Abstract
From the mundane legacy of imperialism to more spectacular accounts of violence, geopolitical contestations permeate in numerous ways the landscapes of people’s everyday life. In a world dominated by geopolitical conflicts and tensions, what is the role of youth in these relations of force? How are youth geopolitically positioned? Are they simply victims of larger geopolitical struggles, or are they perhaps actively involved in them? This chapter addresses the question of the politics of childhood and youth through geopolitical lenses. Specifically, it aims to understand the ways young people become important geopolitical subjects when struggles over identity, territory, and domination are being waged. In order to do so, the chapter turns to the feminist geopolitics literature, as it provides a useful route to rethinking and reconceptualizing the notions of public and private, as well as the hierarchical scalar thinking that permeates many discussions of children and youth politics. The youth and geopolitics nexus is explored through young people’s notion of identity and belonging with particular attention being given to schools as geopolitical sites. These theoretical discussions are followed by some empirical examples of the geopolitics of identity in the high schools of the post-conflict city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Benwell, M. C. (2014). From the banal to the blatant: Expressions of nationalism in secondary schools in Argentina and the Falkland Islands. Geoforum, 52, 51–60.
Benwell, M. C., & Dodds, K. (2011). Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism. Political Geography, 30(8), 441–449.
Brocklehurst, H. (2006). Who’s afraid of children? Children, conflict and international relations. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Calame, J., & Charlesworth, E. (2009). Divided cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cole, E. (2007). Introduction: Reconciliation and history education. In E. Cole (Ed.), Teaching the violent past: History education and reconciliation (pp. 1–28). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Dixon, D. P., & Marston, S. A. (2011). Introduction: Feminist engagements with geopolitics. Gender Place and Culture, 18(4), 445–453.
Dowler, L., & Sharp, J. (2001). A feminist geopolitics? Space and Polity, 5(3), 165–176.
Durham, D. (2004). Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 589–605.
Dwyer, C. (1999). Veiled meanings: Young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences. Gender Place and Culture, 6(1), 5–26.
Erikson, E. H. (1994) [1968]. Identity: Youth and crisis (No. 7). New York: Norton.
Habashi, J. (2008). Palestinian children crafting national identity. Childhood, 15(1), 12–29.
Herrera, E., Jones, G. A., & de Benítez, S. T. (2009). Bodies on the line: Identity markers among Mexican street youth. Children’s Geographies, 7(1), 67–81.
Hill, K. (2011). Possibilities for social cohesion in education: Bosnia-Herzegovina. Peabody Journal of Education, 86(2), 155–170.
Holloway, S., Valentine, G., & Bingham, N. (2000). Institutionalising technologies: Masculinities, femininities, and the heterosexual economy of the classroom. Environment and Planning A, 32(4), 617–633.
Hopkins, P. E. (2010). Young people, place and identity. New York: Routledge.
Hopkins, P. E. (2011). Towards critical geographies of the university campus: Understanding the contested experiences of Muslim students. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(1), 157–169.
Hörschelmann, K. (2008). Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003). Political Geography, 27(5), 587–609.
Hromadžić, A. (2011). Bathroom mixing: Youth negotiate democratization in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34(2), 268–289.
Hyndman, J. (2010). The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’. Political Geography, 29(5), 247–255.
Kallio, K. P. (2008). The body as a battlefield: Approaching children’s politics. Geografiska Annaler: Series B Human Geography, 90(3), 285–297.
Kallio, K. P., & Häkli, J. (2011). Tracing children’s politics. Political Geography, 30(2), 99–109.
Kobayashi, A., & Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(2), 392–403.
Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso.
Leonard, M. (2007). Children’s citizenship education in politically sensitive societies. Childhood A Global Journal of Child Research, 14(4), 487–504.
Marshall, D. J. (2013). ‘All the beautiful things’: Trauma, aesthetics and the politics of Palestinian childhood. Space and Polity, 17(1), 53–73.
McDowell, L. (2002). Transitions to work: Masculine identities, youth inequality and labour market change. Gender Place and Culture, 9(1), 39–59.
Mills, S. (2013). “An instruction in good citizenship”: Scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education. Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 120–134.
Moore, A. (2013). Peacebuilding in practice: Local experience in two bosnian towns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Müller, M. (2011). Education and the formation of geopolitical subjects. International Political Sociology, 5(1), 1–17.
Natter, W., & Jones, J. P. I. I. I. (1997). Identity, space and other uncertainties. In G. Benko & U. Strohmayer (Eds.), Space and social theory: Interpreting modernity and postmodernity (pp. 141–161). Oxford: Blackwell.
Nayak, A. (2010). Race, affect, and emotion: Young people, racism, and graffiti in the postcolonial English suburbs. Environment and Planning A, 42(10), 2370–2392.
Palmberger, M. (2013). Practices of border crossing in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina: The case of Mostar. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20(5), 544–560.
Peake, L. (2009). Gender, race, sexuality. In S. J. Smith, R. Pain, S. A. Marston, & J. P. Jones III (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social geographies (pp. 55–77). London: Sage.
Ploszajska, T. (1996). Constructing the subject: Geographical models in English schools, 1870–1944. Journal of Historical Geography, 22(4), 388–398.
Pratt, G. (1999). Geographies of identity and difference: Marking boundaries. In D. Massey, J. Allen, & P. Sarre (Eds.), Human geography today (pp. 151–168). Cambridge: Polity.
Pykett, J. (2012) (Ed.). Governing through pedagogy: Re-educating citizens. London: Routledge.
Secor, A. J. (2001). Toward a feminist counter-geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istanbul. Space and Polity, 5(3), 191–211.
Smith, S. H. (2009). The domestication of geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim conflict and the policing of marriage and the body in Ladakh, India. Geopolitics, 14(2), 197–218.
Smith, S. H. (2013). ‘In the heart, there’s nothing’: Unruly youth, generational vertigo and territory. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(4), 572–585.
Staeheli, L. A. (2010). Political geography: Where’s citizenship? Progress in Human Geography, 35(3), 393–400.
Staeheli, L. A., & Hammett, D. (2010). Educating the new national citizen: Education, political subjectivity and divided societies. Citizenship Studies, 14(6), 667–680.
Thomas, M. E. (2005). ‘I think it’s just natural’: The spatiality of racial segregation at a US high school. Environment and Planning A, 37(7), 1233–1248.
Thomas, M. E. (2009). The identity politics of school life: Territoriality and the racial subjectivity of teen girls in LA. Children’s Geographies, 7(1), 7–9.
Torsti, P. (2009). People’s attitudes versus politics: Segregated education in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Perspectives in Education, 27(2), 190–198.
Vanderbeck, R. M., & Johnson, J. H., Jr. (2000). ‘That’s the only place where you can hang out’: Young people and the space of the mall. Urban Geography, 21(1), 5–25.
Watt, P. (1998). Going out of town: Youth, ‘race’, and place in the South East of England? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16(6), 687–703.
Zembylas, M. (2008). The politics of trauma in education. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan.
Zembylas, M. (2011). Investigating the emotional geographies of exclusion at a multicultural school. Emotion Space and Society, 4(3), 151–159.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this entry
Cite this entry
Laketa, S. (2016). Youth as Geopolitical Subjects: The Case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Kallio, K., Mills, S., Skelton, T. (eds) Politics, Citizenship and Rights. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-57-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-57-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-4585-56-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-4585-57-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences