Children, childhoods, and security studies: an introduction

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• children
• childhood
• youth
• security
• subjecthood
• 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 both broad and narrow, childhoods are determined by exigencies of gender, ethnicity, race, class, location, and more. They may be experienced as contingent, changing, and multiple even for the individual, depending on operant relationships or the circumstances of the moment. But the zero plural rendering – the child – so unreflexively invoked even in the very name of the 1992 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), for instance, collapses such alterity into a presumed universal conception of childhood that does not withstand critical scrutiny (James 2007, 262; Cordero Arce 2012, 382). Consistent with this universalizing move, the UNCRC defines children as all persons under the age of 18 – though it incorporates numerous qualifications as to capacity at younger ages, these too are universalized. Similarly, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has settled on the ‘straight-18’ standard, calling for an international prohibition on recruitment into armed forces before that benchmark age. As David Rosen (2007, 297) points out, this necessitates that ‘existing and competing definitions of childhood be abandoned in favor of a single international standard.’ As laudable as it may seem on some levels, the encoded assumption of ‘straight-18’ (that childhood is an innocent stage of life to be protected) is a privileged perspective founded on structural and material privilege that is not and has never been universal, even in the global North (see Cook 2008, 44–45). It cannot accommodate the possibility of child soldiers as autonomous agents with their own motivations, however formulated, and the effect is to flatten complex and varied subject positions, essentializing and separating ‘the child’ from politics and from independent agency.

The common thread in these and other dominant constructions of childhood is diminution of agency. Where agency is conceded in some way or measure, it is typically an impoverished rendering that does not admit of the possibility of bona fide political subjecthood. Thus, children and youth might be seen to act, but they cannot be read as the autonomous authors of their actions in the same manner as an adult political subject. This amounts to an insistence upon regulation of child and youth agency in ways that contain and reassign the political subjecthood behind it. That is the effect of, for example, casting all child soldiers as victims by dint of their age, notwithstanding that some might actually be pursuing an autonomously reasoned survival strategy. It invalidates the possibility that a child worker’s own view of her circumstances might be that she has entered into an employment contract (Scullion 2013) and that the fact of an exploitative relationship of exchange is not, in itself, generally regarded as sufficient basis to question the autonomy of choice of an adult in the same circumstances. Similarly, a moral panic over presumed ‘dangerous’ young men in the UK may have less to do with any reality of youth violence than with the location of political subjecthood such that its capture and regulation through military service can be promoted (Basham 2011) – here, the state (whose franchise derives from adult citizenry) is recentered as the operant political subject and the inherent contradictions of the ‘straight-18’ definition of childhood are brought starkly into relief once again.

What calls out for more in the way of critical reflection if we are to productively engage intersections of childhood and security are the everyday ways in which we reproduce subject positions, ascriptions, and inscriptions (Butler 2004) and, thus, the universal child. Childhood as a stage of life to be regulated is central to the Rousseauian commitments that remain integral to prevailing understandings of education’s social purposes and, increasingly, as a technology for the making of neoliberal market participants. Tensions manifest in a multitude of well-known definitional contradictions: a young person, by virtue of nothing other than chronological age, may be deemed old enough to be held accountable under criminal law but not old enough to be a juror; she may be free to give military service but not to vote. Such discrepancies between rights and accountability expose social conventions of domination and control. It is noteworthy in this connection that positing an incomplete or deficient capacity for reason has historically been a strategy for resisting empowerment of all manner of marginalized groups. Accordingly, it is important to bear in mind that references to childhood are, in fact, references to adult–child relationships (Johansson 2011, 102) encoding power relations that constitute adults as sociopolitical actors. As such, social reproduction of the universal child of hegemonic imagining is itself an insecurity practice worth unpacking.

