Child Security in Asia

The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar

Cecilia Jacob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134508921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Millions of children around the world are affected by conflict, and the enduring aftermath of war in post-conflict societies. This book reflects on the implications of children's insecurity for governments and the international humanitarian community by drawing on original field research in post-conflict Cambodia and in Burma's eastern conflict zones.

The book examines the way that politics and discourses of security and child protection have further marginalised rather than enhanced the protection of children. In Cambodia, threats from trafficking, exploitative labour, and high levels of domestic and social violence challenge the government and the international humanitarian community to respond to the new human security terrain that is the legacy of three decades of political violence. Burma has endured over 60 years of insurgency and civil conflict in ethnic minority states, significantly affecting children who are recruited into armies, killed, maimed or tortured, and displaced.

Analysing the theoretical and practical challenges faced in addressing children's security in global politics, the book offers a novel framework for responding to the politics of protection that is at the heart of this crucial issue. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Politics and International Relations and Security.

Part I

1 Childhood, security and protection

Concepts and theoretical approach

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the key concepts that are central to the rest of this book: childhood, critical security, human security, and child protection. It starts by discussing the concept of childhood, and the implications of childhood for the study of global politics. It is suggested here that socially constructed images of children based largely on the Western discovery and development of childhood have shaped international discourses surrounding children, with important implications for the formation of the global agenda and protection framework for children in the context of politics and security.

The second part of this chapter turns to the concept of security itself, arguing that critical security studies offers the most appropriate theoretical context for conceptualizing children's security. In the third section, the concept of human security is discussed in this broader theoretical context. In this section I also clarify the concepts of child protection and child security as used in the book, and discuss the role of state and non-state actors in relation to this overarching human security agenda.

Childhood

Childhood is a fluid concept in many cultures; in fact the very notion of childhood as a phase of a person's life is largely accepted to be a social construct (James and James 2004) and based on Western historical tradition (Boyden 1997; Pupavac 2001). This point was made in Western scholarship by Philippe Ariès in his seminal piece, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime (1960), translated into English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, in which he explores the way that modern Western society has increasingly portrayed childhood as a distinct phase of life segregated from adulthood, a distinction that was not so evident in the Middle Ages in Europe. Although his work is the subject of much debate and controversy among childhood scholars, it marked a turning point for the study of childhood (James and Prout 1990: 17).

It was not until the 1990s that sociologists identified childhood as a variable of social analysis, worthy of study in its own right and comparable with variables such as gender, class and ethnicity (James and Prout 1990: 17). Scholars recognized ‘[c]hildhood as a “natural” temporal space in which the physiological and psychological development stage common to all children transcends cultural difference’ (James and James 2004: 18–19). Until this point, the fact that adults and children inhabit ‘different theoretic social worlds’ (Jenks 1982: 24) had been largely unquestioned in academic disciplines, and the separation of children's experience from that of adults through our institutions and practices was taken for granted (James and James 2004: 20–1). Chris Jenks has suggested that age is considered a new ‘frontier’ in sociological research, alongside sexuality and disability (Jenks 1996: 57). Given the impetus in social sciences to reconsider dominant theoretical positions by exploring children's experiences and perspectives, this chapter draws connections between the implications of the discipline of childhood sociology and the study of global security.

While the school of thought stemming from what is often referred to as the ‘New Sociology of Childhood’ has impacted on many academic disciplines, the literature on global politics does not discuss the socially constructed stereotypes surrounding childhood and how these feed into understandings of security.¹ While children are deeply implicated in the workings of global politics and security, the notion of childhood itself has been relegated somewhat to a more symbolic and utilitarian status within the academic discipline of global politics.

State leaders and politicians have used stereotypes surrounding children to promote political ends because ‘children seem uniquely suited for use in propaganda as icons of “the threatened” and the insecure’ (Brocklehurst 2006: 48). In a similar fashion, humanitarian agencies employ images of suffering children to invoke empathy from the international community in order to boost funding campaigns, a tactic Karen Wells labels as the ‘politics of pity’ (Wells 2009: 34). Stereotypical imagery of children's lives also influences the workings of global politics through popular debate. For example, debate within Germany over its contribution to an EU presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo centred on the issue of child soldiers (Fiorenza 2003: 16; IOL News 2006; Wagnsson et al. 2010: 5). The German government grappled with public reactions to the possibility of EU military engagement with child combatants. Many of these debates rest on popular imagery of the child soldier: for example, Katrina Lee-Koo argues that ‘the African boy reflects and reinforces pre-existing notions of the global South as a morally defunct zone of tragedy’, an association driven by global advocacy discourse, which, despite its good intentions, tends to reinforce North-South power relations through the construction of the ‘child soldier’ (2011: 731).

