Discovering Childhood in International Relations 1St Ed Edition J Marshall Beier Full Chapter

Discovering Childhood in International
Relations 1st ed. Edition J. Marshall

Beier
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/discovering-childhood-in-international-relations-1st-ed
-edition-j-marshall-beier/
Discovering Childhood
in International
Relations
Edited by
J. Marshall Beier
Discovering Childhood in International Relations
J.  Marshall Beier
Editor
Discovering
Childhood
in International
Relations
Editor
J. Marshall Beier
Department of Political Science
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-46062-4 ISBN 978-3-030-46063-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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
information 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, express 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.
Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com
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 actively remaking our world
Acknowledgments
My deepest and sincerest gratitude is owed to each of the contributors

to this volume. Not only have they been wonderful to work with at all
stages of the project but they have taught me much and have given me
pause to reflect anew on matters of shared interest in ways exemplary of
the best of all we hope for in collegial relationships and from collabora-
tive work. The contribution they collectively make herein offers excep-
tional insight, deeper and more engaging than I could have imagined at
the outset of our work together, into what thinking about children and
childhoods means for and about disciplinary International Relations. I
look forward to continuing the conversations they open here and to all
that we still have to learn from them.
In this and other work, I continue to gain much in the way of encour-
agement from members of the Department of Political Science at
McMaster University. In particular, I would like to thank the superbly
engaged undergraduate students who have made my fourth-year semi-
nar, “Child/Youth Rights and Security in Global Political Perspective,”
among the most stimulating and thought-provoking (and, happily,
ongoing) experiences of my professional life. They and the many excel-
lent graduate students with whom it is also my privilege to work are ever
pushing my thinking in new ways and inspiring deeper contemplation on
issues central to this volume. Likewise, my colleagues in the International
Relations field, Peter Nyers, Robert O’Brien, Tony Porter, Alina Sajed,
and Lana Wylie are fonts of intellectual energy and constant sources of
inspiration. Together with others in our Department, we all depend as
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
well on the administrative support provided by Manuela Dozzi, Rebekah

Flynn, and Wendy Ryckman, for which I am also always grateful.
At Palgrave, Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg were supportive of the
project from our earliest discussions and their enthusiasm did much to
underwrite confidence that the way the volume was framed would make
the most of its potential. In later stages, Rachel Moore guided the com-
pleted manuscript through the production process. I could not be more
appreciative for these efforts or for the time and talents of all the others
who work behind the scenes to see this and other projects through to
print. Many thanks are due as well for the valuable and supportive feed-
back from the reviewers for Palgrave that played an important part in
strengthening the volume and in urging its most interesting and original
contributions to the fore.
Finally, I extend my thanks to friends too numerous to list and, of
course, to my family. These are the relationships that sustain us and
which, therefore, are requisite to all that we do. My mother, Carole
Beier, my late father, Ron Beier, and my aunt, Myra Hurst have all been
present through the span of this project, discussed aspects of it with me
when I was still thinking them through, and forgave me for completing
the editing lakeside on a family vacation. As always, I am grateful to my
daughter, Kaelyn Beier, for her many contributions to my thinking along
the way and for continuing to teach by way of example on the indispen-
sability of young people’s daily contributions to the social worlds we all
inhabit.
Hamilton, ON, Canada J. Marshall Beier

January 2020
Contents
1 Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

in International Relations 1
J. Marshall Beier
2 Decolonizing Childhood in International Relations 21

Katrina Lee-Koo
3 Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework

for Engaging Images of Children in IR 41
Helen Berents
4 Children as Agents in International Relations?

