Our members, Prof. J. Marshall Beier (McMaster University, Canada) and Dr. Helen Berents (Griffith University, Australia), talk about their edited collection, Children, Childhoods, and Global Politics (Bristol University Press, 2023).
Childhoods intersect global political life in myriad ways and children have always been important and effectual social agents. However, this has not been well reflected in scholarship on global politics. Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are all too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. They have appeared principally as child soldiers, rhetorical devices, or, even less visibly, conflated with women as ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe 1993). In ways consistent with dominant understandings of childhood, they are invoked visually and rhetorically to influence policy and to reinforce or question global order and power, yet are rarely considered meaningful social actors in their own right.
An emergent current of scholarship on global politics (broadly defined) turns on curiosities piqued by this investment in images of children and ideas about childhood as well as the general failure of associated fields and disciplines to develop research programs commensurate with their importance. These interventions have begun to work toward recovery of children’s agency and to sketch the complex heterogeneity of childhoods in connection with pressing issues of insecurity, rights, and exploitation affecting children in contexts of conflict, migration, labour, climate change, among others.
The puzzle of children’s co-constitution within and of international politics, yet their absence as meaningful subjects, is the animating focus of Children, Childhoods, and Global Politics. Through original research across a diverse range of issues and contexts, the volume’s contributors offer new and compelling ways to think about and act on redress of this absence.
Both of us are located within the discipline of International Relations, but consistently have drawn on Childhood Studies and other disciplinary insights in our own work on children and childhoods. As participants in the engaged and growing community of International Relations scholarship around issues of children and childhoods, we were keen to draw together some of the unique but complementary lines of inquiry being pursued by both early career and more established colleagues working in this space.
Previous work has established that children and childhoods are not new, but rather are newly noticed in international studies. Thus, we wanted to get on with the business of doing the work of revealing what it means to recognise childhood as already a constituent part of our subject matters and present in the ways we theorize them.
An important motivation of the project has been to bring together a range of unique contributions in a single collection, so as to capture the diversity and complexity of childhoods’ ideational circulations and lived experiences from an equally diverse range of analytical standpoints.
The volume’s fifteen chapters are the work of more than twenty contributors from a dozen different countries and their original research projects are similarly diverse in the particular issues they ply and the empirical contexts in which they are located.
In doing this we wanted the volume to both speak to our disciplinary ‘home’ but also offer contributions that encourage interdisciplinary attention on children and childhoods as a global political constituency.
What would global political life look like without children and childhoods? If the question seems an odd one, it is perhaps because it presumes something quite outside the ambit of what global politics is usually understood to enclose and well beyond the realm of possibilities normally imagined about childhood. Certainly, for students and scholars of disciplinary International Relations, the association is not an intuitive one, but neither has it figured significantly in the wider interdisciplinary spaces concerned with critically interrogating the politics of the global. And yet, the provocation is important because, despite a dearth of attention to children and childhoods, they are indivisible from and indispensable to discourses and practices of global politics.
Though the dominant understanding of childhood is premised on developmentalist-inspired assumptions of children’s incapacity and the consequent deferment of their meaningful participation in the social worlds we share, this belies not only their competence as everyday social actors but also the ways in which they are relied upon as such. And while imagined childhood is sentimentalized as a time of innocence, understood to demand a unique claim on protection from the harsh realities of the world, the fact is that children the world over contend daily with ‘adult’ life through, among other things, participation in labour markets, shouldering domestic responsibilities on which households and communities depend, enduring structural deprivations, navigating complex emergencies, and experiencing armed conflict. What is more, the everyday functioning of global systems of material production and the maintenance of status quo power relations depends on millions of children performing essential functions and fulfilling important roles across these and other contexts.
While recognizing and taking seriously this indispensability of children to sociopolitical life is a critical first move toward finding them in global politics, coming to a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of childhood(s) themselves is no less crucial. On first gloss, the meaning of childhood may seem self-evident as a temporally-delineated formative stage of the human life course. This aligns well not only with vernacular usage and but also with culturally- and historically-specific common senses that hold childhood – and, by extension, children – sequestered behind some nominally fixed age threshold. For juridical purposes, this lends straightforward criteria for the governance of children through age-contingent deferment of rights, participation, bodily autonomy, and more. In practice, however, definitions of children and childhood are much less clear cut, varying in application not only across spatial and temporal registers but also as befits particular political purposes.
Children may be deemed too young to vote but old enough for military service; they might reach the age of criminal culpability before being permitted to serve on juries. More broadly, childhood entails duties of care and protection from adults that extend to some children but which, mediated by intersecting social categories of identity and difference like race or gender, are less accessible or even explicitly denied to others. At the same time, imputed ‘childishness’ is a stock rhetorical feint by dint of which the competence of adult subjects is routinely placed under challenge, even at the level of interstate diplomacy. This malleability of childhood in practice – variously claimed, withheld, and ascribed separate from age – reveals it as an intersubjectively held idea residing more in social imaginaries than in meaningfully objective characteristics. It begins to lay bare, too, how childhood is an ideational keystone to the working of wider imaginaries and, as such, is not only affected by politics but is itself always political.
Returning to our opening question then, there is a dual sense in which it is literally impossible to imagine global political life without children and childhoods. First, because children have always been important and effectual social agents (see, inter alia, Wells, 2015; Chou et al., 2017; Bessant, 2020), the world we know and seek to apprehend more fully would undoubtedly appear very different were their multifarious contributions suddenly to be somehow withdrawn. And, second, imagined childhood itself is integral to the (re)production of the social worlds we inhabit locally and globally. Like race or gender, ideas about childhood are vital to the constitution of acting subjects and acted upon objects not only in the relatively mundane encounters between adult and child in everyday life but in global political life also. Summoned rhetorically, the figure of the child is an important political meaning-making device in whose name desired futures are claimed, for whose sake security is demanded and insecurity decried, and over whose suffering retributive violence is sanctified. Imagined childhood – marked by innocence, incapacity, dependence, and vulnerability – thus operates as a social technology of governance both in regulating the lives of children and in the possibilities it can open or foreclose along lines of global political practices, performatives, and processes.
Just as they are and have always been essential to global political life, children and childhood have likewise always been important – though, paradoxically, largely unnoticed – in global political studies, including the more narrow and often parochial field of International Relations (IR). As the field has seen new critical challenges broaden its remit to move beyond old referents toward more inclusive and more nuanced approaches to the study of global politics in recent decades, ever more students and scholars of IR have come to recognize how race, gender, and indigeneity have never been absent from its articulations of apposite subject matters, research programs, and conceptual traditions. Rather, these and other neglected arbiters of the kinds of worlds we imagine have always been inseparable from colonial and patriarchal framings of global politics and, consequently, from the contours of disciplinary IR as it was traditionally tooled to narrate those worlds. Though we remain at the early stages of its recognition as an equally important social category of identity and difference, childhood similarly has always been present and important not only in the study of global politics but also to IR, where it likewise is not new but merely newly noticed.