were probably familiar with the consequences of the crisis).

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In these presentations, the politics of complicity in reproducing the image, and particularly using an image of a dead child as a generic stand-in for the ‘crisis,’ seemed not to have been considered by the academics. This is an anecdotal example, and I do not raise it to criticize these presenters particularly, but rather to highlight the way in which images of children become ‘background’ and the ways in which these images function as symbolic without consideration of the implications. As scholars of global politics, we are not separate from the politics of reproduction of these images. It is evident that images of children are ubiquitous in a wide variety of sites of discussion and analysis of global events. These images vary across time and location in terms of specifics, but there are features of photography of children that endure. The following section unpacks the dominant frames of childhood that are evident. Through their varied and widespread use, images of children reinforce often problematic ­neo-colonial power relations, function to erase the capacity of actors outside the Global North, and locate political agency in the hands of the viewers.

Delinquent, Victim, Icon: Framing Images of Childhood Children are widely understood as appearing in dichotomous ways in international politics: they are delinquents or victims. Seen as apolitical, children are frequently overlooked in IR. However, representations of children and childhood are profoundly political and politicized.2 Katrina Lee-Koo (2018: 51) notes that children in images do not wield political power themselves, “[i]n fact, the power of the images is fuelled by the subject’s lack of power.” These dichotomous normative categories represent children as either essentialized victims or as dangerous delinquents. The dichotomous, and stereotypical, depictions of children both flatten and ‘fix’ children’s experiences of conflict, crisis, or disaster, and “oversimplify a complex reality” (Wessells 1998: 641). By understanding images of children through categories, we limit our ability to fully explore their politicization and deployment as affective icons. I argue we should instead understand these descriptors as frames rather than fixed categories. An understanding of frames allows the unpacking of the assumptions and stereotypes that inform images. Discourses frequently use terms such as ‘child victim’ or ‘delinquent child.’ Understanding these as frames

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allows a critical questioning of how we see what is framed as victimization or delinquency. This denaturalizes the narratives about children and separates such narratives from the site of children’s bodies themselves. Such a move also allows for an accounting of the way frames can overlap, creating powerful images of children. Images of young boys holding guns are framed both as victimization of children and as a potential site of danger and delinquency. The child has to be both rescued and contained and re-socialized. While I am arguing here for a reconfiguration of our understanding of images of children as being framed, rather than being categories, the broad typology still holds. Images of children are generally framed as engaged in dangerous activities, as victimized and suffering, or as undertaking activities that are seen as exceptional for children. Delinquent, Suffering, Exceptional Images of children framed as delinquent or dangerous can be seen in some depictions of child soldiering as well as youth involvement in civil protest and violence (particularly in urban centres of the Global South). These images are used by news agencies, but also appear in films such as Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2007). Images of dangerous children are also used in the politicization of the irregular movement of people. Both the so-called Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’ (Pruitt et al. 2018) and the arrival of people from the Northern Triangle of Central America to the border with the U.S. are frequently illustrated with images of large numbers of (male) children and young men, framed as threats and dangers. When it comes to images of children in contexts of global politics, there is no doubt that it is frames of suffering and victimization that dominate. The protracted conflict in Syria has led to several profoundly difficult images of the suffering and death of children, from the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach in 2015, to ­five-year-old Omran Daqneesh covered in blood and dust in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo in 2016, to the deaths of children in the 2017 gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun. In 2018, it was images of starving, emaciated children in Yemen that circulated globally—images that echoed previous photos of starvation, including most famously the image of the starving Sudanese girl and the vulture which won photographer Kevin Carter the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994. The image of Kim Phúc, naked and running from a napalm attack, taken by Nick

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Ut in 1973, is still frequently invoked and used to illustrate the violence of war for children. The tropes in these famous images to illustrate children’s suffering from starvation, disease, and war, and their victimization through injury and death are repeated in many images used by news outlets and advocacy organizations. Finally, I add to the usual dichotomy of delinquency/victimization the frame of exceptionalism: children who, as I have argued previously, exceed what is expected of them as children due to powerful assumptions about gender, age, race, and global power relations (Berents 2016). Such images are held up as iconic; they embody actions that others should aspire to. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai, fifteen-years-old when she was shot by the Taliban for her advocacy for girls’ education, is an example of an iconic child (see Berents 2016). Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose advocacy for political action on climate change has seen her speak around Europe, appear on the cover of Time Magazine, and nominated for a Nobel Prize can also be understood as exceptional. Eight-year-old Bana Alabed, who with assistance from her mother, tweeted from Aleppo during the time it was under siege in 2016, can be understood as exceptional. Images of her tweeted during the siege gave a face to the events and experiences from the position of a child. This frame usually depends on the child first being framed as victimized, and overcoming that victimization to achieve recognition of their exceptionalism. Considering how the experiences and actions of children in conflict come to be framed visually as delinquency, victimization, or exceptionalism exposes the political work images of children do. The next section unpacks the implications and underpinnings of these framings. Implications of These Frames of Childhood While it is possible to identify the dominant and stereotypical frames used to visualize childhood, there are complex implications and underpinnings that help inform these simplistic characteristics. Images of children are complex and contested. They draw on particular ideas of childhood that stem from the Global North, are imbued with layers of historical assumptions, and rely on profoundly gendered, racialized, and ageist tropes. Images of children function to both represent the child themselves, but also to implicate adults in various ways.

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Understandings of children as innocent, pure, and in need of protection stem from a long history of Western thought and have been exported globally, particularly with the rise of international human rights discourse. Kate Manzo (2008: 636; emphasis in original) notes that, while the association of images of children with human rights discourse might be recent, “tropes of innocence, dependence and protection have a far longer lineage in colonial ideology (including the child-centrism of missionary iconography) and development theory.” There is a hierarchy of childhood evident in how these images are chosen for publication and circulated and shared, whereby certain kinds of bodies are able to be photographed in agony or violence, and others are not depicted (Berents 2019: 11). These frames are also profoundly gendered. Erica Burman (1994: 245) notes the operant assumption that “good girls need to be saved, but bad boys need to be contained.” While girlhood in the Global North is seen to be autonomous and educated, girlhood in the Global South is depicted as failing to be this. Girlhood in the Global South is “perceived to be always in danger, at risk of co-optation by ideologies and adult (men) who do not share the liberal enlightened values of the Global North” (Berents 2016: 517). Even when it is not girls specifically, vulnerability and victimization are coded feminine. In contrast, the delinquency and potential danger of children is rooted in masculinized stereotypes. Age also plays a role here, with the feminized space of victimization most often depicting younger children, while delinquency is most commonly evidenced by children approaching the cusp of youthhood or adulthood (Pruitt et al. 2018). Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) influential observation of the frequent collapsing of the categories of children and of women as “womenandchildren” when discussing foreign policy is relevant here. “Womenandchildren” becomes a homogenous category that experiences victimization and is associated with passivity and innocence. Humanitarian organizations and other aid efforts draw on this construction to gain support for causes (Carpenter 2006). This norm is reinforced and perpetuated through the use of particular images of deserving victims in disaster and conflict situations. The assumption of the inevitable failure of parents, adults, and, by extension, whole countries (predominantly in the Global South) to protect children is evidenced via images of children’s suffering. Susan

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Moeller (2002: 39) argues that children are “a synecdoche for a country’s future, for the political and social well-being of a culture.” Young girls, as the quintessential child victim, collapse “femininity and childish dependency” to “evoke sympathy” (Burman 1994: 242). Such a collapse “reinforces assumptions of children’s passivity, and reproduces patriarchal relations, both within and between donor and recipient countries” (Burman 1994: 242). Narratives of passivity and victimization also mediate “engagements within the Global North about issues in the Global South while erasing any complicity by states of the Global North in contributing to the crisis that is being responded to” (Berents 2016: 517). By and large, images of children in conflict and crisis reproduce framing of children as either victimized or engaged in delinquent behaviour. Images of children as dangerous or victimized do not have a voice, and these images reinforce certain representations that underpin understandings of broader issues. Exceptional children such as Malala Yousafzai or Greta Thunberg are not only exceptional in their visual representations, but images of both young women are often accompanied by their own voice. Young women like Malala can speak because they are reproducing a framework of ‘good girlhood’ (see Berents 2016). When children are allowed to speak, these moments also are bound in politics and politicized. Images of children usually depict children using one or more key frames: children as engaged in dangerous activities; children as victimised and suffering; and, children as exceptional. These frames are saturated in implicit assumptions about age, gender, and race and operate through powerfully uneven global power relations. Recognizing this is a first step toward taking images of children more seriously as a site of politics in IR. This chapter now turns to suggestions for how to more systematically engage in this work.

A Framework: Methods and Critical Questions Methods and Approaches There is not one straightforward approach to taking images seriously in IR. The ‘visual turn’ in IR has led to a fruitful expansion of consideration of images in global politics, and a proliferation of ways of attending to images. Roland Bleiker (2015: 877) advocates “drawing on multiple, diverse and even incompatible methods.” His proposed sites and

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modalities for considering images draws on Gillian Rose’s (2006) work on visual methods. Rose identifies four sites: the site of production, the site of the image, the site of circulation, and the site of audiencing. Through these four sites, three modalities can be explored: technological, compositional, and social (see Rose 2006: 24–47). Bleiker notes that the variety of methods required to consider these different sites and modalities might exceed the capabilities of any one researcher. However, various efforts by multiple researchers across these sites and modalities can uncover the value of considering the way images are imbricated in political events. For those interested in taking images of children in global politics more seriously, Rose’s sites and modalities offers a clear, structured outline to be engaged when considering how a piece of research might be positioned. Each site and modality have their own potentials and pitfalls also, in terms of what it can uncover and what it might overlook. A Proposal for a Critical Framework This discussion so far leads to the necessary demand of how, then, images of children should be given serious consideration in IR. I propose here a series of questions that, taken together, can be considered a framework for how, as scholars concerned with the appearance of such images and the representations of children within them, we might take seriously their presence. In some ways, this is a very simplistic framework. To ask “what, how, where, when, why” can be seen as reductive and limited. However, I propose it here as a way to prompt the vitally necessary critical questions which are so often absent in analyses of images of children in IR. The first is to ask: what images of children are we seeing? As discussed above, certain children and certain frames of childhood are more often used when representing children in global politics. Critical consideration of what frames we are seeing children through is a first step to a more critical engagement with images of children. To an extent, this is a content question: are the images of child soldiers, or of suffering children, or children who are dead? If children are suffering, what are they suffering from: war, disease, starvation? The counter to this question, which must also be considered is: what images of children are we not seeing? When certain images of certain children gain prominence there are other children whose experiences are marginalized or erased.

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Accounting for absences is a more difficult task but one it is important to undertake to understand the presence of the visible images also. Critical exploration of images of Malala Yousafzai in the aftermath of the attempted assassination notes there were two other girls in the vehicle with Yousafzai—Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan—who were also injured, yet images of their suffering were not circulated. In depicting the so-called Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis,’ the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi went viral, whereas images of older children and adults did not (Pruitt et al. 2018)—a feature of disaster and humanitarian photography with a long history (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015). Images of children that frequently circulate are of certain kinds of children. Tanya Steele (2014) argues that “brown children matter when it comes time to illustrate grief and suffering,” while Hutchison (2014: 2) highlights the colonial implications of images of disaster, noting that victims of the 2004 Asian Tsunami were portrayed “as dark, primitive, and powerless.” There are implications around what kind of children are understood to be able to be photographed in these contexts that are deeply saturated with concerns about age, race, and gender. Having considered what kinds of images we are seeing, the related question that might be asked is: how are children depicted in these images? In outlining a critical visual methodology Rose argues that the site of the image itself is an important site of meaning for images (2006: 32). While an image cannot be understood without context, the composition of an image shapes the message an image may convey. Images of children’s suffering are often depicted through close shots of children’s faces both in news coverage and in humanitarian and advocacy work (Burman 1994; Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015). Images of delinquent or dangerous children are often portrayed through images that take in a large number of children and youth. Such tropes hold powerful sway in relation to images of children that circulate in global political discourse. The composition of such images is a valuable site of critical enquiry, and may be explored by adopting an approach such as compositional interpretation (Rose 2006: 56–85) or even a more straightforward content analysis to explore what is in the images. There is another way to consider the question of how children are depicted, and that is to consider the people who capture these images. Photojournalists, often working under very difficult circumstances, make political, ethical, and aesthetic decisions about what to focus their lenses on in the first place. Kevin Carter, who photographed the starving

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Sudanese girl and the vulture in 1993, was the object of public condemnation for taking the image (the accusation being he photographed rather than helped, although he explained later that he subsequently carried the girl to aid) (Pollock 2012: 75). Nilufer Demir, who photographed Alan Kurdi on the Turkish beach acknowledged her inability to do anything to ‘save’ Kurdi, saying “There was nothing to do except take his photograph … and that is exactly what I did…I thought, ‘This is the only way I can express the scream of his silent body’” (quoted in Griggs 2015). Critical exploration of how certain depictions of children are chosen by the photographer is another dimension to an exploration of these images. Third, as scholars of IR we can ask where are we seeing images of children? Historically, it has been news outlets that have made the editorial decisions about publication of images. The now-iconic image of then nine-year-old Kim Phúc and other children running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War “almost didn’t run” according to the senior photo editor of the Associated Press (Miller 2012: 147). Yet it was published by the New York Times and then other outlets, generating outrage and becoming one of the key visual markers of the war. In relation to the publication of the image of Alan Kurdi in 2015, several newspapers have publicly discussed the editorial decision-making process in deciding to publish. Mortensen and colleagues (2017) argue that, in publishing the image of Kurdi, editors considered the influence of social media, the affective qualities of the image and its ability to ‘move’ an audience, and the historical precedents of previously published images of death and suffering. Images of starving children in Yemen in 2018 were published by the New York Times, with the international picture editor David Furst arguing that the paper chooses not to publish many “horrific” or “invasive” images but that in publishing these images “we felt it would be a disservice to the victims of this war to publish sanitized images that don’t fully reflect their suffering” (Nagourney and Slackman 2018). Images of suffering children in this instance are situated as the best form to convey the broader horror of the war.3 More recently “the visual field has become increasingly democratised” (Bleiker 2015: 86). As smartphones become commonplace and devices with social media sharing capabilities widely used, images are not only shared by news outlets but can be directly uploaded to image sharing services and social media platforms such as Flickr or Twitter. Journalists and human rights activists share photos taken ‘on the ground’

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which can go viral before traditional media outlets have processed similar images. The publication and sharing of images of children is central to considerations of the uneven global power relations that are implicated in images of children in conflict and crises. Who the desired audience is, what editors think audiences should or should not see, and the power of social media to disrupt traditional modes of sharing such images needs critical consideration. The ways in which children are framed is important to unpack to better account for the role of these images in IR. The fourth question to consider is: when do we see images of children? This question is interested in the context in which images circulate. Here we can ask what event the image of the child is associated with, drawing on considerations of the framing of the child to consider the way in which the image functions as a shorthand. When a news story about violence in a civil conflict in an African country is headed with an image of young boys holding guns, what is the audience being asked to understand about this conflict in particular? Images of children—as child soldiers or as starving victims—add an urgency to the story being shared. They also visually depict a range of assumptions and stereotypes. Burman (1994) and Vanessa Pupavac (2001) both explore how depictions of children reinforce patriarchal relationships between the Global North and South. When images of children are used, whether by news or advocacy organizations, they are caught up in powerful norms and assumptions which require unpacking. Asking when images of children are seen in global politics also necessitates questions about the conditions which lead to the image being widely shared. The image of Alan Kurdi was shared via a Turkish news agency and confined to small-volume sharing and retweeting by mainly Turkish Twitter accounts until, firstly, the Emergency Director at Human Rights Watch, Peter Bouckaert, and then Washington Post Beirut Bureau Chief, Liz Sly, both tweeted the image, spreading it to a global audience and leading to news outlets running it the following day (for excellent detailed analysis of the spread of the images of Kurdi see D’Orazio 2015; Vis and Goriunova 2015). While no other image has had the viral reach of Kurdi’s, others are shared and retweeted to significant effect. The images of children dying from gas in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria in 2017 led to direct foreign policy consequences as U.S. President Trump ordered airstrikes in response to seeing images of the “beautiful babies.” When images of children are successfully shared, the frames and composition of the images can become a significant factor in influencing international politics.

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Finally, these previous questions lead to the key question: why are we seeing these images of children? What are the direct political, social, and ethical questions that images of children in global politics provoke? At the most basic level, any images of children are published, tweeted, or used in advocacy campaigns because they draw on essentialized ideas of childhood. The dominant framings of children are powerful indicators of the severity of political events. While Trump’s reaction to the Syrian children as “beautiful babies” who were murdered has a different motivation from the use of a sad-looking girl-child alone on a rubbish pile by an NGO seeking sponsorship and funding, both return to a notion of children as innocent, dependent, and in need of protection. Why, after months of reports and photographs and video of refugees attempting to cross into Europe during 2015, did an image of a dead toddler capture the world’s attention? What work did images of children on the Kindertransports in WWII do for public understanding of the evils of the Nazi regime? What are the implications of terrorist organizations using images of child-martyrs in their magazines (see Watkin and Looney 2019)? Thinking beyond these images as illustrations of crises, conflict, and disaster and instead critically questioning how and why images of children influence and contribute to an affective global politics allows more nuance to be made visible. Each of these questions by themselves may be sufficient for considering a certain image or set of images. However, they function powerfully together to denaturalize the presence of images of children in the spaces of concern to IR scholars. The questions proposed here prompt different forms of inquiry into the presence of images of children in global politics; some will be more relevant than others in certain instances. However, all of them prompt two forms of inquiry, one that asks what role these images play in the unfolding of global politics, and the other that asks what politics and invisibl(ized) assumptions underpin the production, circulation, and affective responses to these images. In all cases, one should also ask what is not visible in these contexts.

Conclusions The questions proposed here, and the outline of methods and approaches, provides those interested in taking images of children more seriously a framework for thinking about how to undertake this kind of work. It is offered as a starting point, not a total solution or toolkit.

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By drawing on the symbolic value of children, images can function to abstract or universalize a particular moment. This move to abstraction can also be a depoliticizing move, an invocation of the assumed universality of norms of childhood. Through this chapter, I have argued to resist the assumed natural depoliticization of images of children and instead to consider them as sites of profound political contestation. As Burman (2008: 179) has argued, it is particularly due to the “ideological functions of the iconography of children” that childhood is a key analytical lens to consider pressing issues of contemporary times. There are limitations and pitfalls in undertaking this work. Images capture particular moments and exclude others; they are subject to editorial selection, contested affective reactions, and political responses. Focusing on the images that are evident in global political discourse risks reifying and freezing our understanding of children’s role in conflicts and crises. Using images of children ourselves, as scholars of IR in teaching and research presentations, as a stand-in of a broader issue, contributes to the reproduction of problematic framings of childhood. However, the framework outlined here can help respond to this by prompting a critical questioning of the appearance of images which holds the potential for a more inclusive, responsive form of IR. Asking what, how, where, when, and why we see these images opens space to consider their production, circulation, and reception, and requires making visible the sites of uneven global power relations that influence the way that age, gender, race, and geography shape what images are seen. Images of children are a key site of politics, emotion, and social contestation and deserve closer attention by IR scholars. Ariella Azoulay (2004) has reframed the act of looking at a photograph as instead a form of ‘reading.’ She argues that viewing images of suffering and atrocity “allows a reading of the injury inflicted on others becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation” (Azoulay 2004: 14). In taking images of children seriously as scholars of IR, I argue we can extend our understanding of suffering and violence in global politics. Instead of simply looking at an image of a child as a synecdoche for broader issues, we should read the ubiquitous images of children in global politics to better understand our collective role in situations of conflict and disaster. With this approach, images of children’s suffering, violence, and strength could form a core part of a potentially more ethical response to conflict and disaster that responds to the inherently exploitative and unequal power relations that are present in the circulation of images of children in contemporary contexts.

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Notes 1.  This reaction described by Berger is identified by other scholars also, whose work constitutes a particular line of argument that the aestheticisation, and impulse of affective response, precludes political response. On this see Berger (1992), Sontag (2003), and Campbell (2004). All these authors question this moment of seizure, and subsequent affective and social responses, arguing for questioning the naturalness of this response. 2. I would stress that children themselves also have political agency—a fact which is also often ignored or dismissed in IR. While I am focused here on the representations of children as political, I do not want to erase the political agency and subjecthood of children themselves. For more on this, see Berents (2018), Watson (2009), Lee-Koo (2011), Beier (2015), among others. I also do not want to imply that these framings are inherently false; children do suffer disproportionately in conflict and their experiences of violence are complex and traumatic in a multitude of ways. Rather, it is to argue that these frames shape discourses in particular ways, and limit other—and more nuanced—understandings of children’s experience of global political events. 3. It exceeds the scope of the discussion here, but the NYT’s editorial about publication of these images also repeatedly refers to the trauma of the journalist and photojournalist on assignment in Yemen and the need to honour the risk and trauma the journalists have experienced. This is an odd justification for the publication of images of children’s suffering and death, which seems to hold equivalent the suffering of the children and journalists as motivation for publication (see Nagourney and Slackman 2018).

References Ali, Sadaf Rashid, Debbie James, and Fred Vultee. 2013. “Strike a Pose: Comparing Associated Press and UNICEF Visual Representations of the Children of Darfur.” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 3 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.2979/africonfpeacrevi.3.1.1. Azoulay, Ariella. 2004. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Beaumont, Peter. 2018. “Image of Sobbing Toddler at US Border: ‘It Was Hard for Me to Photograph’.” The Guardian, 19 June. Accessed 15 January 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/19/imagesobbing-toddler-us-border-it-was-hard-for-me-to-photograph-john-moore. Beier, J. Marshall. 2015. “Children, Childhoods, and Security Studies: An Introduction.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1 080/21624887.2015.1019715.

60  H. BERENTS Berents, Helen. 2016. “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (4): 513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.20 16.1207463. Berents Helen. 2018. Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia. New York: Routledge. Berents, Helen. 2019. “Apprehending the ‘Telegenic Dead’: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics.” International Political Sociology 13 (2): 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly036. Berger, John. 1992. About Looking. New York: Vintage. Bleiker, Roland. 2001. “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30 (3): 509–533. https://doi. org/10.1177/03058298010300031001. Bleiker, Roland. 2015. “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43 (3): 872–890. https://doi. org/10.1177/0305829815583084. Bleiker, Roland, ed. 2018. Visual Global Politics. New York: Routledge. Burman, Erica. 1994. “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies.” Disasters 18 (3): 238–253. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-7717.1994.tb00310.x. Burman, Erica. 2008. Developments: Child, Image, Nation. New York: Routledge. Campbell, David. 2004. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media” Journal of Cultural Research 8 (1): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1080 /1479758042000196971. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2006. ‘Innocent Women and Children’: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians. London: Routledge. Dencik, Lina, and Stuart Allan. 2017. “In/visible Conflicts: NGOs and the Visual Politics of Humanitarian Photography.” Media, Culture & Society 39 (8): 1178–1193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717726865. D’Orazio, Francesco. 2015. “Journey of an Image: From a Beach in Bodrum to Twenty Million Screens Across the World.” In The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*, edited by Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova, 11–18. Visual Social Media Lab. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis.” Village Voice, 25 September, 29–32. Fehrenbach, Heide, and Davide Rodogno. 2015. “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective.” International Review of the Red Cross 97 (900): 1121–1155. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1816383116000369. Griggs, Brandon. 2015. “Photographer Describes ‘Scream’ of Migrant Boy’s ‘Silent Body’.” CNN, 3 September. Accessed 15 January 2019. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/03/world/dead-migrant-boy-beach-photographernilufer-demir/.

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Hansen, Lene. 2014. “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib.” Review of International Studies 41 (2): 263– 288. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210514000199. Honwana, Alcinda Manuel. 2006. Child Soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hutchison, Emma. 2014. “A Global Politics of Pity? Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of Solidarity After the 2004 Asian Tsunami.” International Political Sociology 8 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ips.12037. Hutchison, Emma, Roland Bleiker, and David Campbell. 2013. “Imaging Catastrophe: The Politics of Representing Humanitarian Crises.” In Negotiating Relief: The Dialectics of Humanitarian Space, edited by Michele Acuto, 47–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Landler, Mark. 2017. “Acting on Instinct, Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy.” New York Times, 7 April. Accessed 11 January 2019. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/04/07/world/middleeast/syria-attack-trump.html. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2011. “Horror and Hope: (Re)presenting Militarised Children in Global North-South Relations.” Third World Quarterly 32 (4): 725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.567005. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2018. “Children.” In Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker, 48–54. Abingdon: Routledge. Manzo, Kate. 2008. “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood.” Antipode 40 (4): 632–657. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00627.x. Miller, Nancy K. 2012. “The Girl in the Photograph: The Visual Legacies of War.” In Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, 147–166. London: Reaktion Books. Moeller, Susan D. 2002. “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Children in the Telling of International News.” Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics 7 (1): 36–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1081180x0200700104. Mortensen, Mette, Stuart Allan, and Chris Peters. 2017. “The Iconic Image in a Digital Age: Editorial Mediations Over the Alan Kurdi Photographs.” Nordicom Review 38 (2): 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1515/nor-2017-0415. Nagourney, Eric, and Michael Slackman. 2018. “Why We are Publishing Haunting Photos of Emaciated Yemeni Children.” New York Times, 26 October. Accessed 14 January 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/ 10/26/reader-center/yemen-photos-starvation.html. Olesen, Thomas. 2017. “Memetic Protest and the Dramatic Diffusion of Alan Kurdi.” Media, Culture & Society 40 (5): 656–672. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443717729212.

62  H. BERENTS Pistol, Rachel. 2017. “British Media Suspicion of Child Refugees Goes Back to the 1930s.” The Conversation, 10 March. Accessed 15 January 2019. https://theconversation.com/british-media-suspicion-of-child-refugees-goesback-to-the-1930s-73942. Pollock, Griselda. 2012. “Photographing Atrocity: Becoming Iconic?” In Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, 65–78. London: Reaktion Books. Pruitt, Lesley, Helen Berents, and Gayle Munro. 2018. “Gender and Age in the Construction of Male Youth in the European Migration ‘Crisis’.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (3): 687–709. https://doi. org/10.1086/695304. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2001. “Misanthropy Without Borders: The International Children’s Rights Regime.” Disasters 25 (2): 95–112. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-7717.00164. Rose, Gillian. 2006. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage. Shapiro, Michael J. 1988. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sliwinski, Sharon. 2011. Human Rights in Camera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Steele, Tanya. 2014. “Deceased Brown Bodies Unceremoniously Displayed on Our Screens…” IndieWire, 18 July. Accessed 15 January 2019. http://www. indiewire.com/2014/07/deceased-brown-bodies-unceremoniously-displayed-on-our-screens-159103/#.U8u3Qy6G6z4.facebook. UNICEF 1997. Cape Town Principles and Best Practices: Adopted at the Symposium on the Prevention of Recruitment of Children into the Armed Forces and on Demobilization and Social Reintegration of Child Soldiers in Africa. 27–30 April. Cape Town: UNICEF. Vis, Farida, and Olga Goriunova, eds. 2015. The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*. Visual Social Media Lab. Watkin, Amy-Louise, and Seán Looney. 2019. “‘The Lions of Tomorrow’: A News Value Analysis of Child Images in Jihadi Magazines.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42 (1–2): 120–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576 10x.2018.1513696. Watson, Alison M. S. 2009. The Child in International Political Economy: A Place at the Table. London: Routledge. Wells, Karen. 2013. “The Melodrama of Being a Child: NGO Representations of Poverty.” Visual Communication 12 (3): 277–293. https://doi. org/10.1177/1470357213483059.

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Wessells, Michael G. 1998. “Children, Armed Conflict, and Peace.” Journal of Peace Research 35 (5): 635–646. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234339803 5005006. Zarzycka, Marta. 2016. “Save the Child: Photographed Faces and Affective Transactions in NGO Child Sponsoring Programs.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 23 (1): 28–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350 506814568362. Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Children as Agents in International Relations? Transnational Activism, International Norms, and the Politics of Age Anna Holzscheiter Introduction Could Malala Yousafzai have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 without a ‘real’ adult, Kailash Satyarthi, at her side? In the context of contemporary discourses on children as political actors, such recognition of the powerful role of adolescents who are shaping global politics seems inconceivable. Revisiting IR engagement with children as agents in international politics and the practical implications of forceful norms on child participation for international organizations, this chapter asks: Where is the place for young people as political agents in contemporary international politics? The chapter revisits influential IR theories on international norms and the role that social movements and transnational advocacy play in the emergence, consolidation, application, contestation, and transformation of international norms in the light of this

A. Holzscheiter (*)  Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_4

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core question. It exposes the ephemeral role assigned to children in this important strand of IR scholarship and it aims to show how a stronger emphasis on children as social and political actors relevant to international policymaking and standard-setting considerably enriches and diversifies our understanding of the ‘social forces’ that shape international politics. Recent and contemporary social movements of young people around the world—rallying for stricter regulation of weapons in the U.S., for action on climate change in countries across Europe, or for greater political freedom in North Africa—showcase the considerable political energy and agency of persons who would be defined under international law and in most domestic jurisdictions as children, adolescents, or teenagers (i.e., under eighteen years of age). The participation of young people in the Arab uprisings in 2011 or public discourses surrounding national referendums on gay marriage or abortion in Ireland and the UK are just two of many examples that show how the actions of children and adolescents can be consequential for politics and law. As unique as contemporary forms of social and political organization and youth activism may appear, though, it is misleading to assume that political activism and engagement of young people is a phenomenon of our times. The beginning of the twentieth century saw a noteworthy movement of working children rallying for better working conditions across Europe—a movement whose impact was mirrored in the early child labour legislation of the International Labour Organization created in 1919 (Liebel 2003). The late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s witnessed the Peace Movement in North America and Europe, mostly consisting of pupils and students rallying against the Vietnam War and the NATO Double-Track Decision. During the 1980s, the environmental movement in Germany saw thousands of young people protesting against nuclear energy and deforestation and in Great Britain thousands of children took to the streets in a nation-wide school strike, protesting against economic exploitation in the context of the Conservative government’s program offering workplace training.1 Despite these recurring waves of youth activism in different parts of the world and despite a slow recognition of children and youth issues as being relevant to the institutions of global governance, children have yet to be acknowledged as pertinent subjects in the study of international politics.2 In fact, it is plausible to assume that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the invisibility of children’s agency in IR scholarship on the one hand and their limited political representation in global governance on the other. The problem is not that nobody sees

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young people as ‘zoon politikon,’ but that political, social, and economic agency of young people is not adequately recognized in International Relations scholarship as significant for international politics and law. This absence or invisibility of children in the discipline of IR appears particularly puzzling in the light of neighbouring disciplines in the Social Sciences such as Sociology or Human Geography which have, for considerable time, acknowledged the agency of young people.3 The default position underlying much writing on the place of children and childhood in international politics is that ‘high politics’ concerning security, finance, environment, labour, migration, etc. takes place in venues populated by adult professionals. By contrast, the understanding that children and adolescents are particularly affected by international politics—for better or for worse—is rather undisputed (Holzscheiter 2018). International humanitarian law has, from the onset, framed women, children, and the elderly as particularly vulnerable and innocent groups of persons that should receive special protection in times of war (Van Bueren 1998). International legislation in the area of labour rights and sexual exploitation has also addressed how transnational structures of exploitation (e.g., trafficking, ‘white slavery’, prostitution) particularly affect women and children. Landmark treaties on ‘inhumane’ warfare, like the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Ottawa Convention to Ban Landmines, have been motivated by the high numbers of children among the mostly civilian victims of landmines and chemical warfare (Cameron et al. 1998). If, however, there is a strong recognition that young people are, in many cases, disproportionally affected by international politics, it appears logical to ask why there are such limited possibilities for meaningful participation of this group in the creation, consolidation, and transformation of international norms. The status of children as both affected persons and relevant agents in international politics has so far been explored by a number of noteworthy contributions to (Critical) Security Studies and (International) Political Economy. These studies have sought to highlight how children are constructed as apolitical and childhood as happening outside the political domain in the discipline of International Relations and, particularly, with reference to conflict, war, and, security (Brocklehurst 2006; Beier 2015; Berents 2018). Engaging a different strand of literature in International Relations scholarship, this chapter seeks to expose the invisibility of children and young people in theories on international norms and transnational activism.

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I share the critique voiced by other contributors to this volume that what is missing, in particular, are theoretical and empirical contributions that see children and young people not only as objects of international concern and potential beneficiaries of international cooperation, but also as subjects—in fact persons—in international politics, endowed with social, economic, and political agency. As existing work on children in International Relations evidences, however, they only receive attention when situated in classical fields of international politics such as security, war, and the economy and when they are constructed by and large as innocent victims of violence and exploitation. By now, there are a number of studies that have looked at international law on the rights of the child, but they have done so from IR perspectives that focus on the impact of international norms on childhood on national jurisdictions (Simmons 2009; Linde 2016; Moody 2017) rather than on the impact of children and young people on shaping these norms, then and now. Following a number of scholarly contributions that have sought to re-narrate International Relations by exposing the agency of children and young people and their influence on international politics (Liebel 2003; Stammers 2012; Honeck and Rosenberg 2014; Honeck et al. 2014), this contribution asks how past and present ‘politics of age’ has been reflected both in IR scholarship on international norms and t­ ransnational advocacy. Rather than only exposing how youth agents and movements have been largely side-lined in core IR debates, the chapter seeks to explain varying degrees of recognizing children and young people as political agents that play a role in shaping international institutions and contributing to the setting, transformation, contestation, and enactment of international norms. The chapter asks to what extent international organizations and transnational advocacy networks open up spaces for transnational activism directly by children and young people rather than on their behalf. As I argue in this chapter, the contested nature of children’s subjectivity in international politics and law is closely linked to two related phenomena: first, I argue that the fragmentation of rules and structures of global governance that govern childhood impacts on the recognition of children’s agency. The creation of separate institutions for child rights governance has without doubt strengthened the visibility of children and childhood as a specific issue area in international politics. At the same

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time, the fragmentation of the international human rights system and the relegating of children’s rights to their special ‘niche’ may negatively affect the possibilities of children to articulate their interests and standpoints extensively, also in matters that affect them indirectly. A separate children’s rights regime allows deferring problems relevant to children to child-specific institutions, I contend, and therefore restricts political agency of children to these institutions rather than making participation of young persons a general principle of international institutions. Secondly, I relate the varying degrees of political agency and representational power of children to the ways in which child participation as a “procedural principle” (Holzscheiter 2017) has been interpreted in the context of international institutions and linked to rules of interaction and access that govern or ‘tame’ the activities of children and young people in the context of international organizations. I argue that while international organizations have, generally, increased their permeability towards children and to bottom-up organizations set up by children and young people, contemporary debates on child participation expose conflicts over legitimate representation. In fact, as I claim, the ‘opening up’ of international organizations towards a broader array of non-state actors leads, in many cases, to conflicts over representational authority between long-standing non-state partners of international organizations on the one hand (often from the Global North) and bottom-up organizations representing affected persons (often from the Global South). The chapter starts by revisiting the literature on international norms and transnational advocacy, exposing the absence of ‘age’ as a sociological category and of children as agents in leading theories on the emergence, consolidation, transformation, and contestation of international norms. I then suggest enriching the study of international norms and transnational advocacy in IR by focusing on the “politics of age”—i.e., the political representation of minors in global governance, the institutional barriers they confront, and their possibilities to communicate across the ‘age border.’ In conclusion, the chapter discusses how the study of (non)participation of children in international institutions and the contentious politics revolving around access of young people to international fora contributes to an understanding of children as ‘contested subjects of rights.’

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The (In)visibility of Children in Research on International Norms and Transnational Advocacy and Activism When inquiring about political agency and representation of children and young people in international politics and particularly from within international organizations, three pertinent strands of IR literature come to mind. Scholarship on international institutions, particularly those contributions that have looked at pluralization, democratization, and the ‘opening up’ of international organizations; scholarship on transnational advocacy (networks); and the literature on social movements. In the following, I will revisit all of these literatures in order to expose the absence of an understanding of children and young people as legitimate participants in international governmental and non-governmental organizations. My portrayal of the literature follows contributions in IR scholarship that have sought to explain why children are undertheorized in IR and have argued that the children “that are most valued are largely seen and not heard – positioned and increasingly politicized, but not engaged with” (Brocklehurst 2015: 29). In International Relations scholarship, there is a clear tendency to treat children and young people as ‘cases’ at best. Most scholarly contributions that have been engaging with children in international politics interpret international policies and norms addressing children largely as instruments to protect children. Children are understood as innocent, vulnerable, and mostly incapable of claiming their own rights or interests. The typical portrayal of children in a number of seminal studies, thus, is one that objectifies the child and treats it as an object or point of reference for adult policymakers’ concern, normative aspirations, and benevolence. Discussions of the emergence, consolidation, and transformation of international norms on child protection and child rights rarely discuss the relevance of children’s actions or inactions as an explanatory variable in the history of child rights governance. A case in point is Zoe Moody’s (2017) work on the history of the UN Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC) which is, essentially, a story in which adult diplomats and legal experts are the sole protagonists—the invisibility or absence of children in this process is not even problematized in her study. This understanding of the (non)place of children in international politics, thus, corresponds to a forceful narrative in international politics and law on the innocent and mute child in need of protection through

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international cooperation (Holzscheiter 2010). The acclaimed studies by Beth Simmons (2009), Charli Carpenter (2010), and Robyn Linde (2016) confirm this tendency. Simmons, in her exploration of “the protection of innocents” argues that, children typically require advocates willing to articulate and press their interests. International Law can play an important role in advocacy on behalf of children. (…) Moreover, it can provide a lever to give their would-be advocates influence over policies likely to have an impact on the well-being of those who are not able to organize and speak for themselves. (Simmons 2009: 307; emphasis added)

In this portrayal of mobilization for (children’s) human rights, these rights are mobilized to “improve the lives of the young” and to protect “vulnerable individuals who are least able to defend their own interests” (Simmons 2009: 308). Children “have no right to vote, no capacity to lobby or to exert market pressure, and very little independent access to courts in most countries” (Simmons 2009: 315). The same tendency marks Robyn Linde’s (2016) book on the Globalization of Childhood, more specifically on the global diffusion of the prohibition of death penalty for perpetrators below the age of eighteen. Even though her theory on norm diffusion builds centrally on the activities of state and non-state norm entrepreneurs, no space is given in the book for at least a consideration of the place of children and young people themselves in such entrepreneurship. The question of how norm entrepreneurs interact with the young people whose interests and rights they advocate for vis-à-vis individual governments and international organizations is left unaddressed. The book clearly espouses a protectionist approach to children under international law, without any discussion of the empowering dimensions of international treaties and transnational advocacy. Finally, Charlie Carpenter’s various studies on issue-salience and unsuccessful advocacy in the case of ‘children born of wartime rape,’ again, replicate a traditional concern for children as victims worthy of better protection by the international community (see Carpenter 2010). These three authors must be recommended for their choice of children as a group of persons worthy of academic study, considering the fact that most of the seminal studies on the global diffusion of international norms, transnational advocacy, or social movements have fully ignored children and young people as research subjects and agents alike

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(Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999).4 The Oxford Handbook on Social Movements (Della Porta and Diani 2015) can be considered as giving one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date overviews of scholarship on Social Movements. Among its many chapters, only the chapter by Goldstone (2015) on “Demography and Social Movements” addresses questions of age and young people as being part of social movements. By looking at youth movements from the perspective of demographics and cross-generational comparison, though, the chapter frames young people’s involvement narrowly with regard to a correlation between young age and violence, using examples such as the Black Panther movement in the U.S., the Arab uprisings in 2011, or the German Red Army Faction. Young people are presented as “more available for activism, often lacking the responsibilities of families or established careers and the burden of mortgages. It is also the case that young people tend to be more extreme in their views, and more willing to engage in violence for a valued goal” (Goldstone 2015: 150). Children and young people are also absent as agents in other seminal books such as Roland Bleiker’s (2000) Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics. His theory on transversal dissent and its effects on international relations builds on agency beyond state behavior and how it shapes the emergence and history of transnational and political struggles. However, while there is some reflection on the role of ‘young poets’ in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is no more room for minors in his theory on popular dissent. Even in cases where children’s rights are included, such as in Simmons (2009), the chapters on children always appear last in line as empirical case studies—a trend that clearly locates them at the boundaries of international politics. What thus emanates from the literature is the invisibility of age as a sociological category and the absence of a politics of age with regard to the emergence of international norms and advocacy networks. Where they are addressed, children are presented in a passive voice, as silent victims for whom international rules are being made and in a typical narrative that moves from core issues (security, economy, humanitarian law, civil rights) to more ephemeral subjects (women, children). The literature exhibits a de-linking of the political activities of young people and transformations in international norms and policies, assuming that it is only adult advocates and norm entrepreneurs that have the means and agency to establish new norms or transform existing ones. Studies by Jean Grugel and Ingi Iusmen (2013) on agenda-setting for children’s

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rights in the context of the European Union and by Ingvild Bode (2018) on the issue of child soldiers in the UN Security Council are cases in point. The agents relevant for setting the child rights agenda are portrayed as the “child rights lobby,” consisting of child rights advocates, lawyers, experts, and practitioners. It is the big civil society players— Save the Children, Plan, the Children’s Rights Action Group (CRAG), or EUROCHILD—that constitute the backbone of advocacy (or ‘lobbying’) for child rights in the context of the European Union (Grugel and Iusmen 2013). Beyond its focus on adult advocates for children, the literature also conveys a rather rigid line of separation between the ‘innocent,’ mute child on the one hand and the deviant, radical, criminal young person on the other. As ‘discovering childhood’ is not an integral part of IR scholarship, scholarly contributions in this field can be found mostly in interdisciplinary journals or those not directly pertinent to IR—e.g., journals from the fields of Sociology, Education, (Social) Psychology, Geography, or specialized interdisciplinary journals such as Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research.

Children and Social and Political Agency—The UNCRC and Child Participation as a Procedural Norm in International Organizations The findings on the invisibility of children as social and political agents in IR literature and neighbouring disciplines such as International Political Sociology presented above appear all the more puzzling in the light of an increasing recognition of children’s legal subjectivity in the course of the twentieth century. With the adoption of the UNCRC in 1989—the first binding international treaty defining human rights for children—signatories to the UNCRC took on not only the obligation to protect children and their rights to be free from exploitation, hunger, or violence. They also confirmed their responsibility to ensure that children are given the means and space to participate in decisions affecting them and on the basis of their ‘evolving capacities’ to gradually become independent holders of human rights (Article 12, UNCRC). In fact, with the UNCRC, and particularly Article 12 and the concept of ‘evolving capacities,’ the legal personality of the child in international politics changed dramatically (Holzscheiter 2010). While prior legal standards for children had treated the child as a passive, innocent, and vulnerable

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object of international concern, protection, and solidarity, the drafters of the UNCRC not only broadened the range of human rights for children, but also for the first time included the full range of human rights for children, most notably political rights such as the right to be heard or freedom of assembly and religion. As the cornerstone of this supposedly seismic shift in international law on the rights of the child, Article 12(1) of the UNCRC stipulates that States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Despite drafters’ being open to the idea of giving children the possibility to articulate their viewpoints—and thereby re-defining the child not only as a mute beneficiary of adult protection and intervention but also as a social and political agent—the participation of children in the very creation of the UNCRC was never discussed as a logical corollary of that new dimension in the international law on the rights of the child. As I have shown elsewhere, the state and non-state representatives and legal experts who drafted the UNCRC had a rather narrow idea of child participation when they drafted Article 12 (Holzscheiter 2010). Now, 30 years after the UNCRC adoption, however, the political rights enshrined in the UNCRC and the principle of child participation have been elevated to the most ‘revolutionary’ dimension of this treaty and as a core benchmark against which progressive child rights policies are measured. In that sense, Article 12 of the UNCRC can be seen as a door-opener for children in national and international decision-making processes and political institutions as, at least in principle, it has evolved into a general principle promoting the widespread political and social participation of young people. It is no longer a substantive right applicable to a limited range of contexts but rather a principle sui generis, a procedural norm that sees child participation as a value in itself rather than just a means to an end relevant to a limited number of situations. The fact that the Committee on the Rights of the Child has elevated participation as contained in Article 12 to one of the four general principles of the UNCRC (rather than merely one right in a long list of rights) implies that considering the views of children on all matters affecting them must

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be seen as a general procedural principle that should be recognized in all interactions with children as affected persons.5 The legal subjectivity of children was further strengthened with the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the UNCRC on the Establishment of an Individual Complaints Mechanism in 2011 and with the established practice of the Committee on the Rights of the Child to include children as part of the NGO delegations to the Committee hearings in Geneva. It is also reflected in the creation of the UN’s Focal Point on Youth—UN YOUTH—which works to “strengthen the participation of youth in decision-making processes at all levels in order to increase their impact on national development and international cooperation”6 and provides an impressive list of youth-related activities in the UN system. Young people have been able to shape the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals in an unprecedented way, in stark contrast to the negotiations of the Millennium Development Goals. They presented directly to the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and participated in the negotiations through the UN Major Group for Children and Youth. Some countries included young representatives in their delegations, such as the UK’s Department for International Development. All of these developments testify to a growing recognition of child participation as a general procedural norm, rather than a sporadic, isolated event or an internationally agreed principle that is relevant only with regard to a limited set of issues. In the light of these developments, therefore, it has to be asked to what extent international organizations and transnational advocacy networks systematically open up spaces for transnational activism by children and young people rather than on their behalf.