Transnational Activism, International Norms,
and the Politics of Age 65
Anna Holzscheiter
5 Doing IR: Securing Children 89

Helen Brocklehurst
6 A Tale of a (Dis)Orderly International Society:

Protecting Child-Soldiers, Saving the Child,
Governing the Future 115
Jana Tabak
ix
x CONTENTS
7 From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child

Soldier: How the Martial Regulation of Children
Normalizes and Legitimizes War 135
Victoria M. Basham
8 Toying with Militarization: Children and War

on the Homefront 155
Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter
9 Between Borders: Pop Cultural Heroes and Plural

Childhoods in IR 179
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy with Cole Byram,
Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus Perry, Trinity Perry,
Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore
10 Revisiting ‘Womenandchildren’ in Peace

and Security: What About the Girls Caught
in Between? 199
Lesley Pruitt
11 Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security

and Resilience 219
J. Marshall Beier
12 Centralizing Childhood, Remaking the Discourse 243

Alison M. S. Watson
Index 263
Notes on Contributors
Victoria M. Basham is Reader (Associate Professor) in International

Relations at Cardiff University, Wales. Her research interests lie in the
field of critical military studies at the intersections of feminist interna-
tional relations, critical geopolitics, and international political soci-
ology. Her research explores how war, and war preparedness, shape
people’s daily lives and how daily life can, in turn, influence and facili-
tate war and other geopolitical outcomes. She is particularly interested
in how experiences of gender, racialization, sexuality, age, and social
class intersect with the prioritization and perpetration of military power.
Victoria is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Military Studies
and Co-Editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series, Advances
in Critical Military Studies. Between 2017 and 2019 she served as the
President of the European International Studies Association.
J. Marshall Beier is Professor of Political Science at McMaster
University. His publications include Childhood and the Production
of Security, ed. (Routledge, 2017); The Militarization of Childhood:
Thinking Beyond the Global South, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014);
Canadian Foreign Policy in Critical Perspective, ed. with Lana Wylie
(Oxford University Press, 2010); Indigenous Diplomacies, ed. (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); International Relations in Uncommon Places:
Indigeneity, Cosmology, and the Limits of International Theory (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, 2009). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical
Studies on Security and his work has appeared in journals including
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Children’s Geographies, Contemporary Security Policy, Critical Military

Studies, Global Governance, Global Responsibility to Protect, International
Political Sociology, International Politics, International Studies Review,
Journal of Human Rights, Security Dialogue, and Third World Quarterly.
Helen Berents received her Ph.D. (International Relations) from the
University of Queensland, Australia in 2013. She is currently Senior
Lecturer in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at the Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her research draws on
peace studies, feminist international relations, and critical security stud-
ies to consider representations of children and youth in crises and con-
flicts and engagements with lived experiences of violence-affected young
people. Her work has been published in journals including International
Feminist Journal of Politics, International Political Sociology, Critical
Studies on Security, and Signs. Her first book, Young People and Everyday
Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia, was pub-
lished by Routledge in 2018.
Helen Brocklehurst is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the
University of Derby. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from
Aberystwyth University and teaches in the areas of conflict, gender,
and global politics. She has published a number of articles and chap-
ters exploring the relevance of children for studies of security and is still
working on a second book. Her ongoing interests include contributing
to the reframing of juvenile informational material on war, terrorism,
and politics, and related to this, exploring how the publishing industry
and digital media companies might mitigate risk and social harm in their
management of photographic images of (young) people in adversity.
Cole Byram graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis, USA in
2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and Accounting
(double major). He was a member of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab stu-
dent think tank in 2018–2019. He began study at the Maurer School of
Law, Indiana University, Bloomington in the autumn of 2019.
Sean Carter is Associate Professor in Political Geography at the
University of Exeter. He has a particular interest in the ways in which
cultural and geopolitical practices are mutually constitutive, particularly
the interrelation between geopolitics and various forms of popular cul-
ture. This has been pursued through a number of research projects that
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
examine how the geopolitical world is framed, visualized, and performed.

