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RETHINKING PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES
SERIES EDITORS: OLIVER P. RICHMOND · ANNIKA BJÖRKDAHL ·
GËZIM VISOKA
Childhoods in Peace
and Conflict
Edited by
J. Marshall Beier
Jana Tabak
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies
Series Editors
Oliver P. Richmond, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Annika Björkdahl, Department of Political Science, Lund University,
Lund, Sweden
Gëzim Visoka, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a
decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing inno-
vative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International Rela-
tions. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have
contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the
search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. Constructive
critiques of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday contributions to peace,
the role of civil society and social movements, international actors and
networks, as well as a range of different dimensions of peace (from peace-
building, statebuilding, youth contributions, photography, and many case
studies) have been explored so far. The series raises important political
questions about what peace is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well
as where peace takes place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisci-
plinary perspectives on the development of the international peace archi-
tecture, peace processes, UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation,
statebuilding, and localised peace formation in practice and in theory. It
examines their implications for the development of local peace agency
and the connection between emancipatory forms of peace and global
justice, which remain crucial in different conflict-affected regions around
the world. This series’ contributions offer both theoretical and empir-
ical insights into many of the world’s most intractable conflicts, also
investigating increasingly significant evidence about blockages to peace.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14500
J. Marshall Beier · Jana Tabak
Editors
Childhoods in Peace
and Conflict
Editors
J. Marshall Beier Jana Tabak
Department of Political Science Department of International Relations
McMaster University State University of Rio de Janeiro
Hamilton, ON, Canada Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-74787-9 ISBN 978-3-030-74788-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For the young people navigating peace and conflict
Acknowledgments
A debt of gratitude is owed to the many people without whom this

volume would not have been possible. As with all such projects, it is
founded on the strength of vast and intricate webs of relationships that
exceed the possibility of their being mapped. Not least among these
are the connections (whether literal or figurative) that oftentimes bind
us to those about whom we research and write. They include also the
growing number of colleagues working at the emerging nexus between
Critical Childhood Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies, Critical Secu-
rity Studies, and disciplinary International Relations more broadly. From
the outset, we have benefitted from the insights and encouragement of
students and colleagues alike. Like those further afield in the vibrant and
expanding networks of scholarship, activism, and communities of practice
around issues of children and childhoods in varied contexts of peace and
conflict, valued members of our home departments bear special mention
for their interest in and support of our work on this and other projects.
It simply is not possible to recognize everyone we would like to here, but
all have left indelible impressions with their ideas, perspectives, support,
and encouragement. We continue to learn from our participation in these
networks and hope to contribute to them in return.
In more direct connection with the book itself, we are grateful to the
contributors for answering our initial open call for papers with original and
deeply intriguing proposals, for following through on the submission of
full chapters that delivered on this promise, and for carrying out revisions
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
to schedule while juggling the many new and competing demands occa-
sioned by a global pandemic. Challenging times beget changing expecta-
tions around commitments earlier made and we recognize the extraordi-
nary effort needed in many cases to follow through in spite of them. It
has been our genuine pleasure to work with and learn from each of you
through this process and we look forward to continuing conversations
with hopes of further collaborations in the future.
We are very pleased to have the volume included in the Rethinking
Peace and Conflict Studies series and thank the series editors, Oliver P.
Richmond, Annika Björkdahl, and Gëzim Visoka, for their support and
for drawing the book into such good company. At Palgrave, Anca Pusca
and Katelyn Zingg ushered our proposal through the process of approval
and acceptance, while two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave gave excel-
lent and engaged feedback from which we have all gained much. We are
grateful to them all for their enthusiasm, their clear and supportive edito-
rial guidance, and for input into the framing and scope of the volume—
the final product is much stronger for all of it. Ashwini Elango provided
excellent project coordination, seeing us through the production process
and to publication swiftly and professionally.
And, as always, we are indebted to our families. Their love and support,
their patience as we tend to commitments, and the often-profound
insights they inspire are contributions in their own right, in this and in
all else we do.
January 2021 J. Marshall Beier

Jana Tabak
Contents
1 Other Childhoods: Finding Children in Peace

and Conflict 1
J. Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak
Part I Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict

2 Children as Soldiers or Civilians: Norms and Politics
in the United Nations Monitoring and Reporting
Mechanism on Children Affected by Armed Conflict 23
Vanessa Bramwell
3 Voices of Ex-Child Soldiers from the War in Bosnia
and Herzegovina: Between Public and Private
Narratives 43
Dalibor Savić, Rusmir Piralić, and Aleksandar Janković
4 ‘I Have the Right’: Examining the Role of Children
in the #DimeLaVerdad Campaign 65
Diana Carolina García Gómez
Part II Pedagogies of Children in Peace and Conflict

5 Children, Internationalism, and Armistice
Commemoration in Britain, 1919–1939 85
Susannah Wright
ix
x CONTENTS
6 Childhood, Education, and Everyday Militarism

in China Before and After 1949 103
Haolan Zheng
7 Primary Education and the French Army During
the Algerian War of Independence 123
Brooke Durham
8 Militarizing Citizenship in Ukraine: “Strategy
for the National-Patriotic Education of Children
and Youth” in Social Context 143
Vita Yakovlyeva
Part III Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict

9 More Than a Victim: Childhood Resilience in Malik
Sajad’s Munnu 165
Suniti Madaan and Cijo Joy
10 Children and Childhood on the Borderland of Desired
Peace and Undesired War: A Case of Ukraine 183
Urszula Markowska-Manista and Oksana Koshulko
11 Production of ‘Safe’ Spaces for Adivasi Children
and the Armed Conflict of Bastar, India 203
Rashmi Kumari
12 Raising the Empire’s Children? Everyday Insecurities
and Parenting the Privileged in the United States 223
Jennifer Riggan
Index 241
Notes on Contributors
J. Marshall Beier is a Professor of Political Science at McMaster Univer-

sity. In his current research, he investigates issues around children’s polit-
ical subjecthood, visual and affective economies of children in abject
circumstances, and imagined childhood as a technology of global gover-
nance. His publications include: Discovering Childhood in International
Relations, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Childhood and the Produc-
tion of Security, ed. (Routledge, 2017); The Militarization of Childhood:
Thinking Beyond the Global South, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014).
He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security and his
work has appeared in journals including Childhood, Children’s Geogra-
phies, Contemporary Security Policy, Critical Military Studies, Global
Governance, Global Responsibility to Protect, International Political Soci-
ology, International Politics, International Studies Review, Journal of
Human Rights, Security Dialogue, and Third World Quarterly.
Vanessa Bramwell is a Ph.D. candidate at Massey University, New
Zealand, examining the role of norms in the UN infrastructure on child
protection in armed conflict. Her general research interest is in civilian
protections in conflict through the disciplinary lenses of politics, Interna-
tional Relations, and Security Studies, and in communicating across wider
disciplinary boundaries in the theorization of conflict-affected people. She
is working on contributions to several publications due in 2021, while
building academic teaching experience. She lives with her husband and
two sons in Wellington.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Brooke Durham is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History

at Stanford University. Her work focuses on the history of the French
Empire and decolonization in North and West Africa in the twentieth
century. She is completing her dissertation on social work, education, and
human development during decolonization in Algeria.
Diana Carolina García Gómez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Childhood
Studies Department at Rutgers University—Camden, New Jersey, USA.
Drawing from the fields of childhood studies, memory studies, decolonial
thought, and international relations, her research focuses on children’s
and youth political participation in peacebuilding, collective memory, and
social movements in post-conflict contexts, particularly in post-accord
Colombia. Her dissertation, Cultivating Hope: Children’s and Youth’s
Participation in Collective Memory Processes in Post-Accord Colombia,
centers children’s and youth participation in transitional contexts by
examining their engagement with collective memory processes in urban
and rural settings. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, and an M.A. in Cognition
and Communication from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Aleksandar Janković is an Assistant Professor at the University of Banja
Luka, Faculty of Political Sciences, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He special-
izes in theoretical sociology. His research interests are in the areas of
social inequalities, sociology of youth, post-socialist transformation and
ethno-nationalism, and social statistics.
Cijo Joy teaches English Literature as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc) at
the University of Delhi. He has an M.Phil. from the University of Delhi
in Adivasi folktales from the state of Jharkhand. In his research, he traces
shifts and changes of the Adivasi identity from precolonial to contem-
porary times and situates it in contestation with caste hierarchies as well
as the colonial and postcolonial state. His research was inspired from his
work with cultural groups focusing on archiving folk songs across India.
His activism has focused on issues of civil liberties and democratic rights.
He is currently working on the novel and textual articulation of tempo-
ralities in the city in South Asia. His research interests also include critical
theory and childhood.
Oksana Koshulko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global
Economy at Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine. She has an M.A.
degree in Economy and Society from Lancaster University and a Ph.D.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
in Economic Sciences. Her areas of research are Women’s Studies and