International Institutions, Transnational Advocacy, and the ‘Politics of Age’7 Considering the ever-greater recognition of child participation as a central principle of global governance, the gaps identified in the literature on international norms and institutions appear even more puzzling. Scholarly work on child participation and youth activism in neighbouring disciplines (such as Political Geography, Sociology, and Education) evidences that empirical research concentrates solely on national or sub-national political and social structures—child participation and youth

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activism in international organizations is an under-researched phenomenon. Drawing on the little there is, in what follows, I discuss a number of cases in which children and young people have been able to participate in norm-setting activities in international organizations. Based on these accounts, I advance a number of propositions on how children’s political agency challenges norms and procedures of international institutions. The examples are drawn from secondary literature and my own work on international child labour policies and they show that, typically, access of children to the confines of ‘adult’ policymaking does not result in possibilities for meaningful action and articulation. And yet, in some instances, participation rights granted to children have caused normative upheaval in international organizations as they brought to light contending views on children’s agency and autonomy. These cases, thus, point to a correlation between children’s growing visibility and political agency on the one hand and a politicization of international policy-areas such as child labour, sexual rights, gender, or intergenerational justice on the other. By now, a number of studies have pointed to the growing diffusion of a democracy norm among international organizations that reaches out not only to changing procedures of decision-making and power re-balancing between large and small states, but also to non-state actors’ involvement in international policymaking (Dingwerth 2007; Scholte 2011; Tallberg et al. 2013). More recently, the scholarly debate on ‘affectedness’ has linked questions of democratization and participation to the role that affected persons (sometimes also called “policy-takers”) and their organizations can and should play in international politics. Under the rubric of “affectedness” a number of studies have pointed to inclusion of the affected as a general rule—or procedural norm—in international organizations (Sändig et al. 2018; Hasenclever and Narr 2019). The transformation of international organizations’ interaction with ­non-state actors, thus, is seen in close relation to the empowerment of new actors and organizations in international politics. This relation is not unidirectional: as much as affected persons have claimed their right to be included and ‘heard’ in international policymaking forums, new ground rules of IOs for interaction with civil society actors have also changed the status of these persons and groups in international politics (Holzscheiter 2018). Following the growing acceptance of the right to participation by children and young people as a cornerstone of intergovernmental and

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transnational child rights governance, we would therefore expect IOs to become more receptive to the appropriate representation and active involvement of children and young people in international policymaking processes. However, as both IR literature and IO practices of involving societal actors in international policymaking make clear, to see children as transnational advocates and political representatives vis-à-vis international institutions is still a rare phenomenon. As I will discuss in the last part of this chapter, the involvement of children and young people in international institutions has brought with it two dimensions of contestation: first, contestation over established substantive norms; and, second, contestation over access rules (i.e., procedural norms) for n ­ on-state actors, which is reflected in conflicts over representative authority between traditional (adult) representatives and newer (child, affected) political agents. Children as Contested Subjects of Rights in International Politics— Conflicts Over Rules of Access for Children In his assessment in Governance and the Rights of Children, B. Guy Peters (2012: 8) comes to the conclusion that “[a]lthough one of the rights contained within the [UNCRC] is that children should have the opportunity to express their views and be heard, these participatory rights are rarely as meaningful as the participatory rights of adult citizens.” This diagnosis applies as much to domestic political structures as it applies to international institutions. The occasions on which children— particularly those younger than fifteen years of age (which is typically considered the age at which children become ‘young people’)—have been allowed to speak in sites of high-level international policymaking have been exceptional events. When the UNCRC was adopted by the General Assembly in 1989, the UN published images accompanying the celebration showing then-Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar together with a handful of girls and boys of about ten to thirteen years of age, some of them dressed in traditional costumes. Typically, though, the perspectives and opinions of children are being represented and articulated in the context of international organizations by young adults who represent former child soldiers, former child workers, or former child victims of violence, exploitation, or trafficking.8 The claims of children are thus voiced by young adults who no longer fall under the legal definition of a child, but whose life experiences during childhood qualify them to

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speak on behalf of large groups of children. Possibilities for those persons who are not yet adolescents to voice their opinion are usually only created in the context of special events such as, for example, the UN World Children’s Day, where ‘kids’ could communicate via the Hashtag #KidsTakeOver.9 Judith Ennew’s (2008) analysis of child participation in various international meetings and organizations, including the annual sessions of the UNCRC Committee, confirms a tendency to treat participating children as witnesses rather than representatives. During the UNCRC Day of General Discussion on the Child’s Right to be Heard in 2006, an unusually high number of children were present but still subjected to patronizing practices such as the distribution of ‘attendance certificates’—which adult delegates did not receive. In its concluding report of this event, though, the UNCRC Committee called for the systematic inclusion of children in policy matters in order to ensure their effective participation (Ennew 2008: 73). On the very rare occasions that children articulated contentious positions on a seemingly universal international consensus, their contributions incited very strong reactions on the part of State representatives. It is these instances that present particularly interesting cases to explore in terms of children’s visibility and agency in international organizations as they point to the contestedness of both substantive and procedural norms in international politics—and to the potential consequences that the political actions of children can have on the biography of international norms. There is only a small number of studies one can draw upon in order to explore the effects of children’s involvement in international standard-setting activities. A particularly well-explored case here is the involvement of representatives of child worker associations in the context of negotiations over ILO Convention No. 182 on the ‘Worst Forms of Child Labour’ in the late 1990s (White 1994, 1999; Smolin 1999; Hanson and Vandaele 2003; Liebel 2003; Bourdillon et al. 2010). In 2018, associations of working children and adolescents complained in an open letter to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the central international body overseeing the UNCRC’s communication procedure for individual complaints. They protested against being excluded from the IV Global Conference on the Eradication of Child Labour where, on the basis of “security concerns,” organizations representing working children and adolescents had been denied access to the conference’s premises. The case would be little surprising, had child worker organizations not been given permission to address State Delegates

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during those Child Labour Conferences in the 1990s in the course of which the new ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour was being negotiated. It was right in the upshot of the adoption of the UNCRC that the new status of the child under international law—as an active rights-holder and political being—was also legitimizing the empowerment of child representatives in the context of intergovernmental organizations such as the ILO. As an outcome of the representation of regional and transnational coalitions of child workers in the venues of international conference diplomacy, contentious debates on what counts as ‘acceptable forms’ as opposed to ‘worst forms’ of child labour that were dividing industrialized and developing countries were infused with even more subversive perspectives. On the one hand, child workers supported a softening of abolitionist child labour policies by framing most forms of child work as alternative forms of vocational training. On the other hand, however, child workers used the participatory rights enshrined in the UNCRC as a discursive resource in order to question the representational power of both State delegates and traditional non-state partners of the ILO (Holzscheiter 2016). They demanded to be recognized not only as economic but also as political agents and claimed their right to actively participate and be heard on matters affecting them—in this case international policies regulating child labour. In contrast to most instances in which children and adolescents were being invited to speak in front of State Delegates in international organizations, the contributions of representatives of working children at the Oslo International Child Labour Conference in 1997 provoked very strong reactions, particularly by State delegates. They brought to light normative tensions between traditional protective and abolitionist positions on child labour and progressive, emancipatory dimensions of child rights on the other. As I have shown elsewhere, these normative tensions have already marked the deliberations on the UNCRC and also found their way into this seminal treaty. As such, the transnational mobilization of young people outside and inside international institutions has also led to a growing visibility of these normative tensions and fueled a further politicization of ILO debates. The association between children’s political agency inside international institutions and politicization of international debates has been explored in much detail in the case of ILO child labour policies and the drafting of a new ILO Convention in the late 1990s. There are, however,

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also other areas of international politics, in which growing activism and political organization of persons that fall under the rubric of ‘children’ but who are mostly adolescents and young adults, has resulted in norm contestation and politicization. Noteworthy studies focus on issues of sexual and reproductive rights and gender, such as Emily Bent’s (2013) study on the participation of girls in the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Bent’s study sheds light on the possibilities for meaningful participation in ‘formal’ adult spaces in the UN context with the aim of revealing structural and conceptual barriers to political engagement of girls. Her interviews with teenage girls who have participated in the UN Commission on the Status of Women lead her to conclude that “biological age dictates the conditions of political participation” and that the only option for children is “to grow up and become political” (Bent 2013: 174). Qualitative research on the parameters for young people’s involvement in international organizations, thus, testifies to the contested political identity of under-18s and to their limited acceptance as interlocutors in policy-making debates organized and led by adult state representatives. Looking at the effects of an occasional opening-up of international institutions to children and their meaningful rather than only ‘tokenist’ (Hart 1997) participation in international policy debates, it is possible to conclude that children’s agency is consequential in at least two significant ways, both for the institutional set-up of international organizations as well as for the international norms that are being debated in these contexts. First, giving children the possibility to articulate themselves vis-à-vis representatives of Member States of IOs often moves into the spotlight normative tensions and conflicts that are related to the very nature of children’s rights as being both about rights to be protected by adults and rights that safeguard individual autonomy and freedom. Secondly, the empowerment of children in international rule-settings can create fields of tension between substantive and procedural norms. While access to IOs for specific groups of persons (women, children, Indigenous peoples, people living with disabilities, persons representing the Global South, older persons, minorities, workers, etc.) has become central to contemporary discourses on the democratization and legitimacy of IOs, it has at the same time become a matter of conflict with regard to changing rules of access for organizations and networks representing these groups vis-à-vis international organizations. Ongoing divisions over the extent to which participation, autonomy and agency

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should be granted to groups of persons previously held to be vulnerable and silent thus reflect back on the ground rules of international organizations for accreditation, participation, and speaking rights. Child Participation and ‘Closure’ of International Organizations—Organizing Out Children The discussion above clearly shows that politically active children are uncomfortable subjects in international politics. The highly divided public opinion concerning the contemporary transnational environmental movement rallying around seventeen-year-old Greta Thunberg is yet another example of this discomfort that comes with young activists who gain access to international forums and articulate their positions vis-à-vis domestic and international policymakers. As it appears, international organizations have found a number of strategies with which to contain rising demands for direct representation by children and young people. Three of these strategies are noteworthy. On the level of institutional structures, IOs can contain child participation through the separation of child-related issues from other issue areas that are relevant to childhood—the separation of agendas on children and women (Twamley et al. 2017), of children’s issues from questions of sexual identity (LGBTI), and the artificial line of division between child protection and youth activism are particularly relevant to institutional fragmentation in the case of children. The creation of specific niches for child-related issues does not only disconnect questions of child protection and child rights from other areas of special protection, it also leads to a detachment of child matters from larger, more general concerns with human rights, justice, violence, and social policy. Secondly, international organizations can design access and interaction rules in a way that clearly favours adult organizations and representatives. On a more direct level, they can organize children out of political debates by not allowing them to enter international debates at all. Access for non-state actors to international organizations (and particularly to smaller Committees in which international standards are being drafted or debated) is restricted both in terms of numbers and type/ goal of organization. Thus, as non-state actors very often need a sponsoring government or other NGO to obtain a delegation pass, children and adolescents are very likely to be last in line when it comes to battles over access among non-state actors. However, even in the context

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of very large conferences with thousands of NGO delegates, it appears delegates younger than eighteen years of age constitute a small minority. Bent (2013) describes this in the case of the Beijing Platform, with 3440 delegates from 138 countries, of which fewer than a hundred participants were below the age of eighteen, mostly representing countries of the Global North. On a more subtle level, they can relegate children’s input to segregated platforms for communication (‘mock’ participation) that are completely irrelevant for interactions between state representatives. Thirdly, on the level of social and discursive practices, contentious child participation can be contained through framing strategies that present children as ‘marginalized’ or as ‘the future’ and, consequently, as future political subjects and by means of restrictive diplomatic customs of talking and behaving that make children’s ways of speaking and interaction seem inappropriate. A number of studies have analysed the ways in which the discursive representation of children as a “marginalized population” (Jeffrey 2012: 2469) or as “pre-citizens” or “not-yet-citizens” (Russell et al. 2010: 472) constructs children as absent and invisible subjects in political discourse. Examples of child participation in the context of international organizations such as the United Nations or the International Labour Organization show two things: first, that meaningful participation challenges access rules of international organizations; and, secondly, that when IOs change access rules this may result in conflicts between ­non-state actors—among them organizations and individuals representing children and adolescents—over representational power (Holzscheiter 2016). As the examples given above show, the study of access rules and the ways in which they influence child representation in international institutions should be given greater emphasis in Childhood Studies. As I have argued elsewhere, these rules are a strong explanatory factor for dynamics of contestation and competition among non-state actors and thus also among adult and child representatives of non-state interests, agendas, and perspectives. At the same time, it seems plausible to assume that where these access rules are particularly contentious, we are also dealing with contested substantive norms of international politics, as exemplified by the examples of child labour and reproductive rights. Last but not least, the study of these access rules can tell us a lot about IOs’ strategies to contain the influence of uncomfortable societal actors and to mitigate contestation of their governance structures and policies by these actors. Thus, IOs’ formal and informal access rules for the

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participation of children and young people must be seen as highly consequential inasmuch as it is here that the formal status of children and thus also their legitimacy, identity, and power is being negotiated.

Conclusion The insights presented in this chapter support the conclusion that children are ‘contested subjects of rights’ in international politics, including their right to be heard and to participate in the creation of international standards and policies that affect them. Even though at various points in time—including the present—children and adolescents have been conspicuously vocal in domestic and transnational politics and even though they have, on a few occasions, gained access to adult-dominated international institutions, their possibilities to directly articulate perspectives, positions, and interests continue to be restricted. Assuming that there is a dialectic between politics and academic scholarship, the findings of this chapter point to a mutually reinforcing relationship between the invisibility of children in IR scholarship on the one hand and their limited room for maneuver in international institutions on the other. As the way we present international relations in IR scholarship shapes our understanding of relevant theories, issues, and agents, the non-place of children in theorizing on advocacy coalitions’ and social movements’ influence on international rule-making should be of particular concern. As this contribution suggests, a recognition of children as competent and resourceful actors in international politics enriches the study of political representation in international institutions, particularly in terms of dynamics of collaboration and conflict between established civil society partners of international organizations and emerging transnational movements and grassroots networks.

Notes 1. https://libcom.org/history/uk-school-students-strike-1985-steven-johns, accessed 8 May 2019. 2. For exceptions, see Carpenter (2010), Holzscheiter (2010), Beier (2011, 2015), and Linde (2014). 3. Jeffrey (2012: 245) even describes this acknowledgment as a mantra. 4. Scholarly literature was searched for ‘child*,’ ‘youth,’ ‘young,’ ‘minor,’ in combination with ‘voice,’ ‘agency,’ ‘advocacy,’ ‘participation,’ ‘empowerment.’

84  A. HOLZSCHEITER 5. Committee of the Rights of the Child, 43rd Session, 11–29 September 2006, Day of General Discussion on the Right of the Child to be Heard, available at: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CRC/Pages/Discussion Days.aspx, accessed 10 February 2018. 6.  UN Youth, “What we do”, https://www.un.org/development/desa/ youth/what-we-do.html, accessed 13 June 2019. 7. UNA-UK, “Engaging Generation 2030”, https://www.sustainablegoals. org.uk/engaging-generation-2030/, accessed 13 June 2019. 8. See for example briefing by Yenny Londoño, former child soldier in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), on children and armed conflict, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyEd_ H5UTQw, accessed 15 April 2019. 9.  https://www.scoopnest.com/tag/KidsTakeover/, accessed 15 April 2019.

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Cameron, Maxwell A., Robert J. Lawson, and Brian W. Tomlin. 1998. To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2010. Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani, eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dingwerth, Klaus. 2007. The New Transnationalism: Transnational Governance and Democratic Legitimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ennew, Judith. 2008. “Children as ‘Citizens’ of the United Nations (UN).” In Children and Citizenship, edited by Antonella Invernizzi and Jane Williams, 66–78. Los Angeles: Sage. Goldstone, Jack A. 2015. “Demography and Social Movements.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, 146–158. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grugel, Jean, and Ingi Iusmen. 2013. “The European Commission as Guardian Angel: The Challenges of Agenda-Setting for Children’s Rights.” Journal of European Public Policy 20 (1): 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763 .2012.693416. Hanson, Karl, and Arne Vandaele. 2003. “Working Children and International Labour Law: A Critical Analysis.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 11 (1): 73–146. https://doi.org/10.1163/092755603322384038. Hart, Roger. 1997. “Childrens’ Rights to Participate.” In Understanding Childrens’ Rights, edited by Eugen Verhellen, 227–243. Ghent: Children’s Rights Centre. Hasenclever, Andreas, and Henrike Narr. 2019. “The Dark Side of the Affectedness-Paradigm: Lessons from the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement at the United Nations.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 4 (3): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1553505. Holzscheiter, Anna. 2010. Children’s Rights in International Politics: The Transformative Power of Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holzscheiter, Anna. 2016. “Representation as Power and Performative Practice: Global Civil Society Advocacy for Working Children.” Review of International Studies 42 (2): 205–226. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0260210515000145. Holzscheiter, Anna. 2017. “Coping with Diversity and Dissent? Contested Procedural Norms on Interactions Between IOs and Non-State Actors.” The Dynamics of Dissent: Direct and Indirect Norm Contestation, Nuffield College Oxford, 2–3 June 2017. Holzscheiter, Anna. 2018. “Affectedness, Empowerment and Norm Contestation—Children and Young People as Social Agents in International Politics.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 3 (5–6): 645–663. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1600382.

86  A. HOLZSCHEITER Honeck, Mischa, and Gabriel Rosenberg. 2014. “Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 38 (2): 233–239. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhu011. Honeck, Mischa, Gabriel Rosenberg, Sara Fieldston, Christina Norwig, Marcia Chatelain, Sean Guillory, Tamara Myers, and Paul Fass. 2014. “Special Forum: Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War West, 1945–1980.” Diplomatic History 38 (2): 233–298. Jeffrey, Craig. 2012. “Geographies of Children and Youth II: Global Youth Agency.” Progress in Human Geography 36 (2): 245–253. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132510393316. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Liebel, Manfred. 2003. “Working Children as Social Subjects The Contribution of Working Children’s Organizations to Social Transformations.” Childhood 10 (3): 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682030103002. Linde, Robyn. 2014. “The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion of Norms and Law Against the Child Death Penalty.” European Journal of International Relations 20 (2): 544–568. https://doi. org/10.1177/1354066113475464. Linde, Robyn. 2016. The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion of Norms and Law Against the Child Death Penalty. New York: Oxford University Press. Moody, Zoe. 2017. “Transnational Treaties on Children’s Rights: Norm Building and Circulation in the Twentieth Century.” In Children’s Rights, edited by Ursula Kilkelly and Laura Lundy, 37–50. Abingdon: Routledge. Peters, B. Guy. 2012. Governance and the Rights of Children. New York: UNICEF. Risse, Thomas, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds. 1999. The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Stephen T., Russell B. Toomey, Jason Crockett, and Carolyn Laub. 2010. “LGBT Politics, Youth Activism, and Civic Engagement.” In Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, edited by Lonnie R. Lonnie, R. Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta, and Constance A. Flanagan, 471– 494. Hoboken: John Wiley. Sändig, Jan, Jochen Von Bernstorff, and Andreas Hasenclever. 2018. “Affectedness in International Institutions: Promises and Pitfalls of Involving the Most Affected.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 3 (5–6): 587– 604. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1599692. Scholte, Jan Aart, ed. 2011. Building Global Democracy? Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Simmons, Beth A. 2009. Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smolin, David M. 1999. “Conflict and Ideology in the International Campaign Against Child Labour.” Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal 16 (2): 383–450. Stammers, Neil. 2012. “Children’s Rights and Social Movements: Reflections from a Cognate Field.” In Reconceptualizing Children’s Rights in International Development, edited by Karl Hanson and Olga Nieuwenhuys, 275–292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tallberg, Jonas, Theo Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito, and Christer Jönsson. 2013. The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twamley, Katherine, Rachel Rosen, and Berry Mayall. 2017. “The (Im)possibilities of Dialogue Across Feminism and Childhood Scholarship and Activism.” Children’s Geographies 15 (2): 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/1473328 5.2016.1227611. Van Bueren, Geraldine. 1998. The International Law on the Rights of the Child. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. White, Ben. 1994. “Children, Work and ‘Child Labour’: Changing Responses to the Employment of Children.” Development and Change 25 (4): 849–878. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1994.tb00538.x. White, Ben. 1999. “Defining the Intolerable: Child Work, Global Standards and Cultural Relativism.” Childhood 6 (1): 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/0 907568299006001010.

CHAPTER 5

Doing IR: Securing Children Helen Brocklehurst

Political Children The opportunity to reflect on children and security in an edited ­collection is of course a symbol of promise and a marker of prospects. It is also perhaps without precedent. It is rare for a substantial referent to receive attention this late in a field of enquiry. Making a critical intervention which is not at least preceded by a traceable traditional or empirical engagement with children presents unique challenges and is perhaps symptomatic of unparalleled resistance. In Who’s Afraid of Children? (2006) I urged stakeholders in IR to acknowledge how their uncritical gaze situated ‘children and war’ and how children’s agency is in effect ‘hidden in plain sight’; politicized and yet ineffectively secured (Brocklehurst 2006). In the academy’s pages and classrooms, children’s capital as threats, victims, and agents remains underrepresented. The child as a referent is still barely encountered—harnessed to narratives on child soldiers or poverty (Baylis et al. 2017), appended to women, and typically essentialized and sentimentalized. Broadly speaking, IR has until very recently considered children as un-political and, male or female, developing, innocent, and passive.

H. Brocklehurst (*)  University of Derby, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_5

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That children’s politics or agency is underplayed guarantees their ­ rolific and undisturbed (ab)use in security practices: “the de-politicisation p of childhood…enables a re-inscription with politically expedient meanings” (Hörschelmann 2016: 30). And a child protected is ultimately a childhood deployed. For example, when is a girl in International Relations? ‘Smart girls,’ ‘saviour girls,’ and ‘rescued girls’ are on the world stage and ideas of ‘girl power’ and ‘global girlhood’ have surfaced. Limited and limiting anxieties about missing girls and victim girls compete with narratives which have signposted, and profited from, girls’ agency and protection. Malala Yousafzai, a teenage activist for education in Pakistan, was a notable ‘global’ signifier of power and threat. This projection or investment is arguably in tension with a lack of engagement, especially political engagement, with girls and their inequalities globally. There are, however, multiple ways that girlhood can be troubled, resisted, or even secured. A new global market in non-fiction—such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Favilli and Cavallo 2017)—now promotes girls’ strengths; “empowering, moving and inspirational, these are true fairy tales for heroines who definitely don’t need rescuing.” How do girls enter, inform, negotiate or even exit girlhoods within and beyond these pages? The strategic harnessing of transhistorical, transcultural infants to pleas to the national conscience is a related instrumentalization of ­childhood (Brocklehurst 2006). Which children do we see—and which become the ‘telegenic dead’—that we cannot unsee (Berents 2019; Perl and Strasser 2018)? An image of a drowned three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi, washed ashore in 2015, is the most viral of our time; a circulation driven through social media before it was taken up hesitantly by newspapers and prompted regional introspection of refugee policy. As is often noted, children offer a barometer of society par excellence. But what happens to most real children when ‘lost’ childhood becomes shorthand for national failings? The mobilization of childhoods will allow politicization of ‘their’ issues but, as Jennifer Hyndman (2018: 386) reminds us, “not all disasters have equal geopolitical valence.” The Ugandan government, for example, is currently attempting to close unregulated ‘orphanages,’ housing up to 50,000 impoverished but often not parent-less children. At least 60 such homes in Uganda are funded by UK charities, church groups, and volunteers, unwittingly complicit in children’s commodification and insecurity (Cheney and Rotabi 2016; BBC 2019). These children will be amongst at least 200 million children who quietly fail to reach their developmental potential each year—losing countries up to 30% in adult productivity (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007).

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Some will be counted in an estimated 5.9 million children globally who die before their fifth birthday (World Health Organization 2016) or the one billion who experience violence annually (Hillis et al. 2016; Huebner et al. 2016). Over one billion people under the age of eighteen also live in territories affected by armed conflict (Huynh et al. 2015). Yet armed children, not targeted children, are perhaps the most signified of insecure children, especially in Western narratives (Graham 2018: 1). As Kim Huynh et al. (2015) remind us, the construction of the ‘child soldier’ is a powerful icon of contemporary global North-South power relations—obscuring children’s diversity, the range of their experiences, the complexity of their agency, and their individual needs and the global causes of children’s militarization, as well as the solutions necessary to address them. A critical child soldier lens now exposes much work to be done: on the specificity of children’s bodies (Wells 2017), on contextually sensitive and empirically informed study of girls’ experiences (Vaha and Vastapuu 2018), and on the Global North, where ‘militainment,’ ‘fun and games,’ also bring wars home (Bourke 2014). Military recruitment remains a vital medium through which states and militaries represent their role in the world (Rech 2014), making childhoods a “site for displacement and manoeuvring for militarization” (Agathangelou and Killian 2011: 40), and children spectators, contributors, and, ultimately, stabilizers of war. Childhood is what states make of it and to this we can add ‘youth’—as security subjects and actors (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018)—and perhaps also former children. Political children illustrate the promise of recognizing childhood as a social construct and seeing children as consumers and actors, both ­positioned and performing, potentially morally and politically engaged, partially knowable, gendered, and even ‘hyper-enabled.’ Childhood is thus fluid, contested, and shaped by priorities, particularly ­ political ­priorities. It is less an agreed reality than an assigned life phase, and makes a ‘messy’ referent (Beazley et al. 2009: 366). Liquid Childhood Perhaps, then, we might speak of liquid childhood. Children are “structurally marginal and situational competent” (Wyness 2006: 234) and a focus on their everyday becomes explicitly relational (Huijsmans 2016). Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli (2011: 100) observe how children spin “webs of power relations in their own political geographies where

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they, for instance, ‘give expression to one’s own views and aspirations’, ‘establish, recognize and contest different interests’, ‘gain advantage over other children’ and adults, and ‘resist defining powers over the self’.” Processes of politicization and securitization intersect through such “mundane politics” (Kallio and Häkli 2011); “motherwork” (Lind 2019) and the interplay of the familial and unrecognized emotional labour of parents, mothers, carers, and teachers (Kallio 2019). Childhood’s unique matrix of norms and social boundaries offers opportunities for agency and transgression which excite both predator and prey. Migration and sex work, and its North-South ‘commodity’ chains, also straddle (inter) national boundaries of minority and majority (Huijsmans 2016). And adversity and poverty may, in turn, make the status of childhood temporarily or permanently redundant. Such lessons from critical geopolitics— its new scales and uneven spaces—show how “young people’s security landscapes are embodied, emotional, intimate and marked by age, gender, and racialised social and cultural relations” (Hopkins et al. 2019: 440). Jacob Rasmussen’s research on youth and private security in Kenya illustrates violent politics feeding into “forms of politics and political becoming” (Rasmussen 2017: 138), within a global security assemblage. And child soldiers are neither ‘child’ nor ‘soldier’ in their contested terrains of identity, victimhood, and survival (Özerdem and Podder 2011). Jenny Holt (2008) shows how institutions shape boyhood and cites Christine Griffin (1993: 13–14) on how “the ‘discovery’ of adolescence coincided with the emerging cult of heterosexual masculinity; with the determined avoidance (especially by elite males) of all things ‘feminine’, and with the construction of ‘homosexuality’ as a new judicio-legal category which was synonymous with sexual deviance, evil and pathological sickness.” Such ‘manmade boys’ served the Victorian Empire in roles that we have generally not conceded as militarized or premature. Through a public-school culture, such boyhoods may have flowed into the habitus of executive power in the UK where childish and hyper-masculine performances have arguably helped disinvest the UK of a collective future with Europe. Adulthood and childhood interweave and intersect; we are all our childhoods. Aging, then, is an accretion of developments, interventions, negotiations, and hijackings. The challenge of discovery is thus also one of attending to futurity— to moving targets—but also to recognize that children are simultaneously being and becoming (Bacon and Frankel 2014: 38–39). As yet, youth continue to be studied as neighbours of adulthood rather than

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as subjects of late childhood (Benwell and Hopkins 2016). Michael J. Dumas and Joseph Derrick Nelson (2016: 30; emphasis in original) problematize the “absence of an expansive imagination of Black boyhood, since they then become subject to an adultification that erases even their right to childhood and their status as still children.” And, as Roy Huijsmans (2016: 2) observes, despite much signposting otherwise, Development Studies and practice have remained adult-centric and only recently has the discipline engaged with “more-or-less ordinary youth” and the potential of studying their everyday lives for rethinking development. More multidimensional understandings of young people’s security and insecurity can be developed through a focus on the intersections of ‘space-time,’ “how one particular conceptualisation of age (chronological age) has become hegemonic, what it mutes, and how it matters” (Huijsmans 2016: 2). We might better understand age, then, not always as a matter of scale/ordnance—but simultaneous time. We need, therefore, to ask when is a child in IR, as well as where is a child? It is adults who co-determine the spatial-temporal boundaries of children’s social worlds and the liminal spaces of much research (Johansson 2012). In turn, young people’s politicization and militarization, in social and domestic spheres, precedes, underpins, and sustains all our ‘security.’ Power relations which subvert, yet also rely on, children and childhoods can only be disrupted through a reconfiguration of politics and agency which includes an engagement with political literacy—theirs and ours. I now focus on the promises and challenges of security in our shared educational spaces and ask in what ways might children discover international relations through IR? I briefly turn to a vignette of such futurity.

Assembling the Child My own 8-year-old has so far expressed no interest in military play or the Scouting movement. The latter’s utility often lies in its function as evening childcare, so his exposure to it is contingent on other pressures of work and motherhood. From his termly school projects he can recall facts about airpower and ‘winners’ in World War II, but also recently believed in alien ants on the moon. And in the popular and ‘safe’ online gaming platform, ‘Roblox,’ he is unable to problematize Jailbreak’s apparent equivalence of being an armed criminal, prisoner, or cop— his defence being that Lego characters will not really die. I steer him away from crime scenes and zombie grandmas towards options such as

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competitively constructing fast-food outlets and counting bricks rather than bodies. I do not know his civilian ‘shooter’ potential (Jarvis and Robinson 2019), nor how his agency is refracted in gaming, nor what interventions are required. At the least, such games’ narratives may skew his burgeoning “understandings of war, peace and politics” (Salter 2011: 362; emphasis added). His security and his contribution to national security will be partly narrated and constructed by his primary school. Within the UK’s Counter Terrorism policy, educational establishments have a statutory duty to actively promote ‘fundamental British values’—of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and belief. His behaviour and work will be under scrutiny (Awan et al. 2019) and his teachers may be making use of a new professional guide by Alison Jamieson and Jane Flint (2017) simply titled, Talking about Terrorism: Children’s questions about terrorism can be penetrating and hard to answer. Many teachers will be caught unawares by such questions, uncertain themselves about terrorist motivation and goals and torn between the instinct to reassure and the awareness that Britain is on continuous terrorist alert…What do terrorists want? How can we stop someone becoming a terrorist? Who is keeping us safe in Britain? Why are terrorists so angry and full of hate? When will terrorism end? (Amazon 2019a)

Much competency on the part of the teacher is required. And as his own critical literacy moves up a notch, what will it matter if his eye also falls on First News—an award-winning web and print newspaper for 7 to 14-year olds, already popular with parents and schools and now partnered with Sky. Will their graphic features on democracy, women’s rights, space travel, and creepy crawlies, register equally alongside their presumably careless description of ISIS as “a group of fighters” in the “I don’t get it section” (de Oliveira 2019)? Reaching two million readers and 900 schools, its commitment to positive stories and its deft interweaving of resources also offers a bold signalling of children as a political audience. Its Special Report on Migrants for example asks: How much of what we know about immigration is fact and how much is fiction? A new Commission on Migration and Health formed by University College London and medical science journal The Lancet aims to blow the lid on myths that some people – including British politicians – still believe about immigrants. (de Oliveira 2019)

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If he is interested in migrants, there are relatively few real books he can access. As he browses public library bookshelves for their recommended Who Are Refuges and Migrants? What Makes People Leave Their Homes? And Other Big Questions (Rosen and Young 2016), he is more likely to find glossier books on a multitude of threats and issues that typically do not share the political contextualization afforded to his mother. Browsing shelves of risks—from global war to global warming, terrorism to tsunamis—it is difficult not to think of his political awakening to a ‘state of terror’ “in which insecurity, suspicion and the manipulation of fear for political purposes are the norm” (Aly and Green 2010: 279). Picture books on war and on terrorism are often uncoupled from broader political and societal narratives of security and presented separately from publications on peace, governance, and democracy. Rarely do they acknowledge the latter themes (Brocklehurst 2011, 2015). Engaging young people in ‘citizenship’ or current affairs through simplistic facts and sensationalism may create a pseudo-adult experience of autonomy and excitement—and ultimately undermine appeals made of conflict-resolving citizens. Narratives of fatalism, themes of difference, and problematic and insensitive images may instead suit commercial drivers and conditions of text production. From my own research, I know that many UK teachers and librarians remain largely unable to confidentially locate adequate resources and often create their own (TES 2019). Such a gap in provision of balanced and accessible reading material to take home clearly complicates the enabling of counter-terrorism in the classroom. A most recent picture book entitled Global Conflict, aimed at 6 to 8-year-olds (Spilsbury and Kai 2018) is one of a minority that illustrates war through artwork and a reflects a human security perspective, drawing on human rights, tolerance, and active conflict resolution. The majority of painted background scenes are of our time: a non-Western space, scorched places of worship, male soldiers, fearful families and aerial bombing on the horizon. But it is perhaps depressing that Global Conflict is ‘a thing’. As the distributor, Amazon.com, notes on its marketing page: “with our 24/7 news cycle and constant access to the latest headlines, the world can be a scary place. Now imagine you’re a child trying to make sense of it all!” (Amazon 2019b). The opening manoeuvre on page 1 is also key, limited to three short sentences and noting simply that “People around the world belong to different groups…people also come from different countries and religions.” The relational aspects of difference are perhaps lost here despite its intention as bibliotherapy.

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He may not absorb or reject, these texts and their messages, but nor will he apprehend how his capacity for engagement with more ‘critical’ subjects may be subverted after his middle childhood. The impact of (now discredited) PISA educational standards and their neoliberal returns means that UK schoolchildren can be tactically directed away from interrogative subjects, permanently foreclosing their formal access to them as adolescents and young adults in further and higher education. In some parts of England, no children are entered for the History examination after the age of 14— allegedly being offered an easier, vocational alternative. Whilst at secondary school, he may also see the armed services at close quarters in one of their 1400 careers fairs, although their ethnographic reception has received little scrutiny in the UK until recently. A head teacher at a large secondary school and college (11–18) in Birmingham commented anecdotally to me of the atmosphere in school on these military days. He described a frisson of anticipation or excitement, read through giggling girls, almost flirtatious behaviour, and intensified attention to appearance (Crane-Seeber 2016). If, indeed, he is finding school unrewarding, the Armed Forces may well have an attractive and life-wide education on offer. Currently 13% of the British Army intake is drawn from such sixteen-year-olds. Once he reaches sixteen, he will have an opportunity to spend a final element of his schooling studying politics under the UK national curricula. His teaching may include gender and feminism, having survived an attempt to oust it in its entirety in 2015, despite it being “one of the most engaging parts of the existing curriculum, in particular as it serves to highlight the connections between politics, power and our day-to-day lives” (PSA 2015). He may also select the optional global politics dimension (examined from 2019). With a focus on states and the state system and factors driving globalization (economic, cultural, political, social, and technological), he will be introduced to security actors via “regionalism, global governance, international law, global institutions, global civil society, non-state actors and non-governmental organisations” and how they may “address and resolve contemporary global issues, such as those involving conflict, poverty, human rights and the environment” (QAA). Arguably, he is capable of reflecting on these actors and dynamics at a far earlier age. The concept of sovereignty, for example, is no less imaginable or complex than the rise of Hitler, but it will have been curiously absent from his curricula. Beyond the UK, the market in global politics curricula for 16-year-olds is already significantly expanding and the International Baccalaureate will soon be the biggest provider of preparatory IR degree

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teaching in the world through its new Global Politics Diploma, which I helped design. Its mission statement might also offer him clarity, wherein its “programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people with their differences, can also be right.” And if he reaches university and wishes to read IR? He does not necessarily need to have a cognate subject in his resume. To prepare him, the ‘globally bestselling textbook’ he might buy in his 17th summer (2028) may still be stating that “the basic problem facing anyone trying to understand contemporary world politics is that there is so much material to look at that it is difficult to know which things matter and which do not” (Baylis and Smith 1997: 3; Baylis et al. 2017: 5). Given what we know about boys’ literacy and reading style, he may also appreciate the appeal of a key textbook Contemporary Security Studies (Collins 2019), that reassuringly recommends he read only two chapters followed by a ‘pick and mix’ approach: “if you want to start with weapons of mass destruction or terrorism then go right ahead…” Such texts create incredibly rich journeys into the subject area of world politics, offering multiple pathways and highways, a global view, an app to recap—but ultimately perhaps a flattened space. Subject disciplines are constructs and these pages bring forth or close down possibilities. It is also a site where his futurity and my profession might intersect in the name of security. On the theme of ‘discovery’ in this volume, I echo Anna Stavrianakis and Maria Stern (2018: 13), in calling for attention to the “institutional, professional and socializing practices of academia.” Much of my research has focused on the relationship of ‘the political’ to childhood and, with this, the relationship of IR to children. Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins (2016) have charted how the sociology of childhood came to disrupt Political Geography over the course of several decades, literally forging new critical framings and relationships. My own everyday, embodied, and emotional (Sharp 2007) experiences of recovering children from ‘within’ IR might also offer some insights into the nature of security.

Assembling the Academic Aged 18 and three months, studying IR felt like an immersion— an initiation, a baptism, and a licensing—into this ultimately grown up narrative. As an undergraduate, I was taught by Baylis and Smith

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(Globalization of World Politics, 1997) and Booth, who was opening up the study of security through the critical spaces in his popular module— in effect advocating security for children, if not (ever) directly about them (Booth 2007). It was tribal, but exhilarating to join the postgraduate front. Future undergraduate textbooks may well have been forming in the minds of my immediate peers (Collins 2007; Williams 2008) and many were also engaged in theoretical forays into poststructuralism, and pathbreaking subjects: on motherhood in the EU (Guerrina 2002) and population politics and the papacy (Neale 1998). I knew there was a child-shaped hole in IR, but little else. I was simultaneously provoked, unsettled, and insecure—a not uncommon postgraduate condition. I sheltered in the observation that ‘women’ had only recently been discovered—or uncovered—in IR. Gender had not been on my undergraduate syllabus and it was still under the ‘alternative’ section of my IR textbook. And despite being advised glibly that gender would limit my research potential, I accepted a second supervisor who was a pioneer (Zalewski). In turn, the work of Cynthia Enloe (1996), memorably frank insights (Spike-Peterson), stepping stones (Kent 1995; Pupavac 1997; Stephens 1997), and tactical advice to ‘just follow the trails’ (PinFat) were also crucial in eventually writing my dissertation, Children as Political Bodies: Concepts, Cases and Theories (Brocklehurst 2000). I trawled education studies for ‘their’ political children—a dazzling treasure trove in comparison to IR—and realized every History had its young. The nearby National Library was critical. I excelled at leaky and late as I wove short-term funding around part time work, but found easy pickings of parallel roles and expectations of children through disparate and distant wars. I realized ‘the problem’ was somehow still in the present. Humour or mirth was quite common in reaction to my topic—albeit meant in good spirits. But frustration perhaps led to the title of my later published PhD monograph in effect, daring International Relations to catch up (Booth and Smith 1995). I caused bemusement hauling back a colourful anthropological tome on childhood into my windowless office, although I have still not come to appreciate its richness twenty years on. Other informal interactions were perhaps instructive of ‘what’ I was discovering: What’s the problem? We ‘see’ insecure children everywhere?! “Yes, but which children? I seem to be finding even more.” So, are you interviewing children in conflict zones? “Hopefully – but it’s not only about real children” (I did not have the means to speak to children, or to interpret child). Should you not work on mothers and motherhood as well?

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“I think I’m showing something different, albeit in related ways.” So you are saying that children should vote? “Yes and no” (on the equation of age and political maturity, see Cook 2013). It must be a hard topic. Do you have children, then? (in my early twenties, I did not, and the question of authenticity they were hinting at was beyond my grasp). And, in preparation for my viva: Should children be added as a final chapter of Waltz’s ‘Man the State and War? [Silent eyeball roll]. I was allocated an External Examiner regarded as suitably eclectic in the field of IR (outer space) and given a 50/50 chance of convincing him. His response was to pass me at warp speed. It still did not feel like an achievement however. Recognition of children’s political form was new in the academy; their presence and absence in world politics remained deadly. And, tellingly, my own ‘discovery’ of children in IR was not anticipated as a journey but a simple exposition. I had no niche. I was a niche. Prior to my first long term teaching post, this view was repeated from elders: Change direction. There is nowhere to go after ‘child soldiers.’ I had not written much at all about child soldiers—in fact I was situating their construction in a broader story of how the discipline of IR was conveniently disengaged with children, and thus cap stoned the separation of politics from childhoods. My early career perhaps remained an endowment of precarity and patriarchy—academicus interruptus—albeit with many opportunities. An invigorating post-doctoral role on policing and victims’ policy in Northern Ireland and South Africa brought me face-to-face with real children and former children who wanted to talk. Community and institutional narratives of security jarred, and still do. Just ask about conflict, I was told. Don’t mention politics. Labels and location mattered. Resourcing was scarce and resilience for children unimagined and undermined. My second post-doctoral position pulled me back to the politics of education and nation, at least until the tragic suicide of the Principal Investigator in 2003—an impact absorbed seamlessly into the regime of publishing and research (Brocklehurst and Philips 2004). The politics of care was embryonic (Askins and Blazek 2017) and with hindsight I practiced slow scholarship (Mountz et al. 2015). My first lectureships provided hefty, feminized administrative loads but reading thousands of ‘children’s’ admissions applications gave me a sense of who wanted to study IR, and who did not in the decade post 9/11. My employment responsibilities also amplified my understanding of their futures and its attendant risks. And I witnessed how other academics

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came of age via dozens of recruitment panels where my junior and female status was needed more than my research. Teaching the IR in which children were absent, I added and stirred where I could; and in classes on gender and conflict, both former child soldiers and current cadets surfaced and informed my understanding of North and South militarization. Mark Evans created a vital opportunity for me to write and find a voice (Brocklehurst 2003), and I contributed to three successive chapters of OUPs new Contemporary Security Studies textbook (Collins 2007), although not without some navigation. My first contribution on ‘Children and War’ seemingly said too much and therefore too little and twice became a chapter on ‘Child Soldiers’ before the baton was passed on. A welcome though brief summary of children within critical security approaches was made explicit by Beier (2016), and in the fifth edition—motherhood, militarism and child soldiers feature prominently within post structural insights—although perhaps still smuggled in under the chapter heading ‘Complicated Subjects’ (Beier 2019). Complicating subjects perhaps. By now, a ‘critical mass’ of work had emerged on political children and youth in conflict, arguably releasing children’s beached referent status as humans in Critical Security Studies (Carpenter 2006; Watson 2006). The process of externally examining theses (Seto 2013; Jacob 2014) marked my own discovery as somehow complete, and my imagined grandiose monograph on ‘the global politics of children and war’ fell away, as I was sent scripts to review, or flyers for books I wanted to see, and on children of all kinds being seen (Huynh et al. 2015; D’Costa 2016; Özerdem and Podder 2016; Tabak 2020). Within and beyond IR, then, who is learning this child-friendly security and how might lessons be disrupted? Despite the opportunities for synthesis, reflection, and inter-disciplinary communication that ­socio-political lenses enable, it is surprising that there has so far been little reflexive attention to the consumption and teaching of ‘security,’ per se. Heightened popular and public security narratives influence vernacular understandings and prompt inductive responses (Jarvis 2018; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams 2016). In short, how do we reach, research, and teach the already ‘entangled’ in global politics and make sense of processes, and encounters, between bodies, objects, thoughts, and imagination (Woodyer and Carter 2018)?

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Public Security. Popular Security Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity. Record £12m sales last year were driven by younger readers, with experts saying hunger for nuance amid conflict and disaster were fuelling the boom. (Ferguson 2019) Greta Thunberg’s speech at Davos shows that if anyone is going to save the world, it’s Generation Z. (Cox 2019)

There is a new popular and professional appetite for understanding security and precarity, often framed by terrorism, extremism, or spectres of Anthropocene descent. ‘#Politics’ in the twenty-first century is a new ‘public’ narrative and with that come new demands on how we interpret and filter it. As Katy Shaw noted in response to the headline above, “it’s no coincidence that poetry as a form is being used to critically discuss events like Grenfell, the Manchester bombing [ISIS] and Brexit as well…It’s being repurposed as this really dynamic and vital form that can capture, in a very condensed way, the turbulent nature of contemporary society – and give us the space to struggle with our desire to understand and negotiate a lot of what is going on at the moment” (Ferguson 2019). At the other end of this spectrum, sales of non-fiction books are giving way to urgent fables of facts and debate. And, as Josie Cox (2019) tells us, it is all there to play for: “In a sea of still predominantly white men, the fresh-faced [16-year-old] Swede, with long braids frequently tucked under a woolly hat, has already achieved what scores of campaigners will spend a lifetime trying to do.” The mission and conference theme of a recent public intervention in Canada, “Communities as Agents and Spaces for Counter-Radicalization Education,” also references this expanded audience and the potential of a security discourse as a transformative, invited space. In this case, conversations around extremism, terrorism, radicalization, and ­counter-radicalization have functioned within a broader mission, as an “interchange of ideas between those who see (general public) and those who decide (policy makers), between those who speak (academic, politicians, media) and those who are silent (youth, communities at large), so that an authentic counter-hegemonic, counter-extremism critical public pedagogy can start to take root” (Arshad-Ayaz and Naseem 2017: 8).