These have included studies of the geopolitics of diaspora communi-
ties, film and cinema, photojournalism, and most recently, play. Sean’s
recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council, seeks to more fully understand the ways in which play
and geopolitics are intertwined, especially in the everyday lives of chil-
dren, and the ways in which an attentiveness to “play” can reframe cul-
tural and political geographies more generally.
Anna Holzscheiter is Professor of International Politics at TU Dresden
and Head of the Research Group‚ Governance for Global Health, at
WZB Social Science Center in Berlin. Prior to taking up her position
at TU Dresden, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations
at the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy,
Freie Universitaet Berlin (2006–2015). She has held fellowship positions
at Harvard University (2014–2015), the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine (2007–2010), and the European University Institute
(2004). In her research, she has been focusing on interorganizational
dynamics between governmental and nongovernmental organizations in
international politics and institutions as well as the emergence, consoli-
dation, contestation, and collision of international norms, particularly in
the fields of (children’s) human rights and global health.
Katrina Lee-Koo is Associate Professor of International Relations and
Deputy Director of Monash Gender, Peace and Security at Monash
University. Katrina teaches and researches in the areas of critical secu-
rity studies and feminist international relations. Her research examines
the protection and participation of civilians in conflict-affected areas and
during peace processes (focused upon women, youth, and children) as
well as the implementation of UN Security Council agendas on these
issues. Katrina is coauthor of Children and Global Conflict (Cambridge
University Press, 2015), with Kim Huynh and Bina D’Costa; Ethics
and Global Security (Routledge, 2014), with Anthony Burke and Matt
McDonald; and, editor of the forthcoming Young Women’s Leadership in
Asia and the Pacific (Routledge), with Lesley Pruitt. Katrina is an asso-
ciate editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and is on
the editorial board for the Australian Journal of Politics and History, the
Australian Journal of Political Science, and Politics and Gender.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jaimarsin Lewis is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,

USA. He has worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu
Peace Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center. In that
capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the
Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.”
Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at
Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and
Political Science at Butler University in Indianapolis, USA and Director
of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab, an innovative think tank for under-
graduate students interested in peace and justice research, education,
and activism. Her research focuses on children and youth in interna-
tional relations and critical studies of political violence, peace(building),
and memorialization. She is the author of numerous books, articles, and
book chapters on children and youth, including the results of in-depth
interviews and focus groups with young people in Northern Ireland and
Israel/Palestine. Her most recent book is Peace and Resistance in Youth
Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The
Hunger Games (Palgrave, 2018).
Karaijus Perry is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,
USA. He worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace
Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In
that capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the
Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.”
Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at
Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Trinity Perry completed her HSE (high school equivalency) diploma in
2019 and is based at the Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. She
worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab and the
Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In that capac-
ity, she contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the Career
and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.” Together
with her coauthors, she presented the results of this paper at Butler
University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Lesley Pruitt is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the
School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Lesley’s research focuses on recognizing and supporting young people’s
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
participation in politics and peacebuilding and advancing gender equity

in efforts aimed at pursuing peace and security. Lesley’s books include
Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender & Change (State University of New
York Press, 2013); The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Policing & the
UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit (University of California Press,
2016); Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combatting
Civic Deficit? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), with Mark Chou, Jean Paul
Gagnon, and Catherine Hartung; and, Dancing Through the Dissonance:
Creative Movement & Peacebuilding (Manchester University Press,
2020), with Erica Rose Jeffrey.
Jana Tabak is Assistant Professor in the Department of International
Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her publications
include: a forthcoming co-edited special issue of Childhood: Journal of
Global Child Research; a forthcoming book entitled, The Child and the
World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (University of Georgia
Press); 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
Diplomacy. She has taught in the areas of international organizations,
peace and conflict studies, and children and war.
Julio Trujillo graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis,
USA in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and
Criminology. He served as the Neighborhood Youth Liaison for the
Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019. He led a youth research team
to conduct interviews with young people in the community about the
barriers to the career and college aspirations of racial and ethnic minor-
ity youth. He has also worked as a community organizer with the
Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. He has received awards for
servant-leadership and social justice advocacy and is a member of the
Alpha Kappa Delta Honor and Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Societies.
Alison M. S. Watson is Professor of International Relations at the
University of St Andrews and Managing Director and Co-Founder of
the Third Generation Project, a think tank focusing upon the human
rights implications of climate change. Her work has largely focused upon
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
examining the human rights of marginalized communities, with a long-

