Childhood and the Production of Security

J Marshall Beier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317240419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

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.

Children, childhoods, and security studies: an introduction

J. Marshall Beier

Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Children and childhoods have not garnered much attention from either mainstream or critical currents of scholarship in International Relations and Security Studies, notwithstanding the significant ways in which they may be inseparable from the fields’ subject matters, core concepts, and ideas. Addressing this omission is not a matter of simply ‘bringing children in,’ however. Rather, it necessitates first coming to terms with how children are already present both as global political actors and as expressed through deeply held ideational commitments that enable and sustain our understandings of and engagements with security. At the same time, this is a presence that has only ever been partial inasmuch as the children and youth of the field’s imagining are not imbued with full and unqualified political subjecthood. Recovering robust subjecthood and a more nuanced understanding of lived childhoods promises, among other things, important theoretical correctives and more sophisticated conceptualization of emergent concepts like resilience.

A prize and a puzzle

The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, presented in Oslo on 10 December 2014 to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, raises something of a puzzle for and about Security Studies. The joint recipients, recognized for their respective roles in promoting the rights and well-being of children and youth, signal much about the nature and limits of our understanding of the intersections and interplays of childhood/youth and security. At age 17, Ms. Yousafzai is, by half, the youngest-ever recipient of the Prize. She is also likely the better known of the two in many parts of the world, having come to sudden and significant international fame some two years earlier when, then 15 years old, she and two other girls living in Pakistan’s troubled Swat Valley – 13-year-old Shazia Ramzan and 16-year-old Kainat Riaz – were shot on their school bus by a member of the Taliban who reportedly asked for Malala by name and sought to make an example of her for her and her family’s active advocacy of education for women and girls. Mr. Satyarthi, at age 60, is closer to the average age of Nobel laureates, having spent decades building a global campaign for children’s rights, initiated in India in 1980 in the fight against child labor. For a hitherto small number of scholars inquiring into Security Studies’ inattention to and somewhat paradoxically deep entanglement with children and childhood, the Nobel Committee’s historic elevation of children’s security issues in its recognition of Ms. Yusafzai and Mr. Satyarthi is simultaneously an encouraging development and revealing of weightier questions.

‘Security,’ as bound up in and articulated through the activism of Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, is only very uncomfortably subsumed under the rubric of state security that has long preoccupied mainstream International Relations and Security Studies, together with much in the way of dominant public discourse. At the same time, Security Studies has evinced its own apprehensions, both implicit and explicit, about childhood as an apposite area of disciplinary inquiry. In his famous post-Cold War call to maintain a strict state-centric focus for a Security Studies that seemed amenable to considering other referents, Stephen Walt (1991, 213) specifically listed ‘child abuse’ among those nontraditional security issues which he feared could dilute the field to the point of threatening its coherence. Walt’s point was not that child abuse was somehow a trivial matter or undeserving of urgent attention, but that the enduring problem of interstate war was not likely to fade and, being of such gravity, was one that demanded primacy of place. Exemplary of realist-inspired commitments that continued to cast a long shadow over security scholarship, this position reflected an abiding faith in the state as the arbiter of security and, thus, as appropriately its referent object. Not surprisingly in light of these commitments, mainstream Security Studies, like International Relations writ large, has been relatively inattentive to children and childhoods, operating either on the assumption that the security of the state equates to the security of those within – children included – or that the former is a necessary precondition to the latter.

Rather more peculiar is the dearth of interest by self-consciously critical currents of scholarship on security. Though many of these increasingly manifest (in a disciplinary sense) interventions have been instrumental in creating openings for engagement with children and childhoods, little such dedicated work has emerged. A qualified exception is the vast literature on child soldiers that has arisen together with the idea of human security and increasing interest in so-called ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999). Much of this, however, turns on reductionist renderings of victimhood which have come under challenge (see, for example, Rosen 2005; Hart 2008; Baines 2009; Gilligan 2009) and which mask other circulations of power (Macmillan 2009) in ways that mystify or deny the political subjecthood of children and youth, while doing little to unsettle dominant understandings of either childhood or security (see Tisdall and Punch 2012; Nieuwenhuys 2013). There is much to recommend more in the way of reflexive critical work in this area. Contributions regarding children and youth in connection with, among other things, global political economy, human rights, and militarism (see, for example, Brocklehurst 2006; Watson 2009; Carpenter 2010; Beier 2011) bear important implications with regard to security as well. There is likewise, as Wagnsson, Hellman, and Holmberg (2010) argue, much unrealized promise in taking children’s agency seriously in Security Studies, not least in advancing the theorization of ‘security’ itself.