These are issues taken up by scholars working in the field of Childhood Studies in ways that better enable us to think about how critical scholarship might best engage intersections between childhood and security. In particular, this growing body of work has opened important avenues of inquiry regarding ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – the crucial distinction mapping with, respectively, ‘adult’ and ‘child’ (Jenks 1996; Matthews 1994; Qvortrup 1994). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1984) and Latour (2005), Barbro Bernstein (2011, 104) treats ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ not as states defined by objective properties but as outcomes of assemblages ‘composed of children’s and adults’ bodies, discourses of childhood, artefacts, school as an institution, etc.’, which work to align being/becoming and adult/child together with, among other binary oppositions, mature/immature, rational/irrational, competent/incompetent, independent/dependent. Approaching the construction of childhood from this perspective opens a space within which to recognize that children and adults alike are in a constant state of simultaneous being and becoming (Bacon and Frankel 2014, 38–39), though hegemonic ideas about childhood function to mystify this. The call to theorize children as beings and becomings (Uprichard 2008), if extended to adults also, thus resists the adult world’s exclusive claim to political subjecthood.

If children and childhood sometimes seem to defy definition, it might, somewhat paradoxically, be due to the fact that dominant commitments about children as an ontological category of human ‘becomings’ are so deeply held. The possibility of young people’s unqualified legitimate and autonomous political subjecthood so defies prevailing common senses as to be unthinkable, and any such subject transgression is most readily made intelligible as pathology of one sort or another, cast as naïve or misguided or delinquent. The ‘human becoming’ is thereby re-objectified into something more amenable to sensibilities which insist upon innocent incapacity to formulate a legitimate subject position. The young person is defined by a lack (of maturity, rationality, competence, etc.) and therefore cannot be truly the author of her own actions, whose ‘real’ determinants must be sought elsewhere (in some guileful interlocutor or other corrupting influence, for example). The inherent indeterminacy of this leads, perhaps inevitably, to clumsy juridical contortions around arbitrary designations like ‘straight-18’ as the means by which to regulate what is ultimately a critical boundary between political objecthood and subjecthood.

There is much at stake in this when it comes to thinking about childhood in Security Studies. As R.B.J. Walker (1997, 69) argued two decades ago, ‘[s]ecurity cannot be understood, or reconceptualized, or reconstructed without paying attention to the constitutive account of the political that has made the prevailing accounts of security seem so plausible.’ Thinking about childhood in relation to security, then, necessarily entails a challenging of prevailing commitments and common senses concerning the political, in which status quo interests may be deeply invested and by which status quo relations of power are sustained. Fundamentally at issue here are particular renderings and boundaries of political subjecthood which work to objectify children and youth and locate them outside of political life.

Innocent childhood

To say that children are constructed outside of political life is not to say that they are not politicized. More than just an enduring Rousseauian inheritance, the trope of innocent childhood is a powerful political expedient. Indeed, as Robin Bernstein (2011) argues, its always contingent and relatively recent (in historical terms) emergence as an idea is inseparable from its strategic uses in political persuasion. The child as human ‘becoming’ highlights adult responsibility and seems irresistible as an associative device by which to motivate political action, from the banal references to ‘our children’s future’ that pepper election campaign rhetoric to the often viscerally felt images of suffering children that foreground urgent appeals for response to humanitarian emergencies. In service of politics both benevolent and malign, childhood is metonymically and semiotically employed to great effect as a contiguous referent through which various projects are themselves associated with innocence and virtue. For example, though the archetype of innocent childhood is a racialized one – again, founded on privilege and thus constructing some children outside of innocence and outside of hegemonic understandings of childhood itself – such is its rhetorical sway that, as Bernstein notes, its appropriation became a critical strategy of antiracist resistance politics in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Elsewhere, evocations of the innocence or purity of childhood were, in the same moment, harnessed to overtly racist projects. In these and other ways, innocent childhood functions as an important component of wider discursive economies (Campbell 1992) through which myriad political projects are raised and sustained, from the propagation of Victorian social values (Thiel 2012) to contemporary appeals for intervention (or against intervention) along lines of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