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Indeed, the idea of children as at least silent partners in security and counter-terrorism may already be a social norm. Nicole Nguyen (2018) has observed in her prizewinning research how the spread and capital of specialized Homeland Security Programme schools and curricula was unanticipated and hidden in plain sight even to her colleagues in the United States. The forging of new spaces and relationships is also evident in Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism (P2P), led by the State Department, managed by EdVenture Partners, and supported by Facebook. Here, “University students push back on online hate, prejudice and extremism while empowering their peers.” EdVenture Partners, in turn, “connects our clients with our network of academic institution and faculty partners to directly engage with the valuable and powerful Millennial market” (EdVenture 2019). It is not quite clear who is servicing what. This prominent counter-terrorism initiative also states that they “engage university students on their own time, terms and turf” (EdVenture 2019). They perhaps have little choice. The current generation are perceived as potentially critical, emotional, and adaptable thinkers, yet also want to embrace pedagogical certainty and need to find financial security. In the UK, evidence suggests that students faced with economic insecurity increasingly limit themselves to doing what is specified for their program and do not read around the subject. This condition ultimately underpins militarization via education: students have little time or energy to think or to resist. In the UK, counter-terrorism consultancies have perhaps filled this gap, drawing in companies, councils, schools, and voluntary groups. Threats countered include radicalization toward violent extremism from across the political spectrum, although few younger partners will understand far-right or racialized narratives riven through their society and media. Happy beneficiaries state, “our sixth form are absolutely buzzing after the session and really enjoyed it” (Arbuthnot 2019). Excitement is not explained, it is rationalized as co-terminous. Engagement with the subject, the promise of emancipation, or the allure of militarized discourses may have created an encounter that would be welcome much earlier. Do we expect to correct or transform children in such ‘politically exceptional’ circumstances more than we might without such existential threats? At a public level, these subjects are increasingly rendered as insulated topics or elevated to safeguarding training. Both positions displace or distort the narratives of power within. We might also ask, what is the counter-narrative that is being delivered or invented and is it any less

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free from fear? A rights-based approach to UK resilience to extremism is being mooted “through complexity of thinking, awareness of rights relating to religious freedom, greater belonging in the school, enhanced appreciation of diversity and the rights of others and protection of identity” (Davies 2018: 28). But might the burgeoning of new commercial and everyday narratives also require cross-disciplinary examination and cross sectoral interventions? On the margins of citizenship, “[d]uties of recognition and appraisal respect are owed by adults to children directly in their interpersonal relationships, but also indirectly through institutions” (Cook 2013: 448). Links between professional subject organizations and educational bodies to help craft and review literature have been triggered by the demands of CVE-E (Countering Violent Extremism Education), but otherwise remain underdeveloped. In the UK, the Political Science Association set up a young people’s politics group in 2013 and has only now introduced a schools’ membership section—decades after other subject associations. As James Williams and Wendy Bokhorst-Heng (2016) have shown, many school textbooks already function as gatekeepers of state identity and nationhood. Studies of informational resources remain sparse, and the cultivation of a more critical register across learning spaces is hard won in stretched or commmericalised educational environments. Why cannot security-related topics be delivered carefully at earlier ages and through multiple subject lenses? I have no doubt that a free, online resource on politics and security, critically conceived and suitable for middle childhood upwards, would be well-received by many parents, teachers, and young people. The success of children’s newspapers in the UK and their issue-based, informational base suggests a trend towards the popularization of security and a readiness of children as consumers and at the time of writing, it is notable that new creative spaces and collaborations are being forged online as a global pandemic disrupts senses of self, community, and resilience. More recently the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research has heralded the potential relationship between Preventing Violent Extremism, Global Citizenship Education, Peace Education, and Education for Sustainable Development. What opportunities might be taken to signpost different or non-militarized dimensions of security? To return to younger children, might we think about how many disciplines are critical to the realization of secure futures? For example, the diagrammatic complexity of plants and their xylem tubes in biology textbooks is

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rarely matched by equally detailed cross-sectional illustrations of the female breast—signifying its capacity to nourish and biodynamically enhance immunity—to be functional rather than topographic—and thus provide resistance to the objectified, sexual breast (Flood 2017), and inform future parents about infant care and perhaps even increase neonatal survival rates. Related to this, what assumptions might older, ‘everyday youth’ enter education with? What needs might they have? Should Arts and STEM subjects also offer pathways into politics and conflict studies, fostering ethical engineers, political poets, informed journalists, and so on? Does university education help us attain a scalable, critical purchase on security? A glance back at popular undergraduate texts is useful. At the time of writing, a critical and directive register is apparent in the 2017 edition of Globalization of World Politics (Baylis et al. 2017) as its opening pages reflect briefly and dramatically on the colonial and racial origins of the discipline. In terms of children, there are but two types of mention in the index (‘child soldiers,’ ‘and development’) disguising over twenty actual references to children, but not amounting to a contribution about their power and agency. As noted earlier, Collins’ Contemporary Security Studies textbook (2016) has a range of empirical and reflexive observations of children and childhoods—if readers choose the right chapter. Paul D. Williams’ and Matt McDonald’s Security Studies: An Introduction textbook (2018) sets a different tone in its foreword, signposting absences, drawing attention to unknowns, and encouraging synthesis of creativity on the part of the reader. The fast-food approach thus becomes more of a cookbook. More generally, “university and employer discourses now identify a need for graduates to have an intellectual and global ‘mind-set’ beyond disciplinary competencies and national boundaries” (Lilley et al. 2014: 225). Many subject disciplines are preparing students (recent children) for a more volatile, risk-orientated, complex, and globalizing world. Students are certainly being prepared for ‘portfolio’ futures and to foster or transfer their resilience in a digital age. Problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity are key transferable skills most wanted by their future employers. Their yield for security is obvious, but on campuses students remain insecure. In my own and other UK institutions, formal and informal demands made of students are enticing and troubling as they navigate everyday, professional, and academic encounters with cybercrime, hate crime, freedom of speech, ‘banter,’ social media, isolation, Islamophobia, and data protection. Student mental health is

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a prolific issue, one third of the UK Muslim students report that they have faced racial attacks (Busby 2018), and female quietness in university classrooms and debates remains unresolved. Perhaps ironically, examples of our ‘global condition,’ ‘extremist-fostering’ behaviour are often witnessed at these most micro of levels (Davies 2018). Across young people’s lifeworlds, political literacy matters more. Can we unshackle security from these broader issues of politics? Is this not what security ultimately is: the sharp end of a broader and deeper discussion of how we co-exist? All these learning spaces (formal and informal) arguably require or anticipate a high level of political and critical literacy. How do we foster critical thinking without attendant consideration of pedagogy and praxis to navigate a digitally mediated, post-trust/post truth society, where ‘fake news’ becomes real power? In a pedagogical sense, as Burtis (2017) notes, “we in higher education have spent far too long avoiding larger conversations about the Web: what it means to our culture and communities; how it’s re-shaping our social and political landscapes; how it’s altering the work of our individual disciplines; and, on a whole, what role schools of higher education should be playing in helping our citizenry understand all of these factors.”

Conclusion Critical Security Studies has contributed to a growing wealth of research that actively and creatively seeks to devise methods that attend to the messiness of intersecting power relations, subjectivities, and scales (Stavrianakis and Stern 2018: 9). To look at political children, then, requires an engagement with other spaces, other people, other disciplines, and an understanding of IR’s emergence as an exclusive set of knowledge assumptions about the ‘international.’ As Jacob (2014: 47) notes, “locating the politics that determine children’s insecurity as a site for intervention is as important, if not more so, than the political influence or agency exerted by children.” We need to witness a convergence in sociological and political approaches and a new attachment to Childhood Studies. Age and our contingent expectations of it thus might be useful dimensions to explore further in IR. If we consider security within a project that seeks to make us literate in the values and ideologies of our time, able to engage with levels of community and expressions of identity, to recognize power and hold responsibility, and explore trust, truth, and data, then education plays a central role.

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The study of militarization is part of the way forward but so too is realizing the spaces and platforms which offer an antidote: “increasing the complexity with which people think about the issues that other radicalizers exploit, serves to reduce vulnerability to the messages of extremism as a broad-based form of primary prevention” (Liht and Savage 2013: 44). The genre of dedicated war comics has not received much attention (Rech 2014), but neither have many school textbooks (Ide 2017), and very few picture books. The largely under-investigated subculture of children’s informational literature (and children’s publishing, per se) is revealing of how academics have not responded to the calls of early feminists and other critical disciplines within International Relations to explore conduits to militarization in private spheres. Making sense of power though society and politics, coupled with direct and constructive interaction with lecturers as human beings and their differentiated, active, and experiential practices, is also ‘doing’ security and (re)discovering childhoods. Perhaps, then, we might better acknowledge “the reality/existence of others as people who each have, create, and live lives of meaning, resonance, hopes, dreams, desires, disappointments, loves, hates, challenges, relationships and so on beyond our knowledge of them” (Pin-Fat 2019: 198; emphasis in original). Whatever their age.

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Askins, Kye, and Matej Blazek. 2017. “Feeling Our Way: Academia, Emotions and a Politics of Care.” Social and Cultural Geography 18 (8): 1086–1105. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1240224. Awan, Imran, Keith Spiller, and Andrew Whiting. 2019. Terrorism in the Classroom: Security, Surveillance and a Public Duty to Act. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bacon, Kate, and Sam Frankel. 2014. “Rethinking Children’s Citizenship: Negotiating Structure, Shaping Meanings.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 22 (1): 21–42. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718182-55680003. Baylis, John, and Steve Smith. 1997. The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Baylis, John, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens. 2017. The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. BBC. 2019. “The Orphanage Business.” 20 January. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00020z7. Beazley, Harriot, Sharon Bessell, Judith Ennew, and Roxana Waterson. 2009. “The Right to Be Properly Researched: Research with Children in a Messy, Real World.” Children’s Geographies 7 (4): 365–378. https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280903234428. Beier, J. Marshall. 2016. “Critical Interventions: Subjects, Objects, and Security.” In Contemporary Security Studies, 4th ed., edited by Alan Collins, 108–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beier, J. Marshall. 2019. “Poststructural Insights: Making Subjects and Objects of Security.” In Contemporary Security Studies, 5th ed., edited by Alan Collins, 111–125. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benwell, Matthew C., and Peter Hopkins. 2016. “Introducing Children’s and Young Peoples’ Critical Geographies.” In Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics, edited by Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins. London: Routledge. Berents, Helen. 2019. “Apprehending the ‘Telegenic Dead’: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics.” International Political Sociology 13 (2): 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly036. Booth, Ken. 1995. “Dare Not to Know: International Relations Theory Versus the Future.” In International Relations Theory Today, edited by Ken Booth and Steve Smith, 328–350. Oxford: Polity Press. Booth, Ken. 2007. Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourke, Joanna. 2014. Wounding the World: How Military Violence and ­War-Play Invade Our Lives. London: Virago. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2000. “Children as Political Bodies: Concepts, Cases and Theories.” PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

108  H. BROCKLEHURST Brocklehurst, Helen. 2003. “Kids ‘R’ Us? Children as Political Bodies.” International Journal of Politics and Ethics 3 (1): 79–92. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2011. “Education and the War on Terror: The Early Years.” In The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, edited by J. Marshall Beier, 77–94. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood— Insecurities of Children.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 29–46. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014679. Brocklehurst, Helen, and Robert Phillips, eds. 2004. History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Burtis, Martha. 2017. “Messy & Chaotic Learning: A Domains Presentation at Keene State College.” 31 March. Accessed 1 July 2019. http://wrapping. marthaburtis.net/2017/04/. Busby, Eleanor. 2018. “Living in Fear: One in Three Muslim Students Attacked on Campus as Islamophobic Hate Crime Surges.” The Independent, 16 March. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/muslim-students-universities-islamophobic-national-union-students-nus-prevent-duty-a8260176.html. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2006. ‘Innocent Women and Children’: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians. London: Ashgate. Cheney, Kristen E., and Karen Smith Rotabi. 2016. “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems.” In Geographies of Children and Young People: Conflicts, Violence and Peace, edited by Christopher Harker and Kathrin Hörschelmann, 89–107. New York: Springer. Collins, Alan, ed. 2007. Contemporary Security Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, Alan, ed. 2016. Contemporary Security Studies, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, Alan, ed. 2019. Contemporary Security Studies, 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, Philip. 2013. “Against a Minimum Voting Age.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 16 (3): 439–458. https://doi.org /10.1080/13698230.2013.795707. Cox, Josie. 2019. “Greta Thunberg’s Speech at Davos Shows That If Anyone Is Going to Save the World, It’s Generation Z.” The Independent, 25 January. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/davos-gretathunberg-climate-change-global-warming-a8746536.html. Crane-Seeber, Jesse Paul. 2016. “Sexy Warriors: The Politics and Pleasures of Submission to the State.” Critical Military Studies 2 (1–2): 41–55. https:// doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2016.1144402.

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Davies, Lynn. 2018. “Review of Educational Initiatives in Counter-Extremism Internationally: What Works?” The Segerstedt Institute Report, University of Gothenburg. D’Costa, Bina, ed. 2016. Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Oliveira, Eddie. 2019. “Myths About Migrants.” First News, 11–17 January, 656. Dumas, Michael J., and Joseph Derrick Nelson. 2016. “(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood: Toward a Critical Framework for Educational Research.” Harvard Educational Review 86 (1): 27–47. https://doi.org/10.17763/ 0017-8055.86.1.27. Edventure. 2019. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://edventurepartners.com/. Enloe, Cynthia. 1996. “Margins, Silences and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations.” In International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, 186–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Favilli, Elena, and Francesca Cavallo. 2017. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Particular Books. Ferguson, Donna. 2019. “Poetry Sales Soar as Political Millennials Search for Clarity.” The Guardian, 21 January. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/21/poetry-sales-soar-as-political-millennialssearch-for-clarity. Flood, Alison. 2017. “Usborne Apologises for Puberty Book That Says Breasts Exist to Make Girls ‘Look Grown-up and Attractive’.” The Guardian, 29 August. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ aug/29/usborne-apologises-puberty-book-childrens-publisher. Graham, Alicia Claire. 2018. “From Combatant to Casualty Challenging Conceptions of Children’s Political Agency in Colombia.” Newcastle University Thesis. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/4107. Grantham-McGregor, Sally, Yin Bun Cheung, Santiago Cueto, Paul Glewwe, Linda Richter, Barbara Strupp, and the International Child Development Steering Group. 2007. “Developmental Potential in the First 5 Years for Children in Developing Countries.” The Lancet 369 (9555): 60–70. https:// doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(07)60032-4. Griffin, Christine. 1993. Representations of Youth: The Study of Youth and Adolescence in Britain and America. Cambridge: Polity Press. Guerrina, Roberta. 2002. “Mothering in Europe: Feminist Critique of European Policies on Motherhood and Employment.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 9 (1): 49–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506802009001381. Hillis, Susan, James Mercy, Adaugo Amobi, and Howard Kress. 2016. “Global Prevalence of Past-year Violence Against Children: A Systematic Review and Minimum Estimates.” Pediatrics 137 (3): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1542/ peds.2015-4079.

110  H. BROCKLEHURST Holt, Jenny. 2008. Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence. Farnham: Ashgate. Hopkins, Peter, Kathrin Hörschelmann, Matthew. C Benwell, and Catherine Studemeyer. 2019. “Young People’s Everyday Landscapes of Security and Insecurity.” Social & Cultural Geography 20 (4): 435–444. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14649365.2018.1460863. Hörschelmann, Kathrin. 2016. “Crossing Points: Contesting Militarism in the Spaces of Children’s Everyday Lives in Britain and Germany.” In Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics, edited by Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins, 29–44. London: Routledge. Huebner, G., N. Boothby, J. L. Aber, G. L. Darmstadt, A. Diaz, A. S. Masten, H. Yoshikawa, I. Redlener, A. Emmel, M. Pitt, L. Arnold, B. Barber, B. Berman, R. Blum, M. Canavera, J. Eckerle, N. A. Fox, J. L. Gibbons, S. W. Hargarten, C. Landers, C. A. Nelson III, S. D. Pollak, V. Rauh, M. Samson, F. Ssewamala, N. St Clair, L. Stark, R. Waldman, M. Wessells, S. L. Wilson, and C. H. Zeanah. 2016. Beyond Survival: The Case for Investing in Young Children Globally. Washington, DC: National Academy of Medicine. Huijsmans, Roy. 2016. “Generationing Development: An Introduction.” In Generationing Development: A Relational Approach to Children, Youth and Development, edited by Roy Huijsmans, 1–31. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Huynh, Kim, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo. 2015. Children and Global Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2018. “To Help or Not to Help? Humanitarian Spaces, Power and Government.” In Handbook on the Geographies of Power, edited by Mat Coleman and John Agnew, 380–392. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Ide, Tobias. 2017. “Terrorism in the Textbook: A Comparative Analysis of Terrorism Discourses in Germany, India, Kenya and the United States Based on School Textbooks.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 30 (1) 44–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2017.1293611. Jacob, Cecilia. 2014. Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar. London: Routledge. Jamieson, Alison, and Jane Flint. 2017. Talking About Terrorism: Responding to Children’s Questions. Bedfordshire: Brilliant Publications. Jarvis, Lee. 2018. “Toward a Vernacular Security Studies: Origins, Interlocutors, Contributions, and Challenges.” International Studies Review 21 (1): 107– 126. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viy017. Jarvis, Lee, and Nick Robinson. 2019. “War, Time and Military Videogames: Heterogeneities and Critical Potential.” Critical Military Studies (online in advance of print): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1573014. Johansson, Barbro. 2012. “Doing Adulthood in Childhood Research.” Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 19 (1): 101–114. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568211408362.

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Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina. 2019. “Leading Refugee Lives Together: Familial Agency as a Political Capacity.” Emotion, Space and Society 32: 1–8. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.08.002. Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina, and Jouni Häkli, 2011. “Tracing Children’s Politics.” Political Geography 30 (2): 99–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.006. Kent, George. 1995. Children in the International Political Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Liht, Jose, and Sara Savage. 2013. “Preventing Violent Extremism Through Value Complexity: Being Muslim Being British.” Journal of Strategic Security 6 (4): 44–66. https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.6.4.3. Lilley, Kathleen, Michelle Barker, and Neil Harris. 2014. “Exploring the Process of Global Citizen Learning and the Student Mind-Set.” Journal of Studies in International Education 19 (3): 225–245. https://doi. org/10.1177/1028315314547822. Lind, Jacob. 2019. “Sacrificing Parents on the Altar of Children’s Rights: Intergenerational Struggles and Rights in Deportability.” Emotion, Space and Society 32: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.07.001. Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennider Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran. 2015. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance Through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14 (4): 1235–1259. Neale, Palena R. 1998. “Constructions, Catholicism and Cairo: The Catholic Construction of Woman, the Holy See, and the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).” PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Nguyen, Nicole. 2018. “‘That’s Just My Own Homeland Security Instinct’: Teaching Terror in Times of War.” Critical Military Studies 4 (1): 17–33 https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2016.1215073. Özerdem, Alpaslan, and Sukanya Podder, eds. 2011. Child Soldiers: From Recruitment to Reintegration. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Özerdem, Alpaslan, and Sukanya Podder. 2016. Youth in Conflict and Peacebuilding: Mobilization, Reintegration and Reconciliation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Perl, Gerhild, and Sabine Strasser. 2018. “Transnational Moralities: The Politics of Ir/Responsibility of and Against the EU Border Regime.” Identities 25 (5): 507–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2018.1507979. Pin-Fat, Véronique. 2019. “‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ Ethics, Emotions, and Encounter in International Relations.” Review of International Studies 45 (2): 181–200. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210518000426. PSA. 2015. “PSA’s Women and Politics Specialist Group’s Response to Department for Education’s a Level Politics Subject Content Consultation.” December. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ a-level%20politics%20consultation%20-%20w%26p%20response.pdf.

112  H. BROCKLEHURST Pupavac, Vanessa. 1997. “The Deviant South: The Globalisation of Childhood and the Creation of a New Moral Order.” Paper presented to British International Studies Association. Rasmussen, Jacob. 2017. “Political Becoming and Non-State Emergence in Kenya’s Security Sector: Mungiki as Security Operator.” In Private Security in Africa: From the Global Assemblage to the Everyday, edited by Paul Higate and Mats Utas, 120–141. London: Zed Books. Rech, Matthew F. 2014. “Be Part of the Story: A Popular Geopolitics of War Comics Aesthetics and Royal Air Force Recruitment.” Political Geography 39: 36–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.07.002. Rosen, Michael, and Annemarie Young. 2016. Who Are Refugees and Migrants? What Makes People Leave Their Homes? And Other Big Questions. London. Wayland Press. Salter, Mark B. 2011. “The Geographical Imaginations of Video Games: Diplomacy, Civilization, America’s Army and Grand Theft Auto IV.” Geopolitics 16 (2): 359–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2010.538875. Seto, Donna. 2013. No Place for a War Baby: The Global Politics of Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence. Abingdon: Routledge. Sharp, Joanne. 2007. “Geography and Gender: Finding Feminist Political Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 31 (3): 381–387. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132507077091. Spilsbury, Louise A., and Hanane Kai. 2018. Global Conflict. Hauppauge: B.E.S. Publishing. Stavrianakis, Anna, and Maria Stern. 2018. “Militarism and Security: Dialogue, Possibilities and Limits.” Security Dialogue 49 (1–2): 3–18. https://doi. org/10.1177/0967010617748528. Stephens, Sharon. 1997. “‘Nationalism, Nuclear Policy and Children in Cold War America.” Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 4 (1): 103–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568297004001006. Stevens, Daniel, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2016. Everyday Security Threats: Perceptions, Experiences, and Consequences. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sukarieh, Mayssoun, and Stuart Tannock. 2018. “The Global Securitisation of Youth.” Third World Quarterly 39 (5): 854–870. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01436597.2017.1369038. Tabak, Jana. 2020. The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress. Athens: University of Georgia Press. TES. 2019. “ISIS and the Dangers of Radicalisation, Extremism and Terrorism.” Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ isis-and-the-dangers-of-radicalisation-extremism-and-terrorism-11085624.

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Vaha, Milla Emilia, and Leena Vastapuu. 2018. “‘My Heart Was Already Cooked’: Girl Soldiers and Situated Moral Agencies.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 31 (2): 223–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/0955757 1.2018.1495180. Watson, Alison M. S. 2006. “Children and International Relations: A New Site of Knowledge?” Review of International Studies 32 (2): 237–250. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0260210506007005. Wells, Karen. 2017. “Children’s Experiences of Sexual Violence, Psychological Trauma, Death, and Injury in War.” In Conflict, Violence and Peace, edited by Christopher and Harker Kathrin Hörschelmann, 19–34. Singapore: Springer. Williams, James H., and Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, eds. 2016. (Re)Constructing Memory: Textbooks, Identity, Nation, and State. Leiden: Sense Publishers. Williams, Paul D., ed. 2008. Security Studies: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Williams, Paul D., and Matt McDonald, eds. 2018. Security Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Woodyer, Tara, and Sean Carter. 2018. “Domesticating the Geopolitical: Rethinking Popular Geopolitics Through Play.” Geopolitics. Online in Advance of Print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1527769. World Health Organization. 2016. “Child Mortality Rates Plunge by More Than Half Since 1990 but Global MDG Target Missed by Wide Margin.” Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/ child-mortality-report/en/. Wyness, Michael. 2006. Childhood and Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Childhood. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 6

A Tale of a (Dis)Orderly International Society: Protecting Child-Soldiers, Saving the Child, Governing the Future Jana Tabak

Introduction “Children, not Soldiers.” This is the title of the campaign launched in 2014 by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict and UNICEF to end the recruitment of children by national security forces in armed conflict situations by 2016. The comma in the title between “children” and “soldiers” not only marks the separation between the two types of beings, but may also be understood as an insurmountable barrier: when children start being soldiers, they automatically drop out of childhood,1 understood as a carefree, secure, and happy phase of human existence. This formulation leaves no room for ambiguity or space for considering children’s own varied experiences of engagement in hostilities or, indeed, local social constructions of the roles suitable for children according to their gender and age. In the poster campaign,2 child-soldiers, represented by a diminutive, vulnerable-looking figure, ask “us” (viewers) to tell the world what is J. Tabak (*)  Department of International Relations, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_6

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happening to them. But what story can be told within such a ­framework? The messy, ambiguous, and sometimes paradoxical experiences of ­child-soldiers in wars are muted when there is only room for one single story of children who are too vulnerable and too small to wear (adult size) military boots and a helmet. The contrast between the cartoon character of the child and real warfare, represented by the pair of boots and the helmet, (re)produces the paradox of the child dressed in military clothing not for fun, but in readiness for actual combat. This campaign, together with the 12 United Nations (UN) Security Council thematic resolutions, forms the architecture of the UN Security Council’s agenda on Children and Armed Conflict. Since 1999, when the first thematic Security Council resolution on children and armed conflict was adopted, the participation of children in wars has not only been constructed as a violation of their rights, but also—and maybe more importantly—as a threat to international peace and security. Essentially, there is a strong connection between the protection of child-soldiers and international security, whereby it is not only ‘morally right’ to protect and care for children, especially those in poor and vulnerable circumstances, but not doing so could lead to wars and political instability. What I propose here is to ask the same question Erica Burman (1994: 248) asks in relation to greeting cards produced by UNICEF and other humanitarian organizations devoted to children’s protection,3 with their message of hope for the future: “whose future is being addressed since, for most children in need, the real danger is that there will be no tomorrow”? According to Burman, it seems as if it is our hopes as modern adults, not those of children in need, that are at stake. I would add that it is the imagined and desired future of (a particular version of) the world that rests on the transformation of (a particular version of) the child into (a particular version of) the adult citizen that is the focus of international attention and aid practices. Herein lies the central puzzle of the chapter: how the construction of the child-soldier as a deviation from the “normal” child and a threat to international peace and security participates in the (re)production of this particular version of the world, whose limits are carefully articulated by and through the ideas of sovereignty, authority, order, and protection. Thus, I aim both to problematize the boundaries that articulate child-soldiers as essentially risky and pathological and to show how these specific limits are instrumental in (re)producing and promoting a

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particular version of the international political order and its (inevitable) promise of a progressive future. Instead of focusing on investigating the experiences of endangered child-soldiers, the next sections address the dangers these children are seen to pose by departing from the protected territory of childhood and thereby disrupting everyday international life. The purpose of this exercise is to problematize the formulation that prevails in the field of International Relations, in which c­ hild-soldiers are invariably framed as an international problem that can only be addressed in terms of a limited number of subjects, narratives, theories, and responses. The problem is not addressed in a political vacuum, but as a fault line running through the norm of the child. Rather than offering the promise of a bright future, the child-soldier has the potential to put national and international progress in jeopardy by failing to take the steps prescribed in the model of child development. By (re)producing the notion of risk, the discourse about the child-soldier elicits strong demands for immediate international intervention. In view of this internationally propagated narrative, it would also be worthwhile reflecting upon accounts of child-soldiers—as appalling and destabilizing as they may be—to explore what they articulate and (re)produce in terms of the establishment and maintenance of order in international politics. The issue under analysis here comes specifically from the circularity between the boundaries that set the limits of what ‘normal’ childhood is supposed to be and their co-option in defining and maintaining a particular version of the world, predicated on notions of order, security, and progress. Within this continuous process, some children are given the chance to be modified, normalized, universalized, and brought into the fold, while many others, including child-soldiers, are left out. What I would contend here is that the limits of the ‘normal’ child are drawn wherever there are children engaged in situations, experiences, and spaces that do not fit into this single category. By engaging with and probing the discourse of the child-soldier and its relationship with the governance of the future of the world, it is possible to think with discourses about children and childhoods and through childhood as a way of disrupting certain (stable) ideas. The highly complex discussions involving children in general and child-soldiers in particular could work as a window through which to glimpse—and destabilize—some of the boundaries that circumscribe a particular version of the world. The balance of this chapter is divided into three sections. Based on the analysis of accounts of child-soldiers in international relations, especially

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those articulated within the humanitarian field, the first section explores their construction as a ‘new’ international emergency and, as such, a threat to world stability. In this sense, the focus is on the interdiscursive links between the idea of the naturally innocent, vulnerable child who should be entitled to a happy childhood, which is constituted and continuously reproduced as a norm in the child-specific rights agreements,4 and the notion of the child-soldier as deviation. The second section turns to the silences that further articulate the identity of the ­ child-soldier as deviation and simultaneously (re)produce the norm of the child. By challenging the boundaries between normal and deviant children, it is possible to bring forth the enormous complexity of what have come to be treated as simple—even natural—ideas of the (particular) child, the (particular) adult citizen, and the (particular) world. Finally, the last section puts forward the idea of addressing child-soldiers not as behind or beyond normalized boundaries, but as “children between boundaries” (Tabak 2020). That is, instead of looking at child-soldiers’ ‘transgressions’ as disruptions of a proper normative international life that must be redressed at all costs, the effort here is to grapple with the contradictions and limits inherent to the ideas of the child and the child-soldier. The idea is to challenge the dividing lines that normalize the processes by which some are said to belong here while others are kept at bay, enabling encounters between differences in ways that do not necessarily lead towards a single, stable endpoint portrayed as progress.

Beyond or Behind the Boundaries: The Child-Soldier as an International Emergency Considered by some authors to be one of the main symbols of the so-called ‘new wars’ (Machel 1996; Kaldor 1999; Singer 2006), child-soldiers have attracted enormous media attention and have also become a priority in the humanitarian field: narratives about (mostly) African boys holding weapons taller than themselves, like AK-47s, have been incorporated into academic debates and become popular themes in the media and entertainment industry. Although the constructions and imageries vary, the discourse about the child-soldier, especially as articulated in the humanitarian field, produces a relation between extremes with a clear message: childhood is facing a serious crisis. The extreme violence of the child-soldiering ‘phenomenon’ is associated with the

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harsh brutality of contemporary wars, which take place inside extremely fragile states. In this discourse, the complexities of both war and children’s experiences of war are lost. Child-soldiers are (re)produced as doubly deviant: although they are not articulated as authentic soldiers because they have not yet reached adulthood, they also spill over the limits of what it means to be a child, since the borders that circumscribe and define the ‘normal’ spaces of childhood—family, home, school, recreational centers—are completely blurred. They thus occupy an ambiguous position at the dividing line between the child and the adult. This discourse therefore expresses the limits of a certain logic of intelligibility—in this case, the exclusive binary relationship between childhood and adulthood, understood here as one of the pillars for the ordering of lives both socially and internationally. As such, the child-soldier is not only a problem, but an international emergency that evokes sorrow, fear, and uncertainty. The logic of this discourse is based on the ontological claim that as child-soldiers are pathological in relation to what counts as the child norm, they pose a threat to international peace and security. Of itself, the ­child-soldiering ‘phenomenon’ connects the urgency of the crisis triggered by the threat posed by dangerous armed children with a heightened sense of moral obligation on the part of the international community to ‘save’ the endangered children caught up in these violent situations. It is as if protecting childsoldiers, as bearers of the world’s future, were not so much an act of humanity as an act by humanity and for humanity (Tabak and Carvalho 2018). In order to discuss the problem of the (re)production of child-soldiers through the logic of exception—i.e., whatever qualities apply to a ‘normal,’ ordered childhood must be absent from their lives—this section is divided into two parts. First, I analyze the way the children’s rights agreements speak of an abstract and generalized child as a norm whose childhood is (re)produced as a natural, homogenous journey towards becoming a competent, educated (adult) citizen. In the second part, the focus is on the encounter between the child as a norm and the discourse about the child-soldier as deviation through the analysis of three contrasting depictions of children engaged in armed conflicts—the dangerous monster, the hapless victim, and the redeemed hero—as identified by Myriam Denov (2010) in the world’s media and policy discourses about children caught up in cycles of war and violence.

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The message articulated in the children’s rights agreements is clear: the promotion of children’s well-being and their transformation into adult citizens is a task to be taken on by the international community. In the name of the improvement of humankind, the cause of children is subsumed under a discourse of absolute universality that is capable of transcending national, political, and social divisions, besides enlisting people globally to counter social problems and militate against disorder and conflict (Pupavac 2002: 57). For its part, the Plan of Action for Implementing the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children (hereinafter “World Declaration”) justifies this global sensitivity toward children by affirming: “There is no cause which merits a higher priority than the protection and development of children, on whom the survival, stability and advancement of all nations – and, indeed, of human civilization – depends” (UN General Assembly 1990a, paragraph 36). The limits of the category of the child are carefully (re)produced through this whole catalogue of international norms for children, which articulate the boundaries of a universalized, but not necessarily universal, understanding of this particular phase of being human, producing a separateness that establishes the distinct attributes, entitlements, and duties for both children and adults. The World Declaration states, for example: “The children of the world are innocent, vulnerable and dependent. They are also curious, active and full of hope. Their time should be one of joy and peace, of playing, learning and growing. Their future should be shaped in harmony and co-operation. Their lives should mature, as they broaden their perspectives and gain new experiences” (UN General Assembly 1990b: 1; emphasis added). The semantic field of innocence, with its emphasis on the child’s vulnerability, immaturity, dependence, and playfulness, is also articulated in images of children that can be seen everywhere across the international community and especially in accounts of children in international relations. Liisa Malkki (2010: 60) has classified these images, through which children are very much marginalized as agents within the international system, into five interrelated registers: (i) children as sufferers; (ii) children as embodiments of basic human goodness; (iii) children as seers of truth; (iv) children as ambassadors of peace; and, (v) children as embodiments of the future. In the UN World Declaration, these images are matched by the gerund constructions of the verbs “playing, learning and

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growing,” which mark a temporality that indicates the notion of being “in process,” suggesting childhood as a transitional phase to adulthood. By analyzing the main international children’s rights agreements, in particular the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, and the documents produced by or in consultation with the United Nations, such as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the International Year of the Child (1979), and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), I identify three overlapping and interrelated discourses that articulate the boundaries of the child as a particular sort of human and its childhood as a particular path toward becoming an adult citizen. First are statements about what could be called a natural child, in which ‘objective’ conceptions of children’s social and biological needs are established and promoted. For example, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly 1959) and the UNCRC (UN General Assembly 1989) state in their preamble that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth” (emphasis added). In this sense, a child needs to be protected on account of the status as a natural child. This same idea about the child was first established in the provisions of the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (League of Nations 1924), which were premised on the understanding that “mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give.” Specifically, the second provision says: “The child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succored.” Biological needs, such as those associated to hunger and illness; psychological issues, like being “backward” in relation to some kind of normality; and moral aspects, such as treating the “delinquent,” are conflated and must be addressed together by “men and women of all nations.” This overall provision-based approach points chiefly toward developmental considerations: “Society owes children the necessary means for growing up to become healthy and productive members of the world” (Wall 2008: 534). Within this approach, all children are entitled to a childhood that provides protection in the form of health, nutrition, and a family setting, and preparation in the form of education and child development practices so that abnormalities can be monitored and their potential for becoming a threat can be kept under control. Associated to the very idea of

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children’s universal needs, the second discourse (re)produces the child as inherently innocent and vulnerable and, as such, the object of international protection. Within this formulation, the UN General Assembly, in 1979, introduced—and justified—the International Year of the Child by stating it was “[d]eeply concerned that, in spite of all efforts, far too many children, especially in developing countries, are undernourished, are without access to adequate health services, are missing the basic educational preparation for their future and are deprived of the elementary amenities of life.” The UNCRC, for its turn, states in Article 19, which serves as guidance for UNICEF child protection practices, that “States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.” Ultimately, the idea of the natural child, with its emphasis on children’s needs in terms of care and protection, impairs any potential to view them as political subjects. Notwithstanding the criticisms voiced by children’s rights movements against the “tutelage status” of child protection practices, the limits on children’s participation are already prescribed in the “vulnerability complex” (Lee 1999) in which they are continuously framed. That is, the international obligation to protect children is authorized by this particular articulation of the natural child as an inherently irrational, innocent adult in the making. According to Nick Lee (1999), children’s innocence is equated with being inherently vulnerable, which authorizes and legitimizes children’s political exclusion and adults’ right to speak on their behalf. At the same time, children’s exclusion is linked to their lack of voice, taken here as a sign of their incompetence, rooted in their biological and psychological immaturity rather than the outcome of any political process. By many and diverse routes, protection mechanisms are designed to assure a process of development informed by both the universalized idea of childhood and a very clear telos for children’s development. The third discourse, then, (re)produces childhood as deserving of investment in the future, especially through school education. Through this discourse, the progress of the child and the progress of the international community coincide or, rather, are co-(re)produced, when: (i) the child as a norm is located in a specific universalizing narrative framed by ideas of

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innocence, vulnerability, and irrationality, whose time is predicated on the notion of one particular developmental journey toward adulthood; and, (ii) the reproduction of the idea and promise of a progressive future for the international community is predicated on notions of security and stability, which are maintained and (re)produced by adult citizens—i.e., the future profile of the (normal) child. The preamble of the International Year of the Child resolution recognizes “the fundamental importance in all countries, developing and industrialized, of programmes benefiting children not only for the well-being of the children but also as part of broader efforts to accelerate economic and social progress” (UN General Assembly 1979). The message is even more explicit in the Plan of Action for Implementing the World Declaration: “As today’s children are the citizens of tomorrow’s world, their survival, protection and development is the prerequisite for the future development of humanity” (UN General Assembly 1990a, paragraph 3). In these statements, children are not just an abstract symbol used to represent basic human goodness or to promote peace. The minds and bodies of both ‘endangered’ and ‘healthy’ children are targets of investments and the authorization and (re)production of the promise of a better future. What, then, happens when a natural child has a weapon in her/his hands? A vacuum of modern categories, ideas, and values becomes evident, leaving no trace of a child, since childhood has, by definition, been lost, as has any semblance of the ordered, progressive world. Neither the world nor the child is recognized in the figure of the child-soldier. By definition, the child-soldier is a pathological deviation from this model of childhood, and as such an international emergency. Far from holding out any promise of a good future, he/she may actually put national and international progress in jeopardy. While the child-soldier is articulated as an innocent, vulnerable child in danger, his counterpart, the dangerous child-soldier, is depicted as a monster and (re)produced as being lost forever in an endless cycle of unrelenting violence and irrationality. Despite the different and sometimes paradoxical attributes and experiences of children engaged in wars, these three images of child-soldiers identified by Denov (2010) articulate them in problematic frameworks and static identities constructed through a logic of extremes that speak of their innocent victimhood or their monstrous behavior (Denov 2010: 2). The image of the child-soldier as a hapless victim revolves primarily around forced recruitment: children being forced to kill or slaughter, especially a

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family member; children witnessing acts of extreme violence, especially against other children; children made objects of humiliation, brutal beatings, rape, sexual slavery, slave labor, and hunger; and, children unprepared for involvement in combat. Most of the reports by humanitarian organizations state, one way or another, that all these children want is to get back their “lost childhood,” of which peace and school are crucial ingredients (Martins 2011). Vulnerability is understood only as victimization and passivity. Also, terms like “used as/for,” “forced to,” “brainwashed,” and “manipulated” appear frequently in these narratives, keeping children in the role of irrational and dependent minors incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. At the end of the day, as Katrina Lee-Koo (2013) points out, the image of the child-soldier as a hapless victim revolves around three themes: protection/rescue, innocence, and degeneracy. Together, she argues, “these three themes provide a moral foundation for conflict and project a familiar yet powerful metaphor for the claim that international order is the product of strong states, which protect vulnerable populations from abusive and ultimately illegitimate states” (Lee-Koo 2013: 483). Conversely, the child-soldier as a monster fails to meet the criterion of “innocence,” as he/she is not only marginalized, but actually demonized. This is clearly posed by Peter Singer (2006: 74), when he refers to the participation of child-soldiers in ritualized killings of others as “the defining moment that changed their lives forever.” At this point, children cross the “ultimate moral boundary, they are made anathema to the only environment they knew” (Singer 2006: 74). They become “killing machines” that do not have a sense of empathy for the civilian population (Dallaire 2010: 4). The 2013 Watchlist report, drawing upon the testimonies of people from neighbourhoods in Mali, foregrounds the fear surrounding these children, even though they are just small boys: “We saw a young youth from our neighborhood, not older than fifteen years old… We didn’t even want to look at him because we were afraid he’d kill us (for recognizing him). No one said anything… he was really a boy” (Watchlist 2013: 20). Despite their ‘child-like’ features, ­child-soldiers, whose developmental process has been ruptured by their participation in war, induce feelings of condemnation as well as pity. The discourse of the child-soldier as an international emergency is reproduced in the images of the victim and the monster, which destabilize the protected territory of ‘normal’ childhood. Within this formulation, the need to control them and the desire to restore them to normalized childhood become a matter of urgency. What happens is that

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the image of the redeemed hero is pinned on those children—erstwhile victims and/or monsters—who are lucky enough to have been ‘saved’ by international society. They have survived extreme violence and great adversity, but have managed to ‘reset’ their ‘natural’ developmental course as children. It is as if child-soldiers went from one type of space to another: there, ‘the life of the gun,’ where children, robbed of their right to school education, are capable only of imperfectly perceiving the world around them; and, here, after being rescued, where they learn the skills they need to operate within the codes of prescribed social behavior, eliminating any inherent dangers they may bear in virtue of their life experiences in war (Shepler 2014: 80). This transformation process has been translated into a picture of the now-celebrated former child-soldier, Ishmael Beah, wearing an Armani jacket and holding school books, while in the background there is an AK-47 inside a camouflage bag standing on the floor (Denov 2010: 10). The picture is from a Playboy article about Beah’s (2007) autobiographical book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in which ideas of victimhood, risk, and ultimately “redemption” and “salvation” are articulated. The happy ending is equivalent both to the exclusion of the camouflage bag with the AK-47 inside, which is left in the past, and the inclusion of books as a signifier of school, a safe place where he can relearn how to be a child. If the child-soldier as a victim and a monster is articulated as a target of intervention in the form of ‘exploitation and abuse’ by evil recruiters—be they (illegitimate) nation-states or irregular armed forces—the former child-soldier as a redeemed hero is also a target of intervention, but this time in the form of ‘salvation’ envisioned by international actors in the ‘best interests of the child.’ Through these images, the discourse about the child-soldier operates in three guises: (i) the articulation of the child-soldier as an anomaly in contrast with the model of the natural, healthy child; (ii) the (re)production of the child as a norm against which child-soldiers are judged and found deviant or pathological; and, (iii) the framing of the ­child-soldier not only as a child rights violation, but also as an international emergency with the potential to threaten international peace and security, providing the rationale for external intervention when ‘reality’ and ‘normality’ fail to coincide. Not only is this perspective uncritical of the ordering mechanisms and their power relations, but it also (re)produces certain boundaries that delimit the model of the child and a particular version of the world that children with weapons insist on challenging, overstepping, or sidestepping.

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The challenge this sets for the next section is to explore the ­boundaries of discourses about the child, childhood, and child-soldiers, which gloss over many of the internal variations and complexities of children’s experiences. When these limits are politicized, it is possible to explore a more powerful understanding of the role of the child in the articulation of a particular version of the world, which, despite claiming to be universal, is actually an array of multiple inclusions and exclusions. Furthermore, as the child is rendered meaningful by its relationship with the category of the adult, problematizing authorized ‘truths’ about children and childhood means not only challenging the idea that c­hild-soldiers are, by definition, an exception to the norm, but also seeing the “conception of adulthood as uncertain and messy, although this is rarely noted,” (Brocklehurst 2015: 32) and the adult citizen as a capable ‘stranger.’

Exploring the Boundaries, (Dis)Ordering the Future In contrast to the image of Beah depicted in Playboy, the NGO Save the Children, in its 2009 campaign against the use of child-soldiers, showed a picture of a young African boy wearing old military clothes and trainers set inside a glass case in an empty, arid place that seemed to have been devastated by war.5 The idea was apparently to imagine a future world in which child-soldiering had been eradicated, so the child-soldier remained only a memory, signified in this case by his representation as a museum exhibit. Instead of books, the boy in the glass case still carries a heavy firearm like an AK-47. A small plaque outside the case reads simply, “Democratic Republic of Congo.” The child, whose name the viewer does not know and whose voice they cannot hear, is kept under control inside solid boundaries like a museum exhibit. He cannot move. He cannot become a threat to the world. He, the child-solider, is an international emergency and, as such, must be relegated to an uncivilized past so that the promise of a progressive future for ‘all’ humanity can be renewed. Children and worlds are thus made visible or articulated through the model of the child, which allows some children to be modified, normalized, and universalized, while leaving many others out, constrained within a glass case. Three points are constantly enacted in this basic formulation: the child is not evil, the child is not an adult, and the child is indeed a symbol of a

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progressive future. However, what would happen if instead of affirming ­child-soldiers through absolute negations or exceptions, notions of childhood and the child—and, indeed, adulthood—were destabilized and politicized? This section explores how the logic of extremes that articulates child-soldiers as innocent or frightening works hand-in-hand with the norm of the child and operates as a mirror in which the world reaffirms its own shaky order. At the very most, the discussion I propose here converges on the status and politics of boundaries (Walker 2010), since the ambivalent approach to the child, combining vulnerability and risk, generates huge challenges whenever or wherever (at the boundary) the child and its childhood, articulated as a universal norm, clash with the external conditions for their constitution—the deviant child-soldier—and also (equally importantly) with worlds that express the potential for difference and plurality. When the child is (re)produced as a universalized form of being, some kind of conditionality is articulated between the norm and the child-soldier, who is included in the discourse of normality only by virtue of her/his exclusion from the normal conception of the child and ordered spaces of childhood. According to the discourse about the natural child, marked by notions of irrationality and innocence, the risk— or emergency—arises wherever child protection practices, designed as mechanisms for controlling and (re)producing the boundaries between the norm and its deviation, are absent. The dangerous monster or/and the hapless victim in danger thus invade the secure, universalized world predicated on notions of progress and order from which differences must be excluded. It is as if the discourse of the child-soldier as an emergency articulated a ‘triple exceptionalism’ (Walker 2004), marking the limits of the modern individual, who corresponds to the ‘normal’ child in the future. Being a child is not enough when her/his ‘normal’ childhood has been lost. Secondly, this triple exceptionalism marks the limits of the modern state in its capacity to protect children. Being a state is not enough if its territory has been overrun by chaotic ‘new wars.’ Finally, triple exceptionalism points out the limits of a world that keeps out children who fail to exhibit the features of the ‘ordered and progressive’ world. Saved by the (civilized) world, the image of the redeemed hero hinges upon the idea of the natural child as a potentially valuable contributor to a better future for international society. This operates as the promise of unmaking the child-soldier and, in doing so, (re)building the tale

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of a (dis)orderly international society whose promise of a progressive future is under threat. The report that celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Machel Report says: “In a globalized world, local and regional destabilization has global repercussions. Not only is responding to conflict a moral obligation; protection is in the direct security interests of all States” (UN General Assembly 2007: 20). This begs some questions: In whose best interests are these mechanisms for “saving” child-soldiers carried out? The interests of the child? If so, what child? The interests of the world? If so, what world? Within this formulation, the child as a monster, a victim, or a redeemed hero has no chance of agency; he/she is either the object of exploitation or the object of salvation, and any capacity he/she may have to participate in identifying her/his own concerns, demands, and solutions is quashed. By problematizing the boundaries of the discourses that frame the child as a norm and the child-soldier as pathological, it is possible to move the focus away from the modernist duality of childhood and adulthood, envisaged to bring about more stability and coherence, since it also limits the space available for ambiguity and complexity. In so doing, room is opened up to explore the extent to which children are potentially competent social actors and “active in the construction of their own lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live” (James and Prout 1991: 8). In problematizing the limits of the discourses about the child and the child-soldier, there is a risk that a complete switch from today’s political circumstances to something else could be envisaged, or a completely new form of human being could be constructed, simply replacing one essentialist argument (that children are incompetent) with another (that they are competent). Rather, effort should be made to explore the already complex politics behind the lines that are drawn around the concepts and categories of child, childhood, and child-soldier, especially to investigate how they articulate specific kinds of subjectivities, life experiences, and objects. For example, when it comes to children’s agency, especially in the case of child-soldiers whose autonomy and agency are investigated in a situation where their protection is considered most necessary, the conversation should not only be about the possibility of attributing agency to children, which is always relational, but also about examining what agency means and what children are capable of doing and how they can make a difference in situations of armed conflict. Furthermore, by considering the different spaces of children’s experimentations, it is

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important to investigate how children as political subjects impact on modern understandings of adulthood and citizenship and, consequently, on the modern articulation and promotion of a particular version of the social and international order today and tomorrow. By insisting on the challenge “to reimagine the potentials that might be created in a sustained politicization of the boundaries, borders and limits of modern political formations” (Walker 2010: 257), the next and final section does not so much consider child-soldiers in terms of ­‘children without childhood’ as it discusses the idea of what I have termed “children between boundaries” (Tabak 2020). In other words, rather than (re)declaring what constitutes an exception to the norm of the child and relegating child-soldiers to a spatiotemporal locus of illegitimacy and silence that often exists outside—or behind—the boundaries of the world, the concluding section engages in a reflection about the idea of children, questioning the limits of ‘normal’ childhood.