Migration Studies, including Refugees and Asylum Seeking, inspired by
the occupation and war in Ukraine since 2014. In 2019, she prepared a
master’s thesis for Lancaster University, entitled “Exploring patriotism of
women engaged in revolution and war in Ukraine.” She has published
over 140 scientific papers, books, and chapters in books in various coun-
tries, including the USA and the UK. Dr. Koshulko currently studies
women’s and children’s issues and society in general as impacted by the
occupation and war in Ukraine.
Rashmi Kumari is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Childhood
Studies at Rutgers University. As a scholar trained in Social Anthro-
pology, she also holds a Women’s and Gender Studies certificate from
Rutgers University. Her research engages with residential schools for
Adivasi (Indigenous) Children in Chhattisgarh, India. She is currently
conducting fieldwork for her dissertation entitled, “Shaping Indigenous
Girls as National Subjects: Role of Residential Schools in Central India.”
Her research explores the intersectionality of indigeneity, age, and gender
in the lives of Adivasi children living in highly militarized contexts.
She engages multimodal ethnographic fieldwork utilizing photography
and documentary filmmaking components. Through multimodal work,
Rashmi engages Adivasi youth in the ethnographic processes while also
disseminating filmmaking techniques. Rashmi’s field engagements can be
found at https://rashmish.xyz.
Suniti Madaan teaches English Literature as an Assistant Professor (Ad-
hoc) at the University of Delhi. She has a doctorate from Jawaharlal
Nehru University in the area of Indian comics, looking specifically at the
evolution of popular children’s comic, Tinkle, from the 1980s to contem-
porary times. In her doctoral work she reads caste, gender, and class poli-
tics in children’s comics as an expression of middle-class popular culture
in India. She has also translated a short story and some poems from Hindi
to English for the Sahitya Akademi journal, Indian Literature. She is
an active member of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Litera-
ture and Language Studies and has presented research papers in its inter-
national conferences. Her research interests include children’s literature,
childhood, Indian English writing, and popular culture.
Urszula Markowska-Manista field researcher and contemporary
nomad, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, Faculty
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
of Education and Lecture & Program Co-Director of M.A. Child-

hood Studies and Children’s Rights, University of Applied Sciences,
Potsdam. She conducts field research on the everyday life and education
of children in culturally diversified environments, among Indigenous
communities (Central Africa), children “out of place” (the Horn of
Africa), national and ethnic minorities (the South Caucasus), as well
as children and youth with migrant and refugee backgrounds. She
researches, publishes, and teaches extensively on topics related to child-
hood and youth studies through Indigenous, postcolonial perspective,
nondiscrimination, and participatory approaches to research, chil-
dren’s rights, and education in pre-dysfunctional contexts and culturally
diversified environments.
Rusmir Piralić is an ex-child soldier participant of war in BiH. He
holds a bachelor’s degree in criminology from the University of Sarajevo,
Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies, Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Currently, he acts as president of War Veterans Asso-
ciation—Juvenile Volunteers of the War of Independence and Libera-
tion ’92-’95 Canton Sarajevo. He is a Peace Activist and an Independent
Researcher. He is presently involved in the “Children of War to Children
of Peace, Learning from the War Past” project—a youth ethnic reconcil-
iation project sponsored and provided by Visegrad Fund implemented in
BiH.
Jennifer Riggan is a Professor of International Studies at Arcadia
University. An educational and political anthropologist, her research and
publications focus on Eritrea and Ethiopia to explore: the relationships
between political identities and the state; teachers and political insta-
bility; and, displacement, containment, and temporality. She has held
fellowships from the Wolf Humanities Center (2020–2021), the Georg
Arnhold Program (2019), Fulbright (Addis Ababa University 2016–2017
and Asmara University 2004–2005), The Spencer Foundation/ National
Academy of Education (2012–2014), and the Social Science Research
Council (2004–2005). She is the author of The Struggling State: Nation-
alism, Mass Militarization and the Education of Eritrea (Temple Univer-
sity Press, 2016). She is presently co-authoring a book entitled, The
Hosting State and Its Restless Guests: Containment, Displacement and
Time Among Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Dalibor Savić is an Assistant Professor at the University of Banja Luka,

Faculty of Political Sciences, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in
social science research methods. His research interests are in the areas
of applied sociology, sociology of youth, sociology of sport, and peace
studies. He is currently involved in the “Children of War to Children of
Peace, Learning from the War Past” project—a youth ethnic reconciliation
project sponsored and provided by Visegrad Fund implemented in BiH.
Previously, he was a research team member for the “Life Projects of Young
(Re)emigrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina” project.
Jana Tabak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International
Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of The
Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 2020). Her other publications include: a co-edited
special issue of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research; a book
entitled Organizações Internacionais: História e Práticas, 2nd edition, ed.
with Monica Herz and Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann (Elsevier, 2015); and,
Modernity at Risk: Complex Emergencies, Humanitarianism, Sovereignty,
with Carlos Frederico Pereira da Gama (Lambert Academic, 2012). She
is the author of articles in the journals Contexto Internacional, Cultures et
Conflits, Global Responsibility to Protect, and The Hague Journal of Diplo-
macy. She has taught in the areas of international organizations, peace and
conflict studies, and children and war.
Susannah Wright is a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Tutor
in the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, UK. She has
researched and published articles and a monograph on themes of chil-
dren, moral education, and citizenship in England in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Her current research considers themes of
young people’s engagement with war and peace, and with internation-
alism and pacifism, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Until the end of 2019
she was co-editor of the journal History of Education and is now Hon.
Secretary of the History of Education Society (UK).
Vita Yakovlyeva holds a Ph.D. in Social Theory and Cultural Studies
and is currently a Research Associate at the Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research
interests lie at the intersection of critical studies of childhood, its materi-
ality, and social memory. She has previously studied childhood memories
in relation to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
independent Ukraine, focusing on the event of the Chernobyl nuclear

explosion as a formative socio-political framework still resonant in the
Ukrainian society.
Haolan Zheng is an Associate Professor of China studies at Keio Univer-
sity, Japan. She received a B.A. from Fudan University and a Ph.D.
from Keio University. She was visiting scholar at Stanford University in
2019–2020. Her research focuses on grassroots politics in modern and
contemporary China. Her first book, entitled Chinese Rural Society and
Revolution: The Historical Transformation of Jinggangshan’s Villages (in
Japanese), was awarded the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 2010. Her
works have been appeared in many academic journals and books in Japan.
Her co-edited book, Mao’s Campaign and Ordinary People’s Daily Life,
will be published in 2021. She is currently working on everyday politics
in socialist China, from the perspective of children and youth.
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Dominant discourses on ex-child soldiers in BiH 45

Table 3.2 Discourses on childhood 47
Table 3.3 Typical motives for joining the armed forces and their
characteristics 54
Table 3.4 List of interviewees 61
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Other Childhoods: Finding Children in Peace

and Conflict
J. Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak
Introduction
Childhoods intersect peace and conflict in myriad ways, though render-
ings of children in these contexts are all too often reduced to one of
two dominant, if quite distinct, framings: hapless victims or child soldiers.
While critical interventions of recent years have begun to work toward
the recovery of children’s agency and to sketch the complex hetero-
geneity of childhoods in both framings, the framings themselves remain
dominant. The contributors to this volume approach redress of this by
way of offering a collection of nuanced accounts of children and child-
hoods in varied contexts of peace and conflict across political time and
space, finding other childhoods constituted in and constituting interstitial
J. M. Beier (B)
Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
e-mail: mbeier@mcmaster.ca
J. Tabak
Department of International Relations, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. M. Beier and J. Tabak (eds.), Childhoods in Peace and Conflict,
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_1
2 J. M. BEIER AND J. TABAK
sites and practices. Organized according to three broad and overlap-

