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, Singerâs students assessed the childâs 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 âwhat we owe to people in needâ 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 fails to ignite that very sense of obligation and the apparent disconnect between ethical reflection and lived experience, revealed in the experiment, is Singerâs 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 Singerâs 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 childâs immediate situation is urgent but are not able to glean anything about any circumstances more generally or apart from that specific plight. And, while Singerâs 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 childâs predicament rather than the child, who is rendered utterly one-dimensional as, simply, âchild.â 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 lotâso much so, in fact, that the intelligibility of Singerâs experiment depends on it.
Singerâs 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. âChildâ 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 theyâor, more particularly, their omissionâmight 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 Singerâs students will undoubtedly have brought the cultural competencies to decode âchildâ as embodied helplessness and vulnerability. Nothing more than âchildâ is said because nothing more need be said. And this is revealing of how much is already âknownâ about childhood as well as of the cultural traction of the deferred meaning behind the signifier âchild.â
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 âemotional scenery â (Brocklehurst 2015: 32). Half-noticed and rarely heard, they are nevertheless important to global politics and to IR in the same way the nondescript âdrowning childâ is important to Singerâs 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 IRâs 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 ânew sociology of childhoodâ 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 IRâs omission of children and childhoods. Looking to sources of the fieldâs 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 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 Petersonâs 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 Relationsâspecifically 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 âdiscoverâ 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?
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 contributorsâ own research projects. Thinking in terms of a collective disciplinary enterprise of âdiscoveringâ 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 âdiscoveringâ has been undertaken in other disciplinary literatures, with reference to, variously, gender, race, culture, class; likewise citizenship, discourse, aesthetics, among others. Similarly, âdiscoveringâ 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 ânew site of knowledgeâ (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 âadd children and stirâ 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 worldâs 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 childrenâfrom rights regimes, to regulation of bodily autonomy and security, to the social spaces they (may) occupy, and moreâis nevertheless a key constituent of global political ...