Between Boundaries: Celebrating the Contradictions of Childhoods and Worlds In 2012, the American NGO Invisible Children launched the ­campaign “Kony 2012,” whose main goal was to help arrest Joseph Kony, the leader of the armed group Lord’s Resistance Army, in Uganda, who is accused of recruiting thousands of children. Endangered Ugandan children are represented in the campaign video by a young boy and ­ former child-soldier called Jacob, who talks about his brother who was killed by the rebels, whom Jacob saw cutting his brother’s neck. Jacob then concludes he would rather die than live on this earth. While the world of Invisible Children’s founders, represented by its co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jason Russell’s little boy, Gavin, is colorful and playful, a place where he has a loving family, lives in a safe house, “loves jumping on the trampoline, being a ninja, and dancing” (Russell tells us, the viewers, in voiceover), the earth where Jacob lives is almost ­black-and-white, where poor, unhappy children are dressed in rags, full of fear, and dependent on external help. Drawing upon strict binaries like “happy childhood” versus “unhappy childhood,” “victim” versus “protector,” “good guys” versus “bad guys,” “chaotic Uganda” versus “civilized United States,” the documentary (re)produces the discourse about the child-soldier as an international emergency subsumed in a vocabulary of crisis and danger.

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In order to counter this construction, perhaps we need to rethink the sequence of events that structures the narrative that leads to the (inevitable) relationship between vulnerability, innocence, irrationality, and the child, which is associated to the understanding of the (inevitable) relationship between order, security, protection, progress, and the world, excluding many other “earths.” Through the course of this chapter, what we have seen is that the world is actually challenging the growing assumption that it is becoming more planetary, universal, and inclusive. To speak about universalism, humanity, the world, and the child is to silence the politics of (re)drawing the connections and distinctions between singularity and plurality, identity and difference, universality and particularity, as ordering mechanisms. Therefore, it is still imperative to understand discourses about the child and the child-soldier as politically produced, unequally distributed through and by differential operations of power. Although critiquing the universalizing norm of childhood may be an uncomfortable exercise, it is precisely by challenging this idea, defined by what children lack and what they put at risk, that we can move towards considering a multiplicity of childhoods and children that do not fit the models assigned to them. In such an approach, “[t]o stress that children are important actors in society is not to say that they act like adults or that the differences between children and adults are minimal” (Huynh et al. 2015: 50). Furthermore, by recognizing that children—as well as adults—are in a constant state of simultaneous being and becoming (Beier 2015) and that there is no point of complete separation between childhood and adulthood, it might be possible to move beyond the outside-inside alternative and reflect upon the limits. Between the child-soldier as a hapless victim, the child-soldier as a monster and a risk to the world, and the former child-soldier as a redeemed hero, there are a great many children who participate in wars, whose different stories of oppression and resistance, of who they are and who they might become, do not necessarily fit into the trajectory of redemption envisioned by the international community on behalf of a single humanity. In this sense, when thinking about child-soldiers as neither behind nor beyond normalized boundaries, but as “children between boundaries,” the idea is to destabilize the limits between child and adult, ‘normal’ child and ‘deviant’ child. In doing so, it is possible to explore child-soldiers not as risks to the prevailing international

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order, but as potential ways of (re)thinking this order and its naturalized categories. As such, the effort here has been to explore the contradictions and limitations inherent to the ideas of the child and the child-soldier, both of which sustain and can be made to challenge the proliferation and normalization of the processes by which a particular version of the world is ordered. The campaign “Children, Not Soldiers” concluded at the end of 2016. Even though there are still children engaged in armed groups, the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict and UNICEF celebrated the fact that at least a consensus envisioned is now a reality and over 130 thousand child-soldiers have been released and reintegrated since the implementation of the Children and Armed Conflict mandate. The picture used to introduce the news of the success of this campaign on this UN office’s webpage is of a Black child wearing a yellow T-shirt on which are emblazoned the figure from the campaign poster and the symbol of the UN’s Peacekeeping Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).6 Instead of a weapon, the former child-soldier is holding books (or notebooks), pencils, and a ruler, all wrapped up like a gift with UNICEF tape. It is a celebration of the consensus: (normal) children—or redeemed heroes—are back at school. After all, the threat inherent to child-soldiers, whether they be victims or monsters, is that they might become ‘us,’ the modern adult. Finally, the choice of the word “children” instead of the singular “child” followed by the preposition “between” is not unintentional. The phrase “children between boundaries” denotes that it is exactly by challenging the boundaries between here and there, self and other, normal and pathological, particular and universal, that encounters between differences may be considered, rather than inclusions and exclusions. At the end of the analysis, I trust this chapter is in a perpetual state of becoming, so that what I offer here is a series of possibilities for further thoughts about childhood, children, child-soldiers, and worlds in ways other than the strict modern logic of exclusion, where fixed boundaries and normalized categories become contingent and permeable. At the end of the day, instead of (re)producing the prevailing tale of a (dis)orderly international society, in which the borders of the particular versions of the child, the child-soldier, and the world are drawn and redrawn with such elegance and such violence, I would rather make an alliance with childhood not as a chronological phase of life, but as a

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condition of ignorance. Not knowing here does not mean being lacking, but actually quite the opposite: experiencing a realm of possibilities for exploring new potentials and prospects, when children—and, indeed, adults—and their life experiences overflow and challenge the boundaries of the (glass) cases that construct and reconstruct the international political order. Acknowledgements   This chapter is part of a larger research project, whose main ideas are further developed in my book The Child and the World: C ­ hildSoldiers and the Claim for Progress (University of Georgia Press, 2020). I would like to express my gratitude to both the Brazilian graduate funding agency, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior— Brasil (CAPES), which partially financed my research (Finance Code 001), and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), the Rio de Janeiro state funding agency, for providing resources and funding for the development of this chapter.

Notes 1. This makes reference to Graça Machel’s report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, which sets forth the main ideas that constitute the discourse about the child-soldier. In it, Machel (1996: 57) states: “Children [child soldiers] are dropping out from childhood.” 2.  The poster campaign is available at https://childrenandarmedconflict. un.org/children-not-soldiers/, accessed 5 January 2018. 3. Profits from the sale of greeting cards are usually used to provide for the basic needs of children around the globe, such as food, medicine, and fresh water. 4. The children’s rights agreements under analysis here include the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, and the documents produced by or in consultation with the United Nations, such as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the International Year of the Child (1979), the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children and the plan of action for its implementation in the 1990s. 5.  For the image see Save the Children, “Child Soldier.” Available at: https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/outdoor/save_the_children_ child_soldier, accessed on 15 January 2018. 6.  The picture is available at https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/lessons-learned-and-best-practices/, accessed 26 June 2019.

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References Beah, Ishmael. 2007. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Sarah Crichton Books. Beier, J. Marshall. 2015. “Children, Childhoods and Security Studies: An Introduction.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/21624887.2015.1019715. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood— Insecurities of Children.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 29–46. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014679. Burman, Erica. 1994. “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies.” Disasters 18 (3): 238–253. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-7717.1994.tb00310.x. Dallaire, Roméo. 2010. They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers. New York: Walker & Company. Denov, Myriam. 2010. Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huynh, Kim, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo. 2015. Children and Global Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1991. “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Children, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 7–34. London: Falmer Press. Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. League of Nations. 1924. Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. http:// www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm. Lee, Nick. 1999. “The Challenge of Childhood: The Distribution of Childhood’s Ambiguity in Adult Institutions.” Childhood 6 (4): 455–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568299006004005. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2013. “Not Suitable for Children: The Politicisation of Conflict-Affected Children in Post-2001 Afghanistan.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 67 (4): 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718. 2013.803031. Machel, Graça. 1996. Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children: Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. Report of Graça Machel, Expert of the Secretary General of the United Nations, New York, A/50/60. Malkki, Liisa. 2010. “Children, Humanity and the Infantilization of Peace.” In In The Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, edited by Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, 58–85. Durham: Duke University Press.

134  J. TABAK Martins, Catarina. 2011. “The Dangers of the Single Story: Child-Soldiers in Literary Fiction and Film.” Childhood 18 (4): 434–446. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568211400102. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2002. “The International Children’s Rights Regime.” In Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics, edited by David Chandler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shepler, Susan. 2014. Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone. New York: New York University Press. Singer, Peter W. 2006. Children at War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tabak, Jana. 2020. The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Tabak, Jana, and Leticia Carvalho. 2018. “Responsibility to Protect the Future: Children on the Move and the Politics of Becoming.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 121–144. https://doi.org/10.1163/1875984x-01001007. United Nations General Assembly. 1959. Declaration of the Rights of the Child, A/RES/1386 (XIV). http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b38f0.html. United Nations General Assembly. 1979. International Year of the Child, 18 October 1979, A/RES/34/4. http://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f1b462.html. United Nations General Assembly. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1577: 3, http:// www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b38f0.html. United Nations General Assembly. 1990a. World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children. http://www.unicef.org/wsc/declare. htm. United Nations General Assembly. 1990b. Plan of Action for Implementing the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children in the 1990s. http://www.un-documents.net/wsc-plan.htm. United Nations General Assembly. 2007. Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, A/62/228. http:// www.refworld.org/docid/47316f602.html. Walker, R. B. J. 2004. “Conclusion: Sovereignties, Exceptions, Worlds.” In Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, edited by Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat, and Michael Shapiro, 239–250. New York: Routledge. Walker, R. B. J. 2010. After the Globe, Before the World. New York: Routledge. Wall, John. 2008. “Human Rights in Light of Childhood.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (4): 523–543. https://doi.org/10.1163/ 157181808x312122. Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict. 2013. Where Are they…? The Situation of Children and Armed Conflict in Mali. New York: Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

CHAPTER 7

From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child Soldier: How the Martial Regulation of Children Normalizes and Legitimizes War Victoria M. Basham Introduction Every war is a war against children. (Save the Children 2019)

This popular slogan of the charity Save the Children, attributed to the founder of the organization, Eglantyne Jeb, said to have been stated around one hundred years ago, is a reminder that wars take particular tolls on children and young people. Though often overlooked in scholarly and popular analyses of war, children are especially vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and trafficking, and are particularly adversely affected by limited access to education and basic services in the chaos that often accompanies warfare. This is all in addition to their vulnerability to the immediate dangers of war itself. Another important issue that has received limited attention is the martial regulation of children and childhood, despite it being a longstanding feature of warfare and war preparedness. From historic and contemporary youth paramilitary organizations to the ongoing enlistment of child soldiers across the globe,

V. M. Basham (*)  Cardiff University, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_7

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nations and armed groups across time and space have utilized children for military ends. Yet, with some notable exceptions (see for example Brocklehurst 2006; Watson 2006; Benwell and Hopkins 2016), the role and political expectations of children in conditions of war has received fairly limited attention, particularly in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and especially beyond the Global South (Beier 2011). Such omissions of children and childhoods from IR are especially peculiar given the primacy of war in the constitution of the discipline but are perhaps also unsurprising given its longstanding fetishization of state-centric analyses. Recent estimates suggest that almost a fifth of the world’s children (around 420 million) now live in areas affected by armed conflict and that the participation of under-18s in armed forces, whether non-conventional, national, or state-affiliated, is on the rise (Save the Children 2019). These figures alone might suggest the necessity of paying closer attention to those recognized as children and young people1 but the interrelatedness of childhood and warfare also warrants closer examination because, as I will argue herein, children and young people are significant to making war possible, both symbolically and literally. In order to demonstrate the constitutive role that children and young people, and ideas about them and their futures, have for warfare and war preparedness, this chapter examines two different attempts to martially regulate children and young people, one historic and one contemporary. The first is the systematic socialisation of young people by the Nazi regime through the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) and the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel or BDM) in 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Germany. The second pertains to practices surrounding the ongoing paramilitary training and recruitment of under-18s by the British Armed Forces. I draw on these cases because, despite their historical, cultural, temporal, and ideologically divergent characters, both demonstrate salient discourses around children and childhood that can transcend these very divergences. As I will also argue and attempt to show, whilst populist notions of British national identity continue to draw heavily on the defeat of the Nazi enemy other for their constitution, some of the key constructions that the Nazis relied on when attempting to martially regulate German youth are strikingly familiar when examining contemporary British claims about the benefits of exposing young people to martial values and activities, and about the place of young people in the

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contemporary British nation. This is not to suggest that these regimes are the same in character, nor are their actions, but that the commonalities in the discursive construction of children and childhood in both cases should alert us to the problematic assumptions that can underlie any attempts to martially regulate the young. I begin the chapter by exploring the key reasons for why I think it is important to conceptualize the interconnections between children, youth, childhood, militarism, and war, to think about the problems but also promise that such work can bring to IR. I then move to my two case studies and explore how they can deepen our understanding of those interconnections. I consider, in particular, tensions between aspects of young people’s agency that are recognized (usually those that conform to martial needs) and those which are not (usually those that challenge or complicate martial and adult assumptions). These serve as important reminders that children are always simultaneously geopolitical actors as well as subjects upon whom geopolitics is enacted. IR’s broad omission of children and childhoods risks objectifying the young as incapable of the meaningful exercise of agency when actually they play key roles in the reproduction of the geopolitical; for example, children’s labour and consumption plays an enormous role in constituting the global political economy (Watson 2006). My analysis of the two modes of martial regulation at the centre of this chapter borrows from Roxanne Lynn Doty’s (1993) discourse analytic method. I examine how children, young people, childhood, and youth are discursively constructed intertextually though various key sources pertaining to the Hitler Youth and BDM and to the paramilitary training and recruitment of under-18s in the contemporary UK. Paying close attention to how these texts rely on presupposition (the construction of particular kinds of worlds where particular things are deemed ‘true’), predication (the linking of certain qualities to particular subjects), and subject positioning (implied relationships between subjects and between subjects and objects), I aim to demonstrate how children and childhood, as both agentic subjects and objects, are socially constructed in ways that make the practice of warfare and preparing for war more possible (Doty 1993). I conclude that in revealing how children make war possible, symbolically and literally, these cases enable me to argue for greater consideration of the martial regulation of children as a promising way to enrich our analyses of war and militarism in IR.

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Childism and Militarism In her posthumously published book Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, the psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (2012) urges us to pay greater attention to how people, institutions, and societies routinely and systematically rely on prejudices against children to justify and legitimate their behaviours. She argues that whereas we have become accustomed to thinking about (though not overcoming) prejudice against other social groups, we frequently overlook how “prejudice is built into the very way children are imagined” (Young-Bruehl 2012: 5) as possessions of adults, families, governments, and other institutions. One effect of this is that in defining and drawing boundaries around children and childhood, adults, especially male adults, are reproduced as the natural agents of action, rationality, maturity, and control (Jenks 1996). Another is that those designated as children are routinely denied their evolving abilities to contribute in agentic ways to communal life, despite the recognition of this as an inherent right in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. One of the key prejudices that children are subjected to is the notion that they require taming, that they need to be physically and psychologically controlled so that they can become obedient and useful (Young-Bruehl 2012; see also Valentine 2009). Evidence has shown that such authoritarian ideas are hegemonic globally within the context of schooling where what is taught and learnt is rarely decided by learners and usually determined by adult government officials and teachers (Harber 2004). Moreover, there is much evidence to suggest that this dominant authoritarian approach to schooling, which emerged from early hopes and desires that the establishment of mass schooling systems would “produce citizens and workers who were conformist, passive and politically docile,” is now so “deeply embedded in schooling” that it is “highly resistant to change as a result” (Harber and Sakade 2009: 173). The utility of authoritarian modes of schooling are clear when looking, for example, at the salience of the links between private schooling and elite higher education and elite employment in the UK, a country where schools remain “too often sites of social reproduction rather than social mobility” (Harber and Sakade 2009: 172). Despite this, in recent years the proffered solution to ongoing and deepening inequality in the UK has been the proliferation of academy schools, which educationalists have criticized for their reliance on militaristic, authoritarian, and

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the supposedly ‘emancipatory masculinity’ of ‘heroic headteachers’ to deal with poverty which, in the context of academies and their champions, is “framed as a cultural problem of low aspiration and implicitly tied to…working-class and ethnic minority populations” (Kulz 2017: 87). Alongside the expansion of academies, the UK’s schooling system has also seen the introduction of a series of ‘military ethos’ initiatives, aimed at exposing greater numbers of British schoolchildren to instruction by military veterans, assumed to be an especially effective source of discipline, and to military activities, considered to be a superior means of facilitating self-discipline and teamwork (Basham 2016). Though such initiatives have been marketed as firmly in the interests of young people, they also create opportunities for the recruitment of young people and for normalizing the military as a vehicle for social change and self-improvement, concealing its primary function of violence (Basham 2016). As Rachel Woodward (2005) argues, when civilian spaces such as schools become subjected to military objectives and influence, such sites become ‘geographies of militarism’—sites from which the notion that maintaining a strong military that can promote the interests of the nation overseas, but also at home, are reinforced. It is these militaristic ideas and, indeed, attempts to ‘school’ and effectively discipline children through exposure to martial practices that lie at the centre of my two case studies to which I now turn. Each demonstrates how childism facilitates attempts to martially regulate children and young people by prioritizing the militaristic desires of present generations to build their pursuit of their idealized vision of the nation at the expense of future generations (Young-Bruehl 2012).

Priming Children for a National Socialist Future: Nazism and Young People The Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth, the male youth wing of the Nazi Party, was officially formed in 1926, with the founding of the Bund deutscher Mädel (BDM) or the League of German Girls, coming four years later in 1930. The members of both organizations were young people aged 14–18 who had passed ‘racial tests,’ and both also had wings for younger children aged 10–14 years, the Deutsches Jungvolk for boys, and the Jungmaedelbund for girls. The founding of these youth organizations signalled that German children and young people were recognized as a “powerful political force” by the Nazis (Campbell Bartoletti

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2005: 7), albeit in specifically gendered and, of course racialized, ways. Whereas boys participated in military training to prepare them for later military service—by the end of the war, boys as young as twelve were serving in German civil defence and in the German home guard (USHMM 2018)—girls were prepared for futures as wives and mothers by taking on childcare responsibilities and caring roles in their local communities. Although membership of these youth organizations was initially voluntary, by 1936 participation became compulsory under the ‘Law Concerning the Hitler Youth’ and it is thought that more than 82% of German children and young people belonged to the organizations (USHMM 2018). Examining salient discourses around the Hitler Youth and BDM reveals just how deeply interconnected childhood, militarism, and national identity and goals became during the rise and rule of the Nazi Party. Blood and Soil: Children as the Heirs and Future of the Aryan Race Children were recognized early on by the Nazi Party as agents, key to their early electoral success, because the young actively participated in early political campaigning and informed adult relatives and adult members of their communities about Nazism (Campbell Bartoletti 2005: 7). Young people also provided a more foundational and symbolic rationale for the rise of National Socialism though. As objects of the state, they allowed the Nazi Party to prioritize ultimate over immediate aims and to build for a ‘brighter’ future distinguishable from a less cherished past (Childs 1938). As symbols of this brave new world for the German people, the Hitler Youth and BDM were often present at large Nazi Party gatherings, including the annual Nuremberg rallies (USHMM 2018). As Hitler (cited in Pagaard 2005: 191) proclaimed to crowds in 1933: I begin with the young. We older ones are used up. We are rotten to the marrow. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them, I can make a new world.

Much as the global youth of 2019, saddled with a world of violence, inequality and multiple insecurities, are expected to take on mammoth burdens created by previous generations (Young-Bruehl 2012), the youth of

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1930s Germany were tools for its remaking and for remaking the world in the image of National Socialism. As former ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd (in Childs 1938: 268), noted in his commentary on The Nazi Primer, the instructional booklet intended for Hitlerjugend and BDM members and other youth: “The children belong to the state and party, not to families.” Whenever viewed in such ways as objects, children and young people become ‘maleable.’ In the context of the rise of National Socialism, this malleability made them especially useful practically and symbolically, whether through their often willing surveillance of adults who failed to conform or pay suitable to respect to Nazi ideology (Campbell Bartoletti 2005) or through their depiction as a “rising generation” that would “worship their chief and get ready to ‘save civilisation’ from the Jews, from Communism, and from democracy” (Dodds in Childs 1938: 280). Moreover, the Nazi youth movement fulfilled a dual function: it enabled the Nazi Party to prepare for its envisioned future and to weaken longstanding bonds between the young and established associations and authorities such as the church. By monopolising the time of young people, children’s daily lives were structured by activities within the bounds of Nazi control and previous claims to moral authority were displaced (USHMM 2018). The establishment of the Hitlerjugend and BDM, and its attendant wings, was profoundly childist in the prioritization of national and adult ‘needs’ over those of the young. In its underlying assumption that children and young people were possessions of the nation and in its manipulation of their desires to engage with some authority in public life, the Nazi Party put the young at risk. They alienated some from their teachers and parents, placed some in direct physical and psychological danger, and some were eventually taken by U.S. troops to Dachau to be confronted with the visceral horrors of the Holocaust (Campbell Bartoletti 2005). Of course, not all children and young people conformed—the “Nazi aim of mobilizing all German youth under the banner of the swastika proved ultimately impossible” (Pagaard 2005: 205)—and youth movements including the ‘White Rose’ resistance highlighted this; though they, and many other young people who opposed the Nazi youth movement, ultimately paid for their resistance with their lives. Educated in the profoundly unscientific ‘racial science’ that underpinned Nazi ideology, the young were characterized as the rightful heirs to a vast territory taken from the German people by the racially impure and morally degenerate. The Nazis sought to train the young “into the belief that

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their Aryan ancestors were the most perfect in the world” and of their right, and the nation’s right, to annex countries where their Aryan ancestors had resided (Dodds in Childs 1938: 260). The young were thus central to the Nazi regime’s normalization and legitimation of its militarism which was there to ensure the future of Germany was fulfilled. Discipline, Obedience, and National Military Might Whilst the ability and, indeed, responsibility of the young to play an active part in the formation of the future of the nation was routinely stressed, strict obedience was always central to instruction for members of the Hitlerjugend and BDM (Childs 1938). For the Nazi Party, the best means of crafting young people to be the vanguards of their new world was through paramilitary training that primarily emphasised physical exercise alongside education in the National Socialist worldview and the subjectivities young people were expected to adopt within that worldview (Childs 1938). As Hitler proclaimed at the Nuremburg rally in September 1935: What we look for from our German youth is different from what people wanted in the past. In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.

Children had to be racially conscious and physically fit to be equipped to build the new future of Germany and the Aryan people (USHMM 2018). As Michel Foucault (1980: 58, 56) argued, it is always necessary to “study what kind of body the current society needs” and the “insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers.” This is because the processes that discipline these bodies, that give individuals mastery and awareness of their embodied selves, can be of great value to the body politic. In the case of the Hitler Youth and BDM, the bodies of young men and women fulfilled different functions. For girls, their particular way of fulfilling “the highest purpose in life… service to the people” was accepting the “high calling of motherhood [that] has once again become the natural task and accomplishment of every sound woman” (Childs 1938: 96). Physical fitness and bodily discipline would enable them to reproduce the Aryan race. For boys, being trained as future soldiers, mastery over the “biting cold, scorching heat,

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blistered feet, aching limbs” experienced by military recruits the world over, would have made their bodies both sites “of suffering and a vital resource” to the nation (Higate 1998: 181); sites where they could exhibit their worth or failure to the Reich. As organizations that were overtly paramilitary in nature—members wore uniforms and badges, held ranks, carried knives, and had access to weapons stores, and, as time progressed, even had their own heroes—the Hitlerjugend and BDM simultaneously taught young people to “think and act as one…[and] to obey their leader no matter what,” whilst affording them a sense of voice and power; this often came through their ability to harass teachers and other adults if they failed to espouse Nazi views (Campbell Bartoletti 2005: 28). Whilst the Hitlerjugend and BDM subsequently came to be seen as “conduits of political mobilization” for one of the utmost heinous of political forces (USHMM 2018), these youth organizations were regarded as significant political tools for convincing the wider world of the legitimacy of the Nazi Party’s actions, not just the German people (Childs 1938). The crafting of obedient, disciplined children was not only regarded as a social good in Germany but also in other nations watching the resurgence of Germany. One visiting U.S. reporter to Germany before the outbreak of war commented that “children and young men no longer loaf on street corners…They no longer run through the towns, hunting for mischief. They are in uniform marching with the Hitler Youth. They have no time for cigarettes, dancing, flasks, lipsticks, automobiles, or movies” (cited in Campbell Bartoletti 2005: 28). Here we clearly see the kind of discursive reproduction of the young that Doty (1993) alerts us to trace. There is clear presupposition of a world where the social ‘truth’ is that children are “dangerous, unruly and potentially out of control in adultist public space” (Valentine 2009: 24). We see the predication that children are mischief-making subjects. And we see instances of subject-positioning that imply the relationships between children and dancing, lipsticks, and the like are negative but that the relationships between children marching in uniform as members of the Hitler Youth are an antidote to the social problem of children and childhood. Whilst the Nazis sought to utilize martial modes of regulation to encourage their youth to weed out the ‘degenerate’ external ‘races’ that they posited as threats to the German homeland, in liberal democratic countries like the UK and U.S., concerns about the degeneracy of children, particularly signalled by the physical and supposed moral

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deficiencies of working-class children, also abounded. Such ideas were prevalent in these nations as well in the early twentieth century; people feared that degenerate, disobedient children could make industrial nations less competitive in a world where Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ was seen primarily in economic terms (Cunningham 2006). In the UK, in particular, the continuation and long-term economic success of ‘Mother Empire’ was seen to be especially dependent on her children’s labour and discipline (Cunningham 2006). Various social and moral reformers of nineteenth century Britain saw military training as a potentially very useful means for teaching boys, in particular, “a sense of discipline and citizenship,” and it was these notions that are thought to have influenced Octavia Hill in establishing a volunteer cadet unit in Southwark in 1889, often credited as the start of the Army Cadet Force (Hobbis Harris 2013: 9). Thus, whilst the Hitlerjugend and BDM served a particular set of purposes for the Nazi Party, their martial regulation of the young was certainly not peculiar or particular to their brand of nationalism. Indeed, by turning to more contemporary modes of martial regulation of the young in the UK, we can identify similar discursive practices around children, childhood, militarism, and war.

The Future of Warfare: Britain’s Child Soldiers At the time of writing, and likely of publication, and perhaps for some time yet to come, the UK remains the only state of the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations Security Council that still actively recruits under-18-year-olds into its armed forces and from the age of sixteen. Although under-18s in the British Armed Forces are now prohibited from direct participation in armed conflict by official UK government policy, this policy can be overruled if ‘military need’ deems the deployment of minors to be necessary (Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch 2013). Moreover, despite the deployment of minors to war zones being officially prohibited, the UK deployed at least eight young people under the age of eighteen to war zones in error between 2005 and 2010 (Medact 2016). Children as young as fifteen years and seven months are able to begin applying to serve in the UK military. In a 2013 UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) document on the British Armed Forces’ policy on recruiting under-18s, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Child Soldiers International, the MoD (2013) claimed that their policy is ‘defensible’ and states that the policy

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reflects the normal school leaving age of 16-years-old. This presupposition suggests military service at sixteen reflects the realities of society. However, given that 86% of 16- and 17-year-olds go on to further education (Department for Education 2019) and that this trend has existed for some time, it would be fairer to say that sixteen years is the legally permissible, rather than ‘normal’, school-leaving age. The document also states that the MoD (2013) takes pride in: the fact that our Armed Forces provide challenging and constructive education, training and employment opportunities for young people and that the Armed Forces remain the UK’s largest apprenticeship provider, equipping young people with valuable and transferrable skills.

Here there is clear predication in the linking of qualities implied as being beneficial to young people such as ‘challenging’ and ‘constructive’ to the policy of recruiting under-18s. The subject positioning here is one where young people’s relationship to the Armed Forces is both positive for them in becoming employed and fulfilled and one where the military itself is a site of opportunity. Moreover, the military is a site where the greatest number of apprenticeships are on offer so, whilst this system of opportunities is something that other employers offer, no one does this to the same extent as the Armed Forces, marking them as a site of exceptional opportunity. In this implied relationship between the young, the military and opportunity, the military’s primary function as the state’s wielder of violence is obscured in the normalization of the military as a provider of apprenticeships. Such presuppositions, predications, subject positioning, (Doty 1993) and obfuscation pervades military recruitment literature and practice. Belonging to the Nation In order for a young person to enlist in the British Armed Forces below the UK’s legal age of adulthood (18), all potential recruits require parental permission. On page 21 of the application form for ‘Service in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces,’ parents or guardians of those under eighteen years of age are asked to sign a statement that reads: I have no objection to this application being forwarded for processing. If this application proceeds, I give consent for my son, daughter or ward to

146  V. M. BASHAM undergo physical and mental tests and assessments, interviews and medical examinations, which may involve time away from home in a service establishment. My son, daughter or ward also understands and agrees to follow instructions given to them by Service Recruiting, Careers and Selection staff. (Armed Forces Careers Office 2007)

In signing such declarations, parents ensure that young people are transferred from being the possessions of their families to being objects of the state and its martial capabilities. Though a national poll conducted in 2014 showed that 77% of the British public support a rise in the age of recruitment to eighteen, as I have argued elsewhere (Basham 2011), this has not stopped periodic calls for the re-introduction of compulsory military national service for young people, as a perceived panacea to social ills such as youth gun and knife crime. Nor has it stemmed the tide of government initiatives such as those previously described that see children undergoing martial regulation and socialization in schools as a moral and social imperative (Basham 2016). As in Nazi Germany, these calls and initiatives invoke the kind of childist view that martial activities can provide a useful means to tame and discipline otherwise unruly youths and make them socially and economically productive for the state (Young-Bruehl 2012). These practices normalize and legitimize the maintenance of standing armed forces and the idea that their engagement with children and young people is banal. More recent advertising has stressed that military service can provide young people with a sense of ‘belonging,’ assumed to be lacking in their civilian lives. However, in emphasizing the benefits of enlisting to individuals, such advertising works to conceal the violence that is central to military service and the wider social and political inequalities that have produced the kind of alienation and thirst for belonging that the military seeks to exploit in the first place. The Army’s 2018 This is Belonging campaign, which cost £1.6 million, specifically targeted young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, living in households with an average annual income of £10,000 (Louise and Sangster 2019). A list of target cities with relatively high levels of deprivation was also drawn up and made part of the Army’s brief for the advertising agency as key target areas for dispersing campaign material (Louise and Sangster 2019). Much as the Vote Leave Campaign and its various champions exploited anti-immigration sentiment in the context of the UK’s 2016 referendum on its membership of the European Union to raise questions of who

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does and does not belong, the Army’s This is Belonging campaign tries to establish an ‘other’ that is responsible for the alienation that some young people in impoverished regions and families may feel. Equally, just as the focus on immigration by the Vote Leave Campaign conceals the decades of government austerity and other economic policy that has created vast inequality in the UK (Dorling 2016), so too does the Army’s This is Belonging campaign work to conceal its historic and ongoing reliance on the most socio-economically disadvantaged, in the context of a recruitment crisis in which the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have an annual recruitment shortfall of 10%, and the Army has an annual recruitment shortfall of 30% (Louise and Sangster 2019). Given that the military’s two-tier entry system for those who are more educated and those without qualifications has been shown to not only normalize pre-military class inequalities but to ensure that soldiers re-enter the labour market with skills for low-status jobs and officers re-enter it with skills geared toward higher-status positions (Levy 1998; Joyce 1998; Louise and Sangster 2019), the notion that the martial regulation of young people is to their benefit is profoundly disingenuous. In common with the Nazi youth movement are clear attempts to ensure that children and young people bear the brunt of at least some of the desires of current adult generations (Young-Bruehl 2012) to normalize and legitimize militarism. Discipline and Punish: Child Soldiers and British Military Might The targeting of young people from some of the most ­socio-economically deprived regions and households in the UK clearly suggests that, contrary to the notion that engaging in martial activities benefits them, their martial regulation is of far greater benefit to a state that sees maintaining its military power as more important than the exploitation of the young and vulnerable. In the context of the British Army, which is the service with the highest concentration of under-18year-olds and 18–24 year olds, once an applicant has reached the age of sixteen they can either train at AFC Harrogate as junior soldiers, where they will “learn all the skills you need, from map reading to how to handle a weapon” (British Army 2019), or, if they have aspirations to become officers, they can apply for scholarships to study at University or for a place at the Army’s residential sixth form college, Wellbeck, where they can combine their pursuit of A-levels with military training. Most of those who enlist whilst still under-18 do not end up in further or higher

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education, however; they end up in frontline combat roles in the lowest ranks of the Armed Forces (Medact 2016). In the UK’s recent war in Afghanistan, soldiers who enlisted at the age of sixteen were approximately twice as likely to be killed or injured than those who enlisted when they were eighteen years old or above (Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch 2013). Recent reports by non-governmental organizations have argued, on the basis of medical evidence, that the recruitment of under-18s into the British military is a public health issue because of these higher risks of fatality and injury. They have also pointed to harms within the Armed Forces such as alcohol misuse—which is higher than in the wider civilian population and higher among younger military personnel—and to self-harm and suicide, which is also more common among young military personnel than among young civilians (Medact 2016). Another important issue that has been raised by such organizations is the informed and voluntary nature of consent to enlisting. It has been argued that marketing and recruitment materials provide little to no balanced information about the risks of military service, and there is also clear evidence to suggest that the UK Armed Forces disproportionately target some of the most socio-economically vulnerable children in their recruiting practices, raising important questions about the state’s exploitation of some of its most precarious young citizens (Medact 2016; Louise and Sangster 2019). For Young-Bruehl (2012: 3–4) the most profoundly anti-child of views are those that consider “adult authority over children absolute, to the point of life and death.” In light of the UK’s policy in recruiting under-18s despite strong evidence of grave risks to them, the UK’s martial regulation of children is profoundly childist. It clearly prioritizes the military’s recruitment needs and the state’s desire for martial capabilities over the lives and life chances of children and young people. The question is why this is the case. I would suggest that the answer lies in the centrality of military power to past and current generations and their sense of British national identity, an identity that is increasingly fragile in a period where the UK is far less economically and politically powerful on the world stage than it once was, especially as an imperial power. Paul Gilroy (2005) highlights just how intoxicating the idea of the defeat of the Nazi regime by a small, plucky island nation remains to British culture, how it continues to shape the British state’s sense of itself as a global power. But Gilroy (2005) also highlights just how contingent

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this mythological national story of belonging is on the consistent and persistent erasure of the UK’s own expansionist practices and own application of ‘race science’ to justify civilizing and laying claim to other people and their lands that laid at the heart of the British Empire. This Empire was maintained throughout the Second World War and its people and resources were also exploited so the British could fight the Axis powers but this does not sit comfortably with the image of the UK and its military as a ‘force for good’ in the world. Gilroy (2005: 437) points to how notions of superiority continue to surface in Britain’s “apparently endless and unhealthy fascination with the Second World War”, noting that: Down in those famous, culture-conserving air-raid shelters where we sat out the blitz, tea was being ritually brewed to restore national spirit and to revitalize a sense of homogeneous community – across class divisions. That colonial elixir was nourishing while it lasted. Once it ran out, togetherness and mutuality were replaced by chronic, nagging pain.

This nagging pain to which Gilroy refers in his evocation of the harking back to the Blitz and Britain’s war against the Nazis has an almost visceral quality to it that suggests a nation’s heart and soul has been ruptured by a current lacking in a past homogeneity, by a dangerous heterogeneity that risks undermining the very self-determination that the British fought for in the Second World War. One could see it as a profound irony therefore that British national ‘belonging’ relies so heavily on the Nazi other and also the erasure of colonial practices that resembled Nazi expansionism and racial ideology. However, whilst in Nazi Germany, the martial regulation of children was justified as a means of fulfilling the destiny of the German people, as Michael Billig (1995: 1) reminds us, any society that “maintain[s] armies maintain[s] the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself” and any nation that continues to recruit children to its ranks in full knowledge of the risks to them would most certainly appear to value militarism more than the lives of its children. It is essential that the British Armed Forces continue to be represented and to represent themselves as a site of social mobility, societal benefit and belonging, to normalize and legitimize their existence, lest the real class, and racial, divisions that underpin British foreign policy are revealed.

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Concluding Thoughts—Populism Then and Now: Children as the Future of Brave New Worlds The love of homeland was destroyed and made ridiculous. A world citizenship with a supernational imprint was presented as the goal worthiest to strive for…Ideas foreign to our people spread…people became more and more dependent economically upon foreign countries. (The Nazi Primer, Childs 1938: 102) …too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street. But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means. (Theresa May, British Prime Minister, 2016)

In his analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and what he calls ‘the poetics of National Socialism,’ Albrecht Koschorke (2017: 3) asks how it is that “certain ideas – especially ones that start out as marginal and circulate on a small scale – strike a chord with the population at large, and under what circumstances…they make the leap from the world of speeches and screeds to political action.” Acknowledging that explaining this is extremely complicated, Koschorke (2017: 6) nonetheless suggests that the translation of “more or less diffuse emotional states – fear, hatred, feelings of belonging, desires, interests and so on – into slogans and narratives” can be highly effective of affective charges that facilitate distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ because they create a sense of “cognitive stabilization” in the place of previously untargeted “pent-up aggression” and “free-floating expectations, hopes and desires.” For the Nazi regime, the young provided a means to recover a homeland seen as tainted and seized by outsiders, a means to stem economic dependence on other countries and make a brave new world for Aryans. When Theresa May proclaimed in 2016, in the context of the highly divisive referendum outcome some months before that put the UK on the path to leaving the European Union, that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” she too sought to turn hopes and fears into slogans and narratives that would engender a particular kind of politics, a politics that emphasizes the “people down the road” over a notion of world citizenship. In this context, the UK Armed Forces are facing a recruitment crisis and they have framed the solution to this as targeting

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children and young people who are longing to belong. Such martial regulation prioritizes the desires of the UK to remain militarily relevant on the world stage over the wellbeing of some of its most vulnerable young people and it does so by promising them, and wider British society, a sense of national pride and belonging that draws on an ‘us and them’ narrative no less familiar to Mein Kampf. This is not in any way to suggest that current British military recruitment practices, or the nature of a UK identity constructed around anti-immigration and anti-globalisation sentiment, are reducible to or the same as Nazism. Nor is it to suggest that the horrors and crimes of National Socialism are in any way diminished by tracing discursive practices in their martial regulation of youth that have wider salience. Instead what I am suggesting is that it is vital to question any attempts to martially regulate the young in whatever political context. This is because these attempts are so often profoundly childist in seeking to prioritize the militarist politics of current adult generations over the needs and rights of the young. The immersion of young people in Nazi ideology was something of great concern to occupying allied forces at the end of the Second World War. In the papers of Margit Meissner, director of German Youth Activities (GYA), an organization linked to the U.S. Army of Occupation of 1947–1948, she describes how she was questioned daily about the role of the GYA and outlines its mission as assisting the “military government in the re-orientation and rehabilitation of German youth” (Meissner 1947–1948, item 5). She describes this as a mission to “develop personal initiative among young people” and to “foster independent and critical judgment and self-responsibility in group endeavour” which she states is “not an easy short-term job” (Meissner 1947–1948, item 5). Such qualities might easily be regarded as antithetical to the martial regulation of the young by the Nazis but, in characterizing them as mere objects of the regime, it obscures the desires some German youths had to participate in National Socialism and of other young people to resist it. Similarly, the representation of military service as of benefit to Britain’s youths, especially the ‘wayward,’ denies the young political, economic, and life choices. The adult population of the contemporary UK may be better served by applying some critical judgement and self-responsibility of their own by asking who really benefits from the martial regulation of young people. There is also a lesson here for IR. Its longstanding neglect of the role of children in global politics obfuscates their geopolitical agency and significance. Until states,

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militaries, and indeed, many scholars of IR, come to think more carefully about the implications of the martial regulation of young people, every war will continue to be a war against children.

Note 1. As Benwell and Hopkins (2016) note, ‘children’, ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ are all contested concepts that can vary in meaning across cultures, contexts and time. For the purposes of this chapter, I will therefore adopt an understanding of children and young people that is contextually contingent in my discussions of the Hitler Youth and contemporary British military policy.

References Armed Forces Careers Office. 2007. “Application for Service in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces Form.” Accessed 1 March 2019. http://s175741619.websitehome.co.uk/euotc/files/AFCO_Form4_Joint_July07.pdf. Basham, Victoria M. 2011. “Kids with Guns: Militarization, Masculinities, Moral Panic and (Dis)Organised Violence.” In The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, edited by J. Marshall Beier, 175–193. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Basham, Victoria M. 2016. “Raising an Army: The Geopolitics of Militarizing the Lives of Working-Class Boys in an Age of Austerity.” International Political Sociology 10 (3): 258–274. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olw013. Beier, J. Marshall, ed. 2011. The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Benwell, Matthew C., and Peter Hopkins, eds. 2016. Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. Los Angeles: Sage. British Army. 2019. “Options: Soldier Junior Entry.” Accessed 1 March 2019. https://apply.army.mod.uk/how-to-join/entryoptions/soldier-junior-entry. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Campbell Bartoletti, Susan. 2005. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow. New York: Scholastic. Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch. 2013. One Step Forward: The Case for Ending Recruitment of Minors by the British Armed Forces. London: ForcesWatch. Childs, Harwood L. 1938. The Nazi Primer. New York: Harper & Brothers. Cunningham, Hugh. 2006. The Invention of Childhood. London: BBC Books.

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Department for Education, UK. 2019. Destinations of Key Stage 4 and 16–18 students, England, 2017/18. London: Department for Education. Dorling, Danny. 2016. “Brexit: The Decision of a Divided Country.” BMJ 354 (8066): 91. Doty, Roxanne Lynn. 1993. “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A ­Post-positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines.” International Studies Quarterly 37 (3): 297–320. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2600810. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon and translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. “Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘War on Terror’.” Patterns of Prejudice 39 (4): 431–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00313220500347899. Harber, Clive, ed. 2004. Schooling as Violence: How Schools Harm Pupils and Societies. Abingdon: Routledge. Harber, Clive, and Noriko Sakade. 2009. “Schooling for Violence and Peace: How Does Peace Education Differ from ‘Normal’ Schooling?” Journal of Peace Education 6 (2): 171–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/174002009030 86599. Higate, Paul. 1998. “The Body Resists: Everyday Clerking and Unmilitary Practice.” In The Body in Everyday Life, edited by Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson, 181–198. London: Routledge. Hobbis Harris, John. 2013. Cadet’s Pocket Book. Newport: Military Pocket Books. Jenks, Chris. 1996. Childhood. New York: Routledge. Joyce, Eric. 1998. Arms and the Man: Renewing the Armed Services. 2nd ed. London: Fabian Society. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2017. On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kulz, Christy. 2017. “Heroic Heads, Mobility Mythologies and the Power of Ambiguity.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 38 (2): 85–104. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.1044071. Levy, Yagil. 1998. “Militarizing Inequality: A Conceptual Framework.” Theory and Society 27 (6): 873–904. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1006962331533. Louise, Rhianna, and Emma Sangster. 2019. Selling the Military: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Marketing in the UK. London: ForcesWatch and Medact. May, Theresa. 2016. “Theresa May’s Conference Speech in Full.” The Telegraph, 5 October. Accessed 1 March 2019. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ 2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-speech-in-full/.