ping themes (ontologies, pedagogies, and contingencies), each chapter
explores the complexities of a particular case study, providing new insights
into the ways children’s lives figure in engagement, ambivalence, contesta-
tion, and resistance in and through the (re)production of political violence
and (anti)militarisms. Venturing beyond the well-worn paths of work
dominated by the iconic figure of the child soldier (in most conventional
renderings, typically prepubescent, male, African) and the objectified child
victim (exemplified in ubiquitous images of acutely vulnerable children in
circumstances of abjection), each urges us to glimpse other childhoods,
in places beyond those that have tended to draw most attention. They
do so from a variety of disciplinary, experiential, and (inter)relational
standpoints. Together, they bring into comparative perspective children’s
experiences of peace and conflict across a range of less familiar contexts
via original inquiries into specific cases of children and childhoods in
peace and conflict including, among others, classroom curricula on war
commemoration in the United Kingdom, pedagogy in the People’s
Republic of China, resistance movements in Colombia, the ongoing war
in Ukraine, and North American parenting practices. A further important
contribution is in foregrounding childhood agency, treating militarized,
conflict-affected, and peacebuilding subjects as more than ‘passive skin’
inscribed by others and recovering something of the ways in which they
perform, acquiesce in, and resist militarisms in their own everydays (de
Certeau 1984).
Children as victims appear primarily as the ‘emotional scenery’
(Brocklehurst 2015: 32) of conflict and security literatures, critical and
mainstream alike. Images of child soldiers or child victims of war similarly
manifest as potent political resources while also encoding much in the
way of claims about various peoples and contexts. Among other things,
the overwhelming focus—albeit with a few notable exceptions—on
sub-Saharan African contexts does the political work of reproducing
colonial relations of power (Macmillan 2009; Lee-Koo 2011) whilst
mystifying myriad intersections of militarisms with the everyday lives and
lifeworlds of children elsewhere. In particular, the militarized childhoods
of the comparatively privileged environs of the advanced (post)industrial
societies of the Global North are due more attention (see Beier 2011).
Of course, as Diana Carolina García Gómez reminds us in Chapter 4,
“Children and youth are more visible in war than they are in peace.” War
understandably draws our gaze, but looking only to the exceptional or
1 OTHER CHILDHOODS: FINDING CHILDREN IN PEACE AND CONFLICT 3
the spectacular confounds our notice of what may be equally instructive

in contexts more apt to register as mundane and quotidian (Beier and
Tabak 2020). Disturbing the sharp distinction between war and peace—
understanding them as imbricated and interpenetrated along practices
of war, war preparation, war commemoration, and more—helps us in
uncovering a more complicated picture and understanding a fuller range
of militarized childhoods. At the same time, we should take care to hold
these insights together with those to be gleaned from situations in which
children are more visibly—or perhaps more recognizably—affected by
war. As a collection, the chapters gathered in this volume make visible
a range of different contexts of children and childhoods in war and
peace. Together, they provide a rich case/empirical complement to the
existing literatures seeking to broaden our understanding of childhoods
in zones of conflict (Brocklehurst 2006; Jacob 2014; Huynh et al.
2015; D’Costa 2016), children as peacebuilders (McEvoy-Levy 2006,
2018; Pruitt 2013; Berents 2018), the child soldier as (de)constitutive
of global ideational orders (Tabak 2020), and theorizations of children
and childhoods in global political perspective more broadly (Benwell and
Hopkins 2016; Beier 2020).
The organization of the volume along themes of ontologies, pedago-
gies, and contingencies should not be taken to mean that each chapter
speaks to only one of these or that any of the three is not relevant to
all chapters. Rather, it reflects our reading of the sum of the chapters
in each part as an illuminating ‘constellation’ of insights that contribute
to complicating dominant knowledges, ‘common senses,’ and habits of
thought along lines of each particular theme. In the realm of ontolo-
gies, fundamental questions about the nature of childhood, central to
debates animating Critical Childhood Studies, are crucially at stake. Here,
childhood defined by deficit and understandings of children as preso-
cial “human becomings” (Uprichard 2008) have come under sustained
critique from a new sociology of childhood (Burman 1994; James et al.
1998) that places the accent on assets and abilities in its recovery of chil-
dren’s active and engaged political subjecthood in ways more consistent
with concomitant moves toward apprehending them as rights-bearing
subjects (Mayall 2000; Alanen 2010) meaningfully engaged in (re)making
the social worlds they inhabit. Still, the children and childhoods ‘called
into being’ by the sorts of ideas and practices of which these currents have
been critical are, nevertheless, among what we might call ‘actually existing
childhoods’ in the sense that they have social and political currency and
become the basis for ways of relating to and with children—inasmuch as

they remain dominant and hardened into ontology in the everyday gover-
nance of social worlds, they retain important relevance even as we work
to reveal their indeterminacies and the unequal relations of power they
sustain.
The second broad theme turns on pedagogies whereby myriad knowl-
edges, performances, practices, and competencies may contribute to the
militarization of children’s lives, including in but not limited to soci-
eties of the Global North. While this includes purposeful inculcation and
even martial instruction, it emerges too in school curricula, semi-formal
extracurricular programming, and experiential learning in everyday life.
Treating these circulations as pedagogies is not to suggest that there
need necessarily be a conscious instrumentality giving rise to them. The
thrust of some contributions in this part therefore reveals heterogeneous
assemblages, understanding that actors can be a part of an assemblage
without necessarily sharing the same aims. Here too, we see at the same
time children’s agency at work in remaking and resisting. As Susannah
Wright shows In Chapter 5, even in the context of direct and program-
matic instruction, children “in varied ways take on, amplify, modify, or
sometimes resist, core…messages.” Pedagogies here are understood as
practices of creative and complex exchange where the terms of sociopo-
litical relationships across both time and space are in a constant state of
negotiation.
Such negotiation is very much at issue too in the third and final part,
“Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” which includes inves-
tigations that foreground questions of responsibility to children. Here,
contributors assess, among other things, resilience-building, the demands
of protection, and the material and psychosocial effects of childhoods
lived in the shadow of war. Through all of these, we glimpse not only
the subjecthood of children but also the ambivalence of the adult world
in the navigation of risk and of responsibility to children. Reading these
contributions together, we see too how children’s subjecthood is simulta-
neously mediated by, in interaction with, and engaged in refigurations of
resilience, protection, enlistment, and unequal relations of power. These
and other contingencies of lived childhoods remind us that children and
childhoods are, like adults and adulthoods, constituted together with the
particular social worlds of which they are part. To speak of children and
childhoods in peace and conflict, then, demands that we sustain critical
interrogation of the homogenizing discourses that flatten alterity in defer-

ence to hegemonic tropes of both childhood and child. We are thus called
to be attentive not just to intersections of childhoods with peace and
conflict but to the particular circumstances, idiosyncrasies, and peculiar-
ities of everyday lives also—a more situated view of children’s agency,
in light of culturally and historically specific mediations particular to
post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Russia (described by Urszula Markowska-
Manista and Oksana Koshulko in Chapter 10), is but one for example.
Together, the varied contributions to this volume, rich in such empirical
detail and insight, sketch for us some exemplars to hold in comparative
perspective so that we might broaden our gaze beyond the unidimen-
sional framings of child soldiers and child victims in ways that will perhaps
aid in keeping sight of children as meaningful subjects interacting in, with,
through, and beyond peace and conflict.
Other Childhoods and Other Emergencies

