J. Marshall Beier – författare

Making what will be an important contribution to a much needed critical turn in the vast and still rapidly growing child soldier literature, they address multifarious ways in which childhood is militarized beyond the global South through enactments of militarism that have drawn much less in the way of critical inquiry.

Responding to security scholars’ puzzling dearth of attention to children and childhoods, the contributors to this volume reveal the ways in which they not only are already present in security discourses but are actually indispensable to them and to the political projects they make possible. From zones of conflict to everyday life contexts in the (post)industrial Global North, dominant ideas about childhood work to regulate the constitution of political subjects whilst variously enabling and foreclosing a wide range of political possibilities. Whether on the battlefields of Syria, in the halls of the UN, or the conceptual musings of disciplinary Security Studies, claims about or ostensibly on behalf of children are ubiquitous. Recognizing children as engaged political subjects, however, challenges us to bring a sustained critical gaze to the discursive and semiotic deployments of children and childhood in projects not of their making as well as to the ways in which power circulates through and around them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.

Making what will be an important contribution to a much needed critical turn in the vast and still rapidly growing child soldier literature, they address multifarious ways in which childhood is militarized beyond the global South through enactments of militarism that have drawn much less in the way of critical inquiry.

Responding to security scholars’ puzzling dearth of attention to children and childhoods, the contributors to this volume reveal the ways in which they not only are already present in security discourses but are actually indispensable to them and to the political projects they make possible. From zones of conflict to everyday life contexts in the (post)industrial Global North, dominant ideas about childhood work to regulate the constitution of political subjects whilst variously enabling and foreclosing a wide range of political possibilities. Whether on the battlefields of Syria, in the halls of the UN, or the conceptual musings of disciplinary Security Studies, claims about or ostensibly on behalf of children are ubiquitous. Recognizing children as engaged political subjects, however, challenges us to bring a sustained critical gaze to the discursive and semiotic deployments of children and childhood in projects not of their making as well as to the ways in which power circulates through and around them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.

Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. This book seeks to recover children’s agency and to recognize the complex variety of childhoods and the global issues that affect them. Written by an international list of contributors from Europe, Africa, North America, and Australasia, chapters present highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time and space split into three broad sections: imagined childhoods, governed childhoods, and lived childhoods. Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how international relations is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity.

Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. This book seeks to recover children’s agency and to recognize the complex variety of childhoods and the global issues that affect them. Written by an international list of contributors from Europe, Africa, North America, and Australasia, chapters present highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time and space split into three broad sections: imagined childhoods, governed childhoods, and lived childhoods. Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how international relations is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity.

This edited volume offers in-depth analyses of childhood as a social technology of governance. Contributions explore the ways in which dominant ideas about childhood bear on governance in a range of specific contexts, spanning the personal, the local and the global. Each chapter reveals important insights into how ‘imagined childhood’ functions as an ubiquitous and powerful social technology of governance. In so doing, they highlight the importance of theorizing childhood not as a time of life, but as a cardinal category of identity/difference that is indispensable to social meaning-making.Rooted in critical childhood studies, the book explores how ‘imagined’ childhoods not only govern children’s lives, but also constitute adult subjects, institutions, states and other political orders.

This book examines how and why, in the context of International Relations, children’s subjecthood has all too often been relegated to marginal terrains and children themselves automatically associated with the need for protection in vulnerable situations: as child soldiers, refugees, and conflated with women, all typically with the accent on the Global South. Challenging us to think critically about childhood as a technology of global governance, the authors explore alternative ways of finding children and their agency in a more central position in IR, in terms of various forms of children’s activism, children and climate change, children and security, children and resilience, and in their inevitable role in governing the future. Focusing on the problems, pitfalls, promises, and prospects of addressing children and childhoods in International Relations, this book places children more squarely in the purview of political subjecthood and hence more centrally in IR.

This book examines how and why, in the context of International Relations, children’s subjecthood has all too often been relegated to marginal terrains and children themselves automatically associated with the need for protection in vulnerable situations: as child soldiers, refugees, and conflated with women, all typically with the accent on the Global South. Challenging us to think critically about childhood as a technology of global governance, the authors explore alternative ways of finding children and their agency in a more central position in IR, in terms of various forms of children’s activism, children and climate change, children and security, children and resilience, and in their inevitable role in governing the future. Focusing on the problems, pitfalls, promises, and prospects of addressing children and childhoods in International Relations, this book places children more squarely in the purview of political subjecthood and hence more centrally in IR.

The chapters in the second section bring to view everyday pedagogies whereby myriad knowledges, performances, practices, and competencies may function to militarize children’s lives, including in but not limited to advanced (post)industrial societies of the global North.