Discovering Childhood in International Relations

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.

Visual representations of children are ubiquitous in international relations, they illustrate, indicate, and indict, but we rarely stop to consider the implications of their presence. Such images reproduce stereotypical conceptions of childhood: starving children as paragons of innocence, teens clutching AK-47s as delinquent or posing a risk, and dead children as the ultimate condemnation of circumstance. Such images present children as iconic, a synecdoche for understanding a political event; they illustrate without reflection. This chapter asks what a more critical engagement with images of children and childhood might offer IR. It outlines a critical framework for considering such images to draw out the possibilities and tensions inherent in the circulation of evocative images of children in international relations. It outlines a way for those interested in engaging with the visual politics of childhood to consider the complex ways frames and discourses reproduce global inequalities, stereotypes about conflict and disaster, and allow a more meaningful engagement with representations of childhood in international relations.

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.

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.

Child-soldiers are a constant in almost every armed conflict around the world. While International Relations (IR) research regarding their participation in wars is still very limited in terms of scope, images of Black boys (mostly) carrying weapons like AK-47s are on display everywhere across the international community. In them, children are not only the child-at-risk, but also the risky child, who rather than offering a promise of a good and productive future, has the potential to pose a threat to international progress if not successfully reintegrated into civilian life. By exploring the way the accounts of child-soldiers in IR, especially those articulated within the humanitarian field, construct them in largely contrastive ways, this chapter aims both to: (i) problematize the boundaries that articulate child-soldiers as essentially pathological in relation to the “normal” child located in a specific universalizing narrative framed by ideas of innocence, vulnerability, and irrationality; and, (ii) show how these specific limits articulate a particular version of the international political order predicated on notions of stability and security. Within this formulation, childhood is understood as a social construct related to the processes by which international politics is ordered and the promise of a progressive future for humanity is continuously (re)made.

The popular slogan of the charity Save the Children that “Every war is a war against 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.

This chapter reflects upon some of the broad themes from our Ludic Geopolitics research project, a project that seeks to explore and understand the politics around childhood and play, specifically in relation to so-called ‘war toys’. Critical approaches to such war play and war toys have tended to stress their militarizing effects—our main argument is that too often these fail to adequately recognize the political lives of children, and render them instead as passive subjects. As a 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. In this we argue for a multi-sited research perspective that places children and their agency at the centre. However, the chapter also recognizes 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.

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 this chapter, an intergenerational, inter-racial, and cross-cultural research team adopts a “world-travelling” approach to remember and collectively deliberate on pop culture that was important to us in childhood. This approach disrupts the IR field’s often uncritical reliance on ‘credentialed’ voices and exclusionary knowledge-gathering and evaluating processes. Looking at the IR themes in the artifacts, practices, and ‘heroes’ that we recall as meaningful to us, we show how the ‘commonsense’ of IR is reproduced in and through children's lives. We also show how much is lost from the dominant IR narratives through the structural exclusion of diverse children’s perspectives and experiences and through failures of intergenerational curiosity and empathy. Our recollections reveal 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, and to shape how they/we act in the world. In integrating childhoods into IR, we need to be mindful of how children of color, including those in wealthy, donor states in the North are implicated, and of how the intersections in young lives of race, class, gender, and other identity factors can be fairly represented in the narratives of world politics.

International Relations (IR) tends to ignore children in general and girls in particular. Where they have been included it has most often been under the conflation of ‘womenandchildren’ used to represent an agentless, victimized shorthand for non-combatants. Feminist IR scholars and critical peace and security scholars have engaged with children as they have sought to break up ‘women and children’ into separate, distinct entities. For feminists, these claims typically rely on the premise that women should be seen as equal to men, not relegated to the private world of children. However, gendered hierarchical notions may permeate feminist theories of peace and security when they rely on adult-centric models of agency and fail to acknowledge the presence and actions of girls. Theoretical advancements through intersectional feminism are needed to better understand and account for girls in relation to peace and security. Pursuing this approach makes it possible to acknowledge that the needs and experiences of women and children can both differ and overlap, rather than (re)creating age- and gender-based hierarchies that rely on false oversimplifications, which hamper peacebuilding and further insecurity for people of diverse ages and genders. To demonstrate this, the chapter engages with UN Security Council Resolutions, related debates, and empirical examples from Colombia.

Among the conceptual challenges that new thinking about children and childhood raises for International Relations is how to reconcile subjecthood and (in)security. While the rise of resilience as a paradigmatic alternative to security holds promise for the recovery and foregrounding of subject positions too easily occluded by simplistic renderings of victimhood, it has drawn criticism for downloading the responsibility to abide onto those affected by adverse circumstances. Worse, it risks erasure of trauma in its tendency toward valorization of 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. Though problematic in all cases, this may appear especially so when it comes to children, whose disempowerment makes them uniquely vulnerable. 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 and vulnerability both conspicuously foregrounded.

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.