term specialization in considering the place of children in the interna-
tional community and the politics of childhood. More recently, she has
been co-developing, with Bennett Collins, a research approach that is
collaborative and “community”-led, as well as a teaching approach that
aims to provide students with practice-based as well as theoretical skills.
Her most recent article examines the meaning of ‘home’ and its impor-
tance as a site of political agency.
Mikayla Whittemore is a sophomore student in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at Butler University, majoring in Political Science,
International Studies, with minors in Peace Studies and Spanish. She
interned with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019 focusing on
mass incarceration and food justice. She is studying abroad at Valparaiso
University in Chile in the autumn of 2019.
Tara Woodyer is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the
University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research examines how childhood
is entangled in the (re)production of wider sociocultural processes. She
has a particular interest in ludic—or playful—geographies, advancing
theorizations of play and childhood agency through attention to embod-
iment and affect. Tara’s recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by
the Economic and Social Research Council, has explored play as a crit-
ical lens for addressing conflict and militarization. This has focused on
using ethnographic, child-centered techniques to examine how children
express and enact contemporary geopolitics through everyday domes-
tic practices of play. This work interrogates militarization beyond areas
of actual armed conflict and highlights childhood political subjectivity
through consideration of embodiment.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

in International Relations
J. Marshall Beier
In a much-cited 1997 contribution to the New Internationalist, moral

philosopher Peter Singer described a thought experiment posed to his
students in which he asked them to imagine that, along their route to
the university, they happened upon a child drowning in a shallow pond.
In the scenario he sketched for them, the students could easily and safely
wade into the pond to perform a rescue but would have to weigh saving
the child against soaking their clothes and missing class. Unsurprisingly,
Singer’s students assessed the child’s life to be of greater value than the
comparatively inconsequential cost of wet clothes and a missed class and,
accordingly, they were unanimous in saying they would opt to perform
the rescue. The point of the exercise was to prompt reflection on the
ethical question of “what we owe to people in need” and, extending
the exploration, Singer found that the majority of his students felt they
would have the same obligation to a child far away whom they also had
the ability to save from death at no risk or significant cost to themselves
(Singer 1997). Of course, the ability to aid others in need routinely
J. M. Beier (*)
Department of Political Science,
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
e-mail: mbeier@mcmaster.ca
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_1
2 J. M. BEIER
fails to ignite that very sense of obligation and the apparent disconnect
between ethical reflection and lived experience, revealed in the experi-
ment, is Singer’s entre to making some weighty propositions on recon-
ciling ethics and self-interest as a route to the ethical life. Beyond the
particular insights Singer urges us to draw from his experiment, though,
it is interesting too for what it leaves unexplored: ironically, the child at
the center of the scenario.
What do we know about Singer’s child? On first gloss, it might seem
precious little. Despite repeated references to her/him/them in the first
paragraphs of the essay, nothing is said to give even the slightest hint
about, for example, age or gender or any other identity characteristic.
Indeed, no physical description of any sort is offered and the child is not
placed in a broader social context. We know that the child’s immedi-
ate situation is urgent but are not able to glean anything about any cir-
cumstances more generally or apart from that specific plight. And, while
Singer’s students are positioned as both the subjects of ethical deliber-
ation and hypothetical would-be rescuers, the child is imbued with no
agency whatsoever. In fact, the only thing said of the child is that he/
she/they is/are drowning. This, however, describes the child’s predic-
ament rather than the child, who is rendered utterly one-dimensional
as, simply, ‘child.’ The ostensible focal point of the scenario seems, par-
adoxically, to warrant no further ascription or elaboration. And yet, from
this it becomes clear that, while we have been told very little, we actually
know quite a lot—so much so, in fact, that the intelligibility of Singer’s
experiment depends on it.
Singer’s child is the quintessential person in need, understood at once
as the very embodiment of helplessness. Deployed as a rhetorical device,
the child in need of rescue or protection draws on inveterate ideas about
innocent, vulnerable, and precious childhood so pervasive and so deeply
held that they need not be explicitly described. ‘Child’ functions as the
byword of these qualities, which are customarily and reliably taken to
be its defining features, and therefore invites no dithering on questions
of the need for or propriety of intervention. Nothing of the widely var-
ied subject positions or complex intersectionalities of actual lived child-
hoods is held visible in this formulation, nor does Singer reflect on how
they—or, more particularly, their omission—might bear consequentially
on the responses of his students. It matters to the purpose of his sce-
nario that the object of rescue is the one-dimensional child of hegem-
onic imagining and it matters too that Singer’s students will undoubtedly
1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD … 3
have brought the cultural competencies to decode ‘child’ as embodied