154  V. M. BASHAM Medact. 2016. The Recruitment of Children by the UK Armed Forces: A Critique from Health Professionals. London: Medact. Meissner, Margit. 1947–1948. “Margit Meissner Papers”. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Gift of Margit Meissner, Accession Number: 2007.359.1. Ministry of Defence. 2013. Policy on Recruiting Under-18s (U18). Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Ref. FOI2015/00618 by Child Soldiers International. Pagaard, Stephen. 2005. “Teaching the Nazi Dictatorship: Focus on Youth.” The History Teacher 38 (2): 189–207. https://doi.org/10.2307/1555719. Save the Children. 2019. Stop the War on Children: Protecting Children in 21st Century Conflict. London: Save the Children. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). 2018. “Holocaust Encyclopedia: Hitler Youth.” Accessed 1 March 2019. https://encyclopedia. ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-youth-2. Valentine, Gill. 2009. “Children’s Bodies: An Absent Presence.” In Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth, edited by Kathrin Horschelmann and Rachel Colls, 22–37. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Watson, Alison M.S. 2006. “Children and International Relations: A New Site of Knowledge?” Review of International Studies 32 (2): 237–250. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0260210506007005. Woodward, Rachel. 2005. “From Military Geography to Militarism’s Geographies: Disciplinary Engagements with the Geographies of Militarism and Military Activities.” Progress in Human Geography 29 (6): 718–740. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph579oa. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2012. Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Toying with Militarization: Children and War on the Homefront Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter Introduction ‘How do they militarize a can of soup’? It is with this question that Cynthia Enloe (2000: 1) begins Maneuvers, her seminal study of the militarization of women’s lives. In this instance, Enloe was referring to a can of tomato and noodle soup which she had purchased some years previously out of curiosity, for rather than containing noodle pieces in the shape of the letters of the alphabet, this can had been made with n ­ oodles in the shape of Star Wars satellites (for a more recent example of the emergence of ‘military themed eggs’ in the UK in the wake of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, see Tidy 2015). Enloe’s question immediately suggests a series of further questions: who is the ‘they’ inferred in the question? What might be the purpose of such a militarization? Do objects have an infinite capacity to effectively transmit such intended forms of militarization? And perhaps, most pertinently for this edited collection, who is the intended target of the militarized soup? Whilst Enloe identifies the likely purchaser as the target, we can perhaps think T. Woodyer (*)  University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Carter  University of Exeter, Exeter, UK © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_8

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of the ultimate intended ‘target’ as a child; ‘fun’ shapes are a key feature of the ways in which food is marketed at children, and food and drink products are frequently tied in to movie promotions and other kinds of franchises. Enloe does not quite make it clear whether the ‘Star Wars’ satellite-shapes of her particular can of soup are related to the Star Wars film franchise, or rather draw inspiration from the failed Reaganite space weapons programme that took its name from the films; in either case, children are being enticed with noodles in the shape of military-related objects. In thinking about why children and childhood should be taken seriously within IR, then, one argument would simply be that children are subjected to the wider worlds of militarization and security whether they like it or not. We might think of Enloe’s questioning of the militarized soup can as a ‘research puzzle,’ after Linda Åhäll (2016), who likewise uses the everyday ubiquity of the poppy as an entry point for thinking about remembrance and the performance of the political more broadly within the UK. Reflecting on the notion of ‘the research puzzle,’ Åhäll (2016: 165–166) contends that “learning from feminist theorising by letting political puzzles guide the research design, rather than the academic field, we might ensure theoretical and methodological creativity in a way that leads to… new and exciting directions, beyond the limited mappings in Schools and theoretical perspectives, beyond the dominant narrative of our discipline.” In our case, the research puzzle began with a child’s toy; more specifically a 10-inch high action figure, similar in design to G.I. Joe or Action Man. The ‘Her Majesty’s Armed Forces’ (hereafter HMAF) toy range was launched in the UK in 2009. The range consists of a variety of different kinds of toys and play objects, such as military costumes for children to wear, smaller Lego-style play kits, and toy military vehicles. The 10-inch action figure range, though, was both the centrepiece of the launch and subsequently the most popular with consumers, in terms of sales. The design of the action figure shares much with its predecessors, G.I. Joe (available 1964–1976; 1982–1994, largely in the U.S.), and Action Man (1966–1984; 1993; 1996–2006, largely in the UK), with two notable differences. Firstly, both those earlier ranges tended to trade on nostalgia, especially the Action Man range which was dominated by uniforms reminiscent of the Second World War, and whose main enemy was a German action figure (evidenced both by the availability of German WW2 uniforms as part of the range, and through the

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para-textual visual culture of the Action Man range, in advertising, packaging and other printed materials). Although there are a few notable exceptions, contemporary military or political issues were rarely engaged within either the Action Man or G.I. Joe ranges. In contrast, the HMAF range drew explicitly on British military engagements that were happening at that time. The uniforms, weaponry, and vehicles were designed to authentically match those currently being used by the British military, and the desert combat action figure (with obvious allusions to UK military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan) was the best selling in the range. This leads directly into the second notable difference: whilst both G.I. Joe and Action Man sought a degree of authenticity with their products, the HMAF range took this a step further, through its close relationship with the UK Armed Forces. Whilst produced and marketed by a commercial toy company (Character Options), the range was licensed and, thus, to some extent, produced in co-operation with the UK Ministry of Defence. This allowed the product to use, for example, the authentic insignia of all of the main branches of the UK Armed Forces (Army, Navy, and Air Force), which are otherwise prohibited for reproduction. That the Ministry of Defence officially licensed the product was also featured prominently on the packaging. Our exploration of the place of children within the field of IR thus begins with this ‘research puzzle’: what are we to make, and how do we make sense of, the emergence of this particular toy range? And what does this particular example tell us about the ways in which childhood and wider geopolitical issues are entangled? These questions have, of course, been asked before, and in the next section of this chapter we briefly review some of the literature around ‘war play.’ This literature can perhaps be characterized as having two main concerns: first, emerging largely from childhood studies and psychology, a concern to establish whether ‘war play’, in a general sense, is good or bad for children and their development as moral or ethical subjects; and, second, more often arising from International Relations, Security Studies and Critical Geopolitics, an emphasis on interrogating the ways in which ‘war play’ is subject to manipulation and coercion by state and vested elites, largely understood through the framework of militarization. In the rest of the chapter we principally seek to engage with the second of these two literatures. Our main argument is that too often the accounts that stress the militarization of childhood fail to adequately recognize the political lives of children, and render them instead as passive subjects. As a

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response, we argue that in order to develop more nuanced accounts of the entanglements of childhood and IR, child-centred ­methodological approaches are necessary. We illustrate this argument through reference to the embodied and ethnographic approach that characterizes our Ludic Geopolitics research project. The chapter also reflects more generally on the promises, problems, and prospects for taking children seriously within IR. Thus, whilst throughout the chapter we argue for a multi-sited research perspective that places children and their agency at the centre, we also recognize that there are challenges in doing so. For example, multi-sited approaches present both methodological and analytical challenges; and emphasizing childhood agency and political subjectivity potentially risks downplaying issues of power, vulnerability, and often well-founded concerns around militarization. We discuss these ideas in more detail in the concluding section.

The Militarization of Childhood Public discourse on the issue of war play tends to structure the debate in binary good/bad terms: that either war play is good because, for example, it is a natural expression of human behaviour, and because it is a reflection of the real world; or, that war play is bad, because it, for example, encourages violent and aggressive behaviour between children. Furthermore, these kinds of arguments often position the deliberation about the rights and wrongs of war play in a developmental framework—that is to say, in the context of child development, towards some future adult self. Broadly put, then, the ‘war play debate’ sets in opposition those that believe ‘violent’ play during childhood portends a violent adulthood and those that reject, or at least downplay, such a correlation (Goldstein 1998; Holland 2003). With reference to the former position, there have been a historical series of what might be called ‘moral panics,’ ranging from concerns about toy warships on the eve of World War One (Fraser 1966; Reynolds 2013), to more recent concerns about the effects of computer games—a topic raised by UK and U.S. legislatures in the wake of the 2011 attacks by Anders Breivik and the 2012 Sandy Hook killings (UK Parliament 2011; Karlinsky and Przygoda 2012). The established academic literature on this debate is, however, much less clear about these issues of cause and effect. Research findings are inconsistent, with different studies variously reporting that

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war toys enhance aggressive behaviour (e.g., Feshbach 1956; Turner and Goldsmith 1976), lower aggressive behaviour (e.g., Bonte and Musgrove 1943; Gribbin 1979), and have no effect on aggressive behaviour (e.g., Etaugh and Happach 1979; Sutton-Smith et al. 1988). To some extent, these contrasting conclusions are the outcome of varying methodological approaches and definitional differences around key concepts. These literatures provide a useful departure point for thinking through the geopolitics of childhood, although very few of these studies are couched in terms of militarization, militarism, or the geopolitical. What the more nuanced research in this area does provide, however, is recognition of two important elements. First, that play is ultimately a creative and imaginative activity, the outcomes of which are hard to predict. As Jeffrey H. Goldstein (1992: 2) argues, “One cannot say that a toy has this or that effect. It depends upon the manner and context in which a toy is used. If war toys do not consistently lead to aggressive behaviour it is because most children play with them in imaginative, cooperative ways.” A second critical insight from this literature is a recognition that many of those accounts that necessarily see a direct and causal connection between war play and violence and aggression do so because of a particular construction of childhood and childhood subjectivity. As Jackie Marsh (2004: 320) argues, “[t]he distaste towards gun play is akin to the disdain which many educators demonstrate towards some of the other activities children enjoy, such as watching television or playing computer games…ultimately, a number of early childhood practices are predicated on idealized models of childhood in which children are situated as vulnerable and in need of protection from the ravages of media and other cultural influences.” In short, these approaches share much with the so-called developmental approach to childhood, an approach that tends to emphasize what children lack, assuming that childhood is a phase through which individuals must pass before becoming an adult with fully formed capabilities and the power to exert their own agency. These kinds of approaches have been critiqued recently and as such there has been something of a turn away from developmentalism in Childhood Studies. This turn understands childhood through its capabilities, rather than its deficiencies, and thus understands children as capable social and political actors in their own right. In the context of war play, then, this opens up the possibility of modes of engagement such as experimentation,

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­ eaning-making, and resistance. We explore these ideas more fully in the m next section (Childhood and Political Subjectivity) and build on these arguments in the analysis of our empirical research. Within International Relations and Critical Geopolitics, studies of war play have emerged as part of a wider rise in interest in the connections between popular culture and world politics (for overviews of this work, see Grayson et al. 2009; Caso and Hamilton 2015). Kyle Grayson et al. (2009: 155) contend that these studies of popular culture and world politics align with a broader concern expressed across various critical branches of IR that developed from the late 1980s, to move beyond the cause and effect models that had traditionally been the core part of the discipline, toward a research agenda that posed the question “how did this become possible?” With more specific reference to images, although applicable to popular culture more broadly, Roland Bleiker (2018: 19–20) has recently argued, “causality is not the right concept to understand the impact of images… Images work gradually and across time and space. They transgress numerous borders – spatial, linguistic, and psychological and other ones. They work inaudibly but powerfully: by slowly entrenching – or challenging – how we view, think of and thus also how we conduct politics.” We would argue, then, that this stance provides the most fruitful approach to understanding the geopolitics of childhood and ‘war play,’ for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows us to sidestep the perennial binary debate about the rightness/wrongness of war play that has tended to dominate public debate. This debate is often wrapped up in questions of direct causality, which, we would argue, divert attention from the full range of political effects of war play. Second, and relatedly, this opens up the possibilities for a greater range of studies into the politics of war play, with the ability to pose different kinds of questions and frame the contours of the debate in different ways. We go on to explore some of these in the context of our own Ludic Geopolitics project, in the next section. Studies on popular culture and world politics have been w ­ ide-ranging and varied in their subject matter, taking in, for example, film (e.g., Weber 2005), photography and photojournalism (e.g., Campbell 2003), art (e.g., Danchev 2009), and TV (e.g., Debrix 2008). We do not intend to review this literature, but it is worth pausing to make a couple of observations. First, as is the case more widely in International Relations and Critical Geopolitics, children are largely absent from this work,

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with some notable exceptions (e.g., Brocklehurst 2011; Crowe 2011). Second, whilst there has been engagement with games as a form of popular culture, this has usually focused on video games. James Der Derian (2001) provided a significant intervention in these debates through his notion of MIME-NET (­military-industrial-media-entertainment network), a reworking of the Cold War concept of the m ­ ilitary-industrial complex. For Der Derian, this was a useful concept for exploring the growing interconnections between the logics of military, media, and technology, as well as the material connections between those different industries. Amongst these connections, Der Derian drew attention to the increasingly close co-operation between video games and contemporary warfare, not just in representational terms, but also through collaborations between weapons designers and games designers, for example. One particular game, America’s Army, signified this relationship especially well—a free-to-play, online video game, officially linked to the U.S. Army and used as a recruitment tool (see Stahl 2006; Power 2007). Games with less direct links to the military, but with very clear military themes (such as the hugely successful Call of Duty franchise), have also received critical attention. Mark Salter (2011), for example, analyses the geographical imaginations inherent across a range of video games and Nick Robinson (2015: 452) discusses recent video games that portray the U.S. military engaged in contemporary conflicts, arguing that these provide “a lens to reveal key dynamics underpinning American exceptionalism in US foreign policy.” For the most part, these studies tend toward discursive readings of military-themed video games, although there are some exceptions to this (see Bos 2018). These textual and discursive readings of video games have provided significant critical purchase, and have raised important issues about the militarization of popular culture, and by extension, everyday lives. Roger Stahl (2006: 113), for example, argues that video games that invite the player to adopt military roles blur the distinctions between citizens and soldiers, “merging the home front and the battlefield though multiple channels.” He further suggests that “[t]he blurring of the lines between citizen and soldier initiates a ‘third sphere’ of cultural production. This third sphere is a symptom of larger social militarization, of the recoding of the social field with military values and ideals” (Stahl 2006: 125; emphasis added). A key contribution of this work, then, has been to tie together the distant and the proximate (the separation of which underpins much

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Realist work in both IR and Political Geography) in our understanding of global politics, and to make visible the militaristic tendencies of forms of culture, such as video games. Perhaps what some of this work has been less adept at doing is exploring this entanglement of the distant and the proximate (or to put it another way, the international and the domestic) in ways that do not reduce the latter to an effect of the former. Critiquing this spatial and scalar hierarchy has been a regular refrain in feminist accounts of the political, from the early writings of Enloe (1989) to more recent articulations from, amongst others, Rachel Pain (2015) and her account of ‘Intimate War,’ which rejects the notion that the geopolitical ‘out there’ (the international) simply ‘drips down’ into the geopolitical ‘in here’ (for a fuller discussion of these ideas, see Woodyer and Carter 2018). It follows, then, that what is required in our attempts to understand the militarization of childhood through toys such as the HMAF range is a methodology that allows for more than just a discursive or ‘textual’ reading of the action figures and their accessories; a methodological approach that understands these toy objects as having potential militarizing effects, but not to determine these prior to the event (where the event can be understood as the coming together of the toy with a child or children, and the playful, emergent, experimental, and ambiguous outcomes of that encounter). Thus, whilst we would agree with Stahl (2006: 125) that the social field can be ‘recoded’ with “military values and ideals,” we would add two important caveats. First, the social field needs to be specified in ways that recognize the existence of particular locations of encounter. As Matthew Rech et al. (2015: 57; emphasis in original) argue, “locating militarism amidst the people and places it affects is to realize that these everyday, local, and personal sites of militarization are not just reflective, or just a consequence of, militarism ‘writ large’, but that they are constitutive of militarism, and are central to not only its effects, but its reproduction.” Second, this is not just an issue of scale, but, crucially, of agency too. More specifically, some versions of the militarization of everyday life thesis posit militarization discourses as all-powerful, reducing the everyday as simply the site in which militarization takes effect, rather than as the site of encounter, engagement, and negotiation. In the case of militarized effects of children, the agency afforded to the ‘target’ of militarization discourses is doubly denied, given the political status and subjectivity often afforded to children. It is to this question that we now turn.

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Childhood and Political Subjectivity The previous section alluded to the dominance of a particular conception of childhood within research on the militarization of childhood generally, and war play more specifically. This is the concept of the child as object, a person acted upon by social institutions—effectively an outcome of society—rather than a subject acting in society. Based on an assumption of dependency and vulnerability, this approach fails to understand children in their own right, rendering their situated knowledge and capabilities invisible. As argued by J. Marshall Beier (2015: 6), “[t]he common thread in… dominant constructions of childhood is the diminution of agency.” This most traditional of perspectives, whilst still common in research on children, co-exists uneasily with theoretical perspectives developed since the 1980s that focus on children’s subjectivity and social agency. These perspectives extend earlier traditions that sought to acknowledge the child as a person with subjectivity, albeit one with limited development and maturity, to focus more fully on children’s understandings and experiences as social actors in their own right. Analytically, children are given central conceptual status; they are “seen to act, take part in, change and become changed by the social and cultural world they live in” (Christensen and Prout 2002: 481). This epistemological shift is marked by changes in the sites of concern within research. Firstly, we might note a move away from sites of socialization such as the school and public playground, most notably in geographical research. Attention to children’s everyday practices of living in relation to their use of local neighbourhoods, movement between places, and intimate engagements with popular cultural forms emphasizes children as more than solely parts of the social institutions on which they were traditionally seen to be dependent (Woodyer et al. 2015). Secondly, we might note a growing emphasis on the child’s body. This is seen in attention to the body as a key site over which the child exercises control and the role of the body’s materiality in shaping children’s constructions of social relations, meanings, and experiences (Prout 2000; Horton and Kraftl 2006). Materialist re-imaginings of childhood have sought to emphasize the myriad ways in which children exercise agency. Drawing on ­actor-network theory, Sharon Ogilvie-Whyte (2003) has (re)conceived children as ‘heterogeneous engineers’ examining how they emerge through interactional processes with a large array of human and nonhuman entities. Her observations of play reveal children’s tactical and

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strategic use of a range of entities—from siblings to planks of wood— in their competition over playground space. More recently, childhood scholars have drawn on the insights of new materialisms, particularly Karen Barad’s (2007) intra-actional understanding of agency to position children as participants amongst a world of active materials (Rautio 2013, 2014; Änggård 2016; Arvidsen 2018). This new materialist approach “direct[s] attention to the ways in which children constitute their material – human and non-human – surroundings and vice versa. Agency [is] allocated space in between children and their environments, arising in complex encounters rather than located only in the human individuals” (Rautio 2013: 396). Here agency is conceived less as an essential attribute of children, and more an effect of connections between heterogeneous entities. Recognition of children’s social—or, rather, socio-material agency— has arguably not been matched by the same level of attention to children’s political subjectivity or agency (though there are notable exceptions, e.g., Beier 2011; Brocklehurst 2015). This is, in no small part, due to childhood not being considered as “self-evidently political” (Kallio 2008: 286), and perhaps even dismissed as inherently “apolitical” (Philo and Smith 2003). As Kirsi Pauliina Kallio (2008: 286) argues, “Generally speaking, childish behaviour is considered the very opposite of being political.” Kallio (2008: 286) thus calls for politics to be “redefined as an on-going negotiation and struggle taking place in everyday life.” Through this lens we can recognize a longer trajectory of child-centred research focused on micro-political acts within everyday practices of living. Play, for example, has been recognized as an important site for the negotiation of subjectivities (e.g., Thorne 1993; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Holt 2007; Rosen 2017) and the questioning, parodying, and subverting of socio-cultural norms (Katz 2004; Marsh and Bishop 2013). Whilst this research is important for emphasizing children’s negotiation rather than simply reproduction of social worlds, there remains a lack of focus on the particular characteristics of play through which these micro-political processes operate. This limits recognition of children’s political subjectivity and agency. One notable exception is Susan McDonnell’s (2019) study of how children’s playful practices shape senses of belonging and acts of exclusion. She explicitly frames play as a site of ‘tactical criticality;’ a “site of in-betweeness, where assemblages of disparate elements (bodies, things, media narratives) produce innovative re-imaginings and becomings; or alternatively foreclose becomings and reproduce binaries” (McDonnell 2019: 262).

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Child-Centred Methodology Let us return to the notion of the ‘research puzzle.’ How might the political puzzle of the HMAF toy range, together with the arguments outlined above, guide research design? If we are to produce a nuanced account of the entanglement of children and militarization, we need to examine how this toy range enters the political lives of children. This was a key guiding principle behind our Ludic Geopolitics project. Prioritizing this particular audience over the cultural producers of the range—including both the toy company and the UK Ministry of Defence—corrects the tendency of prevailing frames of militarization that reduce children to passive subjects. It also runs the risk of over-emphasizing children’s political agency, again leaving part of the puzzle missing. As McDonnell (2019: 262; emphasis added) argues, we need to attend to “both the vitality and the constrained nature of children’s world-making practices.” To this end, we adopted a multi-sited approach to make sense of the emergence of the HMAF toy range. This was organized around four inter-linking sites: (i) trade-based; (ii) museum-based; (iii) school-based; and, (iv) home-based (see Fig. 8.1). The trade-based strand of the research acted as a starting point for querying the role the HMAF toy range plays in naturalizing an ideologically charged British militarism based on juxtaposition of ‘hero’ with ‘extremist’ (Kelly 2013). Through analysis of toy trade publications, interviews with cultural producers (including design teams, factory floor workers, and licensors, spanning military action figure ranges from the 1960s to the present day), and ethnographic analysis of trade fairs, we were able to trace the historical trajectory of the British military action figure, and thus contextualize its development in relation to wider geopolitical climates. The potential contribution of the HMAF toy range to a contemporary institutionalized homage to militarism is evident in the brand owners’ open acknowledgement of the range’s role in a wider re-enchantment with the British military: I think there is so much excitement about the range as it’s important to have the right products for the time and I think the new ranges have really hit the psyche of the nation. I think it would have been more difficult to launch this range three to four years ago but now the public perception of the armed forces has changed significantly. (Marketing Director, Character Options, Toys N Playthings 2009, 24)

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Fig. 8.1  Diagrammatic representation of the different research strands of the multi-sited Ludic Geopolitics project (Source Authors)

Wider analysis of the timing of military ranges coming to market reveals close correlation with periods of military engagement. However, interviews with trade professionals revealed that the production of a toy such as a military action figure is the outcome of a complex set of relations between individual designers, corporate strategies of toy manufacturers, the contemporary geopolitical context, and the wider processes of the toy trade. This makes it hard to sustain claims about the ideological intent of particular products. Whilst the HMAF range has obvious public

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relations potential for a Ministry of Defence keen on improving the public image of the British military, their decision to licence the range following an approach from Character Options was less a deliberate move to target messaging at a particular young audience, than more basic considerations about brand reputation and the materiality of the products bearing their insignia. The museum-based strand of our research allowed us to trace the cross-generational relations that shape engagements with war toys. This involved ethnographic analysis of a ‘War Games’ exhibition curated by the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, including observation of visitor engagement and analysis of visitor feedback postcards (for a fuller description of method and findings, see Carter et al. 2016). The placing of toys into a museum display clearly positions them differently than in their usual domestic setting of the home. They are not so obviously used as play objects allowing for more reflective practices around the relationship between war, toys, play, and violence, by children and adults alike. The diversity of children’s responses to the exhibition and its themes challenged notions that discursive readings of toys can be straightforwardly mapped onto children’s responses to them, and revealed children’s ability to clearly distinguish between real and fictional violence. This demonstrated that it certainly appears to be an oversimplification to suggest that children are passive recipients of the geopolitical content of toys. The school-based strand of the research was principally used as a recruitment strategy for the home-based phase of the project. HMAF toys were introduced into the school classroom, children were given some time for free play with them and any classroom objects they chose to enrol in the play, before being asked to produce a short play narrative in small groups. Researchers observed the play, talking to the children about the development of the play scenarios. These hour-long sessions revealed the influence of peer culture (including incorporation of popular inter-textual references from film and TV) and school curricula (ranging from religious stories to topic work on war) on children’s play narratives. Whilst one of the project’s ultimate aims was to move beyond the traditional site of war play research (the school classroom) as a means to address the limitations of previous work, this strand of the research was important for including collective processes of socialization into the research puzzle. As William A. Corsaro and Luisa Molinari (2000: 197–198) argue, “socialiation is not something that happens to

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children; it is a process in which children, in interaction with others, produce their own peer culture and eventually come to reproduce, to extend and to join the adult world.” By working with the children, rather than the adults responsible for safeguarding as is common in previous studies, this school-based research allowed us to begin to access peer cultures that inevitably influenced the play we were to go on and explore in the ­home-based strand of the research. The home is a crucial setting for understanding how war toys are actually played with, but has been overlooked as a site of analysis in research to date. Domestic spaces of play are key sites for the development of children’s political identities through the negotiation of a complex set of relations between the individual and the wider world (see Woodyer and Carter 2018). To fully appreciate children’s political subjectivity, we need to be open to the myriad ways their agency is expressed, including how it arises in the embodied and affective dimensions of their everyday lives through complex encounters with disparate elements from bodies and things to media-driven inter-textual references. This necessitates a child-centred methodological approach that is: (i) non-reductive and does not seek to trivialize play in terms of its significance for the player or its transformative potential; (ii) ­more-than-rational, appreciating that play’s meaningfulness may derive from the pleasure of making nonsense; and, (iii) embodied, facilitating understanding of the intra-action between bodies and material entities such as toys and play environments. To this end, we turned to non-representational theories, which have drawn increasing attention ­ to how geopolitical knowledges are actually enacted ‘on the ground’ (Carter and McCormack 2006). They are particularly pertinent here, for as geographers have noted, play exceeds representation: “This is felt in its prioritising of the non-cognitive and more-than-rational, its embodied nature, its heightening of the affective register, its momentary temporality, its intersection between being and becoming, and its intensity” (Woodyer 2012: 319; see also Harker 2005). The Ludic Geopolitics project conducted a series of play ethnographies in family homes, involving a mix of observant participation and video techniques to give the child and their intra-actions central conceptual status. Observant participation in the child’s play with HMAF toys was used to enable the researcher to begin to appreciate the embodied and affective dimensions of play with military action figures. This is based on recognition that to understand an embodied practice like

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a participant means to miss most of what is going on as it is acted out in a p ­re-reflective manner, drawing on intuitive forms of knowledge. Through active engagement in the play, the researcher can begin to fill in gaps in meaning with embodied information that is not accessible to the uninitiated player nor readily reflected on, and thus communicated, by the participant. This intense form of observant participation helps the researcher make more thorough sense of children’s engagements with HMAF toys, experiencing the tactility of manipulating the toys, the muscular sensations and visceral pleasures involved in play, and negotiating cues for action from material elements, including other players. Play extended beyond HMAF toys to include use of other toys in the child’s toy collection. This was important for exploring individual children’s play preferences as expressed across different genres of play. Child participants were encouraged to lead the play, including the type of play, toys used (which often included toys other then HMAF figures), setting (such as family room, bedroom, or garden), duration of individual play events within the session, and role of the researcher within the play. As part of the play ethnographies, children were loaned handheld camcorders to record their play both within and between sessions with the researcher. This allowed for a wider range of play practices to be captured, including lone play. Beyond brief demonstrations of the basic recording and playback functions of the camcorder, and how it could be held in the hand or secured on a tripod, children were given no instruction about what or how to film. They were free to direct the footage, which included putting the researcher in front of the lens or instructing them on how to use the camcorder to capture particular elements of the play. This encouraged children to reflect on their own play, with shared viewing of video footage between researcher and child later extending this reflection. Crucially, this reflective element did not seek to rationalize the play, but rather add a further layer of meaning to the analysis by sharing experience of the play between different players. This is a methodological approach that was developed and implemented as part of previous geographical research on children’s domestic play with toys, albeit a wider range of toy type (for a fuller account of the method used, see Woodyer 2008; forthcoming). This method was particularly instructive for demonstrating that despite concerns around the ideological role of war play, as an embodied, ambiguous process of assembling disparate elements (including bodies, toys, and inter-textual references) it cannot be over-determined,

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predicted or explained prior to observation of its practice. Whilst the design and material properties of war toys shape children’s play, they do not fully determine their use or meaning since play is an inherently creative practice of bricolage. Indeed, in many cases the kinds of play enacted with the HMAF figures could scarcely be called war play at all. ‘Reality’ and ‘fantasy’ are combined in the construction of play narratives, scenarios, and moments, often with the explicit aim of making nonsense that, rather than being trivial, carries the potential for r­e-imagining the world and how it operates. War play was mapped and spatialized in various ways, through reference to notions of terrain and landscape, as well as the development of strategies within the play to resolve and overcome different forms of conflict. Issues related to violence, justice, national identity, and conceptions of the enemy were both reflected and reworked in the observed war play. Play scenarios often involved deliberate mishmash of geopolitical references, including historical world wars and the more recent ‘war on terror.’ Children did, at times, reinforce notions of a Manichean world, for example demarcating U.S. characters as heroic saviours existing on a higher moral plane enacting militarized responses justified on the basis of retaliation, illustrating the partial domestication of geopolitical logics and cultures of militarism. However, there was also clear evidence of children’s reworking of geopolitical imaginaries. Nominated ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ were both seen to have complex identities as play unfolded, each demonstrating capacity for aggression and caring for others. Playing as both perpetrator and victim, children explored notions of self-sacrifice, resilience, initiative, perseverance, comradeship, and respect for others through their characterizations, alongside the visceral thrills of taking aim and dodging shots, and mimicking the loud noise and forceful shock waves of explosions, for example. The relation between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy,’ of making nonsense and striving for realism through fidelity to geopolitical and military references, was complex, mostly marked by ambiguity. Less ambiguous was the immediate entanglement of the distant ‘world out there’ of the international geopolitical realm with the proximate ‘in here’ of the domestic space of the home with its intimate familial routines and relations of everyday life. This entanglement was enacted through embodied and affective modes of interaction—such as twisting, balancing, crashing, shooting, imitating, narrating, (un)dressing, and singing—with a wide array of human and nonhuman entities—siblings, pets, dinosaurs, Barbie dolls, furniture, and

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Christmas trees to name but a few (for fuller empirical descriptions of children’s war play, see Woodyer and Carter 2018). Children’s embodied engagements with the HMAF toys thus evidenced the nascent geopolitical practices of children, in terms of how they articulate their understandings of the geopolitical world through play, but also begin to re-work and re-imagine these geopolitical imaginaries. Children’s play scenarios, then, are far from straightforward mappings of a militarized logic of the ‘war on terror’—the geopolitical era that the toys represent—onto the domestic play spaces of children in the UK. Children are clearly more than mere vessels passively consuming ideas and practices through a linear process of socialization.

Reflections and Conclusions This discussion of some of the key findings of the Ludic Geopolitics research project is necessarily rather broad in scope, but in conjunction with the conceptual debates in the earlier sections of the chapter, our intention has been to reflect on the potential for a more child-centred IR, as well as to recognize some of the tensions and unresolved issues with such a project. One of our key aims has been to think more carefully about the ways in which causal explanations often ‘sneak back in’ in critical studies of militarization. Our multi-sited, empirical, embodied, and child-centred approach seeks to better understand the entanglement of militarization and the everyday in ways that avoid such a simplistic causal framework. A parallel move to this rejection of a simplified causality framework is to, conversely, prioritize the agency of childhood and children. This is, of course, a key feature of the ‘new social studies of childhood’ that has emerged in recent decades across the social sciences, including IR. However, whilst this move may help resolve (or at least reframe) the causality problem, it does, in turn, raise a series of issues and concerns of its own that scholars of childhood and IR need to carefully work their way through. In this conclusion, we briefly highlight some of these issues. Much valuable scholarship in IR and other disciplines has forcefully made the case that militarization entails the puncturing of the social realm with militaristic values and ideals. This is often couched as either a dripping down of the international to the domestic, or as an ‘invasion’ of the private realm: the historian Joanna Bourke’s (2014) book on military

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violence, for example, is subtitled ‘how war play invades our lives’. These kinds of accounts tend to invoke a certain kind of scalar politics, one that not only demarcates between the ‘big’ and the ‘small,’ or the ‘international’ and the ‘domestic,’ but also creates a hierarchy between these different sites and scales. Our research seeks to unsettle these demarcations, and to recognize the entanglement and co-constitution of these realms. Nevertheless, analytical and methodological challenges remain. As Kallio (2007: 122) has observed, “[c]ombining intensive work with children and critical research outside their worlds sets a fair challenge. As a result, childhood studies often emphasise either one or the other of these approaches.” Conducting intensive and detailed research across multiple sites of political contestation is, then, methodologically challenging. Furthermore, making sense of a multi-sited and multi-method project also presents analytical challenges. Combining different kinds of data from different kinds of sites requires thoughtful and careful consideration of the competing claims that emerge, and almost certainly requires working with and through ambiguity and complexity in explanation. This is one of the consequences of recognizing that power and agency are distributed effects across networks of people, objects, institutions, and ideas. Whilst IR literature influenced by the new social studies of childhood clearly makes the case for a re-orientation of the site of agency towards children, in practice this is a messy and complicated reality, which creates its own set of issues for thinking through. For example, we need to consider how a revived sense of childhood agency fits with concerns around vulnerability. In the context of militarization and childhood, we might want to retain the ability to critique, for example, recruitment campaigns aimed at school children (e.g., Basham 2016) as well as retaining the age certification system for violent video games. Agency and vulnerability in children continue to intersect in complicated ways, and we need to be attendant to these. In our research we have sought to re-think childhood political agency in ways which exceed the rational/discursive terms in which agency is often configured. Thus, children’s political potential is seen not to lie primarily in “reflective contemplations or moral judgements, but in everyday life experiences and practices” (Kallio 2007: 124). The body is an important political channel in this regard, pointing to the need to attend to embodiment (see also Dyvik and Greenwood 2016). Kallio, like us, thus turns to non-representational theory in her appreciation of

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children’s political subjectivity. As an approach to “understanding the world in terms of effectivity rather than representation; not the what but the how” (Thrift 1997: 127), it allows us to view political agency as composed of performative acts, ‘“presentations,” “showings,” and “manifestations” of everyday life’ (Thrift 1997: 126–127), rather than explicitly political acts, strategic in motivation and reflective in their form. There is thus a challenge here in how we might conceive of the political in the first instance. Finally, in re-thinking issues of agency and what might actually constitute the political, it could be argued that there is a danger in actually de-politicizing issues such as militarization. As Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood (2012) elucidate, in focussing upon the ­non-representational, we need to guard against depoliticizing accounts of children’s play. For us, placing children’s play with HMAF figures within the wider context of broader play preferences, peer cultures, influence of school curricula, cross-generational practices, and industry operations, through the multi-sited approach we have outlined was thus crucial. By emphasizing that each site of production and consumption has its own set of politics, a multi-sited approach produces a nuanced account of the entanglement of childhood and militarism that recognises both the vitality and constrained nature of children’s world-making practices.

References Åhäll, Linda. 2016. “The Dance of Militarisation: A Feminist Security Studies Take on ‘the Political’.” Critical Studies on Security 4 (2): 154–168. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2016.1153933. Änggård, Eva. 2016. “How Matter Comes to Matter in Children’s Nature Play: Posthumanist Approaches and Children’s Geographies.” Children’s Geographies 14 (1): 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015.1004523. Arvidsen, Jan. 2018. “Growing Dens. On Re-grounding the Child-Nature Relationship Through a New Materialist Approach to Children’s Dens.” Children’s Geographies 16 (3): 279–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/147332 85.2018.1425371. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Basham, Victoria M. 2016. “Raising an Army: The Geopolitics of Militarizing the Lives of Working-Class Boys in an Age of Austerity.” International Political Sociology 10 (3): 258–274. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olw013.

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176  T. WOODYER AND S. CARTER Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina. 2007. “Performative Bodies, Tactical Agents and Political Selves: Rethinking the Political Geographies of Childhood.” Space and Polity 11 (2): 121–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570701721990. Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina. 2008. “The Body as Battlefield: Approaching Children’s Politics.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 90 (3): 285–297. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2008.293.x. Karlinsky, Neal, and Dan Przygoda. 2012. “Video Games and Violence: Every Generation Blames Newest Media, Expert Says.” ABC News. Accessed 16 June 2014. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video-games-violencegeneration-blames-latest-media-expert/story?id=18009898. Katz, Cindi. 2004. Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelly, John. 2013. “Popular Culture, Sport and the ‘Hero’-Fication of British Militarism.” Sociology 47 (4): 722–738. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038 512453795. Marsh, Jackie. 2004. “Book Review. We Don’t Play with Guns Here: War, Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years.” Journal of Early Childhood Research 2 (3): 319–322. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718x0400200308. Marsh, Jackie, and Julia C. Bishop. 2013. Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day. Maidenhead: Open University Press. McDonnell, Susan. 2019. “Nonsense and Possibility: Ambiguity, Rupture and Reproduction in Children’s Play/ful Narratives.” Children’s Geographies 17 (3): 251–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1492701. Mitchell, Katharyne, and Sarah Elwood. 2012. “Mapping Children’s Politics: The Promise of Articulation and the Limits of Nonrepresentational Theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (5): 788–804. https:// doi.org/10.1068/d9011. Ogilvie-Whyte, Sharon. 2003. “Building a Bicycle Ramp: An Illustrated Example of the Process of Translation in Children’s Everyday Play Activities.” Paper presented at the Childhood and Youth Studies Network Meeting, Stirling, April 30. Pain, Rachel. 2015. “Intimate War.” Political Geography 44: 64–73. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.09.011. Philo, Chris, and Fiona M. Smith. 2003. “Guest Editorial: Political Geographies of Children and Young People.” Space and Polity 7 (2): 99–115. https://doi. org/10.1080/1356257032000133883. Power, Marcus. 2007. “Digitized Virtuosity: Video Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence.” Security Dialogue 38 (2): 271–288. https://doi. org/10.1177/0967010607078552. Prout, Alan. 2000. The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Rautio, Pauliina. 2013. “Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life.” Children’s Geographies 11 (4): 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.812278. Rautio, Pauliina. 2014. “Mingling and Imitating in Producing Spaces for Knowing and Being: Insights from a Finnish Study of ­Child-Matter Intra-Action.” Childhood 21 (4): 461–474. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568213496653. Rech, Matthew, Daniel Bos, K. Neil Jenkings, Alison Williams, and Rachel Woodward. 2015. “Geography, Military Geography, and Critical Military Studies.” Critical Military Studies 1 (1): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23337486.2014.963416. Reynolds, Kimberley. 2013. “‘A Prostitution Alike of Matter and Spirit’: ­Anti-war Discourses in Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture Before and During World War I.” Children’s Literature in Education 44 (2): 120– 139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9179-y. Robinson, Nick. 2015. “Have You Won the War on Terror? Military Videogames and the State of American Exceptionalism.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43 (2): 450–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0305829814557557. Rosen, Rachel. 2017. “Between Play and the Quotidian: Inscriptions of Monstrous Characters on the Racialised Bodies of Children.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 20 (2): 178–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2015 .1121218. Salter, Mark B. 2011. “The Geographical Imaginations of Video Games: Diplomacy, Civilization, America’s Army and Grand Theft Auto IV.” Geopolitics 16 (2): 359–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2010.538875. Stahl, Roger. 2006. “Have You Played the War on Terror?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (2): 112–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07393180600714489. Sutton-Smith, Brian, John Gerstmeyer, and Alice Meckley. 1988. “Playfighting as Folkplay Amongst Preschool Children.” Western Folklore 47 (3): 161–176. https://doi.org/10.2307/1499915. Thorne, Barrie. 1993. Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 1997. “The Still Point: Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance.” In Geographies of Resistance, edited by Steve Pile and Michael Keith, 124–151. London: Routledge. Tidy, Joanna. 2015. “Forces Sausages and Eggs for Soldiers: Food, Nostalgia, and the Rehabilitation of the British Military.” Critical Military Studies 1 (3): 220–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2015.1011439. Toys N Playthings. 2009. “Boys Just Want to Have Fun.” Toys N Playthings 28 (7): 24–33.

178  T. WOODYER AND S. CARTER Turner, Charles W., and Diane Goldsmith. 1976. “Effects of Toy Guns and Airplanes on Children’s Anti-social Free-Play Behaviour.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 21 (2): 303–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/ 0022-0965(76)90044-8. UK Parliament. 2011. “Early Day Motion 2427.” Accessed 16 June 2014. http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2010-12/2427. Weber, Cynthia. 2005. Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics, and Film. London: Routledge. Woodyer, Tara. 2008. “The Body as Research Tool: Embodied Practice and Children’s Geographies.” Children’s Geographies 6 (4): 349–362. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14733280802338056. Woodyer, Tara. 2012. “Ludic Geographies: Not Merely Child’s Play.” Geography Compass 6 (6): 313–326. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17498198.2012.00477.x. Woodyer, Tara. Forthcoming. “Using Ethnomethodologically Informed Ethnography for a Shared Process of Knowledge Creation.” In Embodied Research Methods, edited by Jennifer Tantia. London: Routledge. Woodyer, Tara, and Sean Carter. 2018. “Domesticating the Geopolitical: Rethinking Popular Geopolitics Through Play.” Geopolitics. Online in Advance of Print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1527769. Woodyer, Tara, Diana Martin, and Sean Carter. 2015. “Ludic Geographies.” In Play, Recreation, Health and Wellbeing, edited by John Horton and Bethan Evans and Tracey Skelton, 1–18. Singapore: Springer.

CHAPTER 9

Between Borders: Pop Cultural Heroes and Plural Childhoods in IR Siobhán McEvoy-Levy with Cole Byram, Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus Perry, Trinity Perry, Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore

Introduction This chapter engages with the promise, problems, and prospects of ­studying childhood in disciplinary IR by exploring three questions: How might study of popular culture illuminate or obscure the roles that children and childhoods already play in world politics? Can it help us think holistically about the plurality of childhoods that IR might observe? How can we avoid foci that reproduce privilege and power asymmetries in world politics and in IR? In addressing these questions, the chapter discusses various pop culture narratives, artifacts, and practices, with an emphasis on those that provide heroes for children and have been used by actual young people in their everyday struggles. We argue that popular culture provides one of the first, and most powerful, connections for children to world politics, whether they or S. McEvoy-Levy (*) · J. Lewis · K. Perry · T. Perry · J. Trujillo · M. Whittemore  · with Cole Byram Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_9

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adults realize it or not. Young children are offered transversal and transnational experiences in their pop culture. After early childhood, stories and games become heavier with real-world-reflecting conflicts and crises, and children make their own choices of pop culture heroes. Although deeply influenced by a neoliberal world order, these choices are also shaped by personal challenges, values, and national politics. Children may not be aware of IR or of ‘real’ world politics and conflicts at the time, but they may later make connections between childhood pop culture and those processes. Drawing on the authors’ own memories of meaningful childhood pop culture, we show how our heroes are environmentally influenced and closely linked with local relationships, identities, and struggles. For some they are also connected with experiencing violence (in its structural, cultural, and direct forms) and/or with seeking solidarity in struggles for peace and justice. More generally, they are connected with emotions and with seeking validation, guidance, and escape or sanctuary. They also influence how we try to act in the world. The chapter also provides insights into the methodological challenges of ethically and effectively studying childhoods in IR. It is important that adult scholars recognize their own subjectivity in interpreting ­children’s lives, needs, and agency. One helpful approach, used in this chapter, is “‘world’-traveling” (Lugones 1987) through collaboration with young scholars. As an intergenerational, inter-racial, and cross-cultural research team,1 we adopt a “world-travelling” approach in this chapter in an effort to learn from each other on a more equal playing field and, potentially, to open up to richer understandings of what IR could be. This approach disrupts the IR field’s often uncritical reliance on ‘credentialed’ voices and exclusionary knowledge-gathering and evaluating processes. Our recollections show that children often are not protected, or are only partially protected, from world politics—from war, deportation, drugs, poverty, racism, and gangs—which is part of their everyday lives; and they use pop culture to help make meaning out of these experiences. The whitewashing of IR occurs not only through neglect of Global South issues and voices but also through the lack of people of color from the Global North in the field of IR. In integrating childhoods into IR, we need to be mindful of how children of color in wealthy, donor states in the North are implicated, and of how the intersections of race, class, gender, and other identity factors, in young people’s lives can be fairly represented in the narratives of world politics.

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The chapter unfolds as follows: first, the chapter explores the challenges, potential significance, and pitfalls of employing pop culture to understand childhoods in IR. Then it introduces “‘world’-travelling” (Lugones 1987) as a method, followed by a presentation and analysis of our memories of heroes in pop culture.

