Shifting the burden: childhoods, resilience, subjecthood

Abstract

Despite broadening of its boundaries over the past two decades, Security Studies has so far paid very little attention to childhood and its relationship to status quo circulations of power, to children as possessed of bona fide political subjecthood, and to the under-interrogated ideational commitments that have made these exclusions appear relatively unproblematic. In contrast, the rise of resilience thinking across a range of disciplines in recent years has attracted considerable attention from security scholars and practitioners alike. This article takes a critical perspective on the idea of resilience in connection with children’s (in)security, arguing that the failure to take seriously children’s political subjecthood has dire implications for the figuring and assignment of responsibility for traumas visited upon young people in a range of contexts. Moving beyond zones of conflict to consider also the everyday of (post)industrial societies of the Global North, it finds that resilience thinking together with an impoverished conception of childhood agency may move even the most benignly conceived interventions in cases of real or presumed childhood trauma to place responsibility for the work of forbearance on children themselves.

Keywords:

• children
• childhood
• security
• subjecthood
• resilience
• responsibility

Acknowledgements

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

Notes

1. Much is occluded by standard imagery of child soldiers, not least the involvement of girls (see Mazurana and McKay 2001; Fox 2004). From a postcolonial perspective, Lorraine Macmillan (2009) and Catarina Martins (2011) problematize the dominant, Northern image of the child soldier and its implication in the reproduction of both a particular privileged understanding of innocent childhood and colonial discourses about the Global South.

2. Omar Khadr was fifteen years of age when he was captured by US forces in the aftermath of a firefight in Afghanistan, in which he was severely wounded. He was held briefly at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay where he remained until his repatriation to Canada in 2012.

3. I am indebted to Marc Doucet for drawing this insight to my attention.

Additional information

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).