Civil emergencies, wars among them, always press demands on children
and, in so doing, they can be tremendously illuminating. Though it
seems somewhat strange to think about it in this way, there is a perhaps
fortuitous aspect to the unforeseen circumstance that this volume has
happened to come together at a time of acute uncertainty and disrup-
tion, layered over the demands and challenges of navigating peace and
conflict. As research for the chapters that follow was conducted and, later,
as they were being drafted, the world had not yet heard of the novel
coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. By the time they were proceeding through
the process of review and revision, however, we were in the grips of
the declared COVID-19 pandemic. And, as they moved together into
production toward publication of the book, hope inspired by the distri-
bution of promising new vaccines came together with renewed lockdowns
and disheartening news of the emergence and spread of a more transmis-
sible mutated form of the virus. Among its many lessons, the global health
emergency that arose from the early months of 2020 onward brought
complicated webs of interconnection, interdependence, and inequality
into stark relief. In its uneven (and unevenly experienced) ebbs and
flows, the pandemic revealed not only how circuits of local and global
interaction enabled it to spread and to surge but also how structural
inequalities left some groups or communities (and, within them, some
individuals) more vulnerable. From the local to the global, it exposed
material inequality and disenfranchisement from political power as impor-

tant predictors of risk and of what would be demanded of whom. At
the same time, it saw the urgent suspension of norms and routines of
everyday life, including those affecting the regulation and governance of
social agency.
As these and other circumstances and implications of the pandemic
and the measures undertaken to address it have unfolded, it has been
impossible not to see parallels in the insights to be drawn from the
chapters herein, all which turn on varied experiences of children and
childhoods shaped by and shaping peace and conflict. For many, chil-
dren among them, COVID-19 manifested in ways similar to emergencies
associated with armed conflict. Broadly, exigencies of the pandemic have
frequently been cast as matters of human or national security whilst
response measures are framed in terms that are highly militarized, often
with direct appeal to storied wars of the past as exemplars of individual
duty and sacrifice to collective aims (Beier 2021). The ubiquity of war
metaphors in official and vernacular pandemic discourses (see Isaacs and
Priesz 2020; Lohmeyer and Taylor 2020; Semino 2021) is not incidental.
Rather, it reflects the important work war narratives and metaphors do
in making exceptional measures intelligible and setting threat in external-
ized opposition to an idealized collective identity in ways that obfuscate
inequality even as they generalize responsibility. War and war preparation,
like pandemics, entail disruption, mobilization, and, of course, casualties.
Still, apart from its temporal coincidence with the later stages of this
project, and whatever the material and discursive parallels, why pause to
comment on COVID-19 at the outset of a book on distinctive experi-
ences of children in peace and conflict? Here, we would point to a further
important dimension of pandemic responses as particularly salient: direct
appeals by sovereign power to children as indispensable social agents. In
the early days of the declared pandemic, a number of national leaders
called on the children of their countries to assume responsibility for a
range of mitigation measures that included, among other things, prac-
ticing hand hygiene and physical distancing, supporting public health
workers, personal and family emergency planning, and even reporting
violations of public health orders. Reminiscent of and, in some instances,
rhetorically linked to the roles assumed by children in the World Wars
of the twentieth century—from food conservation campaigns and scrap
drives to agricultural labour and work in munitions plants—the summons
to children to contribute in a new moment of civil emergency places their
recognized subjecthood visibly in tension with their enduring disenfran-

chisement from social power (Beier 2021). We are thus urged to sustain
affirmation of their agency together with recognition of their unique
vulnerability, not losing sight of how the latter may bear disproportion-
ately in their experience of the present emergency (see Lundy and Stalford
2020). These are sensibilities that likewise promise more nuanced read-
ings of the cases of children navigating contexts of organized political
violence, whether in zones of conflict, post-conflict, or relative peace and
security.
The pandemic is instructive too for how it has exacerbated challenges
faced by children in existing conditions of abjection the world over (see,
for example, Börner et al. 2020). For those already experiencing war,
forced migration, famine, climate disaster, or other such exigent circum-
stances, COVID-19 is folded in as a constituent of a complex emergency,
characterized by coeval and intersecting crises straining the social infras-
tructure and resources necessary to address them. Like the pandemic,
situations of armed conflict are not social contexts unto themselves,
somehow flattening alterity in the way that appeals to war metaphors
and narratives might suggest. Rather, they involve myriad intersections of
position and prerogative, abjection and adversity, possibility and promise.
They intersect also with complexities of lifeways and inclinations expressed
in agential remit and, thus, produce unique and diverse expressions and
experiences of peace and conflict alike. And this demands that we think
beyond the iconic figures of the child soldier or the hapless child victim
when we think about children’s experiences both populating contexts of
peace and conflict and as important agential beings, variously making,
remaking, and unmaking those contexts in all their complex exigencies.
Structure of the Volume

Through their various points of entry into children’s experiences of peace
and conflict, the contributors to this volume challenge fixed and bounded
understandings of childhood. Taking a range of different empirical and
conceptual starting points, the borders of what children are and how
they relate to their own lifeworlds are problematized in the chapters that
follow—individually and in reading them together—so their complexities
can be explored. Of particular interest, children are analyzed as polit-
ical subjects, and possible discontinuities between ‘places for children’
(designated as safe spaces by parents, state authorities, and international
organizations) and ‘children’s places’ (as negotiated or constructed by

children and adults) are brought to the fore. Across varied empirical
cases and contexts spanning sociopolitical time and space, the child–adult
relationship, despite its power imbalance, is discussed in terms of “inter-
dependencies” (Punch 2001). Even in armed conflict zones, children
negotiate and resist the constraints of an inside/outside coding of spaces
and hierarchies and reaffirm their relative autonomy within the bound-
aries that limit their choices, creating their own meaningful worlds and
participating in the construction of the lives of those around them and of
the societies in which they live.
While engaging with debates in critical approaches to International
Relations, Childhood Studies, Anthropology, and other fields and disci-
plines, this book does not purport to overcome the dichotomies between
children as vulnerable versus competent or dependent versus autonomous,
but seeks to explore how these sorts of ideas about and practices around
children and childhood have social and political currency and become
determinant of possibilities (and the limits on possibilities) of specific
kinds of subjectivities, life experiences, and objects. At the same time, the
chapters herein expose how challenging and uncomfortable might be the
call to contest the ontologies of childhood and the practices of protec-
tion based on this particular category. One of the aims of this volume is
precisely to confront such narratives about children and childhood and
to investigate their tensions, malleability, and contingencies. In doing
so, room is opened to engage in a further dialogue about the nature
and boundaries of the agentive, competent, knowing child who makes
meaning with regard to her/his own lifeworld (Spyrou et al. 2019).
Furthermore, both ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ operate here as “ana-
lytic prisms” (Jenks 2005: 420) through which contributors explore their
constitutive capacity and the power relations that permeate and autho-
rize the ontologized ideas not only of the child and the modern political
subject, but also about peace, conflict, and the nation-state. In this sense,
besides investigating the ontologized ideas and concepts that produce
a universalizing—but not universal—concept of children and childhood,
this volume invests in problematizing what is produced and reproduced
in the social order when pedagogies of children—or, ordering mecha-
nisms—are put into practice and contingencies of children overflow the
limits of the ideal child whose borders enable, respectively, support and
security opposed to uncertainty and danger.
The first part, “Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” aims

at challenging dominant ontologies that prefigure childhood in particular
ways. The three chapters in this opening part—taking up, respectively,
who counts as a child worthy of protection in armed conflict situations,
questions of voice and participation in the war in Bosnia and Herze-
govina, and the diminution of agency in the peacebuilding process in
Colombia—equip the reader to engage with the complexity of lived
childhoods and to take children as bona fide political subjects even in
cases where they might be profoundly disempowered, under threat, and
consummately objectified.
In Chapter 2 “Children as Soldiers or Civilians: Norms and Politics
in the United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism on Chil-
dren Affected by Armed Conflict,” Vanessa Bramwell invites us to reflect
upon what violations against children in armed conflict situations are
grave enough to trigger strong demands for international intervention.
In her analysis of the practices of protection developed within the United
Nations’ thematic architecture of Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC),
including the six grave violations against children during armed conflicts
which have been specified in several Security Council resolutions, the
child soldier—or, the child with a gun—emerges in the Western imagi-
nation as the hapless victim worthy of protection while the demands and
needs of other conflict-affected children are not addressed in an appro-
priate and relevant way. Focusing on the gaps of the UN’s protection
mechanisms towards children in armed conflict situations rather than
on the international response to the child soldier problem, Bramwell
draws our attention to which images of children suffering generate public
discomfort and elicit global action whilst other violations against children
are silenced. Here lies a puzzle at the center of the international interven-
tions as they are continuously at play: what are the limits of protection?
Which children’s experiences are risky enough to trigger international
attention? What deviations from the ontologies of childhood need to be
addressed as things to be treated/resisted/protected? Either maintaining
its over-focus on child soldiers in the CAAC mandate or expanding the
list of violations against children in armed conflict situations, the United
Nations keeps framing the borders of childhood in a particular bounded
way, despite its many exceptions and silences.
In a similar vein, Chapter 3, “Voices of Ex-Child Soldiers from the
War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Between Public and Private Narratives,”
also focuses on the ‘child soldier phenomenon.’ However, instead of
exploring the international interventions towards children, Dalibor Savić,