IR, Childhoods, and Pop Culture The study of IR as a system of inter-state recognition and exchange, evolving from an international order based in the Peace of Westphalia, has been shown to be mythic, Eurocentric, and racist by many scholars (for a discussion see Pearcey 2016). As such, IR had originally closed off options for considering non-state actors, everyday practices, diverse people, and alternative forms of non-sovereign political community in world politics. This is no longer the case, as postcolonial, constructivist, and some poststructural and feminist interventions in IR have helped show. Furthermore, a sophisticated body of work now exists integrating pop culture into the study of IR (see, for example, Weldes 2003; Neuman and Nexon 2006; Shapiro 2008; Grayson et al. 2009; Dittmer 2010; Caso and Hamilton 2015). These innovations provide one route toward considering childhoods in a transformed IR discipline. Popular culture is here understood as stories, products, and practices that are available for mass consumption and the shared meanings they create in our social worlds. National holidays, sporting events, theme parks, television, books, films, comics, videogames, and music help create and limit political meaning, naturalizing some views and options for policy, obscuring or undermining others, or offering new possibilities (Weldes 2003). There are local and global implications for how pop cultures are made and distributed (Grayson et al. 2009). In addition to the politics of the global production cycle, the stories and images of pop culture have ideological contents that also influence and are shaped by world politics (McEvoy-Levy 2018). The study of pop culture contributes to a more creative IR. It helps rectify “the emptiness” of academic international relations “where people going about their lives experiencing and influencing international relations, should be” (Sylvester 2016: 56). As people, children and their experiences ought to be of interest to IR. Yet, a meaningful and holistic approach to such study is challenging. Childhoods are understood differently across time and geography. Crucially, childhoods are experienced differently, depending on race,

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class, gender, exposure to poverty and/or political violence, among other factors. Adults write the discipline of IR, and when they write about children they may be constructing what is not there and/or misrepresenting what is. Whenever we write about children, we are seizing the power of discourse to frame and interrogate an Other. In integrating the study of childhoods into IR, we may face similar pitfalls to those resulting from efforts to incorporate attention to other Others – including romanticization, exoticization, “hierarchically stratifying the global space,” and “exclusion by inclusion” (Pearcey 2016: 19). Focusing on pop culture is not an easy solution to the problems of (mis)representation described above. Popular books, films, and games perpetuate ideas about children and childhoods that have long been intimate with Anglo-European “civilizationary” concerns such as state-building, militarism, and imperialism: employing ideas of the citizen soldier, power politics, heroic violence, just war, and White saviors, for example. Before, during, and after these policies are projected abroad, they are prepared and practiced on homefronts in the Global North and they rely on smaller, plural, Global Souths within colonizer states to create the narrative and material tensions that justify them being practiced upon. The young are important within this drama as objects of love/ fear that mobilize governmental action: policies like immigration control, military and humanitarian interventions, and institution building are justified by the declaratory need to protect or control raced and gendered young lives. Pop culture can be violent, racist, gender stereotyping, and heteronormative, and is deeply embedded in an exploitative neoliberal world order. But, in the fantastical worlds of fiction, film, and videogames, such ideas are not only reproduced. They are also rejected, or adapted, experimented with, and subverted. Music, fan fiction, and fan activism provide modes of identification and expression across political spectrums. Pop culture comprises a vibrant shoal of plural intersecting and resonating global political spaces. In our early childhood enjoyment of books, television, films, comics, videogames, and other media, we encounter Others—people, places, and scenarios—occupying fictional(ized) elsewheres. Through stories, we are manipulated to identify with these Others and their conflicts, challenges, and joys. In early childhood, fortunate children are encouraged to learn empathy and to value people, animals, and ways of being beyond themselves and outside of their direct experience. For example, young readers and listeners of stories like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric

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Carle) or The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein), viewers of Frozen, and players of games like Animal Crossing, are temporarily “emancipated from places” (de Certeau 1988: 176). Via their caregivers, they are involved in early exercises in ‘transversal politics’ as defined by Roland Bleiker: “a political practice that not only transgresses national boundaries, but also questions the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations” (Bleiker 2000: 2). In these ways, children’s pop culture, even if it is not overtly about world politics themes, conjures affective international relations— with felt identifications and estrangements at once—and nurtures transversal and transnational competencies and post-colonial imaginings. A cognitive understanding and evaluation of international relations— as items in the news, lines on maps, states, foreign policies and world organizations—follows later on. Growing maturity, and entry to the IR discipline, at least in the West/North, is associated with acquiring knowledge of a post-Westphalian world order of states, militaries, and rational defense that are ‘commonsensical’ or at least unavoidable. Thus, we might say that teaching traditional IR involves a form of cultural violence because it tries to replace existing transversal imaginations. However, the other desired outcome of learning/teaching about IR is seeing beyond the state and national chauvinism. Feminist and postcolonial and other interventions in the discipline have brought imagination back in, ­challenging and transforming borders and boundaries. Transnational exchanges have been produced by global pop culture. For example, gender hierarchies are challenged in contemporary young adult fiction and film that, like The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), have young female and male protagonists who do not perform traditional gender roles. The Hunger Games series is radical among contemporary children’s literature in its literary portrayal of the heroes using violence but ultimately rejecting both violence and politics (see ­McEvoy-Levy 2018). But the radical subtleties of the story are lost in the resulting film versions of the series and in the ways it has been spun off into merchandise and other consumption experiences (McEvoy-Levy 2018). Nevertheless, the same pop culture is used by fans for activism and self-expression, demonstrating creative resistance to neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The Hunger Games was used by activists in Thailand, Hong Kong, Russia, and the U.S. and many pop culture texts are rewritten transnationally in online fan fiction sites that are bright with transversal creativity and intersectional politics (McEvoy-Levy 2018).

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Image and discourse analysis of pop culture helps us understand what adults imagine about IR and about children, and what they want to transmit to children about world politics (see McEvoy-Levy 2018). But, as The Hunger Games example above suggests, young people may actually be learning, or creating, something else that can only be fully known through engagement with them about their pop culture tastes. All adults have embodied experience and memories of childhood that they (can) bring to bear in the discussion of IR and world politics, intentionally or unintentionally. There is no escaping the fact that the adults who write IR all once were children; and many scholars also have children or expect to, and/or have strong ideas about parenthood. This entanglement with the ‘subject matter’ of children in IR places the scholar in a different position from when they are writing about institutions or alliances or about adult actors in world politics. But, it also potentially opens a space for intergenerational dialogue. We suggest that by adopting a “‘world’-travelling” methodology (Lugones 1987) in collaboration, remembering where we have been, and remaining reflexive, bridges can be built and some of the pitfalls of objectification, erasure, and oversimplification may be avoided, or at least, brought to the surface. “‘World’-Travelling” In her 1987 essay “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling and Loving Perception,” Maria Lugones provides a feminist postcolonial understanding of solidarity through “cross cultural and cross racial loving” (1987: 3), that also provides a helpful framework for considering childhoods in IR. Drawing on her own experience as a Latina woman, Lugones reflects on how “outsiders” to the mainstream “inhabit ‘worlds’ and travel across them” (Lugones 1987: 14). For Lugones, the flexibility of the “outsider” who by necessity had learned to “‘world’-travel” was a skill that should be celebrated and could be activated on purpose. This travelling skill can be applied to the analysis of the (pop cultural and other) ‘worlds’ of children and adults and our attempts to enrich IR though studying childhoods: In describing my sense of a ‘world,’ I mean to be offering a description of experience, something that is true to experience even if it is ontologically problematic. Though I would think that any account of identity that

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could not be true to this experience of outsiders to the mainstream would be faulty even if ontologically unproblematic. Its ease would constrain, erase, or deem aberrant experience that has within it significant insights into non-imperialistic understanding between people. Those of us who are ‘world’-travellers have the distinct experience of being different in different ‘worlds’ and of having the capacity to remember other ‘worlds’ and ourselves in them. (Lugones 1987: 11)

Children are “outsiders” to the adult worlds of politics and academic IR. Yet, they also live within world politics. Adults are outsiders to children’s cultures and imaginations, yet they also once were children. We are each not just a ‘plurality of selves’ in the sense of having intersectional identities in the present. Part of our plural selves also involves our experiences at different ages. In this sense, all adults are both insiders and outsiders to childhood. We “‘world’-travel” when we remember our childhoods. Lugones’ idea of “playfulness” is also relevant here. Through being reflexive about “‘world’-travelling” in the form of remembering important popular culture’s influence in our childhoods, we may develop insights about how to be academically playful and also how “playfulness” is learned and connects to IR. Lugones contrasts a Western and masculine conception of “agonistic” playfulness, which is concerned with competition, rules, “competence,” and attempts to “conquer,” with her preferred form—a playfulness “open to self-construction” and that was not fixed or arrogant: “As a child I was taught to perceive arrogantly. I have also been the object of arrogant perception” (Lugones 1987: 4). Both children and adults may perceive each other arrogantly. For example, when children are seen as innocent or subordinate or lacking knowledge, they are viewed arrogantly. When children view adults as unable to understand their lives, they are perceiving them arrogantly. Solidarity, Lugones argues, occurs not through unity of perception but through appreciating differences and plurality. Sharing childhood memories of pop culture provides a basis for such solidarity to develop, illustrating one use of a “‘world’-travelling” method. It is in an attempt to practice this last recommendation, that the lead author invited her coauthors to participate by reflecting on pop cultural influences in their own childhoods.

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Personal Memories of Pop Cultural Childhoods In our project, teenage high school/GED students, young adults in college, and a middle-aged professor shared their personal memories of pop culture that was important to them in childhood. Each of the authors individually wrote their recollection and reflected on its significance by answering four questions: (1) What do you remember as important childhood experiences of pop culture? (2) Were any of these related to IR/ world politics issues (e.g., war, global economy, migration, social justice, or peace)? (3) What young heroes from pop culture can you remember liking and do you know why you liked them? (4) How did your environment, the context within which you were living/enjoying pop culture, shape your pop culture interests and what you remember about them? The individual recollections were written in December 2018. Then each piece was first reviewed by their author and the lead author together after a break of about two weeks, to ensure that the authors had time to reflect on their writing. Once these pieces were final, the lead author integrated them into the full narrative. The full narrative was reviewed and commented on by her co-authors, who met as a group prior to finalizing the conclusions. Whether due to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, age, or a combination of these factors, all the authors of the chapter are or have been ‘outsiders’ to elite educational systems and, at a further step of remove, to disciplinary IR. Indeed, more than half of the authors had not heard of IR until invited to participate in the chapter. They travel into the world of academic IR when they consider the questions above. Conversely, the lead author travels into their worlds. Both the lead author and her young adult co-authors learned about each other’s worlds at home, school, on the street, and, as it turns out, in relation to world politics. The recollections are presented in ascending order of age. Jaimarsin (aged 16)—some important experiences of pop culture that I remember from my childhood include my love for videogames such as NBA 2 K games, Dragon Ball Z, Mortal Kombat, and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). I remember playing these games daily and greatly enjoying them when I was eleven to thirteen years old. As a kid I was not really interested in world politics issues. Therefore, most if not all of the videogames I played had nothing to do with that subject. Mortal Kombat was a violent fighting game that only focused on that:

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fighting. This is a contrast to real world events. Countries don’t go to war for just no reason at all. A hero from pop culture that I remember liking was former rapper Master P. Master P. was a rapper from the ghetto who came up from nearly nothing. He grew up in one of the most dangerous areas in the world to being one of the most successful rappers/entrepreneurs in history. He created his own record label known as “No Limits Records,” was in the NBA for a brief stint, and makes his own movies. The reason why I admire him is because I love his story: how he never gave up and how he is a very successful Black man. Even to this day, Master P is still highly respected and is making movies, including a documentary about this life. My environment shaped a lot of my pop culture interests in many different ways. In terms of my music taste, I grew up around a lot of older guys from my neighborhood. They listened to Master P. and other older rappers. I followed into that trend and fell in love with his music. I can relate to it in so many ways and it gives me a similar perspective on life because a lot of the things Master P. went through as a kid, I did too. We both grew up in less than ideal circumstances, growing up poor surrounded by drugs and basically with no positive role models. He saw his brother die. I witnessed my mom overdose on drugs and be in a coma for weeks. Not being able to buy certain things that other kids take for granted; stealing, using drugs, and doing dumb things—I feel like Master P. and I went through a lot of those same things. I feel like he made a lot of mistakes that I made and still make today. I also enjoyed videogames because it was something that I was good at growing up. I was not the athlete that most of my brothers were, so I stuck to the virtual world. Today, Batman is my favorite fictional character because of how interesting his stories are compared to other superheroes. He is human and it makes it more challenging because, as Bruce Wayne, he could be hit by a sniper and taken down. You feel like he could lose. But I also like Wolverine, even though he is immortal, because most of his stories are more gritty and you might read about him in World War II and then in the present day. Karaijus (aged 16)—I remember growing up (between thirteen and sixteen years old) in school and watching kids get teased because they were not wearing the newest designer clothes or the newest of Jordans. This is important to me because I feel like pop culture is directly related

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to what’s in style and what our generation defines as ‘cool.’ I feel like growing up we weren’t informed on what was going on in the world around us or even our country, so none of the things I liked were related to IR/world politics issues. I remember liking superheroes, hip-hop artists like Lil Wayne, and sports legends like Michael Jordan. I liked them because they made what they liked/loved doing into their career. So, they get paid for doing what they like. Also, I looked up to them because they got where they did with little help and were consistent in what they did. Also, they were loyal; for example, Michael Jordan always played for the Bulls, Lil Wayne was always with Cash Money (record label). The superheroes never stopped fighting. My environment shaped my pop culture interests in exposing me to things I wouldn’t be exposed to in a different environment. For example, growing up in America everyone experiences racism. Being exposed to racism can make you think that someone is inferior to someone else because of their race or color. Another example is being exposed to neighborhoods with high crime and drug rates, which exposed me to gang violence, which caused me to start preferring hip hop/rap music because I feel like I can relate. Also, being exposed to these neighborhoods, which exposed me to rap, exposed me to different trends that are started in this environment, for example, sagging, cussing, smoking weed, fighting, playing with firearms etc., which is considered cool to some people. That’s what makes you popular nowadays. Everybody wants a certain kind of girl because of how they are shown in rap videos. NBA Youngboy is popular and people try to take his views and outlook and make them their own—now everybody wants to act like they are depressed. Trinity (aged 18)—Having an African American President was one of the things I remember most about my childhood (I was aged around nine or ten). Before Obama was elected, I didn’t know who or what the President was. I didn’t realize that he was a major factor in my childhood until his eight years were up and we were voting for a different President. There were a lot of issues behind the Presidency of Barack Obama. Everyone had their own opinions, good and bad. It really sparked a phenomenon in racisms. Many people, of many different races, didn’t agree with an African American President, or with Barack, at all. I remember being in second grade and hearing over the intercom that Barack Obama was now President. Immediately the halls rang out in cheers. The first African American President! My Grandma’s boyfriend and I made a

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‘bet’ about who would win. My pick was Barack Obama, so I was pretty excited when I heard the announcement. Barack helped me open my eyes to a lot of issues that need to be solved, like racism and poverty, and he was a hero to me because he made food stamps available for families like mine. In the town I lived in there were not too many racial issues because most of my friends were bi-racial, just like me. As a child, I listened to a variety of music, including country and hip-hop—Taylor Swift, Drake, Lil Wayne. Growing up I always believed in equality, whether it was African Americans against Caucasians or the other way around. I tried to keep the peace but did get into fights. People wanted to think that I was a punk and I wanted to show them I wasn’t. But I want to do something with my life and fighting just leads to more and then having a beef with everyone. Facebook has an important role in people’s views, because I watched a video about if the world was switched, and straight and gay were switched, and that changed my mind about gay people. Mikayla (aged 20)—I am biracial, but was separated from my Black father at an early age. I grew up in the suburbs with my White grandparents who were not fully equipped to help me understand my racial background. Both our differing racial and generational experiences proved to create chasms between our worldviews. As a kid, I felt I lacked the tools necessary to articulate my feelings about injustices I saw in our society surrounding the concept of criminality in the age of mass incarceration. Huey Freeman, a ten-year-old, self-proclaimed left-wing radical, was another kid to grow up in a predominantly White suburb with his grandfather. Watching The Boondocks validated my experience as an outspoken kid who felt cynical about both the historical and present transgressions which occur disproportionately against African-Americans in the United States. Maybe I didn’t have friends in real life to share the same heroes like me, such as Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, but I did have Huey. In The Boondock’s universe, Huey was a young revolutionary and even thought by his society to be a domestic terrorist, much like the man he was named after, Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. I often reflect about how some of the most influential speakers were looked on as terrorists and radicals, such as the aforementioned activists Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Perhaps I wasn’t as oratorically gifted as Huey, but still, I was analyzing the world from my own lenses, hungry for truth, biting away and spitting out the bits that didn’t seem right, and to this day remain grateful for his character’s influence on my beliefs.

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I never knew much about my father beyond the fact that he fought in the Gulf War, and came back home with PTSD. Being his child, and seeing the ramifications of his time served translate into a struggle against recidivism, I looked at wars as an unnecessary evil, and felt that beyond being at battle abroad, this nation was at war with its own people. I have to pay homage to artists such as P!nk and Killer Mike who were making political music that helped raise my consciousness. In 2006, P!nk released a song called “Dear Mr. President,” addressing President Bush in letter underscored by folkish charm. I’ll never forget watching her with a guitar, backed by the Indigo Girls, condemning George W. Bush for his part in the Iraq War, and furthermore his privilege at a safe distance from the carnage of war and poverty. In 2012, Killer Mike released a track called “Reagan” denouncing both the president as a puppet, and the nation for its pursuit of ideological wars such as the war on drugs and terrorism. The song highlighted how Black and Brown bodies are systematically fed to a machine much larger than them—how forced labor has not died in America, but been fueled by policing for profits. These examples cannot capture the entirety of how pop culture played a role in influencing my political beliefs or fueling my passions from childhood, but do well to scratch the surface about what drives my concerns with social justice today. Julio (aged 21)—My story is about love and the sacrifice that my undocumented loved ones have gone through and continue to go through in el Norte. It is about the land of opportunity entangling their core values around my familia, and the commitment they continue to make for a nation-state that yet wants to expel them. I am a ­second-generation U.S. citizen; I know this story just like the millions in my shoes across the United States. And what helped me cope with the struggles of being a second-generation Brown man in this country was the power of Latina/o pride music. The U.S. Federal government once took the closest woman to me. Her disappearance happened during my early teen years. At first, I was too young to fully understand. But as I connected the pieces to the puzzle, the essence of her missing became evident as the days turned to long weeks, and the once perceived fearless man in the master bedroom was heard crying. I knew what had happened, and who was responsible. The context of my upbringing shaped my interest in pop culture. I was attracted to those that were familiar with my situation, but I was too embarrassed and scared to mention the deportation of a loved one in a

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public environment. I therefore did not speak of it as a youth but listened to it and sang those lyrics in my safe space. I acknowledge those that did have the courage to sing about my situation; such as the radical Chicano rap group, Kinto Sul, that rapped about the power of Mexican Aztec blood and my idols, Los Tigres Del Norte, a Mexican band that used their podium to challenge the U.S. status quo. Los Tigres spoke what I considered to be the truth in their song The Golden Cage: what does money and opportunity serve us, if we are prisoners in this great nation? I also related to their songs that argue being an American means being from the South and the North of the Americas, and not just only from the U.S. Cole (aged 22)—I grew up as an only child. But attention from my parents, specifically from my mother, provided the social component that sharing space with a sibling would have done. Consequently, I never really felt I fit the typical definition of a child. My personality reflects this upbringing, as I am very ‘type A’ and independent, and I hate being looked down upon. I grew up in adult conversations, and I often dreaded being immersed in adult-led, ‘youth spaces’ when I left my house. I hated being patronized with condescending adult tones and kept from making important decisions that affected my environment. I have always perceived myself as equal to any adult in the room. In my childhood, I used pop culture to empower myself in an adult world and learn certain social norms amongst people. A show that I watched was Avatar: The Last Airbender. The premise: a world divided into four nations representing the different elements (earth, air, fire, water), where the fire nation seeks world domination due to their ethnocentrism and seeking to industrialize other nations. The ‘Avatar’ is the last survivor of the air nation (destroyed by the fire) and was the main protagonist of the show as he fought fire nation invaders. The characters, both teenage heroes and villains, evolved through the show’s running as they faced crises, overcame ethical dilemmas, and developed their own social identities. I liked most of the characters, but I was always was drawn to the villains. They always seemed more human due to the complexities they exhibited. The villains seemed to be wanting to challenge the world they lived in and, as youth actors, they wanted to exert power to achieve this. Of course, the heroes would also use their power, but it was more to sustain the balance of what was already occurring. I related to the characters who had vision and were determined to be successful despite the age

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barriers placed on them. The creators of the show seemed to humanize the villains, highlighting their personal struggles to fulfill their missions, their motivations, and even their friendships. It is these types of narratives that I often relate back to within my studies of conflict and of how we can’t make actors out to be ‘good v. evil.’ There is such a spectrum of complex factors that exist behind everyone’s actions. We owe it to one another, even those that are against us, to try to understand each other and remember the inescapable fact that we are all human. And for every time we are a hero, we are someone else’s villain. I used pop culture to empower myself to be an influential actor in my social worlds. In my childhood, I had ideas to change my environments and shows like The Last Airbender guided me to transform my agency into action. And I am still reflecting upon those lessons and applying them to my everyday interactions involving power dynamics. Siobhán (aged 50)—Around age ten, I read a novel about children in World War Two called The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier. The heroes were child refugees who survived the war without their parents. They were creative and resilient, and even created their own school—an idea I really liked. Forty years later, I still remember how much that book moved me, and it may have shaped my future scholarly and professional choices. Growing up as a Catholic/Nationalist in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles,’ I sang, played, and listened to traditional music and rebel songs. I felt I was part of history then and somehow fighting back against being ‘a second-class citizen.’ I cried over their flowery and often morbid lyrics about young men being executed by the British and then went downstairs to watch the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) children’s programs. I don’t remember feeling any irony or contradiction in that. I watched tennis and gymnastics competitions on TV and my cousin and I acted out matches between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert on her driveway—using a wooden ladder as a net. The British soldiers stationed at the checkpoint outside her gate watched us, and cheered and laughed when my cousin ‘Chris Evert’ held up her trophy—a frying pan or tea tray from the house. It wasn’t because they were ‘the enemy’ but because they were young men, that I didn’t like being watched by the soldiers, so another time we closed the curtains so we could dance and lip sync to Grease and Abba without being ‘spied on.’ We got shouted at that day by my aunt. Closing the curtains could have been seen as a threat by a skittish soldier who might have shot at us. We were annoyed at the interruption to our play. The danger didn’t seem real.

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On my bedroom wardrobe, I had a photograph of Shaun Cassidy from the TV Hardy Boys alongside a pencil sketch I had made of Romanian Gymnast Nadia Comaneci, and a newspaper picture of Irish Republican Prison Hunger Striker Bobby Sands. If there was a thread connecting these three ‘heroes’ for me, it might have been about identifying with the weak against the strong. The detective Hardy Boys righted wrongs, and a pale, sunken-eyed Comaneci triumphed against the more privileged American and Soviet athletes. Sands’ death was sad because he was young and defying a label of inferiority that we both shared and rejected. However, following parental disapproval, I soon hid Bobby Sands away inside the cupboard. I suppose they were worried that I was becoming ‘radicalized’—to use the contemporary terminology. Perhaps they were right to have been concerned. I did sometimes imagine myself beret-clad, marching with the Cumann na mBan (women’s branch of the Irish Republican Army) behind some coffin in Belfast. But most days I was hand-in-hand with Shaun Cassidy, roller-skating down a sunny California beach boulevard. Between ten and thirteen, pop culture helped me feel politically relevant and experience joy, and it provided the basis for constructing distracting stories at night when the panic attacks started.

Discussion In this section of the chapter, we analyze our childhood recollections and the process we used to gather them and to deliberate together on their meaning. Global childhoods are so diverse, differently experienced, and unequal, that incorporating them into disciplinary IR seems an impossibility, and fraught with potential for over generalization and erasure. Even in one small corner of one U.S. city where we are writing, differences in our experiences and opportunities are clear. Our pop culture interests are also diverse; but as a shared activity, pop culture provided a basis for dialogue and connection. On a scale of participation, our approach would only score in the medium range because the idea originated with the lead author who had already set the framework for the chapter. But each co-author had several opportunities to revise, to read, and comment on each other’s recollections and on the whole chapter, and to contribute to the conclusions. As a focus for participatory research, pop culture engages people, including children, on enjoyable terrain to set a foundation for co-thinking and co-writing. It was

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important to the process to have the opportunity to ask questions, to have one-to-one and group discussions, and freedom to add or edit, although all only made minor changes to their original recollections. Certainly, there was value in the travelling between the physical worlds of the community center and university to work together. But it was in reading the Other’s thoughts, and having conversations about our writing, that the real “‘world’-travelling” took place. Reflective and dialogical “‘world’-travelling” across differences of race, nationality, age, class, gender, and sexuality, stimulated political and ethical questions. As we remembered pop culture, we were also remembering our childhoods—the struggle to be seen and accepted in an adult world and to cope with poverty, for example. And we were remembering our childhoods in world politics—such as the impact of war, nationalism, and immigration policies on our home lives, identities, and political awakenings. But we were also challenging narrow definitions of world politics—including into its purview, gangs, street violence, drugs, and mass incarceration—and showing how pop culture and world politics were constructing each other. Exploring our pop culture tastes helped us identify both differences and similarities in our experiences. For example, in the group discussions, one of the teens noted how we all had struggled with government or other authority figures despite growing up in different circumstances/times and being “introduced to political problems” in different ways. All of us had independently written as if childhood ended around age fourteen, the lead author noted. To which, another teen added that “some 14-year-olds have experienced more than some 30-year-olds.” We then considered whether or not that should affect voting rights. One conclusion we can draw, a teen coauthor said, is that “everybody desires and deserves equality – the opportunity to succeed, whether they take it or not – and that, with equality, the world would be safer and more balanced.” Each of the authors of this piece has had different childhood experiences and yet each has embraced, even relied upon, pop culture as sources of identity, voice, comfort, hope, and escape. In some cases, pop culture was used for directly engaging with world politics and was perceived by some to have influenced their activism, studies, and careers. Our pop cultural heroes were not always fictional, but sometimes fictionalized, as we show in our own memories of political actors and sports figures. The young are seen by adults as in need of protection

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and teaching, but also as requiring monitoring and discipline. In reality, though, neither the protection nor the containment strategies of adults are implemented completely or effectively, as our own memories of our childhoods and our uses of pop culture within them demonstrate. Many of the pop culture artifacts mentioned were created for adults, have mature ratings, or were viewed and thought about in secret. Of course, we also saw how not all children are protected from poverty, drugs, violence, deportation, etc. In sharing our memories of pop culture we invited others into our social worlds and we helped others appreciate those worlds in a new and, potentially, more personal way. While we learned about and from each other, we were also prompted to self-reflection through the focus on memory (e.g., Why am I remembering this? Why is this what I want to communicate to others?). The focus on pop culture encouraged imaginative empathy and ­reality-checking (e.g., How am I and my struggles like or not like those of others? How are they like or not like this celebrity or character?). The emphasis on writing a personal memoir for sharing with others and for publication opened up ethico-political concerns (e.g., Have I done myself justice? Have I been fair to the others I wrote about and to my family and community? Have I written anything I might regret in the future? Could anyone be harmed, including myself? What have I omitted and why? Why is it so difficult to convey emotional ‘truth’? Could someone interpret this in a way I did not intend? Who makes the rules about what is popular? Did I really freely choose these pop culture interests? What other factors were involved?). We also wondered how the original questions had shaped our responses. Perhaps the focus on heroes may have biased some of us toward mentioning characters that are in ‘combat’ or struggle; or, it was wondered, is ‘combat’ an inherent part of world politics, our local circumstances, life struggle, or human nature? Our recollections showed that young people think about pop culture and are able to explain their tastes in relation to other events and factors in their own lives. At the same, what was not said also highlighted privilege and blind spots. Although race and ethnicity were central for some, they were not for others. It was notable that gender roles and sexual identity were largely hidden—perhaps strategically. We were learning about how academic knowledge is constructed and the subjectivities, hierarchies of privilege, and absences that are always involved.

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Conclusion The study of pop culture promises increased understanding of the ways in which children are targets of, and actors within, world politics. Some forms of pop culture deal overtly with traditional IR themes—such as war and other forms of political violence, diplomacy, migration, and national identity. Thus, pop culture helps to create and reproduce ‘commonsensical’ narratives of how these aspects of international relations work and helps reproduce violent and gendered orders. The dominant narratives constituting what IR is, and can be imagined to be, are at least partially reproduced through children’s oppression, disciplining, education, and socialization. In an era of globalization, these narratives cohere within the world’s dominant economies that increasingly provide access to tentacular entertainment options reaching into disparate and plural childhoods. Yet, children and other people are also reaching back. The relationship is not only one of corporate-political manipulation of desires and neoliberal control; it is an exchange. Pop entertainment offers among our earliest encounters with Others and with IR themes. Along with excitement, peril, and ideas about who are the heroes, there is also the experience of joy, empathy, and traveling with “loving perception,” finding sanctuary and solidarity in musicians, fictional characters, and celebrities. Embodied understandings of world politics likely also occur through playing videogames of, imagining oneself as, and acting or dressing up as characters involved in violent and nonviolent political struggles. Gender expectations and local cultures of nationalism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia may be temporarily escaped, or processed and put into context, by young readers, viewers, and imaginers. Or, they may be given meaning and reinforced, or something more ambivalent may take place. The transnationality of pop culture sends violence and destructive stereotypes around the world along with inspiring moments of radical, transversal politics. The transnationality of pop culture also clashes with the present moment of curfew and containment operating on young lives through policing, schooling, criminal justice, and immigration policies. But if we take up the challenge to travel “playfully” and “with loving perception,” to consider world politics via diverse pop cultural reference points, a more inclusive, personally fulfilling, empowering, and transformative IR may emerge—one that diverse children and young people can not only relate to, but also participate in writing.

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The combination in our project of teenagers, young adults, and an older adult sharing the pop culture they liked at approximately the same ages allowed for a deeper level of understanding to develop about the plurality of worlds that we each live within, past and present. Expanded to other topics and venues, such an approach promises to make children’s lives more complex and also more intelligible to adults, and may make them less likely to be romanticized or inappropriately (de)politicized in academic and policy writing. Intergenerational writing collaborations of those directly affected by immigration policies or military service, for example, would offer new perspectives and could help transform the field by challenging all age groups’ assumptions about who has (or should have) the authority and power to speak about IR.

Note 1. The coauthors are members of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab at Butler University and youth program participants and leaders at the Martin Luther King Community Center in Indianapolis, USA.

References Bleiker, Roland. 2000. Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caso, Frederica, and Caitlin Hamilton, eds. 2015. Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-International Relations. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dittmer, Jason. 2010. Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Grayson, Kyle, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott. 2009. “Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture-World Politics Continuum.” Politics 29 (3): 155–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2009.01351.x. Lugones, Maria. 1987. “Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2 (2): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x. McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán. 2018. Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nexon, Daniel H., and Iver B. Neuman, eds. 2006. Harry Potter and International Relations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

198  S. McEVOY-LEVY ET AL. Pearcey, Mark. 2016. The Exclusions of Civilization: Indigenous Peoples in the Story of International Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shapiro, Michael. 2008. Cinematic Geopolitics. New York: Routledge. Sylvester, Christine. 2016. “Creativity.” In Critical Imaginations in International Relations, edited by Aoileann Ní Mhurchú and Reiko Shindo, 56–68. New York: Routledge. Weldes, Jutta. ed. 2003. To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and World Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 10

Revisiting ‘Womenandchildren’ in Peace and Security: What About the Girls Caught in Between? Lesley Pruitt Introduction As this book proposes that International Relations (IR) ought to take children and childhood seriously, the Introduction highlighted the need to think about prospects and limitations in relation to such work, including cautioning against taking an ‘add children and stir’ approach. Likewise, the question arises: where have children and childhoods been ‘added’ in existing IR debates, and what can we learn from critically interrogating such instances? While mainstream IR has typically ignored children, feminist IR scholars have made crucial inroads into critically interrogating the ways children and women have been conflated in relation to peace and security and how gendered exclusions operate through this practice. However, the aim has generally been to differentiate women from children in order to set women up as equal to men. In short, scholarly engagements have tended to re-create or reify age-based hierarchies between adults and children. It is thus necessary to revisit theoretical underpinnings that rely L. Pruitt (*)  University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_10

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on adult-centric models of agency, which, while they ostensibly empower women, may inadvertently or unintentionally marginalize girls. To that end, this chapter proposes that a feminist intersectional approach can help to better analyze framings of ‘womenandchildren’ in IR and to understand the complexity and specificity of girls’ agency in peace and security. I argue that it is necessary and possible, though complex, to think about the needs and experiences of women and children as featuring difference while still taking care to avoid creating false dichotomies or setting them up in frameworks replicating hierarchies based on both age and gender. At the same time, it is important to consider not just differences but also commonalities and intersections, particularly when it comes to girls. After all, girls may be situated as both/and, neither/ nor, woman and child, which can undermine attention to and respect for their needs, knowledge, and perspectives. Likewise, sustained attention to the intersectionality of girls’ lives in conflict-affected situations is required to challenge age-based hierarchies that are also gendered. It is urgent that scholars, policymakers, and practitioners ask questions about exclusions girls face and the resources they use to exercise resiliency and agency in conflict and peacebuilding efforts (Pruitt 2015). Where do girls fit in when it comes to questions of peace and security? How have they been constituted, understood, deployed—often for other people’s political or economic ends? To explore these questions, here I examine how the combined concept of ‘womenandchildren’ has evolved over time, how it relates to feminist theory and practice, and how age-based hierarchies emerge in theory and policy related to preventing and addressing conflict, building peace, and enhancing security. First, I situate girls in existing global discourses. I then investigate ways children are positioned in feminist theories of global peace and security, paying particular attention to the blurring together of women and children as a phrase—‘womenandchildren’—and conceptually as a monolithic, victimized, agentless entity. Next, I engage with intersections that use gender and age as justifications for hierarchy and exclusion. I then offer illustrations from UN Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs) and a brief case study from Colombia to provide empirical examples of how the under-theorizing of ‘womenandchildren,’ including ongoing joint conceptualizations, has been deployed beyond theory to practice. I then explain how this dynamic directly negates the agency of girls and affects understandings of their roles in

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global peace and security frameworks. Finally, I propose that an intersectional feminist framing that goes beyond adult-centric approaches can address these incongruities to transcend theoretical limitations around ‘womenandchildren.’

Finding the Girls Within Global Frameworks Children overall have received little attention in mainstream Security Studies and International Relations (Beier 2015: 1), and their security has been under-theorized (Brocklehurst 2015: 42). Moreover, IR research considering children often overlooks gender (e.g., Gilligan 2009; Sagi-Schwartz 2012; Efrat et al. 2015). These exclusions and misrepresentations disproportionately affect girls. In particular, research has highlighted that girls have gender-specific experiences and receive less attention relative to boys ­ and less support for dealing with violence than women (Pankhurst 2003; ­Schell-Faucon 2001). This context of ignoring gendered differences girls face leaves little space for recognizing and supporting their existing and future contributions to peace (Pruitt 2014). Indeed, research across twenty countries affected by war showed girls and young women to be the most frequently overlooked and at-risk group; moreover, peacebuilding programs aimed at youth tended to be male-dominated, while women’s peacebuilding organizations tended to be aimed at and led by ‘mature age’ women (Sommers 2006). In short, many of the risks children face are compounded for girls, who encounter particular gendered and age-based challenges in conflict-affected settings, yet are substantially marginalized in the theorization of children and women in IR. If girls’ needs in conflict situations are to be met and their participation in peacebuilding ensured, differences they experience in relation to age and gender cannot be ignored. Thus, working to open up feminist IR to account for age while engaging with and supporting girls is crucial. To that end, theoretical advancement is needed “to engage more fully with the socio-political and gendered dimensions of children and childhood” (Brocklehurst 2015: 29). After all, gender significantly influences childhood experiences and status variations (Brocklehurst 2006). Taking this realization forward must include attention to girls, who are often left out of key discussions that consider children, such as attention to child soldiers, where the focus is usually on boys (Lee-Koo 2011), despite girls participating in a variety of contexts and roles. After all, research

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has suggested that girls are often marginalized in programs aiming to support child soldiers and that these programs may also reinforce problematic gendered victim narratives (see, for example, McKenzie 2012 on Sierra Leone). Revisiting feminist IR frameworks can potentially offer a pathway to accounting for children, including girls. However, as is the case with older women, defining girls or young women in any universal sense is ultimately challenging, given not only the complexity and specificity of different lives and contexts, but also because of cultural and organizational dynamics around age and adulthood. Existing definitions of the categories of ‘children,’ ‘girls,’ or ‘young women’ vary. For example, while the United Nations (UN), in its discussions of peace and security tends to define children as being under the age of eighteen, the concept of childhood is not static in policy or research, differing across contexts and cultures. The terminology becomes increasingly complex in situations of war, when children fast become inducted into roles normally ascribed to ‘adults’ (Borer et al. 2006). Within such complex settings of conflict or insecurity, statuses can change quickly, as the whole process of ‘becoming adults’ is often interrupted or changed for boys and girls. For the purposes of this analysis, girls are thus categorized as “those who are seen as children, youth, or young people in their societies and who are identified by others, and/or self-identify as ‘girls’ or ‘young women’ or ‘female’” (Pruitt 2014: 487). Better accounting for girls, and indeed for all children in all their complexity, does not require the creation of new hierarchies. Rather, a broader, more inclusive paradigm of actors is needed that acknowledges children as agents and seeks to incorporate their experience and knowledge into negotiation processes and peacebuilding efforts (Del Felice and Wisler 2007; Watson 2008). Critical reflection and a new formulation of gendered analysis are needed to better understand and incorporate girls’ experiences of conflict and contributions to peace and security. While often overlooked in feminist IR theory, sidelined in women’s peace activism, and lumped in with women in UNSCRs and policy documents, girls have been on the international radar for some time. The UN Conference on Women’s Beijing Platform for Action in 1995 listed “the girl child” among its twelve “critical areas for concern.” Over recent decades, the ways States understand girls have tended to reflect discourses of the ‘girl child’ who needs dual protection as both female and child and who becomes an object of international relations as she offers

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an expedient means for critiquing the track record of other States when they fail to protect girls within their borders. As Iris Young (2003: 2) has observed, overemphasis on men as protectors drastically subordinates women and children under a logic of patriarchy. Moreover, as Helen Berents (2016: 516) notes, girls are particularly framed in development and security discourse as “devices for understanding violence and suffering.” In this way, girls are relegated to the feminized, age-blind, private sphere of ‘womenandchildren,’ where they serve as the apolitical counterpart to the dominant, public, and protecting actors: ‘men and boys’ who engage in politics and war, with girls yet again relegated to a doubly exclusionary private and feminine sphere (Berents 2016: 516). Meanwhile, the ‘girl’ has become extraordinarily visible in recent humanitarian campaigns as a possible donor, fundraiser, or aid beneficiary (Koffman and Gill 2013: 157). This consumer role does not, however, offer opportunities for participation in collective peacebuilding action. Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill (2015: 163) thus argue that this ‘girl powering’ of development has been limited by individualizing discourses that call on “girls to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and transform the conditions of their lives.” This depoliticization and emphasis on individualization feeds into the continued exclusion of girls from discourses of peace and security. This framework does not advance, but rather hinders peacebuilding, as it reinscribes inaccurate binaries and individualizes both risk and potential, ignoring structural barriers girls face when it comes to challenging related problems like patriarchy and poverty. This recent movement toward celebrating yet instrumentalizing girls has also transpired in ways that may situate girls as competing with older women for resources. Indeed, girls “are portrayed as a more worthwhile ‘investment’ than older women. As a World Bank managing director phrased it, ‘[i]nvesting in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics’” (quoted in Koffman and Gill 2013: 89). Given that girls are at the same time regularly constructed as more vulnerable and thus requiring further protections, in this way, “[s]omewhat paradoxically, girls ‘outdo’ older women by being both at greater risk and representing superior productive potential” (Koffman and Gill 2013: 89). Such conceptualizations can give rise to problems for both older and younger women by setting up a false dichotomy between differently aged women while obscuring other intersecting inequalities that

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affect their lives and their mutual capacity for creating important change (Koffman and Gill 2013). Indeed, intergenerational opportunities for supporting girls may be stifled if these policy discourses are seen as leading to a reduction in resources available for adult women (Koffman and Gill 2013: 89). With this in mind, the next section explores how feminist IR theorizing around peace and security may be implicated in obscuring or depoliticizing girls in its conceptualizations of children in relation to women.

Children in Feminist Theories of Global Peace and Security Researchers have critiqued the common unqualified linkage of children and women in understandings of war and conflict (Enloe 1990; Brocklehurst 2006; Carpenter 2010; Puechguirbal 2010; Lee-Koo 2011). Helen Brocklehurst (2006: 167) notes that in “the Vietnam War American troops were kicked into action by descriptions of their enemy as just a bunch of ‘women and children.’” As Cynthia Enloe (1990: 29–32) pointed out in the lead-up to the Gulf War, ‘womenandchildren’ became a phrase that news networks used without discernment. This standard catchphrase perpetuates a stereotype, a quick, graphic representation of female and/or young non-combatants as “default victims, casualties, refugees, and displaced, and the weak and feminine, the non-participants and therefore non-political” (Brocklehurst 2006: 167). Katrina Lee-Koo (2011) more recently confirmed that both children and women continue to be feminised and understood as helpless victims and inherently innocent. The political and moral justification that ‘good’ wars will protect children and women continues to dominate, even though it has met with many critiques, particularly from feminist scholars and activists (Lee-Koo 2011: 737). Beyond critiques of the feminization of women and children, others have criticized the blurring of ‘womenandchildren’ for deeming women child-like. Under this paradigm, the tendency is to see women as members of families rather than as independent individuals or as “almost childlike in their innocence about realpolitik” (Brocklehurst 2006: 12–13). Likewise, Enloe (1990: 29–32) asserts that when running together the words ‘women’ and ‘children’ into one set of victims, both are rendered child-like. In these critiques—drawing on dominant

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understandings of children and childhood as representing dependence, innocence, and/or victimhood—‘child-like’ is used pejoratively. Furthermore, when women and children are rolled together, women’s roles as mothers are made central and they are closely linked with children in ways men are not (Brocklehurst 2006: 12–13). Feminist IR scholarship has challenged biological categorizations and the treatment of women as maternal objects because this results in maintaining ‘women and children’ as a category emphasizing women’s role in maternity, but without recognizing their autonomous social subjectivity and rights (Puechguirbal 2010: 176). Indeed, feminists have documented how frequently women’s agency has been limited to the central roles they play in nurturing and reproducing the nation and thus in (re)creating cultural identity (see Cockburn 1998). At the same time, Watson (2015: 47) suggests that, when it comes to post-conflict and conflict-affected situations, we tend to “think of children as victims,” seeing them as hurt physically and emotionally and struggling with having lost their childhoods. Likewise, narratives situating women as solely linked with children pigeonhole both women and children as potential or actual victims who need (adult) masculine protectors in settings of insecurity. Depicting someone predominantly as a “‘victim’ – by definition, often a condition of powerlessness and domination” (Watson 2015: 47), means that person will likely find it challenging to overcome the effects of the victim status and to fully exercise agency. In short, feminist IR scholars have long argued for breaking up ‘womenandchildren’ to focus on women’s rights, agency, and status within gender equality. This struggle has advanced women’s inclusion in peace and security initiatives. However, such analyses have largely ignored the world of children, including girls, who continue to be positioned in an apolitical private sphere. Redressing this is important, as Carpenter (2010: xv) explains: “lumping together women and children” oversimplifies and does not adequately account for a deeper analysis of the complex power relations that occur within families. This creates risks, as Jacob (2015: 20) asserts, particularly when the lines are blurred between the agendas of those focusing on feminist rights and those emphasizing child rights. As examples, Jacob specifies Enloe’s (1993: 166) statement that war reporting tends to render women “childlike in their innocence about international realpolitik” and also cites Laura Shepherd’s (2006) analysis of Laura Bush’s speech, in which she said: “The running together of ‘womenandchildren’ twice

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in close succession infantilized the women of Afghanistan, denying them both adulthood and agency, affording them only pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction.” Thus, Jacob (2015: 20) argues, such analyses reflect the dominant ways children are characterized in international politics, where often they have come to represent an absence of agency, presenting challenges for IR research agendas, particularly those of feminists, which have elsewhere “become increasingly sensitive to issues of identity, exclusion, and discourse.” While this criticism is important, it does not mean feminist engagements with children must inevitably take such directions, nor does it suggest that the gendered aspects of children’s lived experiences would not benefit from a feminist analysis. Likewise, here I suggest that a feminist intersectional approach can help ensure gender is adequately considered in further developing understandings about children and, in particular, to ensure that girls are not excluded from understandings of both children and women in peace and security analyses.

Reflecting on Gender and Age as Crucial to Rethinking ‘Womenandchildren’? As Ashis Nandy (1983) highlights, both gender and age have been exaggerated and oversimplified to authorize the gaining and maintaining of control over others. Both have also been deployed in setting up false dichotomies. For example, masculinity has been constructed as the fundamental opposite of femininity, while adulthood, as compared to childhood, has been assigned an enhanced value (Connell 2007). Compared to adult males, girls and boys have been both represented as feminine and associated with women (Brocklehurst 2006: 163). Yet, too frequently “the assumption that meeting the needs of women will meet the needs of children is not borne out” (Carpenter 2010: 77). In conflict-affected societies, constructions of privileged masculinity commonly depend upon the celebration of men’s soldiering; however, this construction depends on the binary of glorifying the role women play in mothering soldier sons, particularly celebrating “their maternal sacrifices for the nation” (Enloe 2004: 107). Caring for and taking responsibility for the younger generation is deemed necessary for performing (adult) femininity, which creates a foundational assumption of the type of femininities needed to support militarized masculinity, which tops assumed social and political hierarchies. These maternal

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constructions of women in conflict-affected settings can simultaneously deny the agency and needs of children, particularly girls. Too often, such practices have thwarted possibilities for girls’ contributions. Moreover, the “adult-centric standpoint in security studies,” contrasts “with investments made seemingly on behalf of children and their security” (Brocklehurst 2015: 29). This adult-centric dynamic denies in theory and practice how children and young people in the midst of war assume ‘adult’ behaviors and responsibilities—including “significant roles at a local level…as homemakers, landowners, breadwinners, and peacemakers” (Watson 2015: 57). Despite this, children are typically denied rights to participation in the decision-making processes of peacebuilding. Under formal political mechanisms associated with peacebuilding, young people are frequently relegated to the private sphere as victims without agency, including at times in inconsistent ways. For example, under the law, a young person may, due to her or his age alone, face treatment as a criminal in the court system, but not be seen to have the agency to serve on a jury; meanwhile at times military service is an option, even when these individuals are too young to cast a vote (Beier 2015: 6). This brings to the fore fundamental questions about the approaches taken to understand the role of children as independent, respected actors in war, conflict, and societal reconstruction. Conducting research and practice that allows space for young people’s views in a way that is neither paternalistic nor maternalistic is a challenge that requires denaturalizing the marginalization and lack of power children often experience. As J. Marshall Beier (2015: 4) notes: “Children… are variously constructed as innocent, dependent, vulnerable, impetuous, dangerous; they are to be cherished, nurtured, protected, regulated, feared.” They are also frequently seen as emotionally immature and irrational—categories historically deployed to restrict women from participation in political decision-making. These overlaps and divergences make such intersectionality ripe for further examination.