As Lorraine Macmillan shows in her contribution to this special issue, innocent childhood and invisibility of children’s agency go hand in hand, but the absence this effects also produces things, such as the civilian. Children, at least in the dominant Western construction, are the quintessential innocent civilians. If innocence is a constituent of presumed pre-political life, it entails being held harmless, absolved of political responsibility, and deserving of protection. In short, it is productive of an instrumental boundary between those bodies marked out as legitimate targets of political violence and those which cannot legitimately be understood in that way because they have been constructed outside of political life. Transgressions of the boundary, visiting violence upon those recognized as children (remembering that factors other than age are at play here), may be felt to be especially egregious (Jacob herein, 16) and this, in turn, can be a potent rhetorical resource. Whether in Somalia (Macmillan), Syria (Jacob), or on the streets of Fergusson, Missouri, innocent childhood, predicated on the denial of political subjecthood, functions as metonym for the larger communities of which the (made-)visible child victims of violence are part.

Finding children in Security Studies

The implication for Security Studies is inescapable: children already populate security discourse, most often as innocents to be protected or a social resource for the future, but also as dangerous beings where presumed innocence is subverted by a nefarious force (child soldiers) or is lost for want of regulation (wayward or deviant youth). Children figure prominently as well in security anxieties which cast them as dangerous or potentially dangerous ‘becomings.’ As Helen Berents notes in her contribution herein, children are apt to be read as dangerous for being ‘transgressive’ and potentially dangerous when they do not conform to the prevailing normative renderings of childhood (Berents herein, 92). In a particularly extreme formulation, an anti-terror consultation document recently drawn up by the UK Home Office proposed that nursery workers be tasked with identifying very young children considered at risk of radicalization (Tufft 2015). Regardless of whether such a scheme could ever be seen through to practical implementation, its contemplation is nevertheless instructive as to the contingency of innocent childhood and its inseparability from other power circulations. In a similar vein, ‘zero tolerance’ policies securitize childhood and youth (see Giroux 2001; Saltman, David, and Gabbard 2011; Nguyen 2013) in ways that can all too readily equate autonomous subjecthood with threat. Though less spectacular, the same underlying logics and assumptions are expressed in handwringing about the alleged dire threat or other implications supposed to inhere in demographic ‘youth bulges’ in other contexts (see, for example, Urdal 2006; Weber 2013).

While agency is conspicuous in all of these examples, it is significant that it is also pathologized. Children/youth are present in their connection to operant security discourses in each case, but that presence is marked out as problematic such that it calls for some sort of remediation or correction. Put another way, though agency might be acknowledged, it is not afforded legitimacy and therefore cannot be abided as robust political subjecthood – the effect is that children are once again reduced to an objectified political problem rather than being recognizable as genuine and autonomous political actors. It might be tempting here to suggest that we ought to explore how such children and childhoods could be more meaningfully engaged in Security Studies but, as noted earlier, that raises the specter of their being rendered as what Security Studies needs them to be. If we are to avoid the inscriptive violences of an ‘add children and stir’ approach, then, it is imperative that we come to terms with just what it is that extant Security Studies makes of childhood. The first indispensable move in this direction is recognizing that children are already present in Security Studies as much as in security discourses more broadly. This is not limited to those pathologized instances where frighteningly unregulated ‘becomings’ are understood to pose some danger. The relevance of childhood to Security Studies runs much deeper and in ways that give the lie to any sense that children and childhoods are not always already present.

The importance of finding children in International Relations and Security Studies is not new but, rather, newly recognized (Brocklehurst herein, 34). As Jacob (herein, 15) observes, they are much more present in these disciplinary contexts than we may realize. They pervade constitutive discourses of global politics and security narratives more generally, compellingly invoked as objects of value, of suffering, of hope, and so forth. In this vital sense, they have always been a part of Security Studies, which raises again the puzzle of security scholars’ (and especially critical scholars’) lack of curiosity about children and childhoods. Their presence, however, is very much as ‘furniture of the world,’ to borrow Bertrand Russell’s (1919, 182) memorable phrase. That is to say, ‘the child,’ ontologized into a stable referent along lines of dominant constructions, resides beyond the reach of conceptual debates, here rendered not only as presocial but prior to theory as well.