Rusmir Piralić, and Aleksandar Janković address the experiences of chil-
dren’s participation in war based on their own voices and perspectives.
In this regard, it is worth noting that one of the authors, Rusmir Piralić,
is himself a former child-soldier in the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina
(BiH) and today is a peace activist. If, on the one hand, Bramwell investi-
gates the limits of international interventions aimed at protecting children
in wars, Savić, Piralić, and Janković address children’s experiences in
armed conflict beyond what has been articulated by the humanitarian and
the local ethno-nationalist discourses. The ontologies of the ‘child soldier
phenomenon’ are not only destabilized through children’s own stories,
but also by bringing to the fore children’s participation in a war that took
place in the 1990s in Europe. Within the particular construction of the
child-soldier as a vulnerable and exploited victim that needs to be saved,
little mention is made of the lived realities of children’s participation in
wars outside the African continent. As such, Savić, Riralić, and Janković’s
contribution opens space to acknowledge the participation of children in
wars beyond the usual focus on the Global South or, more specifically,
the characterization of child-soldiers as an essentially ‘African problem.’
In order to problematize the idea of child soldiers as passive partici-
pants in war and post-war events, this contribution explores the similar-
ities and differences between the auto/biographical narratives of former
child soldiers and the hegemonic narratives about them in BiH society.
While there is much that is revealing in these testimonies, something
that is especially interesting is that, although many of them self-identify
as victims of the war, this does not mean their varied experiences as
soldiers—which tell different stories of oppression, participation, and
resistance—may be erased or forgotten. Differently from the humanitarian
discourse that articulates the child-soldier either as the hapless victim or
the dangerous monster, Savić, Piralić, and Janković draw our attention to
the messy, ambiguous, and sometimes paradoxical experiences of child-
soldiers in wars. Furthermore, by making their own voices audible, the
chapter points out the limits of the static identity of the child soldier,
which is rendered possible by its relationship to the category of the child.
As such, exploring hegemonic ideas about child soldiers and their child-
hoods means not only challenging the idea that child-soldiers are, by
definition, an exception to the ontologies of childhood, but also seeing
the conception of child as uncertain.
In Chapter 4, “‘I Have the Right’: Examining the Role of Chil-

dren in the #DimeLaVerdad Campaign,” Diana Carolina García Gómez
turns the focus to the post-conflict situation and children’s engage-
ment in the Colombian peacebuilding process. Exploring the ways in
which the post-accord institutions in the country are conceptualizing chil-
dren’s participation in the process of building a “New Colombia” after
over half of a century of armed conflict, Gómez analyzes the limits of
children’s roles and whether the #DimeLaVerdad campaign subverts or
upholds the hierarchical adult–child relation. What is more, she argues
that recognizing that children are not only victims of the conflict, but
also perpetrators and peacebuilders, opens space for children to share
their stories and to be recognized as citizens of the Colombian society.
Regardless of what they did while engaged in conflict, children’s acts were
presented in terms of their own experiences, allowing them to escape from
the bounded and fixed narrative of child victimhood caused by war and
be recognized by adults as social and political actors. Through analysis
of the campaign, Gómez unpacks the ontology of children as defenseless
objects in need of protection and explores the limits and potentialities
of children’s political subjecthood and their role in negotiating peace in
transitional contexts.
Together, the chapters gathered together in the first part of the book
simultaneously challenge and offer unique analysis on the limits and
silences of the ontologies of childhood, which articulate the borders of
the concept of child as the innocent, vulnerable being who must be prop-
erly prepared to become a rational, productive, educated adult and citizen
of the future. The ideas of both the child and childhood, as they emerge
and are investigated through these three chapters, speak to the ways in
which relations of power are bound up with and are mutually consti-
tuted by dominant ontological renderings of childhood. At the same time,
presenting cases that address these issues in ways and under circumstances
not anticipated by prevailing common senses, they are revealing of the
varied ways in which children’s political subjecthood is at work in the
making, remaking, and unmaking of these same commitments and, with
them, of the social worlds of their everyday lives.
The contributions to the second part of the book, “Pedagogies of
Children in Peace and Conflict,” reveal heterogeneous assemblages—
authorized by hegemonic ideas of peace, conflict, and the nation-state—
that operate as ordering mechanisms by attributing distinctive rights and
duties to both children and adults, determining the objects and agents
of protection, identifying violations of such protections, and setting the

scope for education programs. In Chapter 5, “Children, Internation-
alism, and Armistice Commemoration in Britain, 1919–1939,” Susannah
Wright addresses internationalism and armistice commemoration in the
interwar years in Britain by focusing on both how the internationalists of
the League of Nations Union (LNU) engaged with children and child-
hood as part of their armistice-related activity, and how children engaged
with them as well. Children were understood as important audiences of
the main message articulated through the commemorations—that is, to
remember and to honor the lives lost during the First World War in order
to avoid the same happening again and, in doing so, to promote inter-
national understanding and peace. Exploring LNU texts, Wright reveals
how children were depicted as the “internationalists of the future” and,
as such, frequently neglected as political subjects in their present time.
Performing a pleasing visual spectacle in front of the audiences, children
were prepared to act as capable and productive adults of the future who
would preserve internationalist and peaceful communities—or, as Wright
puts it, “They were to be the keepers of an internationalist inheritance.”
Children’s high profile in modern society as the hope—and instru-
ment—for a progressive and peaceful future cannot be denied. Wright’s
chapter reminds of Erica Burman’s (2008: 11) observation that, “[…]
childhood becomes a site of multiple emotional as well as political invest-
ments: a repository of hope yet a site of instrumentalisation for the future,
but with an equal and opposite nostalgia for the past.” Burman’s argu-
ment turns visible the ambivalent meaning of the child: at the same time
that the child is (re)produced as a symbol of the promise of a progres-
sive future, s/he also serves to display to adult society its own state of
once untutored and undeveloped difference, which needs to be moni-
tored and subject to different forms of regulation and training (Tabak
2020). Considering this process of regulation and training of the child—
among the pedagogies of interest to us—children are placed in designated
spaces, schools being one of them where children can be developed so a
peaceful and secure future can be guaranteed.
Similarly, in Chapter 6, “Childhood, Education, and Everyday Mili-
tarism in China Before and After 1949,” Haolan Zheng focuses on
elementary educational policy in China in order to show the similari-
ties between the Chinese Nationalist Party and Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) understandings of the ideal child, and how this particular under-
standing articulates children’s daily lives. Furthermore, Zheng explores
the intersections between schooling and militarization by addressing how

children in China were not only objects of education, but also widely
mobilized to assimilate and practice militarism in their daily lives, such
as participating in political campaigns to support war under the highly
top-down mobilization system of the CCP during the Korean War. Of
particular interest, Zheng draws our attention to the process through
which the ideal child is constructed in the course of Chinese nation-
building. In other words, the model of the child—or, the future Chinese
citizen—whose life is fully militarized is simultaneously associated with
and authorizes a very specific type of nation-state, whose limits are care-
fully articulated by and through the particular ideas of sovereignty, order,
peace, and conflict.
In Chapter 7, “Primary Education and The French Army During
the Algerian War of Independence,” Brooke Durham extends the inves-
tigation of the investment in schooling, with a focus on the primary
education of rural Algerian children in Grande Kabylie provided by
the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. As
argued throughout the chapter, not only did investing in Algerian
children’s education allow the French military to present a respon-
sible and humanitarian face of its military operations, but primary
schools also operated as strategic spaces for controlling the risks related
to children, who were not just students but potential supporters of
the nationalist militants alongside their parents. Effectively, by disci-
plining the child through school education, risks of instability in
the former colony might be kept at bay. From Chapters 6 and 7,
it seems that schooling occupies a central role in pedagogies of children
once the process of educational learning prepares the child by imparting
knowledge so they can become productive, and ‘properly’ socialized (in
accordance with particular political aims) citizens in the future. Within
these terms, these contributions are in close dialogue with Nikolas Rose’s
(1999: 124) argument that education is recognized not only as an indi-
vidual right for the child, but also operates as a social and collective
right, since it implies the “duty of each individual to improve and civilize
themselves for the benefit of the social health of the community.”
By its turn, Chapter 8, “Militarizing Citizenship in Ukraine: ‘Strategy
for the National-Patriotic Education of Children and Youth’ in Social
Context,” also seeks to analyze the role of education policies, here
in framing the relationships between Ukraine and its youngest citi-
zens. Specifically, Vita Yakovlyeva explores the efforts of the 2016–2020
Strategy for the Ukrainian National-Patriotic Education of Children and