Advancing an Intersectional Feminist Framework An intersectional feminist approach can offer important contributions to understanding girls in peace and security by not merely separating children from women analytically, but by redressing complex power relations among and between them. Gendered hierarchies permeating mainstream

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IR threaten to stymy the transformative potential of feminist IR if it continues to ignore or marginalize children, particularly girls. Thus, rather than opposing women’s and children’s rights, education and psychology scholar Erica Burman (2008: 177) stresses considering “the relations between women’s rights and children’s rights as neither adversarial, nor equivalent, but as allied – albeit as necessarily structured in tension and contest.” Indeed, noting feminist arguments against equating women with children, she highlights how pitting women against children, while positioning children as passive and subordinate, is also problematic (Burman 2008: 180–181). Dissecting this dynamic can advance the future of feminist IR. Discrepancies around what defines childhood, the age at which agency can be exercised, and where these rights sit in a hierarchy of importance with other international legal rights has hindered respect for children’s right to participate effectively in peacebuilding (Carpenter 2010). For example, while in principle Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrines for all children the right to participate in decisions that impact their lives, concerns around participation for children affected by conflict, war, and insecurity too often fall off the UN’s radar. Indeed, while the United Nations’ Security Council’s Children and Armed Conflict (CaAC) agenda may arguably offer significant enforcement mechanisms, these are not framed in a way that accounts for children’s participation. Rather, as Lee-Koo’s analysis convincingly demonstrates, the CaAC agenda “is animated by a protection ethic,” and as such “presupposes not simply that ‘victim’ is a child’s primary identity, but in many cases that it is her/his only identity” (Lee-Koo 2018: 57, 60). While protection in this context is reasonable, the singular focus on it lends itself to focusing predominantly on children as victims without space for understanding nuance in their diverse lived experiences of conflict and recognizing their agency (Lee-Koo 2018). To address the lack of space for children’s, especially girls’, rights in settings of conflict and insecurity, I suggest that further feminist theorizing is required to build on existing women’s activism grounded in a notion of equality that means not sameness, but absence of hierarchy (Ackerly et al. 2006). Hence, while seeing value in feminist IR contributions that have sought to break down conceptualizations that lump children and women together, it is also important to critique the way the terms have been pulled apart and reconstituted, often in hierarchical

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ways. After all, as Maria Mies (2014) notes, hierarchical divisions between women and men inherently entwine with other social divisions, particularly where connections between gender- and age-based hierarchies are concerned. Likewise, feminist IR theorizing, while lending needed attention to women’s rights, to date fails to adequately account for children, including girls. Rather than capitulating to “the demands of a positivistic logic of ‘either/or’” (Elshtain 1975: 140), here I suggest that, while girls and women should not be inaccurately presumed to share the same needs and rights in conflict-affected situations and peacebuilding efforts, considering the intersections girls face when it comes to gender and age is crucial to understanding them adequately. An intersectional feminist approach uniquely offers analytical and theoretical robustness regarding children, particularly girls, in allowing space to account not only for their age, or their gender, but to understand and analyze how they may be positioned by the confluence of the two, including in peace and security efforts. Indeed, IR feminist theory has the capacity to expand from the practice of taking (usually adult) “women’s experience as a starting point” (Carpenter 2010: 9), which has often been the focus in arguments for breaking up ‘womenandchildren,’ commonly resulting in inattention to younger women—girls. While feminist theory has been effectively applied to theorizing a variety of other important intersections in peace and security, including how gender intersects with other factors such as race or sexuality, to date, an analysis has yet to be put forth that applies these important learnings to exploring intersections of gender and age. However, this does not mean feminist theory is unimportant in accounting for the intersection of gender and age, or that it is useless in accounting for girls in peace and security. On the contrary, when considered as part of a “broader project of overcoming gender hierarchies” (Carpenter 2010: 9) intersectional feminist theory remains crucial for better understanding for girls, including how they face insecurity and can contribute to pursuing peace. Sumi Cho, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and Leslie McCall (2013: 787) explain the importance of intersectionality, which emerged in the 1980s “to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics.” They likewise emphasize the importance of intersectionality in exposing how “single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice”

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(Cho et al. 2013: 787). Intersectionality is not a standardized methodology or a grand theory but rather an analytical tool or analytic disposition that can “capture and engage contextual dynamics of power” (Cho et al. 2013: 788). Attention to intersectionality “means that one always has to pay attention to specific contexts and their politics” (Wibben 2016: 22). Moreover, crucially an intersectional analytic sensibility makes it possible to see and theorize intersecting axes of disadvantage (in this case gender and age); it emphasizes structural and political inequalities while simultaneously allowing research to reveal the ways overlapping identity categories may be created and deployed (Cho et al. 2013: 797). More attention is needed in IR research to intersections of age and gender in peace and security. After all, doing so facilitates enacting feminist aims of addressing omissions to redress distorted and partial views (Harding 1987) and thus produces more accurate knowledge while also developing deeper insights (Wibben 2016: 23). Here I suggest that intersectionality can be usefully applied to thinking about gender and its intersection with age. To date, intersectional theory and research has rarely engaged with age, although intersectionality has always represented “a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities” (Cho et al. 2013: 788). Intersectionality permits researchers committed to addressing gender inequality to see that gender is not always the central analytical concern, since “only those privileged enough to never attend to race, class, or further dimensions of their subject positions could conceivably see gender as always and anywhere primary” (Wibben 2016: 23–24). Yet age rarely gets a mention, much less a deep examination as one of these ‘other inequalities’ or ‘further dimensions.’ Developing research in this direction is critical for ensuring more accurate understandings of girls in peace and security. After all, recognizing how age and gender intersect is necessary to adequately explore how girls’ experiences and participation are shaped by gender norms, how they might participate in building peace, and how conflict impacts them (Pruitt 2013). Yet, even the rare peace accord or effort at implementing UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) that does address both factors typically fails to account for how such differences intersect. Hence, the gendered and ageist dynamics of formal institutional frameworks aimed at pursuing peace and security must be scrutinized.

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‘Womenandchildren’ Go to the Security Council and Beyond Although the conflation of women and children has a long history of critique, even UN Security Council Resolutions propagate the conflation of women and children by assuming in policy and practice that children will gain ‘trickle down’ benefits from generalized post-conflict attempts at redressing systemic problems, which marginalizes their ideas, issues, and needs (Watson 2008). Such notions may have fundamentally shaped the first WPS landmark resolution, UNSCR 1325, adopted unanimously in 2000. Initiating the UN’s ongoing WPS Agenda, 1325 conflates ‘women and children’ twice as follows: Expressing concern that civilians, particularly women and children [emphasis added], account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict, including as refugees and internally displaced persons, and increasingly are targeted by combatants and armed elements, and recognizing the consequent impact this has on durable peace and reconciliation. (United Nations Security Council 2000)

And then: Recognizing also the importance of the recommendation…for specialized training for all peacekeeping personnel on the protection, special needs and human rights of women and children [emphasis added] in conflict situations. (United Nations Security Council 2000)

A further simple analysis of UNSCR 1325 finds that the term ‘women’ appears in the resolution a total of 33 times. This includes 13 instances in which the phrase ‘women and girls’ is used. Significantly, every mention of ‘girls’ in the resolution is as part of the phrase ‘women and girls.’ This framing suggests that girls are presumed connected with, yet subsidiary to the needs and perspectives of adult women. It is worth considering why the phrases are never written as ‘children and women’ or ‘girls and women’ in these resolutions. Symbolically and materially, children in general, and girls in particular, are located as after, below, less than women, and several levels marginalized from boys and men, even though in conflict young people often assume responsibilities usually ascribed to—both male and female—adults. Even girls who are exercising roles commonly ascribed to adult women—and even

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sometimes adult men—are denied the agency, recognition, and political significance that this complex nexus of categorizations would imply they deserve under other circumstances. As Cynthia M. Caron and Shelby A. Margolin (2015: 887) observe, categories of ‘children’ and ‘women’ have subsumed girls’ needs and the discriminatory practices they encounter. These characterizations do not accurately represent complex ­on-the-ground dynamics in conflict situations and they highlight the need to pay attention to the way language is used in policy documents and the underlying assumptions that language promotes, as it can problematically reify or ignore gender or age. Beyond the resolutions themselves, discussions around Security Council Resolutions also show evidence of conflating children with women while at the same time presuming the categories share no crossover. For example in background discussions of UNSCR 1706, Cesar Mayoral, Argentina’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, noted that Argentina had cosponsored and supported the resolution because of a belief that the Security Council has a mandate to “protect vulnerable groups, particularly women and children who were the most defenceless.”1 This example shows how the tendency of conflating children and women into inherent victims can be evident in underlying assumptions underpinning UNSCRs. Proposing an alternative universal legal framework for girls is beyond the scope or intent of this chapter. However, the intersectional framework proposed here as an alternative analytical framework has implications for the ways girls are understood in a range of diverse peace and security contexts. For example, evidence from peacebuilding efforts shows how a failure to integrate intersectional analysis in implementation efforts poses important and unique problems for girls. Here, the recent Colombian context is explored as an illustrative example of the complex dynamics girls face and how these are exacerbated by a failure to account for intersectionality more broadly, but in particular around gender and age.

Illustrations from Colombia Virginia M. Bouvier’s (2016), Gender and the Role of Women in Colombia’s Peace Process, prepared for the UN Global Study on 15 Years of Implementation of UNSCR 1325, explores gendered dimensions in analyzing the conflict’s differential impacts on various groups, along

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with the intersectionality between various aspects of identity, including age. In doing so, Bouvier offers salient insights on the diverse contributions, needs, and interests of girls. The report documents young girls in Colombia being kidnapped and kept as sexual slaves for months in farm houses in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, as well as the use of female recruiters in the Urabá region to recruit 12–14 year-old girls who were then sexually abused while at the same time being plied with gifts, paid to have liposuction and breast implants, and forced to use contraception or undergo abortions if they became pregnant, while the girls’ families were given jobs and favors (Bouvier 2016: 10). Reports also detail the use of sexual violence in forcibly recruiting girls (as well as women), and the practice of male commanders in the FARC using their authority to engage sexually with young girls while also prohibiting pregnancy, including requiring contraceptive use and abortions by girls as young as twelve years old (Bouvier 2016: 11). Illustrations from Colombia offer further insights on how girls face unique issues when it comes to recruitment into armed groups and accessing programs aimed at supporting child soldiers. Making up 29% of demobilized children in Colombia, girls’ reasons for joining and leaving armed groups were influenced by both gender and age. Domestic abuse and lack of options for girls were cited as main push factors for joining. Some girls joined armed groups to break with gendered restrictions and expectations or to gain educational opportunities, while in certain regions joining the insurgency offered an alternative to coca production or prostitution. Upon joining armed groups, young people in general and girls in particular were often trapped in high-risk actions. For example, girls and young women risked their lives and health by smuggling cocaine across the border by hiding it inside their bodily recesses. Given intersections of gender and age, girls faced particular vulnerabilities, such as forcible recruitment of 12–15 year-olds who were compelled to perform sex work in mining areas and then replaced with other children when deemed “too sick” or “too used” (Bouvier 2016: 15). Despite these particularities, DDR (demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration) programs in Colombia in the past “have not accommodated the heterogeneity of ex-combatants and the particular traumas of war that different groups have experienced;” through focusing on men’s experiences, these programs have thus failed to meet the needs of girls and women (Bouvier 2016: 24). Similarly, my own (2015) research found that gender influences young people’s participation both

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in violence and in peacebuilding; interview responses from Colombian young people involved in that research suggested that reflecting on gender and applying strategies young people find engaging is crucial to involving both girls and boys in community-based peacebuilding efforts. More recently, the 2016 Colombian peace accord provides an example of a process attempting to address dilemmas around both gender and age, but due to a lack of intersectional analysis and praxis, still leaving girls vulnerable to being “caught in between.” The Colombian accord is unique in the world in recognizing that peace has different meanings for different groups of people, particularly for those marginalized by gender, ethnicity, and age, among other categories, who experienced violence of varying levels and types throughout the conflict. This ‘differential’ approach thus provides for targeted measures for these varied groups in an attempt to ensure all Colombians are accounted for in efforts at peace and security (Koopman 2018). Yet, while the Colombian case provides an example of a legal framework designed to account for age and gender in a peacebuilding context, the two categories remain separated, and any potential intersections between categories are ignored (Koopman 2018). As such, there is no recognition of the challenges or differences a girl might experience as a child and as a woman or female. Likewise, difficulties or discrimination she faces are likely to remain unsatisfactorily addressed when these critical aspects of her life are understood solely in isolation. This is just one among many cases where girls may be ‘caught in between’ even in efforts that attempt to address the complexity of their lives in conflict and peacebuilding. After all, even the most advanced differential efforts, while important, will likely continue to result in women’s programs mainly benefitting older women and young people’s programs mainly benefitting boys and young men. Further attention is thus needed to how children, particularly girls, are situated as hapless victims, conflated with women, and/or uncritically depicted as less than, or beneath, adult men and women, and how such framings can hinder efforts to advance peace and security.

Conclusion Challenging girls’ exclusion from peace and security efforts advances an inclusive feminist approach based on ethical reflection and applying insights made visible through an intersectional lens. Girls do not need,

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nor will they benefit from, a ‘trickle down’ approach to theory, practice, or policymaking filtered through binary prioritizations of men or adults. Instead, an analysis and critique that moves beyond ‘womenandchildren’ to open up new possibilities by challenging age-based exclusions to enhance feminist theories and projects of peace and security is warranted. This work is critical, as the marginalization of girls from understandings of peace and security can have significant consequences for their experiences of (in)security and their crucial participation in peacebuilding in the private, public, local, and international arenas. It should evoke a deep curiosity regarding how it becomes so ‘natural’ to forget about them, situating girlhood as a category inherently ‘less than’ and dependent on adult women (and men). Feminist theories, though they are rarely applied to studies of young people in peace and security, can contribute significantly to developing deeper understandings, particularly through the application of an intersectional framework accounting for age. This application can make room for positive change in scholarship, policy, and practice by uncovering gendered dimensions of young people’s experiences of conflict and peacebuilding as well as other forms of political participation in which they are involved. Following this path adheres to feminist precedents recognizing the personal (private) is political (public) and that artificially constructed hierarchies based on gender—and age—can and should be challenged. At the same time, care must be taken not to conflate the experiences or needs of women and children, as feminist scholars have rightfully made convincing and important claims about differences. However, it is also important not to let difference overshadow crossovers and clear confluences: theoretical advancement cannot be constructed in a sense that leads to unjust domination of one group over the other. Girls deserve further attention to their experiences and knowledge and recognition of their capacity to affect change and contribute to ­decision-making processes. Doing so is a vital step for peacebuilding theory, policy, and practice, offering academic, ethical, and practical benefits. Pursuing this path is necessary to make a better, more inclusive world for everyone.

Note 1. For full transcript see: https://www.un.org/press/en/2006/sc8821.doc. htm.

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References Ackerly, Brooke A., Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds. 2006. Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beier, J. Marshall. 2015. “Children, Childhoods and Security Studies: An Introduction.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1 080/21624887.2015.1019715. Berents, Helen. 2016. “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (4): 513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.201 6.1207463. Borer, Tristan Anne, John Darby, and Siobhán McEvoy-Levy. 2006. “Caught Between Child Rights and Security: Youth and Postwar Reconstruction.” In Peacebuilding After Peace Accords: The Challenges of Violence, Truth, and Youth, edited by John Darby Tristan Anne Borer and Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, 41–67. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bouvier, Virginia M. 2016. Gender and the Role of Women in Colombia’s Peace Process. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood— Insecurities of Children.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 29–46. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014679. Burman, Erica. 2008. “Beyond ‘Women vs. Children’ or ‘Womenandchildren’: Engendering Childhood and Reformulating Motherhood.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2): 177–194. https://doi.org/10.1163/157 181808X301773. Caron, Cynthia M., and Shelby A. Margolin. 2015. “Rescuing Girls, Investing in Girls: A Critique of Development Fantasies.” Journal of International Development 27 (2015): 881–897. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3146. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2010. Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Cho, Sumi, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 38 (4): 785–810. https://doi. org/10.1086/669608. Cockburn, Cynthia. 1998. The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. London: Zed Books. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin. Del Felice, Celina, and Andria Wisler. 2007. “The Unexplored Power and Potential of Youth as Peace-builders.” Journal of Peace and Conflict Development 11: 1–29.

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Efrat, Asif, David Leblang, Steven Liao, and Sonal S. Pandya. 2015. “Babies Across Borders: The Political Economy of International Child Adoption.” International Studies Quarterly 59 (3): 615–628. https://doi.org/10.1111/ isqu.12206. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1975. “‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’: The Dialectics of Development.” Politics 10 (2): 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00323267508401512. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis.” Village Voice, 25 September, 29–32. Enloe, Cynthia. 1993. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilligan, Chris. 2009. “‘Highly Vulnerable?’ Political Violence and the Social Construction of Traumatized Children.” Journal of Peace Research 46 (1): 119–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343308098407. Harding, Sandra G. 1987. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” In Feminism and Methodology: Social Sciences Issues, edited by Sandra G. Harding, 1–14. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jacob, Cecilia. 2015. “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security Studies.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080 /21624887.2015.1014675. Koffman, Ofra, and Rosalind Gill. 2013. “‘The Revolution Will Be Led by a 12-year-old Girl’: Girl Power and Global Biopolitics.” Feminist Review 105 (1): 83–102. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.16. Koffman, Ofra, Shani Orgad, and Rosalind Gill. 2015. “Girl Power and ‘Selfie Humanitarianism’” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 29 (2): 157–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022948. Koopman, Sara. 2018. “La paz en plural: Espacio, raza, género y sexualidad en los acuerdos de paz de Colombia.” In Geografías de Paz, edited by Yuri Sandoval. La Paz, Bolivia: Universidad Mayor de San Andres. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2011. “Horror and Hope: (Re)presenting Militarised Children in Global North-South Relations.” Third World Quarterly 32 (4): 725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.567005. Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2018. “‘The Intolerable Impact of Armed Conflict upon Children’: The United Nations Security Council and the Protection of Children in Armed Conflict.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 54–74. https://doi.org/10.1163/1875984X-01001004. McKenzie, Megan H. 2012. Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security & ­Post-Conflict Development. New York: New York University Press. Mies, Maria. 2014. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.

218  L. PRUITT Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Pankhurst, Donna. 2003. “The ‘Sex War’ and Other Wars: Towards a Feminist Approach to Peace Building.” Development in Practice 13 (2–3): 154–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/0961452032000073152. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2013. Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender, and Change. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2014. “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Australia and the Agency of Girls.” Australian Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 486–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2014.936360. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2015. “Gendering the Study of Children and Youth in Peacebuilding.” Peacebuilding 3 (2): 157–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/2 1647259.2015.1052630. Puechguirbal, Nadine. 2010. “Discourses on Gender, Patriarchy and Resolution 1325: A Textual Analysis of UN Documents.” International Peacekeeping 17 (2): 172–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13533311003625068. Sagi-Schwartz, Abraham. 2012. “Children of War and Peace: A Human Development Perspective.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 56 (5): 933– 951. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002712446128. Schell-Faucon, Stephanie. 2001. Conflict Transformation Through Educational and Youth Programmes. Berlin: Bergh of Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. Shepherd, Laura J. 2006. “Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan ­Post-9/11.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8 (1): 19–41. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616740500415425. Sommers, Marc. 2006. “Fearing Africa’s Young Men: Male Youth, Conflict, Urbanization, and the Case of Rwanda.” In The Other Half of Gender: Men’s Issues in Development, edited by Ian Bannon and Maria Correia, 137–158. Washington, DC: The World Bank. United Nations Security Council. 2000. “Resolution 1325,” S/Res/1325. Accessed 2 July 2019. http://unscr.com/en/resolutions/doc/1325. Watson, Alison M. S. 2008. “Can There Be a ‘Kindered’ Peace?” Ethics & International Affairs 22 (1): 35–42. http://10.1111/j.1747-7093.2008. 00128.x. Watson, Alison M. S. 2015. “Resilience is its Own Resistance: The Place of Children in Post-Conflict Settlement.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014687. Wibben, Annick T. R. 2016. “Introduction: Feminists Study War.” In Researching War: Feminist Methods: Ethics and Politics, edited by Annick T. R. Wibben, 21–31. London: Routledge. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 29 (1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1086/375708.

CHAPTER 11

Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security and Resilience J. Marshall Beier

Introduction For more than a decade, Operation Homefront, an American non-profit organization promoting the wellbeing of U.S. military families, has recognized exceptional achievement by children of armed service members with its Military Child of the Year Awards. Originally awarded to one child overall, the program was subsequently expanded to honor extraordinary contributions by a young person from each of the country’s armed services annually and, more recently, an Innovation Award for Military Children was also added. Recipients are selected from a larger pool of nominees on criteria of academic excellence, volunteerism, involvement in extracurriculars, and for “the positive impact that these special young people have made on their military families, their schools, and their communities” (Operation Homefront 2019). That they have excelled in these ways despite the oft-times difficult circumstances of military family life is a key aspect of the recognition they receive, and citations of past recipients include compelling accounts of hardship J. M. Beier (*)  Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_11

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(including personal or parental illness and having had family members suffer severe combat injury or death) and acknowledge the fuller gamut of challenges commonly faced by military children (among others, the disruptive effects of frequent moves, adjustment to new school environments, and lengthy parental deployments). Whatever the obstacles they might have had to contend with, however, their personal stories also accentuate and celebrate extraordinary achievement in academics, athletics, peer support leadership, and all manner of dedicated community service. They are held to be exemplary and are lauded for their many accomplishments, and quite rightly so. Importantly, the Military Child of the Year Awards program frames the young people it honors as the authors of their successes and, thus, as highly competent and purposeful acting subjects. Related to this, and no less noteworthy, are the many appeals to children’s resilience recurrent in campaign literature, press releases, biographical notes on recipients, and official statements. Indeed, Operation Homefront has described the Awards as being, in addition to recognition of individual character and achievement, an “annual celebration of resilience” (Operation Homefront 2016). In her remarks at the 2011 award ceremony, ­then-First Lady Michelle Obama broadened the ambit, paying homage to the resilience of all military children (Sanchez 2011). Taking this further still, and beyond its specific purchase in the case of military family life, it has resonance too with what has become a prominent theme of late in accounts of children at risk in exigent or adverse circumstances more generally. Across myriad contexts, from the comparatively quotidian (such as instances of personal loss or family reorganization) to the catastrophic (as in situations of war or natural disaster), the resilient child has emerged as a powerful trope where adversity or abjection rub up uncomfortably against an enduring—if culturally and historically specific—idealized view of childhood as a time of innocence and of children as cherished objects of protection. Resilience arouses inclinations here that are potentially transformative to the extent that it explicitly encodes agency and thereby demurs from older developmentalist ideas about childhood that, brought to International Relations, would insist upon children’s reduction to hapless victims or passive objects of security. At the same time, however, it entails the danger both of responsiblizing marginalized subjects in circumstances of acute social, material, and corporeal vulnerability and of implying too much about the social space within which they are able to mobilize an autonomous response to those circumstances.

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Among the conceptual challenges that new thinking about children and childhood raises for disciplinary International Relations is how to reconcile subjecthood and (in)security. While the rise of resilience as a paradigmatic alternative to security (Chandler 2012) holds promise for the recovery and foregrounding of subject positions too easily occluded by simplistic renderings of victimhood (Beier 2015), it has drawn criticism for downloading the responsibility to abide and to withstand onto those affected by adverse circumstances (see, for example, Neocleous 2013). Worse, it risks normalization, acceptance, and palliation of insecurity in its tendency toward valorizing individualized triumph over adversity, one implication of which is that bona fide subjecthood is somehow earned through indomitability to overcome hardship, deprivation, and even violence. While problematic in all cases, this may be especially so when it comes to children, whose disempowerment makes them uniquely vulnerable. It also points up the importance of not conflating agency, as the capacity to act in the world, and subjecthood, as being to some meaningful extent the author of one’s actions. Exploring the challenge this poses for International Relations, the central argument of this chapter is that there is a need to hold security and resilience mutually in tension whilst keeping children’s subjecthood (real or ostensible) and vulnerability both conspicuously foregrounded. In so doing, we are better positioned to answer the call to resist children’s ubiquitous objectification as emotional scenery and their consequent reduction to discursive resources in furtherance of projects not of their making, without losing sight of the power relations constituting and reproduced through childhood. In what follows, I approach this argument by way of what might seem a somewhat arbitrary point of entry: children of military families living in the Global North, and the U.S. in particular. To the extent that International Relations alludes to issues of children’s (in)security, it has tended to be physical security (from violence or profound deprivation) that has been at stake, typically in circumstances of spectacular abjection (as in war or famine) and overwhelmingly associated with the Global South (even when, as in the case of mass migration, this has touched the North directly). The children whose images populate accounts of crises are made the emotional scenery (Brocklehurst 2015: 32) of disaster and atrocity—metonyms for crisis itself and key to how it comes to be registered (Berents 2016, 2019; Beier 2018). Pitiable and helpless, they might scarcely seem imaginable as anything more than would-be objects

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of protection or embodied indictments of those who have failed to protect them, thus referring inquiry to other subjects but seldom understood as subjects in their own right. It is perhaps understandable that we might lose sight of the subjecthood of children in such settings, where their powerlessness is so poignantly expressed in the abjection of their circumstances. With this in mind, for the purposes of this chapter I look to sites that might lend more readily to holding visible both subjecthood and vulnerability of children and to finding them meaningfully part of global political processes and practices, called on to perform work indispensable to status quo circulations of power, and simultaneously subjects and objects of much more complex and nuanced webs of (in)security practices. Among my aims herein, then, is to highlight a more heterogenous geography of childhoods relevant to the study of global politics and thereby to disturb dominant understandings not only of children and childhoods, but also of where and how else we might look for them in the stories IR tells about its subject matters and itself.

Resilience and the Exceptional Child The Military Child of the Year Awards are instructive for the glimpse they afford us into the problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects of locating child subjects between security and resilience. The weight and magnitude of many of the challenges faced by Military Child of the Year Award recipients figures prominently in the program’s framing as a celebration both of high achievement and of obstacles overcome. The ethos palpably expressed in this juxtaposition of triumph and adversity is one of grit and determination but also a certain stoicism. Describing a recent cohort of recipients and noting they, “have experienced the good and the bad of military life, including several who have health challenges,” Karen Jowers (2019) offers that, “rather than ask, ‘Why me?’ they embrace their challenges and have become more resilient.” This narrative positions them unambiguously as acting subjects, founders of their own accomplishments and credited with having conquered (or, at least, not having allowed themselves to be conquered by) adversity. Indeed, Jowers notes that some have taken inspiration from the challenges they have faced and have been, “spurred [by] them to become mentors to others who may be in the same situation, or dealing with similar health issues.” Here there is also an assumption of the at least latent agency of other children for whom the Award recipients serve as mentors: the very

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notion of the role model presumes that others must also have agency in order for these celebrated young people and the promulgation of their individual stories of resilience to move beyond mere pageantry, standing as exemplars and inspiring emulation. There is much about this that sits well with the turn away from developmentalism in Childhood Studies and with approaches that aim toward recovery of children’s subjecthood. The Military Child of the Year Awards seem similarly inclined inasmuch as they place the accent on recipients’ own achievements and, in framing them as role models, implicitly summon a view of all children as acting subjects in their social worlds. It is important to have role models, of course, just as it is important to recognize extraordinary achievements. And these things are all the more important where they highlight the accomplishments of young people and thereby help to unsettle dominant ideas about childhood as, per force, a stage of life defined by emerging but as yet deficient competencies and capabilities. But there is danger too where a narrative of resilience is brought in connection with the celebration of exceptional achievement. While individual accomplishment bespeaks acting subjects, it should not be taken to be their sine qua non. This is all the more emphatically so when it comes to accomplishments celebrated at the pinnacle of a competitive process meant to recognize extraordinary achievements that are, by definition, exceptional. The implications here are deeply problematic in a number of regards, not least that recognition of subjecthood might be held in deferment where resilience is not expressed in particular idealized ways. Beyond the ranks of the seven Military Child of the Year Award winners selected annually and the slightly larger field of similarly exceptional nominees is a much vaster population of children facing the challenges of military family life in relative anonymity and in ways perhaps more typical. This recommends a more nuanced understanding of subjecthood, brought into articulation with both discourses and material circumstances of security and resilience. A recent demographic study counted 1,170,244 children aged eleven years and younger and a further 396,972 between the ages of twelve and eighteen with one or more parents in the U.S. military (United States, Department of Defense 2017: 125). Without at all diminishing the extraordinary achievements of Military Child of the Year Awards recipients, then, it is important to place them in their broader context, wherein the sorts of challenges faced by the recipients are much more the rule than the exception. Among these, studies have shown periods of

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deployment by a parent correlate with high rates of psychosocial morbidity among children in military families (Flake et al. 2009; Chandra et al. 2010) and children with a parent on deployment have been found to be at significantly higher risk of suffering maltreatment and neglect (Gibbs et al. 2007; Rentz et al. 2007; Piehler et al. 2018). Post-deployment, children of military parents with operational stress injuries are similarly at higher risk both for maltreatment and mental health impacts (Cramm et al. 2016). Even in peacetime, accommodating the demands of family life to those of a parent’s career in the military is often difficult (Segal 1986), and this is magnified in cases of single parent and dual-career households. Military families experience geographical reassignment at rates substantially higher than those for the general population and, while there are identified benefits for children associated with frequent relocation of military families, moves to new schools and communities are simultaneously disruptive of relationships upon which peer and institutional support networks depend (Park 2011). Due to chronic employment gaps experienced by non-military spouses, family income levels may be adversely affected in comparison with civilian counterparts (Meadows et al. 2016). Relative to the civilian population, military families with young children, in particular, incur elevated risk of food insecurity, which is itself generative of a host of other psychosocial problems (Wax and Stankorb 2016). Most, if not all, children of military families are faced with some constellation of these and associated challenges and, moreover, risk factors are more predictive of outcomes for these children than protective factors (Wadsworth et al. 2016). Resilience described by way of reference to exceptional achievement, therefore, centers what is already atypical. While keeping this context front of mind, it is nevertheless important not to lose sight of children’s innate capacity for resilience. Unsettling the familiar subject/object relations of protecting adult and protected child, the turn to resilience holds significant potential for the recovery of subjecthood from objectifying discourses of unidimensional vulnerability (Beier 2015). This gets at a more nuanced picture of the lived experiences of children in military families as acting subjects of consequence not only for their own resilience but for that of the military as an institution. For instance, even together with pathological effects, it is common for children to exhibit increased independence during parental deployment (Flake et al. 2009: 272). Related to this, the everyday domestic and affective labour performed by “military caregiver kids”

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(National Military Family Association 2019) is essential to the reproduction of militarized family and social relations and underwrites the viability of U.S. military power in the same way that unwaged gendered labour performed in households has long been understood to sustain the conditions of possibility of the wage labour economy. In these and other ways, children appear as acting subjects and participants not only in military family life but in the life of the military itself, signaling a more complicated picture and urging us to look to the interstices rather than either of the opposed poles of risk and resilience. Adding further layers still, Ernestine C. Briggs et al. (2019) highlight the role of factors such as family demographics, the varied particulars of parental deployments, and the presence or absence of other family stressors as determinants of differential psychosocial outcomes for children in military families. Eric M. Flake et al. (2009: 276) find that “parental wellness is the single most predictive factor of child wellness and increased support mitigates stress.” More specifically, they point to the importance of systems of social support that include but extend beyond the family (Flake et al. 2009: 277; see also Richardson et al. 2016). What is more, race, gender, class, and other factors have been shown to affect the degree to which challenges of military family life may be felt more acutely by some children than by others (Chandra et al. 2010; Atuel et al. 2014). What these and similar studies highlight is the danger of investing too much in discourses of perseverance and individualized responsibility to overcome adversity. And it is thus that thinking about children as subjects in (in)security helps us to bring into focus perilous implications of accessing subjecthood through resilience rather than the other way around. Put another way, if recognized subjecthood is significantly contingent upon demonstrated resilience (understood, in turn, to be expressed in outcomes that turn out to be atypical) then not only is the subjecthood of all others held in deferment but factors such as race, gender, and class, among others, will bear on the likelihood of its affirmation for some children more than others. The deeper significance of this comes to light when we examine key distinctions between framings of security and resilience. Spike Peterson’s (1992: 54) well-known critique of the protector/protected binary as constitutive of protecting subjects and protected objects speaks to the same sorts of logics at work where dominant ideas about vulnerable childhood write children out of subjecthood. As cherished objects of protection, children’s vulnerability calls on the responsibility of other

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subjects in the provision of security. It is also a potent political resource at the disposal of those same subjects. Childhood’s powerlessness is key, for example, to how it is that images of children as the emotional scenery of crisis are so evocative (Lee-Koo 2018: 51) and so useful as well to the political projects of adult subjects seeking to legitimize security discourses and the interventions premised on them (Botterill et al. 2016: 125). But something potentially even more sinister may be at work where a resilience framing is potentially suggestive of some children as ‘failed’ subjects when less successful in withstanding adverse circumstances. This is the specter haunting the celebration of resilience as achievement where sources and conditions of insecurity persist unabated and inasmuch as not all subjects experience these conditions the same way or face them with the support of the same social assets and abilities. Claudia Aradau’s (2014) interrogation of resilience discourses as entailing suspension of the promise of security suggests a further insight that is key to thinking about the context in which they are deployed in connection with the Military Child of the Year Awards: the challenges that confront children of military families are endemic, not sporadic; chronic, not transitory. Though Award recipients have achieved their successes despite adversity, and may even have overcome some of its worst secondary effects, this is not the same as having overcome adversity itself. Frequent moves to new schools, separation from or loss of a parent, unemployment/underemployment of non-military spouses of military parents and the impact this has on household resources, and other challenges of military family life are not resolved by their many undeniably impressive accomplishments. Rather, these hardships and their consequences are abided and, one way or another, assimilated to all military children’s lives, with young people doing the work of accommodating themselves to the demands of military life. This is another aspect of the work required of children by the military as an institution, wherein it is recognized that children’s resilience in overcoming psychosocial problems is essential to ensuring the work focus and mission readiness of their military parents (Conforte et al. 2017). As such, though it is not experienced in even and consistent ways by all children of military families, it is inherent in military family life writ large. For Aradau (2014), appeal to resilience becomes a technology of response to the problem of surprise. Suspension of the promise of security is occasioned in the very inability to anticipate every exigent

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circumstance. Resilience answers this not as a shifting of responsibility for the provision of security to affected subjects but in responsibilizing those subjects to abide insecurity. Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose (2009: 242) describe resilience in the similarly contingent terms of a capacity “to resist being affected by shock or disaster, and to recover quickly from such events.” This entails acting subjects both possessed of and directly engaged in—and thus responsible for—the building of requisite attributes and capabilities: A logic of resilience, then, is not merely an attitude of preparedness; to be resilient is not quite to be under protection nor merely to have systems in place to deal with contingencies. Resilience implies a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary. (Lentzos and Rose 2009: 243)

In the literal and figurative grammars of resilience thinking, acting subjects are called on to do their own work of becoming and being resilient with systemic responsibility confined to promotion of conditions conducive to this work (Beier 2015)—that is, stopping short of provision of security. The implication, however, is that those who fail (relative to others, at least) to be resilient may also have failed as subjects; to be responsibilized in resilience work is, in some measure, to bear responsibility for not being (as) resilient. If resilience turns on a suspension of security and not its utter forfeiture, it presumes a temporary and transient nature to “shocks.” But challenges experienced by children of military families and the insecurities they engender are systemic, not shocks or aberrations. It is in respect of these that an ersatz subjecthood—ersatz in the sense that it is both called into being by and a priori subordinated to the demands of a politics beyond its agential reach—inheres in the downloading of responsibility to abide adversity without the possibility of transcending it (Beier 2015). While children are called on to be resilient, they are held powerless to resolve the sources of the insecurity they experience. There are similarities here to the objectified vulnerable child deployed as emotional scenery in service of political projects not of their making and in respect of which they are utterly without agential remit. While the child called

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on to do the work of being resilient is, of necessity, positioned as an acting subject it is a subject position impoverished both by its disenfranchisement from the possibility of effecting change and by the demand that it be exercised in a specific way—it is difficult to imagine a resistance politics, for example, that would not be read to encode failure to be resilient. In this way the resilience work of children, while highly politicized, is delegated to children who remain relatively powerless and constrained from meaningfully exercising autonomous political subjecthood. The call to resilience here has the potential to become a cudgel, particularly where adversity is highlighted together with the celebration of achievement. Narratives suggesting one has become stronger for reason rather than in spite of adversity have a long lineage in common with the ethos of militarism and have cultural analogues in things like ‘tough love,’ self-improvement ‘boot camps,’ and the like. Embraced by the U.S. Marine Corps, the slogan, “Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body,” exemplifies both the valorization of adversity and the subtext of disdain for “weakness.” Albeit somewhat differently inflected, something of this same ethos can be gleaned from the Military Child of the Year Awards, which link hardship to emergent properties of the acting subject in the context of the challenges of military family life. The connection is explicit in Michelle Obama’s aforementioned remarks, in which she went on to describe “service to our country…sacrifice for a cause…patriotism and courage and resilience” as performed not only by U.S. service members, but by their children as well: they “play their own very unique role in keeping our country safe,” she continued, “and preserving the freedoms that we all hold dear” (Sanchez 2011). That it is the parents and not the children who have formally chosen to enlist, however, alerts us to the mystification of power relations and the danger of raising an ersatz subjecthood. Michelle Obama’s linking of “sacrifice” and “resilience,” both of which she generalized to all children of military families, is telling too of the political importance of the resilience work they do. Containing and obscuring hardship, adversity, and loss through “resilience” and making them meaningful as “sacrifice”—notably, tied to aspirational values of “patriotism” and “courage”—where they cannot be hidden from view is vital to managing popular perceptions of the human costs of militarism. Cynthia Enloe (2019) points out the broader context in which these practices are intelligible:

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To the extent that civilians see the wartime wounded of a current or recent war, they are likely to be unenthusiastic about supporting officials in their next warwaging enterprise. The blind veteran, the veteran amputee – they are not persuasive advertisements for the militarizers’ cause. If the wounds cannot be thoroughly hidden from civilian view, then at least they should be woven, militarizers are likely to believe, into post-war narratives of soldiery resilience and amazing physical recovery: for instance, the military veteran amputees who are shown on the US defense department’s web page playing star roles on ice hockey teams. (Enloe 2019: 402; emphasis in original)

Wounds, of course, include operational stress injuries and, in similar ways, much is invested in managing the broader social implications of these also (Howell 2015). And the wounded whose disquieting visibility threatens to trouble easy recourse to organized political violence include noncombatants as well, among them civilians both within and beyond zones of conflict. As Enloe (2019: 402; emphasis in original) puts it, “Wounds and the wounded are political in so far as political energies and resources are used to make them invisible.” The resilience work performed by children of military families contributes to making invisible and otherwise managing the meaning of significant social costs of contemporary militarism. Of course, this need not always be the programmatic intent of resilience work or of its promotion in order for it to have the same effect. For those directly engaged as its acting subjects, resilience work can be foremost about self-help and wellbeing while still contributing to the viability of recourse to militarized responses to political problems. Similarly, the exceptional achievements of Military Child of the Year Award recipients can be laudable and deserving of celebration in themselves while, at the same time, the exceptional individual held up as paradigmatic becomes problematic as an idea where the implication is that others could or should emulate them and demonstrate resilience in like manner. These stories of achievement are exceptional and deserve to be commended, but as role models they may generalize an expectation, with disciplining effect. It is also the case that children can and do adopt a militarized worldview and they can and do act purposively in accordance with such a world view. They can and do believe in the value of the work of their military parents. The point, then, is not that these are not real expressions of subjecthood in themselves. Rather, it is that alternative expressions—as in a politics of resistance that

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might refuse resilience-as-stoicism by raising complaint, for example—are given no quarter. The downloading of responsibility to abide adversity through the practices of resilience allows a space for the ersatz subjecthood of children necessary to resilience work while withholding the possibility of a fuller subject position of meaningful participation in the political worlds from which their immediate circumstances arise. At the same time, to the extent that children’s resilience work makes the status quo sustainable, it comes together with the deactivation of responsibility of those possessed of real power to transform those circumstances. Remediation of adversity, then, becomes a matter of promoting conditions within which children can do the work of being resilient in the sense of accommodating themselves to hardship and, by extension, to militarism and other such institutionalized expressions of hegemonic power circulations. Beyond the reach of transformation are the militarized practices that have led to the need for children to be resilient in the first place. The effect of the ersatz subjecthood implied in children’s resilience work is the mystification of relations of power between child and adult worlds and, to the extent that childhood and adulthood are essentialized and universalized, mystification also of power relations between sites of relative abjection and privilege (those children there should be able to demonstrate resilience like these children here). If these are deeply problematic implications in light of the varied experiences of U.S. children of military families—and they certainly are—they are even more so when it comes to crosscutting global registers of inequality.

Resilient Subjects Being, Becoming, and Been in (In)Security Getting beyond the limiting conception of subjecthood born of resilience work necessitates a more robust theorization of children as always bona fide subjects in and of the social worlds they inhabit. At issue here are not only the limits of the rarefied theoretical currents of International Relations and what they might not be well equipped to access, but also dominant ontologies of childhood operative in everyday life. While these came under sustained challenge in the ‘new sociology of childhood’ of the 1980s and have been roundly discredited with the rise of Childhood Studies since the 1990s, they continue to operate free of critical scrutiny in social sciences—International Relations among them—in which

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focused thinking about childhood has yet to make significant inroads. In these disciplines and in everyday contexts beyond the academy (see Raby and Raddon 2015), children are not easily apprehended as capable and competent social actors. So entrenched are developmentalist-inspired ideas about childhood that they police even the figure of the exceptional child. Conservative commentators and others have voiced suspicions, for example, that high-profile young activists like Naomi Wadler or Greta Thunberg must somehow have been steered or manipulated to the views they espouse—suspicions derived at least in part from the clarity and sophistication of the political positions each has voiced. It might well be that some who hold such views genuinely cannot, for reason of enduring developmentalist commitments, conceive of young people as thoughtful, informed, and ultimately influential political actors in their own right. It might also be the case that the political opponents of young activists simply draw on the appeal to childhood incapacity as a rhetorical feint, well-rehearsed in strategies of delegitimization. Even in the latter context, however, what is decisive is a reliably widespread ‘commonsense’ about children’s incapacity—reliable enough that a strategy of delegitimization can presume to trade on it—that does not easily countenance the idea of young people’s role in the authorship of a politics and a political subject position. What, then, can students and scholars of International Relations learn from the experience of Childhood Studies in thinking about these persistent developmentalist ideas and how to address the problem of children written out of subjecthood? First, while attention to children as important social actors holds much promise for a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of global politics, care must be taken to avoid the pitfall of reinscribing children and childhoods in different but no less essentialized ways. A key impetus to the development of Childhood Studies was precisely taking to task approaches to childhood that were diminutive of children’s agency (Hanson 2017: 281) and which, centering adulthood, viewed children less as “human beings” than “human becomings” (Uprichard 2008). Agency itself, however, remained undertheorized in many cases (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013) and too seldom distinguished from participation (Punch 2019). In part, this can be attributed to the emphasis on children’s capabilities as a counter to developmentalism as well as to social constructivist critiques of the strong association of children’s vulnerability with presumed deficits and incapacities. As important as these moves were, they could also result in

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a trading of one essentialism for another where a liberal conception of agency as freedom rooted in capabilities, intersecting deeply held notions of the innocence and virtue of childhood, romanticized children’s agency as necessarily beneficial (Holloway et al. 2019). Like the objectified child written out of subjecthood, this is a construction that leaves little room for an understanding of children as complex social actors who might as readily align themselves with power, privilege, and injustice as against it. Saying simply that adults have written children out of subjecthood similarly treads dangerously close to essentializing childhood and adulthood alike and has, in itself, encoded echoes of developmentalism. To unpack this, we can begin with a puzzle that emerges in light of all adults having once been children themselves: if children truly are possessed of authentic political subjecthood, how do we account for their apparent lapse in memory of this as adults assessing the (in)competence of children? Paul Ricoeur’s (1981, 1986, 1988) influential contributions on time and self-narrative might suggest one way of coming to terms with this as the narrative emplotment of past experience (one’s own childhood) entangled with dominant metanarratives (of childhood in general). In this way, refigurations of the adult subject’s own lived experience of childhood can be understood to reflect a (re)writing of past experience as part of the present narrative of the self—the present is in this sense retroactive, but in a (re)writing which may nevertheless be earnest inasmuch as it is an interpretive way of coming to knowledge of the self. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) conception of habitus proposes a strong predisposition of social actors to behave in accordance with social structures inculcated most durably in childhood. Dominant ideas about childhood, to the extent that they are internalized not only by adults but by children themselves, may thus shape and condition the lived experience of childhood as both seeing oneself as and comporting oneself as the quintessential child of prevailing imaginaries—in effect, writing oneself out of subjecthood even in childhood. Both Ricoeur’s and Bourdieu’s formulations preserve the agency of social actors from bare structural determinants of behaviour while still providing for regularities associated with, among others, race, gender, and class (to which we might usefully add childhood—a point to which I will return by way of concluding). For both, subjects are predisposed to act in accordance with social structures without being wholly determined by them. In thinking about the implications of emplotment and habitus together, however, it might seem a counterpoint that if children write

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themselves out of subjecthood then adults would not be retroactively writing out their own child subjecthood—it would seem, after all, that there could be no referent from their own childhoods to permit imagining childhood other than they do. But children do not write themselves entirely out of subjecthood and adults do not entirely write them out either. Children have demands and aspirations whilst adults similarly make demands of them and have aspirations for them. Hegemonic ideas about childhood are therefore rightly counted amongst the social structures in accordance with which subjects are predisposed—though not predetermined—to interpret, constitute, and perform subject/object relationships. Our focus is thus directed toward powerful social forces that work to naturalize the hegemonic terms of these relationships and which press the diminution of children’s subjecthood. Once again, we are presented with a more complicated picture than the aligned adult/child and subject/object binaries might suggest—one that is revealing of circulations of power and of the social relations they sustain and which are ultimately at stake. A first critical move toward holding this visible is in the recognition that children, as the essentialized protected objects of adult protectors, are an enabling condition of adult political subjecthood (Johansson 2011). Taking childhood and adulthood to be meaningful foremost in the social relations that constitute them and of which they, in turn, are constitutive draws attention once more to the interstices between the opposed renderings of “human beings” of the new sociology of childhood and the “human becomings” of developmentalism. Karl Hanson (2017) proposes further disrupting the binaries that bedevil debates about children as social actors in a move that foregrounds relationality by complementing the “being” and “becoming” with the “been.” Arguing that “we can find simultaneous and continuing traces of the past in the present,” and that this can allow us “to overcome even the binary between childhood and adulthood,” Hanson looks to complex relations not only between extant child and adult but between childhood and adulthood as lived experience of the (ostensibly) singular subject: “To understand what children are, we do need to understand not only their past, present and future but also the mutable relations and shifting sequences between these temporal orders” (Hanson 2017: 282). In the perpetual (re)negotiations of these pasts, presents, and futures we find a means by which to deny grand essentialisms the stable conceptual ground on which they depend.