But, as the various contributions to this special issue also make clear, simply ‘adding’ children is not enough and attempting to ‘find’ them is beset by the danger of doing no more than that or, worse, making them what they must be in light of commitments and assumptions that precede them. Feminists and others have alerted us to the analogous perils of ‘bringing in,’ for example, women (Tickner 1992) or Indigenous peoples (Shaw 2002) in a manner that subjects them both to mainstream frameworks’ pronouncements upon ways of knowing and being to which they must then be made to conform if they are to be intelligible. Even if we are properly attentive to the deleterious consequences of forcing children into the conceptual spaces marked out for them in advance by the theoretical mainstream, critical approaches also run the considerable risk of performing similar violences of erasure if they do not bring into relief and interrogate customary and hegemonic renderings of children and childhood. In her contribution herein, Cecilia Jacob points out how this danger might be exacerbated by inadequacies of Critical Security Studies and a privileging of protection over an interest in power, and how it operates to obscure from view alternative imaginings of security and enactments of political subjecthood (Jacob herein, 15). Just as thinking productively about women or Indigenous people in International Relations and Security Studies has meant taking seriously gender and indigeneity in all of their nuance and complexity, so too thinking about children requires theorizing childhood. Failing to do so leaves unchallenged and intact ‘common sense’ assumptions and commitments as well as the ‘subterranean’ circulations of power by dint of which we casually reinscribe them.

We can see something of this in some of the framings of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize and, in particular, of the recipients themselves and the contexts of their activism. Without at all diminishing or in any way calling into question the enormity of the contribution made by either of the 2014 laureates, the politics of political subjecthood at play are nevertheless instructive. It is important to bear in mind that this need not be born of any conscious instrumentality in order to flow together with and reinforce hegemonic narratives and ideas. For instance, while there is certainly much to celebrate about the Prize having been awarded to joint recipients from two South Asian countries – perhaps especially in light of the historically troubled relationship between them – this is something which could also have the unintended effect of reconfirming a widely held sense that issues of child security are at least mostly confined to the global South and thereby to sustain forgetfulness about innumerable forms of insecurity experienced by children the world over, including the global North. That is not to say, of course, that insecurity is not acutely felt by many children and youth in countries of the South. Rather, it is to take note that the problem is not engaged in a political vacuum, as though the gendered and racialized legacies of colonialism somehow play no part or are suspended in the reportage and reception of present events. With this in mind, it is worth considering the extent to which the Nobel laureates might tend to be read as exceptional individuals, not only in connection with their achievements but also in the sense of embodying ‘enlightenment’ in the midst of forms of ‘backwardness’ presumed of societies beyond the global North.

On childhood itself, other aspects of framing are no less significant. Among these are matters of critical importance to the relative visibility of children’s agency and subjecthood. As much of the world learned (or, elsewhere, was reminded) of Kailash Satyarthi’s important work and leading role fighting some of the worst practices of child labor, for instance, the narrative centered him as acting subject. This much is not surprising in the context of the awarding of a Nobel Prize but, as in the case of global origins, it is important to remember also that it is not separable from other entrenched ideas and assumptions – here, those which concern childhood and youth as stages of still-‘becoming’ or ‘incomplete’ personhood. Among other things, such framings sustain and reproduce subject/object inscriptions, like protector/protected, and thereby effect erasure of other subject positions. Child laborers’ own resistance and broader political subjecthood, though not explicitly denied, are not visible.

Something similar may be at work in the case of Mr. Satyarthi’s co-laureate, revealing that underinterrogated knowledges about childhood, though operating on different circuits, are no less relevant to the case of a conspicuous child/youth subject. As noted earlier, Malala Yusafzai was already an activist before the shooting on the school bus – indeed, she was targeted for precisely that reason. But the international fame that arguably led to her being awarded the Nobel Prize arose from the spectacle of the shooting in which the agency and political subjecthood of the shooter, however misguided and repugnant, is conspicuously foregrounded. ‘Malala the activist’ is thus, in important respects, inseparable from and, at least in part, determined by ‘Malala the victim.’ This leads us onto a complicated and deeply fraught conceptual terrain for, in fact, Ms. Yusafzai occupies both those subject/object positions – and, in significant ways, they are simultaneously subject and object positions – together with others still. What calls out for more careful consideration is how it is that some may register more readily than others.

The real puzzle of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for Critical Security Studies is the persistence of unseen (or unacknowledged) circulations of power, expressed through narrations and readings beholden to and reconstitutive of assumptions about childhood that are at work even in our attempts to reveal them. What is apparent here is that the critical faculties honed over the last two decades where a range of other subjects are concerned has achieved precious little purchase when it comes to children. That is not to say that children have been absent from Security Studies. Though seldom imbued with independent agency – and, even where they are, still very much determined by proviso and inscription – they nevertheless populate everyday security discourse in ways that underwrite both mainstream and critical projects and conceptual approaches in the field. Through various points of insertion, the contributors to this special issue bring into relief and disturb assumptions about childhood that work to construct and locate children and youth in security discourse in very particular and circumscribed ways. In so doing, they offer a much-needed corrective to critical scholarship on security that has allowed objectified and essentialized renderings of children and childhood to go largely unchallenged and at times reproduces them.