Youth in developing a unified system of national military-patriotic educa-
tion based primarily on ideas of militarization and territorial defence in a
country impacted by an armed conflict. As spaces for preparing children
to become (a particular kind of) adult citizen, this network of state and
non-government educational institutions, governed by social and educa-
tional policy, operates as an important mechanism for promoting military
training and encouragement of children and youth to take on an active
role in defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial unity based on
particular—although hegemonic—ideas of nationality, ethnicity, and mili-
tarism. Together with the other chapters in this part, this contribution
draws our attention to the pedagogies of children as ordering mecha-
nisms that carefully articulate and authorize the limits not only of the
bounded ontologies of childhood, but also of dominant understandings
of sovereignty, nation-state, peace, and conflict.
However, what happens when the limits of pedagogies are destabilized
by experiences and images of children that overflow what is prescribed by
their ontologies? The third and last part of book, “Contingencies of Chil-
dren in Peace and Conflict,” explores questions that emerge when the
encounter between children’s actual life experiences and their idealized
childhood is more effacing than engaging. While focusing on different
contexts, all four chapters of this part investigate questions of responsi-
bility to children when the processes of pedagogies are simply not enough.
That is, the limits of these myriad knowledges, performances, and prac-
tices lie wherever there are children engaged in experiences that do not
fit into the ontologies of childhood and of the child. In this regard, one
of the main questions that puts these contributions into conversation
is: when may protection mechanisms be better read as processes of risk
management? Or, as Rashmi Kumari invites us to question in Chapter 11:
whose safety is under threat when contingencies of children make ontolo-
gies of childhood unrecognizable?
In Chapter 9, “More Than a Victim: Childhood Resilience in Malik
Sajad’s Munnu,” Suniti Madaan and Cijo Joy question the narrative
about Kashmiri children framed by the limits of the victim stereotype.
Through a critical reading of the graphic autobiography, Munnu: A Boy
from Kashmir, by Malik Sajad, this contribution goes beyond the focus on
children’s victimhood and explores representations of children in armed
conflict situations when many facets of growing up in vulnerable contexts
are brought to the fore. Thinking in terms of “interdependencies” (Punch
2001) helps us navigate through questions related to children’s participa-

tion in socio-political life and their resilience as a way of dealing with
and resisting stress and disturbance. Without excluding Kashmiri chil-
dren’s right to protection, Madaan and Joy contribute to the debates
on children’s rights in situations of armed conflict by complicating our
views about childhood and pointing towards a multiplicity of experiences
beyond being the object of adult protection.
Also with a focus on the experiences of children in armed conflict
situations, in Chapter 10, “Children and Childhood on the Border-
land of Desired Peace and Undesired War: A Case of Ukraine,” Urszula
Markowska-Manista and Oksana Koshulko draw from interviews with
children and adults in order to explore and interpret other forms of
childhood within contexts of extreme vulnerability. Rather than erasing
the experience of war, the authors discuss how these children—even
when they are under threat—have managed to resist and be active in
the construction of their own lifeworlds. Sharing empirical context with
Chapter 8, this contribution also discusses the impacts of the national-
patriotic education curricula in framing the limits of bounded children
and their childhood. However, the authors highlight the dangers of repro-
ducing the victimhood stereotype once it silences the multidimensionality
of childhood, showing how diverse are the ways children react and partic-
ipate in the territories affected by the war and occupation in Ukraine. As
they put it, every childhood is a “perpetual negotiation” of their time and
spaces.
If the first two chapters of this part problematize the over-focus on the
idea of the child as a hapless victim in need of adult protection, the last
two explore the contingencies of children by questioning who/what is
being protected—or whose safety is at issue—when ontologies of child-
hood are under threat. In Chapter 11, “Production of ‘Safe’ Spaces
for Adivasi Children and the Armed Conflict of Bastar, India,” Rashmi
Kumari problematizes state investment in education for Adivasi children
in rural Bastar by complicating the role of schools as ordering mechanisms
in a society amidst conflict. Engaging in the limits of the construction
of childhoods “in crisis” and “in need of saving,” Kumari questions the
official discourse of education and poses the question of what children’s
safety (or lack of safety) entails and authorizes in terms of state practices
towards children in order to maintain stability and security. At the end
of the day, by addressing the ambivalent meaning of children’s innocence
that made them simultaneously victims of violence and potential threats
to state security, this chapter invites us to critically reflect on whose best

interest is being addressed when children are depicted as being “at risk.”
Finally, in a very different context, but addressing similar issues
regarding the anxiety around children’s education when they are
constructed primarily as innocent beings (or, becomings), Chapter 12,
“Raising the Empire’s Children? Everyday Insecurities and Parenting the
Privileged in the United States,” is a personal interrogation of prac-
tices around education and parenting when contingencies of childhood
and children destabilize the idea of childhood as a “once-upon-a-time
story with happy and predictable ending” (James and Jenks 1996: 315).
Outwardly distinct from many of the contributions to this volume,
Jennifer Riggan focuses on the processes of discipline of children and
the rituals adopted by caregivers intended to keep them safe and enter-
tained within a context that may appear less ‘exceptional’ and perhaps
less ‘spectacular’ than zones of conflict as they are commonly imag-
ined. Riggan discusses how the construction of privilege juxtaposed with
daily insecurities that are felt present, but which we cannot really see
or fully understand, produce the limits of the “children of empire.”
Unpacking and complicating parenting practices and parental anxieties
around protecting one’s children against a world with its multiplication
and proliferation of threats, this closing chapter reflects upon and chal-
lenges the limits of the main categories that constitute the book itself,
which are (re)produced as authorized and universal truths and presumed
stable and self-evident categories, such as children, peace, and conflict.
***
In their various explorations of empirical cases both within and beyond
zones of conflict, the contributors to this volume reveal something of how
children and childhoods are always bound up in the making, remaking,
and unmaking of conflict, experienced as war, war preparation, war
commemoration, and more. Likewise, they are indispensable and engaged
subjects in the building and maintenance of peace as well as in imag-
ining and specifying its requisites. Without discounting the importance
of continuing work around issues of child soldiers and war-affected chil-
dren in settings that, having dominated popular iconography and global
public imaginaries, have tended to garner most attention, these original
contributions alert us to the vast multiplicity of childhoods shaped by
and shaping the navigation of peace and conflict in unique and often sui
generis ways. ‘Finding’ children in contexts in which they have been less
often sought, and perhaps even more seldom seen and heard, the chap-
ters that follow nuance our understanding of political subjecthood and
of its varied and complex forms. In so doing, they better equip us to
critically engage the paradox of children’s simultaneous indispensability
to and marginalization in global security practices. And populating peace
and conflict with a fuller range of political subjects, they contribute as
well to a deeper understanding of recourse to organized political violence
and of efforts to manage, mitigate, and ameliorate its imprint upon social
worlds and everyday lives.
Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight

Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(grant number 435-2019-0009).
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PART I
Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict

CHAPTER 2
Children as Soldiers or Civilians: Norms

and Politics in the United Nations Monitoring
and Reporting Mechanism on Children
Affected by Armed Conflict
Vanessa Bramwell
Introduction
2019 marked 30 years since the signing of the Convention on the Rights
of the Child. This convention comprises the protection of children’s rights
in a range of situations, one of which is the protection of children in
armed conflict. This mandate to protect children in armed conflict has
developed a complex infrastructure over the last three decades—an infras-
tructure made up of non-governmental organizations as well as United
Nations working groups. The reporting relationships and mechanisms are
somewhat opaque, however UN documents claim success in a particular
pillar of child protection in armed conflict: the release and repatriation of
child soldiers. Although many contemporary violations in armed conflict
V. Bramwell (B)
Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2021
J. M. Beier and J. Tabak (eds.), Childhoods in Peace and Conflict,
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_2
24 V. BRAMWELL
happen primarily to civilian children (where these can be clearly sepa-

rated from ‘child soldiers’), such as the denial of humanitarian access and
attacks on schools, the child soldier discourse remains highly prominent
in the Children affected by Armed Conflict (CaAC) workstream. Publicity
campaigns and reports by the relevant UN bodies have reflected an image
of the child soldier which has evolved over time, yet consistently speaks
to the role of the conflict-affected child as a site of local and global—
indeed, moral—tragedy; a corrupted victim, whose rightful function as
cultural capital for the future must be restored; a “global child” (Linde
2016) or “world-child” (Tabak 2020).
This chapter examines the development of the norm of the “child
soldier” in the Western imagination, and the way it has evolved along with
the CaAC infrastructure to become the dominant way of conceptualizing
conflict-affected children in this mandate. There is already excellent schol-
arship in the area of ontologies of the child soldier in UN intervention,
and this chapter draws on a base of scholarly work in critical feminist
International Relations and Security Studies, Anthropology and Child-
hood Studies. It also utilizes the author’s own analysis of resolutions and
reports of some relevant UN bodies, including the Security Council and
the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children Affected
by Armed Conflict. These sources together inform a discussion of the role
of norms and political motives, as well as the mechanisms of the infras-
tructure itself, in the dominance of the child soldier mandate. Finally, ways
to move away from an over-reliance on norms concerning child soldiers
are suggested, with the aim of both discouraging such over-simplistic
norms in other areas of the mandate, and giving these overlooked areas
greater attention.
Children in Armed Conflict

