Horror and Hope: (re)presenting militarised children in global North–South relations

Lee-Koo, Katrina

doi:10.1080/01436597.2011.567005

Cited by 44 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…As there are overlaps between these concerns and feminist IR theory, the next section will briefly turn to the potentials and limitations of feminist IR theory for theorizing children in IR. Situating children within feminist IR approaches has been an important site of discussions about childhood in IR to date (e.g., Denov 2006;Fox 2004;Lee Koo 2011;Mazurana and Carlson 2008), therefore a few issues will be interrogated in the next section to reflect on this positioning before laying out a Bourdieu-inspired framework in more detail in the final section to provide additional avenues for refining this important work.…”

Section: Children Are Seen But Not Heard In Irmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…A number of scholars have argued persuasively why children should be included in the study of IR, in the specific areas of global politics (Brocklehurst 2006), the international political economy (Watson 2009), security studies (Wagnsson, Hellman, and Holmberg 2010), and international humanitarian and human rights law (Carpenter 2010). Topically, scholars in IR and related fields -such as international law and peace studies -interested in children have examined child soldiers (Brett and McCallin 1998;Brett and Specht 2004;Cohn and Goodwin-Gill 1994;Denov 2006Denov , 2010Happold 2005;Singer 2006;Wessells 2006), the militarization of childhood (Beier 2011;Brocklehurst 2006;Lee-Koo 2011;Mazurana and Carlson 2008), children born of wartime sexual violence (Carpenter 2007(Carpenter , 2010, and children/youth as contributors to post-conflict peace-building (McEvoy-Levy 2006;Wessells and Monteiro 2006). What can we make of this interest in children in conflict, how should we go about theorizing children in IR, and what significance does this bear on the study of security in IR?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Children and armed conflict’ and the field of security studies

Jacob

2015

Critical Studies on Security

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Sociological studies in childhood have successfully carved out a research agenda that establishes children as worthy research subjects in their own right. This insight has impacted on international relations (IR) very late compared to similar developments throughout the social sciences given the perceived marginality of children to 'central' IR discussions of power, sovereignty, and security. A number of IR scholars have engaged with critical security studies and pioneered work that has justified the relevance of children to IR. This article goes a step further to build on this emergent body of important literature, advocating a Bourdieu-inspired conceptualization of child security in global politics. This approach to the study of children affected by armed conflict contributes theoretical insights for critical security studies, including the way we see civilians in conflict zones and humanitarian spaces, and pointing to the political implications of locating children in the social-political spaces of conflict and security.

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Section: Children Are Seen But Not Heard In Irmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Children and armed conflict’ and the field of security studies

Jacob

2015

Critical Studies on Security

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“…In reaching this conclusion, I rely on academic studies of childhood, particularly the works of Ashis Nandy (1984), Erica Burman (1994), Kate Manzo (2008), Lorraine Macmillan (2009), and Katrina Lee-Koo (2011); all of which provide trenchant analyses of the political meanings of such concepts as "childhood" and "adulthood." For these scholars, the ideas of adulthood and childhood serve as metaphors that have been employed in the service of racism, for the item described."…”

Section: Humanitarian View Of War and The African Child Soldier Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two fighters: images of child soldiers in Jewish and African child soldier narratives

Adesola

2022

Journal of the African Literature Association

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This dissertation examines the representations of African child soldiers in selected contemporary African narratives with a view to mapping the dominant factors that writers privilege in their depictions of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In its engagement with the African child soldier genre, this study posits that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. Such reductive decontextualizations of war realities, I argue, serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centred on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children's involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moralpolitical imagination for centuries.Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, I focus on novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflictssuch as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigerianotable for their exploitation of children for military ends. I maintain that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of "child" and "childhood," as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities.Moreover, I contend that these works also participate in age-old Afropessimistic depictions of a homogenous Africa where it is dangerous to be children, where human lives have no meaning, and where wars are waged senselessly.Overall, my textual-interpretive analyses of the selected novels in this study emphasize the importance of some works belonging to the African child soldier canon to ongoing campaigns against the mobilization of child soldiers and the rehabilitation processes employed by international organizations and transnational NGOs concerned with children at war. In this regard, my critique of African child soldier narratives reveals that the understanding of prewar conditions is vital to initiating viable policies for the protection of children.iii AcknowledgementsIn reflecting on the trajectory of my doctoral program and its culmination in this dissertation, I am once again reminded of the appreciative mindfulness of Niyi Osundare's speaker in his poem entitled "People Are My Clothes," one of the poems from the book on the poet's experience of Katrina -City Without People (2012). Like the grateful speaker in that verse, I too have cause to celebrate the matchless kindness and unconditional generosity of different people towards me while undertaking this research. In varying but consistently impactful ways these people paid attention to me. They cared for me. All that they joyously did for me contributed significantly to t...

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“…This includes ideas about who constitutes danger in our world (Brocklehurst, 2011) as well as where efforts are directed for military recruitment ostensibly undertaken in answer to those dangers (Basham, 2016; Enloe, 2015; Pérez, 2006; Wells, 2014), and the gendered, raced, and classed particulars of the types of bodies targeted in both cases. It is revealed too in the ready association of militarized childhoods with the Global South while the North not only has drawn much less scrutiny in this regard but is, in part, constituted in global moral orders by its positioning in presumed distinction from the South along these very lines (Cole, 2012; Lee-Koo, 2011; Macmillan, 2009). For Lutz (2002: 723), processes of militarization are therefore inseparable from the “deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action.”…”

Section: Childhood(s) Militarism(s)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

Beier

Tabak

2020

Childhood

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Like childhood, thinking critically about militarism can entail a great deal of unlearning before coming to a more nuanced understanding of what lies beyond the signifier. Just as childhoods are multiple, overlapping, contingent, and bound up in many more aspects of our social worlds than is apparent if we look only for the child, so too militarism. The ways in which militarisms intersect childhoods and vice versa, therefore, call us to reflect not only on the conspicuous presence of militaries as institutions or on life in zones of conflict, but on the everyday lives of children everywhere in all their complexity and diversity.

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Horror and Hope: (re)presenting militarised children in global North–South relations

Cited by 44 publications

References 10 publications

‘Children and armed conflict’ and the field of security studies

‘Children and armed conflict’ and the field of security studies

A tale of two fighters: images of child soldiers in Jewish and African child soldier narratives

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

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