The reservation and ambiguity over how to treat the strategic dilemma of confronting ‘enemy’ children in combat, given popular moral sensitivity over childhood, is also emphasized by Peter Singer. He notes how little media attention has been given to the role of child soldiers in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although child soldiers were responsible for the death of the first US soldier in Iraq, and for many since (Singer 2006: 25). This ambiguity in Western responses to fighting children on the ground stems from a moral and ethical consideration for childhood in Western society that isolates and seeks to protect children from the ‘adult’ world.

The standard definition of a child, according to international law, is any person under the age of 18. Children are offered special protection and are therefore a unique category under international law on the basis of age. Conceptualizing ‘children’ in global politics should take into account that this group includes not just ‘youth’, but also younger children, whose needs and capacity for participation vary greatly. This includes infants and preschool aged children, who are often not accounted for in literature on ‘children’ that discusses children primarily as participants in conflict, child labourers, or school-aged children missing an education.

An emphasis on children as ‘youth’, as ‘participants’ in conflict, and as ‘political agents’ may suggest that children are important to global politics because of their capacity to contribute to international security either positively or negatively, a point discussed in the next chapter. This emphasis may exclude discussions of children who are infants, handicapped, or in a position such as bonded labour such that their capacity to ‘participate’ and ‘contribute’ to global politics is not the most appropriate way to discuss their needs. But given that a child by law includes all people under the age of 18, it is worth making explicit the importance of legal mechanisms to protect all children, an international security imperative regardless of children's role. This hinges the imperative of security on rights, rather than on capacity for agency as a more pragmatic response to the needs of children living in insecurity.

While the moral implications for responding to the non-traditional area of children's insecurity creates ambiguity and strategic dilemmas for traditional security actors, part of the political and public response to ‘suffering children’ is also tied up with the language used to describe children, and the connotations given to this group of people. Siobhán McEvoy-Levy points out that in many cultures, ‘childhood’ ends quite early, with children assuming adult responsibilities such as work and heading households at very young ages. The notion of ‘youth’, however, can extend well into a person's late twenties, thirties, and even early forties in some cultures (McEvoy-Levy 2006: 30). The Sierra Leone National Youth Policy, for example, defines ‘youth’ as 15–35 years of age (Denov 2010: 3).

The idea of ‘youth’ in many non-Western contexts is a question of hierarchy, and respecting seniority and the wisdom and experience of elders. I found this notion relevant in my own fieldwork: men in Cambodia in their thirties were found to be reserved around elder people, and dependent on the decision-making of parents and elder relatives. McEvoy-Levy suggests that studying ‘youth’ in the processes of peace-building in post-accord settings is more productive than studying ‘children’, given the central role played by adolescents and young adults in the actual fighting of wars, their desire to participate, and the fact that in post-war societies it is the youth who are largely responsible for the sustainability of peace.

McEvoy-Levy (2001, 2006) also points out the various ways that childhood is associated with vulnerability and innocence, while ‘youth’ is negatively associated with violence, gangs and troublemaking. She notes that the people who are the ‘victims’ of child poverty are often the same ones labelled in the media as ‘troublemaker’ youth, failing to make the connection between the lack of life opportunities of young people that explains how they came to be involved in activities such as militias and gangs. Further, she suggests that the media and politicians are selective in their usage of terminology to describe children, and that it is important to be conscious of this politicization surrounding ‘childhood’ in attempting to address children's insecurity and need for protection. This approach to analysing ‘youth’ rather than ‘children’ in post-accord peace-making processes has the benefit of being able to capture the bulk of the population in conflict and post-conflict society, particularly the bulk of those who were directly involved in hostilities.

Yet for the purposes of this book, I posit that to exclude very young people from the theory and practice of security contributes to the lower priority accorded to this particularly vulnerable category of children in international and national security discourses. In my conceptualization of child security, I do not believe that children need to be active participants or political agents to be deemed relevant and central to the security agenda of conflict-affected states (see Chapter 3). Although many children do take on active and political roles in their societies, and recognition of this is crucial, many children do not. However, this has been overlooked in much of the literature focussing on children as fighters and participants in conflict and post-conflict processes. I argue that it is on the basis of children's human rights that their presence in global security theory and practice is primarily justified.