Children’s suffering is talked about today in ways that are fundamen-
tally different to those of the early/mid twentieth century. The World
Wars were famously brutal to children. Many were killed in air raids and
other military operations, as well as dying due to starvation and suffering
exposure or other forms of victimization in the aftermath of the wars.
The popular conception of children in the public mind usually identi-
fied them as complete victims, always civilian. In this regard, children
shared an ‘identity’ with women, who may have been engaged in war
work at home, but very rarely were active combatants (at least in the
2 CHILDREN AS SOLDIERS OR CIVILIANS: NORMS AND POLITICS … 25
Western collective conscious). David M. Rosen (2005) has examined the

ways in which children exercised their agency in some twentieth century
conflicts, including an analysis of the ‘ghetto-fighters’ of Warsaw in the
Second World War, and demonstrates that children were in fact pivotal
actors in these events—in the case of Warsaw, not even as individual
children contributing to adult resistance, but as a political organization
very much orchestrated, and motivated, by youth; yet, our cultural and
national narratives about the war do not generally recognize this role.
There are some similarities between the way we imagine children in
general in armed conflict today, and how we did so during and after
the World Wars. The suffering of children, as well as women, was the
original mandate for the charity operations of UNICEF (which keeps its
original acronym for United Nations International Children’s Emergency
Fund). Jennifer M. Morris (2015: 3) discusses the origins of UNICEF’s
strict and homogenizing focus on women and children as victims of
global conflict, arguing that this characterization was a political discourse
attached as a condition of funding by the United States, which consid-
ered the strength of the traditional family to be a key pillar in the defence
against communist ideology. While UNICEF’s portrayal of women and
children as total victims became increasingly impactful on the Western
imagination as its fundraising and publicity efforts grew, the suffering of
children was also frequently used as a propaganda tool to further polit-
ical motives or drum up support for war as the twentieth century went
on. The hyper-politicization of the suffering of children in war has also
occurred far more recently, notably with regard to the War on Terror and
the supposed need to liberate women and children from various entities
in the Middle East, including the Taliban. As a recent example, Cathy
Russell, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, stated
in a 2014 op-ed about the fight against ISIL:
Girls as young as 12 or 13 have been forced to marry extremists or sold

to the highest bidder — like cattle at an auction. These are young girls,
mothers, and sisters facing imminent rape, trafficking, and forced marriage.
These are women and girls who pleaded to be killed in airstrikes rather than
be brutalized by ISIL. (Russell 2014; emphasis added)
This description is graphic and emotive, making use of popular norms

relating to the subjugation of the vulnerable (women and children) under
brutal and barbaric foreign powers. There is no agency allowed in this
26 V. BRAMWELL
discourse, and the contrast to Rosen’s analysis of the empowered child

ghetto fighters is stark. The imagery recalls rhetoric from the George W.
Bush administration at the time of the War in Afghanistan, which itself
took on an imperialistic, hyper-altruistic tone:
Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of
joy are outlawed. Children aren’t allowed to fly kites. Their mothers face
beatings for laughing out loud. (Bush 2001)
Such emotive Western characterizations of children’s suffering, but partic-

ularly of soldiering, were popular years earlier, during the Iraq-Iran War.
Shaherzad R. Ahmadi’s (2018) feminist analysis of the intersection of
social class and gendered spaces in boys’ enlistment in the war discusses
the Western account of these young fighters, and its reliance on an
explanation of state-encouraged religious fanaticism. Again, agency is not
afforded at all. Although children have probably always fought in warfare,
and certainly did in modern history—including in the American Civil
War, for example (Rosen 2005: 5)—“…the child soldier as an abused and
exploited victim of war is a radically new concept” (Rosen 2005: 6). The
oft-cited ‘Straight-18’ position on childhood, whereby any person under
the age of 18 is by definition a child, is a concept born out of the Western
Industrial Revolution and consequent periods of state consolidation and
influence over the private sphere (Linde 2016).
Political motives for the propagation of norms such as that described
above will be examined further on in this chapter. But first, it is important
to touch on the theory of norms and symbolic technologies, a theory
which is being usefully applied to research on CaAC by critical feminist
scholars.
Norms and Children in Armed Conflict

The theory of norms came to critical feminist International Relations
theory by way of social constructivism. A popular model for the gener-
ation and spread of norms was put forward by Martha Finnemore and
Kathryn Sikkink (1998: 893), which describes the process of norm diffu-
sion to a point of critical acceptance, or normalization. Later authors
have criticized such models for not focusing enough on the actual emer-
gence of the norms themselves. Elvira Rosert (2019) creates a model
specifically for this stage using the case study of the cluster muni-
tions ban. Rosert (2019: 1103) adds to the existing body of theory on
norms regarding civilian protection in armed conflict by demonstrating

four different sequences of norm generation: “problem adoption” by
norm entrepreneurs; issue creation in the public sphere (i.e., outside
of institutions); creation by institutions; and, creation during multilat-
eral negotiations. This closer look at the generation of norms can aid
in the consideration of motives behind particular symbolic technologies.
Robyn Linde (2016) and Helen Berents (2016) also usefully consider the
generation and spread of norms in examinations of the abolition of the
child death penalty and gendered social media campaigns pertaining to
children, respectively.
Other scholars taking a critical feminist approach to the study of armed
conflict, and women or children specifically in armed conflict, include
Katrina Lee-Koo (2011), Cecilia Jacob (2014), and Bina D’Costa (2016),
who have written about the ways norms impact policy and practice in the
CaAC mandate. Symbolic technologies are the modes by which an intan-
gible idea—a norm—is expressed in language: visual, verbal, written, et
cetera (Carpenter 2006). Photographs and digital footage in particular
are familiar symbolic technologies for transmitting norms in the twenty-
first century, and photographs and film published by global media played
a pivotal role in the establishment of the norm of the child soldier that
was so familiar to audiences starting in the late twentieth century.
This norm of the child victim-soldier was a new norm ascribed to chil-
dren in armed conflict that did not exist in the Western imagination in
the mid-twentieth century. The idea of the “child soldier” was foreign
at that time, as the consolidation of state definitions of childhood, and
the associated denial of agency, were still developing (Linde 2016). On
the issue of agency, Ewa Stańczyk (2015) complements Rosen’s (2005)
account of the Warsaw uprising by examining the way child fighters were
martyred and glorified immediately after the 1944 Warsaw uprising by
the local population; there were localities in the European world at the
time who perceived children as having some agency in conflict, and also
likely did not conceive of adolescent fighters as ‘children’ according to
the ‘Straight-18’ definition. This contrasts thoroughly with the way child
soldiers are now discussed in public policy as well as general conversa-
tion. Today, the public imagination tends to ascribe complete victimhood
to child soldiers. An examination of the development of the UN infras-
tructure on CaAC, in tandem with the development of this norm, can
illustrate the way they are closely related, and extend the existing body of
analysis.
28 V. BRAMWELL
The UN and CaAC: An Emphasis on Child