Security discourse relies on well-rehearsed ‘knowledge’ about childhood whose deferred meaning derives from wider intertextualities but is readily summoned. As we have seen, there is significant indeterminacy and contingency in this so that it functions as a versatile and maneuverable political resource. For instance, the instrumentality of ascriptions of childishness in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, explored in Victoria Basham’s contribution herein, relies on their intelligibility as at least mildly pejorative and demeaning of other subject positions in order for them to function as a discursive technology rationalizing the use and threat of violence. Elsewhere, images and accounts about children themselves, deployed as markers of innocent victimhood, mobilize state violence when they come to stand for aggregate noncombatant groups (Macmillan herein, 64) and, thus, as inherently passive (Watson herein, 52–54) referent objects of humanitarian intervention. Noncombatants do not occupy subject positions with respect to political violence and, as the quintessential innocent civilians, images of children harmed in armed conflict can deal a powerful blow to the perceived legitimacy of the responsible party’s own subject position in warfare. As such, they are an increasingly important factor in the management of perception as it pertains to legitimacy in warfare, conferring an advantage on those endowed with the technological wherewithal to sustain a persuasive claim to meaningful discrimination between combatants and noncombatants (Beier 2003).

Children are easily mobilized into ‘emotional scenery’ underwriting the ‘war on terror’ or, just as readily, used by aid agencies as the ‘hook’ by which to gather support for programs whose actual intended beneficiaries may include but are not limited to children (Brocklehurst herein, 32–33). Together with major children’s rights initiatives through the 1990s, the rapid ascendancy of the human security agenda saw the concomitant rise of the use of images of childhood, epitomizing the broadening of security discourse to include new referents in the wake of the Cold War. Civil society groups also made very effective use of these openings. The movement to ban antipersonnel landmines, for example, invested heavily in such imagery, foregrounding the dire consequences suffered by children in mine-affected countries. Child-sized prosthetic limbs were prominently displayed at international meetings, campaign literature centered child landmine victims, and children were pictured on the cover of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines’ voluminous annual report, Landmine Monitor, in each of its first seven years of publication. Of course, the campaign was undertaken on behalf of all landmine victims, the majority of whom are adults, but the stigmatization of this class of weapons and the startlingly quick completion of an international treaty banning them owed much to the ubiquitous images of child victims who unambiguously register as innocent noncombatants. This, in turn, relied once more upon children’s construction outside of political subjecthood and the persistence of popular imaginaries in which theirs is an innocent existence assigned to particular places such as home and school (Macmillan herein, 65), where political violence must not transgress. It is a particular, idealized version of childhood purposefully deployed, and reproduced in the same instant, in furtherance of a political project. And it is contingent on the disappearance from view of actually existing childhoods wherein the implications of such projects are lived experience (Basham herein, 87).

Abstracted and thoroughly objectified, children and childhood are reduced to terrains on which security practices are played out. These can be ideational, as in rhetorical deployments of innocent childhood, or much more literal and corporeal. Starving children’s emaciated bodies may impel and come to stand for intervention (Macmillan herein, 68), for example. Differently located but drawing equally on dominant constructions of childhood, Jacob (herein, 16) highlights how children are centerpieces of political contestation on the battlefields of Syria. And, as Alison Watson points out in her contribution, the symbolic meaning of childhood can also cause children to be deliberately selected as targets: another violent context of their reduction to sites of political action by others. They inhabit post-conflict landscapes (Watson herein, 51) as victims: orphaned, abject, and dispossessed, their untimely and inapt autonomy portending further danger in the absence of some benevolent regulation. Children’s age can in itself be a significant risk factor for profound insecurity, heightening vulnerability with respect to all manner of dangers and deprivations (Berents herein, 98).