In Chapter 3 I outline some of the ways that images of childhood are employed by politicians and non-government agencies for strategic or institutional ends. Drawing on social constructivist approaches to international security, this book takes as an important theme the conscious and unconscious ways in which socially constructed images of childhood impact on children's security.

As childhood sociologists have pointed out, socially constructed images of childhood in Western literature tend to present children as confined to private spaces of the home and school, and therefore as largely apolitical agents (Boyden 1997: 195–6). In the case studies presented in this book, an examination of this tendency juxtaposed with prevailing (state) security discourse leads to the concluding analysis of how these dominant discourses structure children's protection agendas in conflict and post-conflict settings. Political discourses of security are a crucial aspect in the construction of agendas to protect children and are of great relevance to the analysis of childhood in conflict-affected societies (Wagnsson et al. 2010: 5–8).

Critical security studies

Human security – the notion of human-centred security policy – has the potential to foster ethical thinking and strategizing in relation to the protection of conflict-affected populations. If the concept of human security is to be used as a policy tool, however, its theoretical foundations will be weak unless conceptualized through a critical security framework. Although I will draw more specifically on a social constructivist analysis of children's security in the chapters that follow, I seek to emphasize the significance of the broader critical security project in which this sociological approach is situated, arguing that the study of children in global politics is made possible by the critical turn in security studies (Brocklehurst 2006; Watson 2006a).

Critical security scholars have debated the critical nature of human security; that is, whether human security is inherently transformative rather than merely problem-solving (Grayson 2004) or just the ‘new orthodoxy’ inherent in state security discourse (Christie 2010). Yet a number of critical security scholars have appropriated human security in their terminology as an expedient way to capture the notion of security for people; they thus define security in terms of protecting the human rights of people, which serves an important discursive (McDonald 2002) and normative (Floyd 2007b) function in critical security studies, engaging human rights in an expanded concept of security (Fierke 2007: 144–66; Krause and Williams 1997).

There are a number of important contributions made by critical security scholars that offer theoretical value to the concept of human security and that clarify why this approach is appropriate for the analysis of children's security in global politics. These contributions will be outlined in this section; there will follow a more detailed discussion of human security itself. The contributions of critical security include, first, an epistemological and ontological revision of the concept of security that shifts emphasis away from the centrality of the state referent; second, an emphasis on praxis; and third, an explicitly normative agenda that refocusses analysis on the moral and ethical aspects of global security. These contributions give importance to questions of identity, norms, culture and sociology that offer a more holistic approach to the study of child security.

The centrality of the state

Security studies have traditionally been situated in the broader discipline of international relations (IR) and have tended to focus on militarized and state protection concerns, such as the threat of interstate conflict and territorial integrity. The realist school of thought that dominates IR pursues a rational ‘problem solving’ approach to matters of state security (Cox 1986), basing theory on ontological and epistemological assumptions that it is possible to discover ‘timeless, objective, causal laws that govern human phenomena’ (Krause and Williams 1997: 37), notably the behaviour of states and the nature of international society.

The world constructed by structuralist theorists is centred on states as autonomous units of analysis, and explained in terms of material and instrumental reason determining state preferences (Waltz 1979, 2001), sidelining sociological questions of human agency and norms in constituting the behaviour of states. While its precursor, classical realism, is distinct from neo-realism, or structural realism, in that it is concerned with human nature in the politics of states, it has also appropriated questions of statehood, power and material capabilities as the privileged domain of security analysis (Morgenthau 1993).

Liberal IR theory represents an alternative position to realism in that it asserts optimism about the progressive nature of world politics and the capacity of institutions, diplomacy, non-state actors and ideas to bring about a more idealistic world order (viewing time as linear as opposed to cyclical as in realist theory; for example, Keohane and Nye 2001). Liberalism is still considered a ‘traditional’ IR theory, however, using Robert Cox's (1986) distinction between problem solving and critical theory, as it shares an epistemological and ontological assumption about the nature of international politics and society (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010). This places states and militarism at the centre of the analysis and definition of ‘security’, preventing a radical revision of definitions of concepts such as sovereignty and security, and in effect excluding actors, referents and threats that do not fall within this orthodox understanding.

The belief that reason and empirical observation can be used to determine objective laws that govern relations between states limits the capacity of traditional IR theory to account for the sociological, cultural, historical and political variation between contexts, which shape people's experience of security. It also limits the recognition of the socially constructed nature of political identities and interests, and the power of norms over state behaviour and preferences.

There is therefore inadequate scope within traditional security theory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge contemporary Asia series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: the politics of protecting children and implications for security analysis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Personal interviews
• Index