Soldiers and Reactionary Additions
Children have served in combat around the world since time immemo-
rial. In the Western world, they certainly have done so for hundreds
of years. Traditionally, they were valorised. This is demonstrated, for
example, by contemporary accounts of the heroism of “Christian boy
soldiers” of the American Civil War (Rosen 2005: 6). However, today’s
definition of childhood is different. The Western definition which has
informed international law, beginning formally with the Convention on
the Rights of the Child (1989), defines a child as anyone below the
age of 18. Prior to the Industrial Revolution there was not such a clear
definition between childhood and adulthood. Teenagers often worked to
support their families and, particularly for boys of lower class, there was
often a gendered expectation to work even if that work should include
soldiering—a phenomenon which continues in many areas and is iden-
tified even in Ahmadi’s (2018) analysis of boys soldiers in the Iran-Iraq
War. Moving into the twentieth century, with improved labour protec-
tions, the Western perspective on childhood changed considerably. In the
First World War, the minimum conscription age in the United Kingdom
was 18. According to the binary approach to understanding interstate
warfare prevalent in the West at the time, people during war were divided
into civilians and combatants, which put people under 18 firmly in the
civilian group. Women were also presumed excluded from the combatant
category. This understanding of children and women as the centre of
civilian identity is reflected in the development of civilian protections
and aid during and after the World Wars, with the original mandate of
UNICEF being an example: no aid was provided by UNICEF to men
in its immediate post-Second World War operations, regardless of their
circumstance (Morris 2015: 3).
Following the end of the Second World War and the genesis of the
United Nations, thinking around children in conflict continued to be
influenced by a conception of children as civilian only, despite the fact
that minors did actually serve in Western armies illegitimately. After the
Second World War, UNICEF was founded by the General Assembly.
UNICEF began as a temporary relief agency in 1946, but was given a
permanent mandate in 1953. Civil society in the UK, Europe, and the
U.S. was already active in raising money for this cause, and there was
public demand for a large-scale solution. Morris (2015: 2) contends that
UNICEF was strongly influenced in its conceptualization of victimhood

by political demands at this time; with much of the aid being distributed
in the Soviet bloc, there was considerable suspicion in political quarters,
and the permanent mandate of UNICEF was set with the involvement
of staff from the U.S. Children’s Bureau (Morris 2015: 6). It is clear
through discourse about children and wars, such as the example provided
earlier in this chapter from Russell’s column, that political motives have
remained entwined with the mandate.
Though the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1924)
had been informed by contemporary thinking about children, and the
UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) and the Year of the
Child (1979) demonstrated a growing influence of children’s rights on
UN mandates, agency for children in warfare was not part of the package.
1989 saw the creation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child,
signalling a prioritisation in the UN workstream of concerns related to
children; the Committee on the Rights of the Child brought the mandate
outside the exclusive responsibility of UNICEF. The conceptualization
of children’s victimhood in war began to change from norms of civilian
suffering towards that of the child soldier. In the 1990s, high-profile
conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq War began to draw international media
attention—as did wars in Somalia, Rwanda, and Sudan—and a key area
of interest in these conflicts was the role of children. Lee-Koo (2011: 731)
provides an analysis of how colonial ideas about barbarism and immorality
became tied in with the developing Western norm of the child soldier at
this time, a time when Africa was conceived of as a “morally defunct zone
of tragedy.” The “child soldier” norm in the Western imagination was
most likely both generated and reinforced by the growing public discom-
fort with the inaction of global governments in the face of these images
of children suffering.
In 1993, the situation became pressing with mounting public pressure
over wars continuing in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Somalia, as well as
in the Balkans. A seminal reaction by the UN was to commission The
Graça Machel Report (United Nations 1996). Its purpose was to assess
the severity and types of effects that armed conflict had on children,
and it identified children as gravely affected, not just as civilians but also
as combatants. This report led to Resolution 51/77 (United Nations
Security Council 1997) and the appointing of a Special Representative to
the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.
30 V. BRAMWELL
The first Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Chil-

dren and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, began to advocate for more
concrete CaAC measures towards the turn of the millennium. In 1999,
the seminal Resolution 1261 (United Nations Security Council 1999)
identified six grave violations of children in armed conflict: recruitment,
killing and maiming, abduction, attacks on schools and hospitals, sexual
violence, and blocking humanitarian access. These six violations are
the basic barometer by which the effects of children in armed conflict
are measured by the existing infrastructure. In 2004, Resolution 1539
(United Nations Security Council 2004) devised a clear Monitoring
and Reporting Mechanism (MRM) to identify violations, and shortly
afterward the Security Council Working Group on Children in Armed
Conflict (SCWGCAC) was created to operate this mechanism. Resolution
1460 (United Nations Security Council 2003) stipulated that any party
that carried out grave violations would be noted; however, a party who
engaged in recruitment specifically would be blacklisted in an annex to
the Secretary General’s annual report on Children and Armed Conflict. It
is telling that, at the time, this was the only violation considered worthy
of blacklisting a party for. Child soldiers were clearly a key priority in
both the UN workstream and in the public imagination. Subsequent
resolutions did add the other violations as listable offences, but the
timing of these additions appears to be reactionary.
In 2009, killing and maiming and rape and sexual violence were added
as triggers for listing in the Special Representative’s report. In that year,
the Somali civil war had broken out, and atrocities against children were
well publicized. The second Sudanese civil war had also not long ended,
and images of suffering children were spectres that the UN needed to
be seen to be responding to. Resolution 1882 (United Nations Security
Council 2009) was approved unanimously by the General Assembly. Two
years later, in 2011, Resolution 1998 (United Nations Security Council
2011) added attacks on schools and hospitals as a trigger for listing. The
Syrian civil war had begun in this year, and the deliberate targeting of
schools and hospitals for airstrikes by various parties was met with public
outrage. Resolution 2225 (United Nations Security Council 2015a)
added abduction as a trigger, months after 276 schoolgirls were abducted
in Borno Sate, Nigeria by Boko Haram. A strong relationship between
high profile violations and the adding of those violations as triggers seems
likely; at the very least, this process appears to be more reactionary than
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Childhoods in Peace and Conflict 1st

Edition J. Marshall Beier

Childhoods in Peace and Conflict 1st Edition J Marshall

The Walls Between Conflict and Peace 1st Edition

Peace and Conflict Studies 5th Edition David P. Barash

Cultural Violence in the Classroom Peace Conflict and

Cyber War and Cyber Peace Digital Conflict in the

The Palgrave Encyclopedia Of Peace And Conflict Studies

Contemporary Peacemaking : Peace Processes,

Privatizing Peace How Commerce Can Reduce Conflict in

More information about this series at

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

A debt of gratitude is owed to the many people without whom this

January 2021 J. Marshall Beier

1 Other Childhoods: Finding Children in Peace

Part I Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict

Part II Pedagogies of Children in Peace and Conflict

6 Childhood, Education, and Everyday Militarism

Part III Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict

J. Marshall Beier is a Professor of Political Science at McMaster Univer-

Brooke Durham is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History

in Economic Sciences. Her areas of research are Women’s Studies and

of Education and Lecture & Program Co-Director of M.A. Child-

Dalibor Savić is an Assistant Professor at the University of Banja Luka,

independent Ukraine, focusing on the event of the Chernobyl nuclear

Table 3.1 Dominant discourses on ex-child soldiers in BiH 45

Other Childhoods: Finding Children in Peace

J. Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

sites and practices. Organized according to three broad and overlap-

the spectacular confounds our notice of what may be equally instructive

become the basis for ways of relating to and with children—inasmuch as

interrogation of the homogenizing discourses that flatten alterity in defer-

Other Childhoods and Other Emergencies

material inequality and disenfranchisement from political power as impor-

recognized subjecthood visibly in tension with their enduring disenfran-

Structure of the Volume

organizations) and ‘children’s places’ (as negotiated or constructed by

The first part, “Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” aims

exploring the international interventions towards children, Dalibor Savić,

In Chapter 4, “‘I Have the Right’: Examining the Role of Chil-

of protection, identifying violations of such protections, and setting the

the intersections between schooling and militarization by addressing how

Strategy for the Ukrainian National-Patriotic Education of Children and

2001) helps us navigate through questions related to children’s participa-

to state security, this chapter invites us to critically reflect on whose best

Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight

Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood—Inse-

McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán. 2018. Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading

Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict

Children as Soldiers or Civilians: Norms

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

happen primarily to civilian children (where these can be clearly sepa-

Children in Armed Conflict

Western collective conscious). David M. Rosen (2005) has examined the

Girls as young as 12 or 13 have been forced to marry extremists or sold

This description is graphic and emotive, making use of popular norms

discourse, and the contrast to Rosen’s analysis of the empowered child

Such emotive Western characterizations of children’s suffering, but partic-

Norms and Children in Armed Conflict

norms regarding civilian protection in armed conflict by demonstrating

The UN and CaAC: An Emphasis on Child

UNICEF was strongly influenced in its conceptualization of victimhood