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Disturbing the boundary between child and adult reveals something of the considerable political work invested in policing it. And exposing the relations of power at work in this also positions us to critically assess what is mystified in the ersatz subjecthood of children’s resilience work in the context of adversity that, as in the case of children in military families, is endemic and chronic to their social circumstances. More than the mere suspension of the promise of security, their situation is that the promise is effectively revoked insofar as particular social costs of institutionalized militarism are theirs to bear unremittingly. They are at risk in the sense that military family life entails specific challenges known to be strong predictors of adverse psychosocial outcomes. At the same time, they are vulnerable for reason of dependence and disenfranchisement from social power, not least as would be expressed in a more fulsome exercise of subjecthood than the limited form admitted in resilience work. While this might seem to fix immovable limits on the possibility of children’s meaningful subjecthood, holding security and resilience mutually in tension whilst keeping vulnerability explicitly foregrounded suggests a way of accessing and making visible children’s subjecthood as innately resilient social actors beyond what the exogenously emergent demands of resilience work might allow. Subjecthood presumes power, and vice versa, and both (power in particular) are normally presumed to be opposites to vulnerability. Children’s conspicuous vulnerability is both materially manifest and made manifest in how we grant it recognition. As Judith Butler puts it, when we say that every infant is surely vulnerable, that is clearly true; but it is true, in part, precisely because our utterance enacts the very recognition of vulnerability and so shows the importance of recognition itself for sustaining vulnerability. We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is surely a very good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the claim, however, precisely because it is not taken for granted, precisely because it is not, in every instance, honored. Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability. (Butler 2004: 43)

Butler’s point that vulnerability cannot be taken for granted on the strength of material determinants alone gets at the important sense in which it is something negotiated by subjects in interaction. It also points to the matter of indeterminacies regarding who can and cannot activate

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the responsibility of other subjects to extend protection. Tracey Skelton places the matter of responsibility on both local and global scales: It is important that children are not seen as being so competent that we excuse ourselves as adults from the responsibility of caring for them. They do need protection and they do need provision. Just because some children participate and demonstrate social agency does not mean that they don’t need looking after. We cannot ignore that the fact that the majority of the world’s children/children of the majority world are in vulnerable positions which are not of their making. They are of adults’ making, and frequently distant adults who fail or refuse to see the consequences of their actions. (Skelton 2007: 178)

Seen in this light, recovery of children’s agency must be balanced with sustained affirmation of vulnerability (Oswell 2013) or else risk inviting withdrawal of the obligation to extend protection (see Jacob 2014). Keeping opposed possibilities in balance is a tall order, however, especially when they are referents of contestation beset by the vagaries of unequal relations of power. A promising route to overcoming this lies in reconciling agency and vulnerability. Ketil Eide et al. (2018) find children’s agency in their choosing whom to trust—choosing, that is, where they will turn for protection. This does not dispute that they are uniquely vulnerable but it does mitigate the usual consequence of acknowledging this, which is to downgrade, subordinate, or outright deny the possibility of their subjecthood. This is a view that recommends theorizing vulnerability not as agency’s polar opposite but as an enabling condition of it. In so doing, it keeps both agency and vulnerability conspicuously visible in a way that does not lend easily to overemphasizing one at the expense of the other. And it holds protector and protected as a subject/subject relationship in which each subject position plays an important part in the constitution of the other. In the context of protection, it offers a way of answering concerns about the deactivation of protector responsibility without retreating from the valuable capabilities-focused insights into childhoods and about children as significant social actors. What, though, of children as agents in vulnerability beyond situations of protection-seeking? Phillip Mizen and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi’s (2013) investigations into the considerations moving children to leave their family homes for the streets of Accra lead them to argue for a view of

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vulnerability and agency bound together rather than opposed. Having come to recognize their vulnerability in consequence of unsatisfying relations of care and protection in the home, these children opted for independent migration to Accra on the basis of their own social understandings of care and dependency. This leads Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi to suggest vulnerability as itself an essential constituent of agency: “What we advocate, therefore, is an account of these children’s agency that emphasizes its subjective, experiential and humanistic dimensions, where understandings of their vulnerability constitutes a force capable of moving these children to embark upon such uncertain courses of action” (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013: 379). Rejecting the usual positioning of vulnerability “as agency’s antonym, a deficit of action brought about by…forces that deny the child this capacity to act,” they argue that “awareness of one’s own vulnerability may itself constitute the basis for action” (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013: 369). This is a view of agency upon which a more robust conception of subjecthood can be founded. It finds vulnerability as the aspect of agency that moves subjects to want to mobilize their capabilities—the other key constituent of agency—to do something about their worlds as much as in them. And, as such, it complements capabilities in a way that moves beyond the ersatz subjecthood brought to light in the resilience work demanded of children of military families.

Conclusion: Subjects in Peril Children, like all human subjects, are confronted with innumerable perils and, like all human subjects, they in turn confront those perils in purposive ways. That children are vulnerable is not in dispute. To greater or lesser extents, everyone, child and adult alike, is vulnerable. In the main, it is not vulnerability, per se, that is socially constructed but who is constructed as vulnerable and what that is taken to mean. As subjects in and of the worlds we inhabit, we are all engaged at one and the same time in performing and ascribing vulnerability and in answering it. All human subjects are, thus, necessarily subjects in peril: at once imperiled and navigating the constitution of peril in social relations of power. At the same time, subjecthood itself, being open to contestation in social relations through which power circulates and which come to be expressed in inequality, is always to some degree in peril. Race, gender, class, and other social systems of difference affect differing experiences of these

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circulations for both adults and children. For children, however, subjecthood is uniquely imperiled for the very reason of their social location in childhood as well. Approaches to the problem of security that fail to take account of this are consequently inadequate to accessing children as anything more than the objectified referents—including as emotional scenery—of political projects and interventions of other more powerful actors. Children’s security needs tend to be conceived in material terms as protection from threat and, usually, satisfaction of at least basic material needs. The presumptive threats to and requisites of security are thus easily hardened into an ontology of children’s objective incapacity and essential vulnerability. While there is indeterminacy in all renderings of security (Huysmans 1998), the failure to theorize childhood together with the unequal power relations bound up in its co-constitution with adult subjects masks the unique ambivalence of security where children are concerned. Leaving aside the myriad ways in which the varied exigencies of children’s material circumstances, unique individual capacities, and lived experiences affect childhoods, arbitrary power and idiosyncratic regulatory practices are especially relevant to assessments of children’s (in)security. In addition to the vagaries of local laws, custom, parenting practices (Joelsson 2019), and so forth, power works through the trope of the resilient child in ways that International Relations’ approaches to theorizing security are not well-equipped to interrogate. While the turn to resilience holds transformative potential in its recognition of agency, this may stop short of making space for a more fulsome conception of subjecthood. Theorizing childhood offers something of broader relevance to disciplinary International Relations by bringing this into relief. Finally, the example of the Military Child of the Year Awards confines discussion to a terrain of childhood experience that is, on the whole, conspicuously privileged relative to aggregate global registers. With the important caveat that race, gender, class, and other factors operate in ways that make unsustainable any homogenized rendering of children of military families, even where the focus is limited to the Global North, what should nevertheless be clear from this example is that childhood as a distinct category of identity operates in very particular ways. And this points to a further significant implication for International Relations, this time in the ways we think about categories of difference. Even thinking intersectionally about childhoods to make sense of how some children might be better positioned to answer the demands of resilience work or

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how race, gender, class, and more work to position some young people as cherished objects and others as dangerous subjects, we still do little to disturb the inscribed meaning of childhood itself. Besides looking to the intersectionality of childhoods (plural for reason of their intersections with race, gender, class, etc.) we must ensure we are also always thinking about childhood (singular as a category of difference in its own right) in intersectionality. If childhood is constitutive of adult subjects, then we cannot make sense of the social relations of power bound up in the making of any subject, child or adult, without taking childhood together with other categories of difference as germane to the intersectional constitution of all subjects. Thus, theorizing subjects, vulnerability, and even security, demands that we theorize childhood also. Acknowledgements   Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2019-0009).

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Neocleous, Mark. 2013. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178. http:// www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-resilience. Operation Homefront. 2016. “Press Release: Operation Homefront Accepting 2017 Military Child of the Year® Nominations.” 19 September. Operation Homefront. 2019. “Press Release: Seven Outstanding Teens to Receive Operation Homefront 2019 Military Child of the Year® Award.” 6 March. Oswell, David. 2013. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Park, Nansook. 2011. “Military Children and Families: Strengths and Challenges During Peace and War.” American Psychologist 66 (1): 65–72. https://doi. org/10.1037/a0021249. Peterson, V. Spike. 1992. “Security and Sovereign States: What Is at Stake in Taking Feminism Seriously?” In Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, edited by V. Spike Peterson, 31–64. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Piehler, Timothy F., Kadie Ausherbauer, Abigail Gewirtz, and Kate Gliske. 2018. “Improving Child Peer Adjustment in Military Families Through Parent Training: The Mediational Role of Parental Locus of Control.” Journal of Early Adolescence 38 (9): 1322–1343. https://doi. org/10.1177/0272431616678990. Punch, Samantha. 2019. “Why Have Generational Orderings Been Marginalised in the Social Sciences Including Childhood Studies?” Children’s Geographies (online in advance of print): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.20 19.1630716. Raby, Rebecca, and Mary-Beth Raddon. 2015. “Is She a Pawn, Prodigy or Person with a Message? Public Responses to a Child’s Political Speech.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 40 (2): 163–187. https://doi.org/10.29173/ cjs21758. Rentz, E. Danielle, Stephen W. Marshall, Dana Loomis, Carri Casteel, Sandra L. Martin, and Deborah A. Gibbs. 2007. “Effect of Deployment on the Occurrence of Child Maltreatment in Military and Nonmilitary Families.” American Journal of Epidemiology 165 (10): 1199–1206. https://doi. org/10.1093/aje/kwm008. Richardson, Evin W., Jacquelyn K. Mallette, Catherine W. O’Neal, and Jay A. Mancini. 2016. “Do Youth Development Programs Matter? An Examination of Transitions and Well-Being Among Military Youth.” Journal of Child and Family Studies 25 (6): 1765–1776. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10826-016-0361-5. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

242  J. M. BEIER Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” In Facts and Values: Philosophical Reflections from Western and Non-Western Perspectives, edited by M. C. Doeser and J. N. Kraay, 121–132. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative: Volume Three. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanchez, Elaine. 2011. “First Lady Cites Military Children’s Resilience.” DoD News, 8 April. Accessed 6 March 2019. https://archive.defense.gov/news/ newsarticle.aspx?id=63491. Segal, Mady Wechsler. 1986. “The Military and the Family as Greedy Institutions.” Armed Forces & Society 13 (1): 9–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/00953 27x8601300101. Skelton, Tracey. 2007. “Children, Young People, UNICEF and Participation.” Children’s Geographies 5 (1–2): 165–181. https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280601108338. United States, Department of Defense. 2017. 2017 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy. Uprichard, Emma. 2008. “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood and Temporality.” Children & Society 22 (4): 303–313. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x. Wadsworth, Shelley MacDermid, Jean-Francois Cardin, Sharon Christ, Elaine Willerton, Allison Flittner O’Grady, David Topp, Elizabeth Coppola, Patricia Lester, and Sarah Mustillo. 2016. “Accumulation of Risk and Promotive Factors Among Young Children in US Military Families.” American Journal of Community Psychology 57 (1–2): 190–202. https://doi.org/10.1002/ ajcp.12025. Wax, Sarah Grenier, and Susan N. Stankorb. 2016. “Prevalence of Food Insecurity Among Military Households with Children 5 Years of Age and Younger.” Public Health Nutrition 19 (13): 2458–2466. https://doi. org/10.1017/s1368980016000422.

CHAPTER 12

Centralizing Childhood, Remaking the Discourse Alison M. S. Watson

This volume demonstrates the richness of current research on children and childhood, as well as the need that remains to include children and their childhoods as a focus for mainstream research within the wider discipline of International Relations. In the decade and a half since calling for children to be considered ‘a new site of knowledge’ (Watson 2006) much has changed. At that time, a number of key assertions were already in place: that childhood is a social construction; that rather than being passive actors, children are in fact social actors who have agency, even though the perception of such agency may be contingent on the way in which that childhood has been constructed (Prout 2000); and, that childhood is differentiated by structural processes and by social variables such as gender (Archer 1992), race (Bernstein 1971; Richardson 2000), sexuality (Egan and Hawkes 2008; Robinson 2013), and class (McGuffey and Rich 1999; Gittins 2004). These central tenets of childhood research have endured alongside a plethora of key policy trends that, taken together, have globalized attention on the provision for, and the protection and participation of, children and young people in wider A. M. S. Watson (*)  University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_12

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society. The result, has not been, however, political change. For example, in the United Kingdom, Parliament has not debated the place of children in society with anything like the numbers present that would demonstrate the issue being taken seriously. Similarly, the UK popular press continues to reinforce a narrative that holds that children and youth are immature actors who, when appearing to demonstrate agency, are only reinforcing that immaturity.1 Similarly, International Relations, despite the ground-breaking work that is being done by researchers, of which this volume is an example, remains largely blind to the significance of child research not only in its own right, but for the insights that it can give to the wider discipline. There remains little recognition of the impact that the incorporation of such research could have on wider issues of IR. Finally, these trends have run alongside other significant a­ cademia-wide discussions, not least around the notion of knowledge itself, what constitutes it, and how it may be decolonized. This is an important discussion as it recognizes that the primacy of Western enlightenment knowledge is harmful not only to those who end up marginalized by its narratives, but also by those whose privilege continues that primacy, in part because it leads to potential solutions to ongoing problems being ignored. Although a lot of the debate has focused upon the incorporation of non-Western approaches, there is an argument vis-à-vis childhood research that its incorporation can provide a similar reorientation of knowledge. As Gurminder K. Bhambra et al. (2018: 2) note in their introduction to Decolonising the University, the emphasis on “reflexivity” in a decolonising praxis “reminds us that representations and knowledge of the world we live in are situated historically and geographically. The point is not simply to deconstruct such understandings, but to transform them.” This resonates with childhood research itself which is similarly historically and geographically situated, providing a lens of study that ultimately aims to be transformative in terms of how the international system itself views the place of the child. This chapter begins with an overview of the significance of these central tenets and key policy trends before examining—using a mix of theoretical analysis and practical examples—a number of important questions that together set the scene for the next stages of childhood research, namely: What do we think now about children’s agency and do governance mechanisms/legal frameworks facilitate or hinder this? Can the expanding discourse surrounding the decolonization of knowledge be used as a way of improving the likelihood of incorporating child-focussed

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narratives? And how can the work that is being done on children and their childhoods shed light on other key issues in IR, including the treatment of marginalized communities and issues of intersectionality? The chapter ends with a call to recognize the centrality of children to some of the most pressing issues facing International Relations scholars, including climate change, development, displacement, and post-conflict reconciliation.

Central Tenets and Key Policy Trends The notion that childhood is a social construction continues to occupy a central place in the childhood studies literature as well as in its cognate areas. Childhood remains recognized as a stage whose recognition is in some way contingent upon the social processes and conditions that surround it. Chief of these is childhood’s relationship to adulthood, with childhood the transition stage before the ‘wholeness’ of adulthood is attained. As Sultana Ali Norozi and Torill Moen note: [i]n relation to adults, children are viewed as those who are physically weaker, less well-developed, weigh less than adults. Children are considered those who need to get the developmental stages of secondary sexual features in order to be called an adult. Children tend to have less cognitive skills, intellectual abilities, less knowledge, less ability for reasoning. Children are deliberated as those who have less emotional maturity and less socially skilled. Children are contemplated as those with less competence in terms of life-skills and less expressive. Children are perceived as relatively in [a] powerless position in relation to adults. (Norozi and Moen 2016: 76)

Elise Boulding also notes the significance of adult-child interaction in recognizing that: We may be unnecessarily sabotaging our present, and our children’s future, by being blind to the inconsistencies and irrationalities of adult-child interaction in family and community in this century. Mass media programmes about the right to a happy and secure childhood and to a happy and secure retirement cannot substitute for the actual experience of frank and honest confrontation between generations when perceptions, needs and interests differ, in a context of mutual acceptance of responsibility for each other. Neither can special feeding, health and education programmes undertaken

246  A. M. S. WATSON for children substitute for joint community projects carried out by adults and children together, in which capacities of the young to contribute to the welfare of all receives full recognition. (Boulding 2017: 152)

Nevertheless, as Alan Prout and Allison James (1990: 7) note, although the “immaturity of children is a biological fact of life … the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful are a fact of culture. It is these ‘facts of culture’ which may vary and which can be said to make of childhood a social institution.” Thus, the perception of the nature of childhood at any particular point in time is fluid, and subject to change. Such changes are based on the ways that children, and the society that surrounds them, are evolving. Moreover, far from children playing a passive role in this stage, whereby the construction of childhood is something that happens to children, children themselves arguably do have a role to play in determining how that construction takes place. William A. Corsaro (1997), for example, recognizes the child, as well as the adult, as a social actor that has a hand in manipulating societal values to reflect how they themselves contribute to the construction of their own childhoods. In this view of the social construction of childhood, the agency that a child may display in the creation of the norms associated with childhood at a particular point in time is clearly recognized. Moreover, such norms are ever-changing given the constantly renewing nature of childhood itself. As Corsaro notes (1997: 3), “For children themselves, childhood is a temporary period. For society, on the other hand, childhood is a permanent structural form or category that never disappears even though its members change continuously and its nature and conception vary historically.” Nevertheless, there are times that children are perceived as having more agency than at others; sometimes different forms of childhood are constructed in different ways, and these constructions in turn largely reflect the wider values in society at a particular point in time. In this way, the perception of agency is contingent on the way in which childhood is currently constructed, and that childhood in turn is differentiated by structural processes and social variables such as gender, race, sexuality, and class. Sophia K. Biddle (2017: 10) argues that children are a marginalized group, and that childhood is a dominant identity with “race, gender, and class following behind as important but secondary, intersecting identities.” I would agree up to a point, but it is difficult to ignore the very

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different ways that children are treated as a result of these ‘secondary’ identities and the impact that this has on the wider construction of childhood for children in these groups. Examining how children of colour are treated in relation to White children highlights how the former are given adult characteristics, and treated as such, far before the latter are. As Phillip Atiba Goff et al. (2014: 541) note: Sociologist Michael Kimmel (2008) has suggested that, for middle-class White males, the period of time when boys are not held fully responsible for their actions can extend well into their late 20s. In contrast, the present research suggests that Black children may be viewed as adults as soon as 13, with average age overestimations of Black children exceeding four and a half years in some cases … In other words, our findings suggest that, although most children are allowed to be innocent until adulthood, Black children may be perceived as innocent only until deemed suspicious.

The same is true for girls. As Edward W. Morris (2016: 34) has noted: The assignment of more adult-like characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression. Along this truncated age continuum, Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are wilfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women. This compression [has] stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms [and] renders Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood.

Ironically, too, communities of colour are often represented in ways that are infantilizing. This representation has been present throughout colonial and now neo-colonial encounters, including the ways in which contemporary NGOs reinforce such representations by relying on pictures of children to represent their wider communities. The overall result, then, is that children are perceived as adults, and adults are perceived as not having fully recognized agency. The perception of agency is therefore contingent on the way in which that childhood has been constructed, and that construction is heavily influenced by the identity and circumstances of the child. Similarly, children living in poverty (and thus categorized in a lower socio-economic class) are more likely to work from a young age, which has concomitant impacts upon the future life chances, health, and wellbeing of that child as they grow into adulthood.

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Interestingly, the construction of childhood in the West may have another result. Rather than being a good thing, Rebecca Raby (2014) sees the urge to facilitate children’s participation—arguably inherent in the Western model and especially in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)—is part and parcel of the neoliberal framework and, in particular, that children’s participatory initiatives connect with neoliberal economic and political contexts to prioritize Western individualism and a particular type of childhood whilst acting against the ability of children to actually have agency. She talks about the role of the UNCRC in this, most notably: [a] key influence on advocacy for children’s participation has of course been the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989). Most notably Article 12 speaks of children’s rights to have a say in decisions that affect them, contingent on their age and maturity, although participatory rights are also reflected in Article 13 (freedom of expression), Article 14 (freedom of thought, conscience, and religion) and Article 15 (freedom of association and peaceful assembly). (Raby 2014: 78)

Some researchers have suspected initiatives for children’s participation to commonly reflect a more governmental than liberatory agenda: to foster children’s involvement in decision-making as a way to ensure their developing autonomy, self-governance, and individualized skills for future well-being within global neo-liberal capitalism (Vandenbroeck and Bourverne-De-Bie 2006). “While initiatives to foster children’s participation may be attempts to garner children’s complicity, they also cultivate children’s conceptualisation of their own agency” (Raby: 2014: 83). These central tenets of childhood research have endured alongside a plethora of key policy trends that, taken together, have globalized attention on the provision for, and the protection and participation of, children and young people in wider society. Specifically, there are a number of policy issues that have been, or at least have appeared to be, particularly focused upon children, both in a domestic and an international context. One of these is the relationship between childhood and international development. Arguably, children, and the issues that they face, are present in each of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but, if we consider the indicators of which UNICEF is either custodian or co-custodian, it gives us a real insight into the nature of the priorities vis-à-vis children within the sustainable development agenda.

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Specifically, UNICEF is responsible for seven of the global SDG indicators—under-5 mortality; neonatal mortality; early childhood development; child marriage; female genital mutilation; child discipline; and sexual violence against children—and co-custodian of a further ten SDG indicators, namely: skilled attendance at birth; fully immunized children; sexual violence against women and girls by intimate partner; sexual violence against women and girls by person other than intimate partner; safely managed water; safely managed sanitation and handwashing; child labour; birth registration; stunting; wasting/overweight.2 What is interesting about these responsibilities is twofold. First, they very much adhere to a rights agenda that is not, in reality, about the rights of children, but actually about the obligations that adults have to them. Much of UNICEF’s role within the SDGs is about protection rather than about participation with a focus upon early childhood appearing to be a priority—i.e., under-5 mortality, neonatal mortality, early childhood development, etc. This is despite UNICEF’s focus on participation rights that is normally framed within a wider discourse that emphasizes the capabilities, achievements, and agency of children. Second, there appears to be a blurred line between women and children in a number of the responsibilities that UNICEF has. This may be entirely understandable—e.g., skilled attendance at birth which is important for both maternal and child health; birth registration, which is important both in terms of childhood identity and the claim to rights for both mother and child—but it does nothing to negate the idea that ultimately the place of children in the international system is as secondary actors connected to primary actor adults. In this sense, then, nothing much has changed since 2006 when: international law, and the discourse that surrounds it, reiterates this grouping together of women and children. As Puechguirbal argues, it is as if a new category of human beings has been created, known as ­‘women-and-children’. This in turn can be argued to impact upon women’s ability to find a place of their own within the discourse – ‘an “agency” that builds the framework of an identity undefined by subordination to male power’ – and it arguably impacts upon the place of children within the discourse in a very similar way. By grouping together women and children, both achieve a lack of status that is predicated on the liberal division between the public and the private spheres. (Watson 2006: 242–243)

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Another significant policy issue is childhood poverty and inequality. This used to be perceived more as a majority world issue, but the declining economic situation in the minority world has placed the focus on the extent to which children across the globe are dealing with conditions of poverty and inequality. By 2012, for example, as Craig Gunderson and James P. Ziliak (2014: 1) note, “nearly 16 million U.S. children, or over one in five, lived in households that were food insecure, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as ‘a household-level economic and social condition of limited access to food.’” Similarly, the UK is seeing the rise of food poverty, with Rachel Loopstra et al. (2015: 1) noting that “[I]n the spring of 2014 the Trussell Trust, a n ­ on-governmental organisation that coordinates food banks in the United Kingdom, reported that it had distributed emergency food parcels to 913,138 children and adults across the UK in the previous year – seven times more than in 2011-12.” Such food insecurity, in turn, impacts upon health outcomes (Olson 1999) and upon overall life outcomes—e.g., as a result of a decline in school engagement (Ashiabi 2007). At the other end of the wealth spectrum, there continues to be concern about the place that children have as consumers. Consumption can be seen as a place that children demonstrate agency, but it can also be seen as another example of the ways in which adults impact children’s behaviours. Finally, there is now considerable research about the impact of social media upon children and their social media habits. If anything, the role of social media has become more significant and children’s rights and agency has changed as a result. Sonia Livingstone and Amanda Third (2017) have written about rights in the digital age. As they note, “As a boundary-marking figure, the digitally enabled child threatens to exceed the limits through which they are disciplined and co-opted into securing and ordering the future. In addition to being the mirror that reproduces the legitimacy of the normative adult subject, the child also represents a limit case for thinking about the subject of rights, with ever greater intensity in the digital age” (Livingstone and Third 2017: 660). Given these trends and developments, there are a number of important questions that together set the scene for the next stages of childhood research. It is to the first of these—questions of agency and governance—that we will now turn.

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Agency and Governance As we have seen, in ‘childhood research’ the notion of agency continues to occupy a central place. Arguably, this has always been the case, and has been especially pertinent since the UNCRC highlighted in Article 12 the participation of children in decisions that impact their lives. This reliance on agency as a place to motivate childhood studies in general has, in recent years, developed further into the recognition of agency within certain conceptualizations of childhood, a number of which are of interest to the study of International Relations. Thus, Amy Thompson et al. (2019: 235) outline the very real need to conceptualize how “migrant children express their agency.” As children are being forced to leave their homes in record numbers—whether as a result of conflict, poverty, lack of state protection (Linton et al. 2016) or, increasingly, for environmental reasons—the question of the agency that they have under such circumstances comes immediately to the fore. Defining agency as “an individual’s intrinsic capacity for intentional behaviour developed within the individual’s environment(s) and subject to environmental influences” (Thompson et al. 2019: 236), they recognize the ways in which migrant children have been characterized by migrant experience. This is important not simply in theoretical terms but in practical ones too. In the case of the United States, migrant children have had to represent themselves in legal proceedings. This, of course, is related to the fact that the government wants these cases to fail, and it also says something about the way in which children who are so often ‘othered’ are treated as adults, but it also sets a precedent in that some children have indeed been able to deal with the legal process and have demonstrated their agency as a result. As Thompson et al. (2019: 1) note, children are viewed as either “criminals” or “victims” when instead “a more nuanced approach is required” that is “non-binary” and recognizes the multiplicity of childhood experiences. “The danger of more industrialised nations (especially in Europe and North America) continuing to embrace the tired victim/criminal dichotomy in the wake of perceived child refugee/migrant emergencies is that it perpetuates social structures that ultimately harm children” (Thompson et al. 2019: 249). Raby focuses upon the issue of governance and, specifically, the democratization of governance that a meaningful participation by children in the policy process requires. Referencing Edwards (2010) in recognizing that a “democratisation of governance requires meaningful,

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participatory involvement from all relevant stakeholders” (Raby 2014: 85), Raby notes the significance of a focus upon education in particular, arguing that “what is missing from the debate is a comparison of specific reforms in education designed to allow for system-wide democratization and authentic participation” (Edwards 2010: 176). In terms of governance in general in International Relations, Anna Holzscheiter (2018: 645) argues that “the empowerment and increasing agency of ‘the most affected’ inside and outside of international organisations in many cases brings to light normative tensions and collisions inherent to the international human rights regime.” Importantly, then, this results in a recognition that the human rights regime is a site of tension and disagreement, aiming to represent the issues of the ‘most affected’ but in reality marginalizing the actors who are the most affected because of the nature of the institutional structure that has evolved within the international human rights regime. This brings us again, as in 2006 (Watson 2006: 249) to the recognition of children as ‘active’ citizens that may have a more wide-ranging impact upon the foundations of political interaction than was previously recognized, in particular by extending the notion of citizenship which, in turn, creates possibilities for extending the moral and political boundaries of political community. There is no longer the assumption that political community requires a collective identity that all members are obliged to share. Examining children and the nature of their agency and their place in the system may then give us some insight into the nature of political community in international relations in general.3 Indeed, the role of children may be one of the most obvious places for the ‘open dialogue’ regarding the appropriateness of exclusion from a given community to be examined (Linklater 1998: 220).

The Role of Children as ‘Knowledge Agents’ In 2006 I noted that the agent-structure debate in International Relations is a narrow one and that “acknowledging the significance of children within this discourse may…allow for a fuller understanding of what agency means, and may result in the inclusion of children as ‘knowledge agents’ whose presence may contribute to the demarcation of the discourse itself” (Watson 2006: 247). Since that time, discussion over the nature of knowledge has intensified with time spent, in particular, on recognizing the need to ‘decolonize’ knowledge such that voices

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that have been marginalized, and knowledge frameworks that have been maligned, are acknowledged and incorporated into what is perceived as the ‘mainstream’ (Western-centric) intellectual canon. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in her seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), outlines how the history of knowledge is one characterized by racist research practice and the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, arguing instead for a research and knowledge creation practice that challenges ongoing colonialism and marginalization. The result has been a focus not simply on the continued ignorance by mainstream educators and researchers of writers from the majority world,4 and upon attempts to address this oversight, but also upon how the marginalization of such writers is further crosscut by issues of gender, sexuality, and class. In simple terms, as Grada Kilomba noted in her 2008 book Plantation Memories: What knowledge is being acknowledged as such? And what knowledge is not? What knowledge has been made part of academic agendas? And what knowledge has not? Whose knowledge is this? Who is acknowledged to have the knowledge? And who is not? Who can teach knowledge? And who cannot? Who is at the centre? And who remains outside, at the margins? (Kilomba 2008: 27)

In the case of the child, their place in knowledge frameworks undoubtedly remains at the margins. They are the focus of research but their own voices—given too that decolonizing knowledge also often goes hand-in-hand with a participatory research practice—remain often ­ unheard or tokenized. There is a developing literature on how children themselves can become part of the research process and, as Caroline ­Bradbury-Jones and Julie Taylor (2015: 161) note, “[w]ays of achieving participation are multiple and varied and may include, for example, children setting the research agenda, forming part of an advisory committee or working alongside researchers throughout the research process.” In the discipline of International Relations, however, the use of participatory research in general is much less common than in other social sciences, meaning that the notion of incorporating knowledge frameworks based on the actual participation of children in the research process in a meaningful way remains remote. Some would argue that this could change as a result of the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’ in IR, but this move has not been without criticism, with Wanda Vrasti (2008: 279) arguing that “the complexity of ethnography has been reduced to (1) an

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empiricist data-collection machine, (2) a writing style, or (3) a theoretical sensibility.” Similarly, Jon Harald Sande Lie (2012: 201) recognizes that the ethnographic turn “could not have taken place without adopting a selective and antiquated notion of ethnography… [whilst] others counter that this argument draws on a caricatured version of ethnography.” In addition, ethnography as a practice in other disciplines is, of course, not without criticism. In terms of childhood research, this means asking the researcher to recognize that their research does not take place within a vacuum and that it is their moral imperative to fully engage with a community on that community’s terms (see also Collins and Watson 2018). As Robert Pelias (2004: 1–2) notes in reflecting on the academy: “too often I’ve watched claims of truth try to triumph over compassion, try to crush alternative possibilities, and try to silence minority voices. Seeing the pain this causes I seek another discourse … a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals.” In terms of childhood research within International Relations, this necessitates a different approach, one that both recognizes the knowledge that children have and incorporates it into the intellectual canon in a way that recognizes their role as active change agents. It may also require much more recognition of the place of children within IR pedagogy itself, and of the need to consider teaching practice as a method of political change. As Alexis A. Aronowitz (2009) notes in her analysis of Paulo Freire’s work on student literacy: Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or ‘careers’, but a preparation for a self-managed life… [one that helps] set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. (Aronowitz 2009: ix)

Such critical pedagogy thus results in an education that places the agency of the child at the centre of teaching practice.

Intersectionality and Childhood Finally, we need to ask how the work that is being done on children and their childhoods can shed light on other key issues in IR, including the treatment of marginalized communities and issues of intersectionality.

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To reiterate from arguments made in 2006, in his analysis of “[h]uman rights, law and democracy in an unfree world,” Norman Lewis examines the issue of the ‘rights bearing subject,” in particular using the case of the increased emphasis upon children’s rights, reflected in documents like the UNCRC, to argue that rather than safeguarding human rights, “the elevation of the human rights discourse represents. .. a fundamental attack upon democratic freedoms and rights. .. from civil and political rights in the domestic sphere, to national rights in the international sphere” (Lewis 1998: 98). Lewis’ analysis is significant in that it demonstrates the potential importance of children as a ‘site of knowledge’ within mainstream IR discourse. Far from being a subject that inhabits the fringes of the discourse, he argues that the way in which the existing international legal framework encounters the child in actuality defines the ability of developing states, in particular, “to fulfil the criteria of legitimate state behaviour” (Lewis 1998: 79). Children’s rights, in other words, and the desire to give all children what may be considered to be an idealized version of childhood, may serve as an excuse for intervention in a state’s domestic affairs that ultimately destroys the sovereign status of the state (Watson 2006: 241). This highlights the significance of childhood studies to the spheres of human rights and international relations as a whole. It also, albeit circuitously, recognizes the significance of intersectionality, for if children are marginalized within the international system, children of colour are marginalized to a significantly greater degree. If children are marginalized within the international system, those children living in lower ­socio-economic circumstances (who are often also from communities of colour) are marginalized to a significantly greater degree, etc. The way in which these multiple marginalized identities interact highlight what really should matter to the international human rights regime—not prioritizing Western conceptualisations of childhood, but instead recognizing that those facing the most difficult circumstances with the international human rights regime are those whose voices, alongside the voices of their larger ‘community,’ are most marginalized. Every statistic demonstrates that life chances for children born into already marginalized communities are much less than those of children in the minority worlds. If a human rights regime is going to do anything it should protect those who need it the most, first.

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Final Thoughts The world is changing, and with it our conceptualization of which issues matter most. International Relations as a discipline has for too long relegated people to the margins, along with a host of issues that have now been demonstrated to be of more significance than almost anything. This volume very much speaks to this relegation and, in general, we are seeing a realignment of both policies and the people who are seen as best to pursue them. Thus, children themselves have recognized their centrality to the issue of climate change. From the strides made by climate activists in the United States to bring energy companies to justice, to the climate strikes held across the globe, the recognition that climate change is an issue that children have a particular stake in is clear. A significant literature is now developing as to the ways in which children’s activism is both impacting political agendas and is communicating the significance of climate change to adult populations. Greta Thunberg, for example, noted in 2018: “You have failed us in the past. If you continue failing us in the future, we, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves. The youth of this world has started to move and we will not rest again.” This was the conclusion of an open letter signed by the global coordination group of the youth-led climate strike, published in The Guardian on March 1. As noted at the time, this statement encapsulates an emerging shift and assertion of power, manifested through an international uprising of non-violent protest against the widespread lack of adult action to halt climate change and the destruction of our planet. Initiated by only a handful of individuals, notably Sweden’s 16 year old Greta Thunberg, this movement has now taken hold in every continent, with many thousands of young people striking from school on Fridays in rapidly growing numbers across the world, expected to reach a peak on a global day of action on March 15. Their demand is clear: protect the future of the planet through following the Paris Agreement and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations, limiting global temperature rises to below 1·5°C. Children then are both most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, and most likely to resist it. (Rutter 2019: 102)

Children are also central to the developing literature and policy on migration and displacement. Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry (2004: 198) argue that the standard relationship between adults and children is altered by narratives of displacement whilst Sarah Crafter and Rachel

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Rosen (2016) highlight the clear scale of child displacement and migration within the existing refugee crisis. Finally, in issues of post-conflict reconciliation, children should be treated as perhaps one of the most significant sets of actors, who can be both a means and an end to conflict. While their capability to fight in conflicts is significant, it is more the symbolic meaning that they hold as the future of family lines, and the personification of their cultures, that make the targeting of children a much graver and more vicious tactic. In essence, their destruction has the potential to unravel the very fabric of their society. At the same time, their role in the post-conflict state remains just as relevant to the future of the respective communities of which they are a part. Graca Machel goes one stage further in arguing that the success of post-conflict reconciliation relies in part upon the extent to which peace processes prioritize children. Specifically, she notes that: [w]e know from experience that if children are excluded from a country’s agenda, if their rights are not addressed, a fault line will run through the heart of the nation. The measure of a country’s strength and vision is not its military might but its investment in children’s capacities, in their development. (Machel 2010: x)

It is interesting, and worrying, to note that Machel wrote those words a decade ago, a decade when the discourse surrounding children within the international system should have moved on much further than it has. This is why the work of the authors represented here is so significant. Without work like this, the study of children and their childhoods will become just another addition to an already stratified canon. Instead, these contributions are not only individually significant but together remake the boundaries of the discipline to recognize the centrality of childhood studies to current, and future, conceptualizations of international change. Their contribution offers the discipline the promise of a different lens through which to examine our world, and thus the prospect of a new conceptualization of politics that is both philosophically significant, particularly in terms of a consideration of intergenerational issues, and academically rigorous—and interdisciplinary, given the long history of childhood studies research within cognate disciplines. What must be remembered, however, is that recognizing the significance of this work to International Relations is a question for the entire discipline, rather than allowing it to be considered as a marginal sub-field.

258  A. M. S. WATSON Acknowledgements   The author would like to thank Bennett Collins, Meghan Laws, and Oliver Richmond for their comments and ongoing discussions regarding various aspects of the points made in this chapter that have both highlighted and clarified aspects of the argument herein. The author would also like to thank Marshall Beier for his guidance in writing this chapter. All errors remain the author’s own.

Notes 1.  See, for example, the backlash faced by Greta Thunberg in the popular press in the wake of her visit to the UK, e.g. https://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-6962683/Mother-climate-activist-Greta-ThunbergDENIES-masterminding-daughters-rise-fame.html. 2. https://data.unicef.org/children-sustainable-development-goals/. 3. If we examine the question of children’s identification with political community we are entering into the realms of political socialization, which may take place at an age much younger than we may assume. Indeed, more than forty years ago David Easton and Robert D. Hess were arguing that by the time children had reached the age of seven, the majority had formed a strong attachment to their own political community (Easton and Hess 1962: 236). 4. The term ‘Majority world’ is used in this chapter to refer to the majority of the world’s population who live “in Africa, Asia and Latin America and thus seeks to shift the balance of our world views that frequently privilege ‘western’ and ‘northern’ populations and issues” (Punch and Tisdall 2012: 241).

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Index

A Afghanistan, 30, 33, 148, 155, 157, 206 agency, 2, 7–11, 13, 14, 22, 27–29, 31–33, 48, 56, 59, 66–70, 72, 76, 78–80, 83, 89–94, 104, 105, 128, 132, 137, 151, 158, 159, 162–165, 168, 171–173, 180, 192, 200, 205–208, 212, 220–223, 231, 232, 235–237, 243, 244, 246–252, 254 Alabed, Bana, 50 al-Assad, Bashar, 46 Arab Spring, 22, 66, 72 B Beah, Ishmael, 125, 126 Blood Diamond (2007), 49 Bush, Laura, 30

C Cape Town Principles and Best Practices, 1997, 45 Carter, Kevin, 37, 41, 49, 54 childhood definitions of, 25, 77 social construction of, 23, 25, 91, 115, 243, 245, 246 Childhood Studies, 3, 7, 8, 82, 105, 157, 159, 172, 223, 230, 231, 245, 251, 255, 257 childism, 13, 139 child labour, 25, 66, 76, 79, 82, 249 children as emotional scenery, 3, 221, 226, 227, 237 as exceptional, 49, 50, 52 as innocent, 27, 51, 57, 70, 185, 207, 247

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1

263

264  Index as objects of protection, 8, 9, 11, 12, 220, 225 as victims, 10, 36, 43, 48, 52, 56, 71, 72, 77, 205, 208, 214, 251 as vulnerable, 13, 27, 67, 70, 135, 148, 159, 207, 236, 256 of military families, 15, 221, 223–230, 234, 236, 237 child soldiers, 7, 11, 12, 34, 45, 53, 56, 73, 77, 89, 91, 92, 99, 100, 104, 115–119, 123–132, 135, 201, 202, 213 citizenship, 5, 7, 47, 95, 103, 129, 144, 150, 252 class, 5, 7, 26, 147, 149, 180, 182, 186, 194, 210, 225, 232, 236–238, 243, 246, 247, 253 Colombia, 14, 34, 36, 200, 213

Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1924, 121. See also United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959 Germany, 46, 66, 136, 141–143, 146, 149 girls, 14, 32, 34, 45, 49–52, 54, 55, 77, 80, 90, 91, 96, 139, 140, 142, 188, 200–215, 247, 249 H Hitler Youth, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 152

D Daqneesh, Omran, 49 Demir, Nilufer, 55 developmentalism, 7, 8, 10, 159, 220, 223, 231–233

I International Labour Organization (ILO), 66, 79, 82 International Year of the Child, 1979, 121–123, 132 intersectionality, 2, 14, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 238, 245, 254, 255 Israel, 22

E education, 24, 30–32, 50, 90, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105, 121, 122, 125, 135, 138, 142, 145, 148, 196, 208, 245, 252, 254 Ethiopia, 21

K Khan Sheikhoun, gas attack on, 46, 49, 56 Kony 2012, 129 Kurdi, Alan, 21, 30, 41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 54–56, 90

G Gaza, 22 gender, 2, 5, 7, 14, 26, 34, 36, 50–52, 54, 58, 76, 80, 91, 92, 96, 98, 100, 115, 140, 180, 182, 183, 186, 194–196, 199–202, 205– 207, 209, 210, 212–215, 225, 232, 236–238, 243, 246, 253

L League of German Girls, 136, 139 League of Nations, 121, 132 liberalism, 3, 23–30, 36, 51, 143, 232, 249

Index

M militarism, 13, 100, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 147, 149, 159, 162, 165, 170, 173, 182, 228–230, 234 Military Child of the Year Awards, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226, 228, 229, 237 N new sociology of childhood, 3, 11, 230, 233 Nobel Peace Prize, 32, 50, 65 O Obama, Michelle, 220, 228 Operation Homefront, 219, 220 P participation, 7, 9, 11, 14, 65–67, 69, 74–76, 78, 80–83, 116, 122, 124, 136, 140, 144, 168, 169, 193, 201, 203, 207, 208, 210, 213, 215, 230, 231, 243, 248, 249, 251–253 peacebuilding, 7, 14, 34, 200–203, 207–209, 212, 214, 215 photographs, 21, 37, 43–46, 55, 57, 58, 193 Phúc, Kim, 21, 41, 49, 55 play, 24, 30, 34, 37, 93, 156–160, 163, 164, 167–173, 192, 206 popular culture, 14, 160, 161, 179, 181, 185

  265

R race, 5, 7, 50, 52, 54, 58, 142, 143, 149, 180–182, 186, 188, 194, 195, 209, 210, 225, 232, 236–238, 243, 246 Ramzan, Shazia, 54 Realism, 24, 28, 29, 36, 162, 170 refugees, 21, 30, 41, 57, 90, 192, 204, 211, 251, 257 resilience, 5, 15, 32, 33, 99, 103, 104, 170, 220–230, 234, 236, 237 Riaz, Kainat, 54 S Satyarthi, Kailash, 65 security, 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 16, 28, 35, 36, 67, 68, 72, 78, 89–106, 115– 117, 119, 123, 125, 128, 130, 156, 199–207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 220–223, 225–227, 234, 237, 238 Sharrouf, Abdullah, 47 subjecthood, 7–9, 13, 15, 27, 28, 59, 221–225, 227–230, 232–237 Sudan, 37, 41 Syria, 30, 31, 46, 47, 49, 56 T Thunberg, Greta, 36, 50, 52, 81, 231, 256, 258 toys, 13, 156–159, 162, 165–169, 171 Trump, Donald, 30, 31, 46, 56

266  Index U Uganda, 90, 129 United Kingdom, Armed Forces of, 148, 150, 157 United Nations, 5, 82, 121, 132, 202, 212 United Nations Climate Summit, 37 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, 74, 75, 78 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 (UNCRC), 6, 24, 73, 74, 77–79, 121, 122, 132, 248, 251, 255 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959, 121. See also Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1924 United Nations Security Council, 73, 116, 144, 211 United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, 2, 200, 202, 210–212 Ut, Nick, 49

V video games, 161, 162, 172 Vietnam, 21, 41, 55, 66, 204 W Wadler, Naomi, 231 war on terror, 170, 171 ‘womenandchildren’, 41, 51, 200, 201, 203–205, 209, 215 Y Yemen, 21, 49, 55, 59 Yousafzai, Malala, 32, 50, 52, 54, 65, 90