Constructing childhood

Both textually and semiotically, ‘child’ is very much a floating signifier – one whose mundane usage is so seemingly ubiquitous that it invites little if any critical introspection and elides the inherent complexity and diversity of childhoods, whether in conceptual formulation or as lived experiences (Mayall 2000). It is also one that marks out in advance much in the way of the essentialized attributes and social locations of the human subjects-cum-objects to whom it is applied. Children, as ontological category, are variously constructed as innocent, dependent, vulnerable, impetuous, dangerous; they are to be cherished, nurtured, protected, regulated, feared. There is, in some senses, a very high degree of consensus about childhood and, in others, little or none at all. Dominant ideas about childhood may be broadly inscribed, bespeaking an aggregate of all persons below some age threshold, for example, or they may be imputed to some more exclusive subset of young people, variously defined along intersecting lines of, among others, race, gender, and class. The definitional struggles map with political ones: whether one is constructed within or without childhood bears critically on issues of agency, rights, protection, and more, in ways that may be enabling or disabling of concrete projects and possibilities. Childhood, like security, is an essentially contested concept.

Defiance of definition

While the idea of children as incomplete adults in the making dates at least to Aristotle, the hegemonic, modern, Western notion of childhood emerged only in the seventeenth century (Cassidy 2012, 57) as exemplified in Rousseau’s Emile (1979). Despite its long pedigree, it is through Rousseau that the idea of innocent childhood, closer somehow to God or nature and thus unprepared for the vice and avarice of the social world, has perhaps its most enduring expression. What is most clear from Emile, and which continues to cast a long shadow by way of the important influence it exerted in the founding of liberal views on education, is Rousseau’s commitment to progressive development of the faculties of reason as the sine qua non of participation in the social world. That said, he held strong views as to an essential nature of childhood to which reason was fundamentally inimical: ‘Childhood,’ he wrote, ‘has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways. And I should no more expect judgment in a ten-year-old child than I should expect him to be five feet high. Indeed, what use would reason be to him at that age? It is the curb of strength, and the child does not need the curb’ (Rousseau 1979, 60). Thus, for Rousseau, childhood was perforce a presocial developmental stage of life and, as such, ‘the child’ was necessarily to be regarded as becoming but not yet being a bona fide political subject.

On the one hand, it is dangerous to generalize about historical renditions of children’s capacity for reason and understanding. Though the denial of that capacity is a patently persistent motif, coexisting easily with a full spectrum of other ideational commitments across sociopolitical time and space, its congruence with hegemonic sensibilities of the contemporary global North may lead us to gloss over its specificity. Elsewhere and at other times, this has been a rather more complicated and ambiguous terrain than it may seem in our present rendition. The persecution of Anabaptists by Catholics and Protestants alike in Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, turned vitally on disputes about children’s ability to formulate autonomous choice. Even the most unlikely early modern European philosophers, from Descartes to Locke, betrayed ambivalence about children’s faculties of reason (see Krupp 2009). Certainly, along other human historical trajectories and philosophical traditions, and elsewhere in our present moment in time, there is much that unsettles dominant understandings of childhood as merely a stage of ‘becoming’ and which opens up opportunities to take seriously the heterogeneity of its lived experiences globally and locally.

The indeterminacy of the hegemonic construction of ‘the child’ comes quickly into relief in the problems that arise from juridical definitional exercises. In her contribution to this special issue, Helen Brocklehurst disturbs the conventional age–linear boundary approach, highlighting the contradictions and intrinsic fuzziness of definitions arrived at in this way (Brocklehurst herein, 29–32). Simply put, asking about the ‘when’ of childhood misses much in the way of its determinants. In contexts bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Children, childhoods, and security studies: an introduction
• 2. ‘Children and armed conflict’ and the field of security studies
• 3. The state of play: securities of childhood – insecurities of children
• 4. Resilience is its own resistance: the place of children in post-conflict settlement
• 5. Children, civilianhood, and humanitarian securitization
• 6. Telling geopolitical tales: temporality, rationality, and the ‘childish’ in the ongoing war for the Falklands-Malvinas Islands
• 7. Children, violence, and social exclusion: negotiation of everyday insecurity in a Colombian barrio
• 8. Shifting the burden: childhoods, resilience, subjecthood
• Index