These are just some of the ways in which we find children and childhood already present in Security Studies. We might say that in their incompleteness they are precisely what Security Studies needs them to be, flowing together with and sustaining dominant understandings of sovereignty, authority, order, protection, and much more. The challenge this sets for us, then, is to find what is not fully present, beginning with political subjecthood. This is essential to a progressive rethinking of security as it pertains to children and lived childhoods. Security Studies also stands to benefit from this, both empirically and conceptually. Macmillan (herein, 73) points out that finding children offers, for example, the possibility of a corrective to securitization theory’s problematic centering of elites and overemphasis of a very circumscribed range of speech acts. Jacob (herein, 20–22) alerts us to how feminist approaches might inadvertently become implicated in the denial of children’s political subjecthood (see also Brocklehurst herein, 41). Mindful of this danger while drawing on feminist scholarship on security as well as theories of agency and everyday life, Berents (herein) finds fieldwork exploration a productive means by which to repopulate not only the structures but the discourse of violence and insecurity in ways that resist children’s exclusion. Lived realities of childhood enable alternative political renditions (Berents herein; Basham herein) which, in turn, broach new challenges to accustomed ways of theorizing security, both mainstream and critical.

Taking children and childhoods seriously in Security Studies also raises opportunities to critically engage developing concepts, relatively new to the field, such as resilience. As noted earlier, the conspicuous agency and political subjecthood of Malala Yousafzai’s assailant may register more readily than, and is in key respects determinant of, the visibility of Ms. Yousafzai’s own political subjecthood. The figure of ‘Malala’ that has emerged from the act of violence that brought her to global fame is one deeply marked by a trope of resilience, emergent across a range of disciplines and popular discourses in recent years, not least in Childhood Studies and in clinical fields associated with child and youth well-being. In many of its increasingly common articulations, however, it is a concept sorely lacking in positive content. Resilience in many instances does not mean thriving, resilience is too often about surviving. As such, it may tend to summon a rendering of security in decidedly abject terms, much more akin to realist-inspired accounts than to the many reconceptualizations of the last two decades.

Malala Yousafzai’s abject resilience is key to understanding her visibility as a political subject. She has refused to be silenced, despite the horrific violence inflicted on her, and that resilience has not only come to define her visible political subjecthood but to bound it too. Again, her prior activism has come to light in consequence of this resilience, itself made visible by way of the agential choices of her assailant. It is worth asking why her resilience continues to be explicitly tied to her survival of the attack and not to her earlier political activism. Surely persistence in taking direct action against the denial of social and political rights under extremely challenging circumstances bespeaks resilience, but the centering instead of the forbearance of the act of violence mystifies this. Here too, then, even in the context of global spectacle, resilience is not disturbed by and does not disturb a very impoverished rendering of the acting political subject. In effect, the subject is made to disappear while in plain view. We begin to get a sense from this of resilience as a necessary but not sufficient condition of genuine and robust political subjecthood, and this suggests new ways of theorizing it.

As the contributions to this special issue reveal, taking children and childhoods seriously in Security Studies suggests new ways of approaching this and other issues of interest to the field more broadly. At the same time, it opens up an area of security discourse whose centrality to so much of what concerns security scholars and practitioners alike is belied by the almost complete lack of attention it has attracted thus far. And, not least, it is revealing of our complicities in the marginalization and silencing of political subjects even at a time when we hope to have become much more attentive to the violences of erasure. Through their various points of entry into this underdeveloped area of inquiry, the contributors herein take on a range of important issues at the intersections of children, childhoods, and security, including but not limited to those sketched in a most preliminary way earlier. In so doing, they complicate our understanding of security both conceptually and as lived experience and unsettle many of the existing accounts of its subjects, objects, and content.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

J. Marshall Beier

J. Marshall Beier is Associate Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of childhood and militarism, Indigenous peoples’ global diplomacies, critical security studies, and postcolonial and feminist theory. He is editor of and contributor to The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).