Guardians of the Peace?: The Significance of Children to Continued Militarism

Abstract

Child soldiers truly inhabit the borderlands of international relations, their status as “victim” sealing their fate as a group for whom policy happens, as opposed to one for whom the fulfilment of their own agential needs is possible. Rather than always protecting the child, the Western idealization of childhood, typified in the wording of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), can serve instead to demonize those children whose lives cannot live up to that ideal and who instead must decide, because of the circumstances that face them, to embark upon a different life course. In conflict zones, such children may end up as child soldiers, whilst in the “peaceful” industrialized North they may end up inhabiting the gang culture so often painted as a societal scourge. The aim of this chapter is to consider the similarities between these two phenomena, the significance of such similarities to contemporary characterizations of childhood and militarization and, in particular, the ways in which our own ambivalence in the North about examining the problems that exist for youth here has caused us to shift our focus to those children in the global South that we can characterize as “different” or “other” to our own. This is important not only for any consideration of the rights of the child, but also because in ignoring the significance of children to militarization globally we also ignore a range of social and societal dynamics that, taken together, may explain the true nature of violent conflict—whether in the global North or the global South.