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Abstract
The past decade has seen the emergence of ‘new critical discourses’ on security that argue for a widening of the term. This article hopes to add to such discussions by specifically examining the position of children and of the ngos that champion their rights in relation to the evolving security discourse in Southern societies. With this in mind, the first section of the article outlines the role of ngos in the contemporary practice of security. This will serve as an introduction to section two, where the activity of ngos vis-à-vis children will be considered. Such activity raises a number of questions with regard to the usefulness of incorporating children into the security discourse specifically, and to the social construction of ‘children’ generally. These will be outlined in section three. Section four argues for children to be considered as inherent to the creation of Southern security norms, while the final section concludes.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a colloquium, ‘Etats, ONG et production des normes securitaires dands le pays du Sud’, jointly sponsored by the Institut de recherché pour le developpement (IRD) and Sciences Po, Paris, December 9-10, 2004. The author would like to thank the participants of the panel ‘Politiques de securite et reconstruction sociale’ for their helpful comments at that time. The author would also like to thank Peter Macmillan and Oliver Richmond for their suggestions at various stages of the writing process. All errors remain the author's own.
1 T Väyrynen, ‘Gender and UN peace operations: the confines of modernity’, International Peacekeeping, 11 (1), 2004, pp 125–142.
2 See, for example, C Church & M Fitzduff, ngos at the Table, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. See also Mary B Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace—or War, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999, for an alternative view.
3 See also Alison MS Watson, ‘Children in International Relations: a new site of knowledge?’, Review of International Studies, forthcoming, 2006.
4 See Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1992, pp 11–15 for a brief outline of the economic trends that facilitated this proliferation.
5 Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, p 115.
6 Held and McGrew note, for example, the work of intellectuals such as Marx and Saint-Simon in recognising the impact of modernity upon levels of international integration. See David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization and Anti-Globalization, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p 1.
7 Kaldor, Global Civil Society, p 115.
8 See Oliver P Richmond, ‘“Post-Westphalian” peace-building: the role of ngos’, Martin Journal of Conflict Resolution (online), Article 3, 2001, p 1, for a wide-ranging and thoughtful analysis of contemporary ngo practice vis-à-vis the peaceful resolution of conflict. www.class.uidahoedu/martin_archives/conflict_journal/conflict2.html
9 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, London: Zed Books, 2001, p 54.
10 Hugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham & Tom Woodhouse, Contemporary Conflict Resolution, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p 35.
11 B Boutrous-Ghali, Agenda for Peace, UN Document A/477-277, 3 October 1992. Excerpted from Allan Gerson & Nat J Colletta, Privatizing Peace From Conflict to Security, New York: Transnational Publishers, 2002, p 110.
12 Kaldor, Global Civil Society, p 90.
13 Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, p 31.
14 Ann C Huddock, ngos and Civil Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p 10.
15 General Assembly resolution 44/25. Only the USA and Somalia have yet to ratify the Convention.
16 This focus remains today with, for example, Anti-Slavery International's ongoing work on child labour and the current work of the icrc on children in war. See, respectively, http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/childlabour.htm#work and http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList2/Focus:Children_in_war?OpenDocument.
20 In addition, the csc maintains active links with unicef, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict.
21 Kaldor, Global Civil Society, p 86.
22 James R Tompkins, Benjamin L Brooks & Timothy J Tompkins, Child Advocacy, History Theory and Practice, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1998, p 5.
23 Watson, ‘Children in International Relations’.
24 Indeed, similar arguments may be made with regard to the actions of child-focused ngos, which may be said to be acting simply as an alternative source of opinion in the arguments regarding what is in a child's best interests, rather than letting the child speak for itself. The child remains, in other words, essentially voiceless.
25 Tom Cockburn, ‘Children and citizenship in Britain: a case for a socially interdependent model of citizenship’, Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 5(1), 1998, p 109.
26 J Boyden, ‘Childhood and the policymakers: a comparative perspective on the globalisation of childhood’, in A James & A Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, London: Falmer Press, 1990.
27 Pamela Reynolds, ‘The ground of all making: state violence, the family and political activists’, in Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphele Ramphele & Pamela Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000, p 146.
29 Take, for example, Schroeder's analysis of Seguvian children's lives and experiences in the 1920s and 1930s. In this case, ‘boys’ involvement in rebel information flows was even more crucial than their participation as full-time combatants…Since information was critical to the war effort, since Campesino ‘culture was an oral culture, and since many children have a great capacity for memorization, it is likely that thousands of boys delivered tens of thousands of oral messages to rebel forces—messages never deposited in any archive. In this way the everyday actions of boys, all but invisible in the documentary record, made the rebellion possible’. Michael J Schroeder, ‘“Baptized in blood”: children in the time of the Sandino rebellion, Nicaragua, 1927–1934’, in James Marten (ed), Children and War: A Historical Anthology, New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp 248–249.
30 Watson, ‘Children in International Relations’.
31 Väyrynen, ‘Gender and UN peace operations’, p 136.
32 Tim Dunne & Nicholas J Wheeler, ‘“We the Peoples”: contending discourses of security in human rights theory and practice’, International Relations, 18(1), pp 9–23.
35 Data on child soldiers is notoriously difficult to capture accurately, with estimates of children remaining involved in spla activity veering between 2000 and 7000.
36 This also serves to highlight the crucial role that children may play in economic development.
37 Alison MS Watson, ‘The child that bombs built’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 27(3), 2004, pp 159–168.
38 Sara Cameron, Out of War: True Stories from the Front Lines of the Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia, New York: Scholastic Press, 2001, p 4.
40 John Darby & Roger MacGinty, The Management of Peace Processes, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p 240.
41 ‘Strengthening the United Nations: an agenda for further change’, Report of the Secretary-General, A/57/387 (2002).
42 See, for example, Susan McKay & Dyan Mazurana, Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After the War, Quebec: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2004; and Emily Schroeder, ‘A window of opportunity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: incorporating a gender perspective in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process’, Peace, Conflict and Development, 5, University of Bradford Peace Studies, 2004.
44 Michael W Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12(3), 1983, pp 205–235.
45 Oliver P Richmond, Maintaining Order, Making Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp 191–192.
46 Stephanie G Neuman, ‘International Relations theory and the Third World: an oxymoron?’, in Neuman (ed), International Relations Theory and the Third World, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p 2.
47 Vanessa Pupavac, ‘From statehood to childhood: regeneration and changing approaches to international order’, in Michael Pugh (ed), Regeneration of War-Torn Societies, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p 141.
48 Carole Bellamy, address to the World Youth Forum, Portugal, 10 August 1998.