helplessness and vulnerability. Nothing more than ‘child’ is said because
nothing more need be said. And this is revealing of how much is already
‘known’ about childhood as well as of the cultural traction of the
deferred meaning behind the signifier ‘child.’
Children figure similarly in myriad narratives of global politics and in
the disciplinary stories we tell in International Relations. Though sel-
dom framed as political subjects in their own right, images of children in
abject circumstances have long been made potent political resources with
the potential to mobilize international political action and move shifts
in global policy. They likewise make fleeting cameo-like appearances in
IR textbooks in connection with entries on security, development, and
more, subtly populating conceptual propositions like liberal progress or
the ubiquity of threat with relatable “emotional scenery” (Brocklehurst
2015: 32). Half-noticed and rarely heard, they are nevertheless impor-
tant to global politics and to IR in the same way the nondescript ‘drown-
ing child’ is important to Singer’s lesson in ethical responsibility. And
yet, like Singer in his scenario, IR has paid almost no attention to chil-
dren and childhoods, per se, and has been similarly inattentive to the
important ways in which they are bound up in and bear upon issues of
rights, diplomacies, conflict and security, global political economy, and
other areas of traditional disciplinary focus.
If IR’s failure to take notice of these things belies the significance of
children and childhoods to the worlds of global politics, it is also out
of step with important developments in other fields of study. In paral-
lel with the rapid expansion of what began as a ‘new sociology of child-
hood’ in the 1980s and which gave rise to a burgeoning interdisciplinary
Childhood Studies since the 1990s, associated research programs have
emerged within and across a number of traditional arts disciplines. While
disciplinary International Relations has been something of a laggard in
this regard, slow to recognize the relevance of these developments for
its own subject matters and its ways of approaching them, there are
encouraging signs that this is beginning to change. In particular, recent
years have seen the emergence of an engaged and growing community
of scholarship problematizing IR’s omission of children and childhoods.
Looking to sources of the field’s failure to theorize childhood and to
take children seriously as political subjects in local and global contexts,
these interventions have revealed how International Relations is, some-
what paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of
4 J. M. BEIER
childhood as, perforce, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapac-

ity. These investigations thus have much to tell us about our field itself
as well as beginning to equip us to productively approach what has
been a neglected area of study. Responding to the growing interest in
this developing area of research, a new network of interested scholars
has begun to take shape, drawing together and establishing connections
between emerging and earlier contributors and giving rise to collabora-
tive projects.
With opening interventions on children and childhoods in
International Relations reaching back well over a decade now and as
interest in this scholarship is gathering, there is a need for more thor-
oughgoing reflection on problems and prospects for doing work in
this area in a specifically disciplinary International Relations context.
Spike Peterson’s Gendered States (1992) answered an analogous need
in the early 1990s as interest in feminist theory and Gender Studies
was ascendant in the field. In retrospect, it would have been good to
have had such a collection of reflections on thinking about indigene-
ity in International Relations at the fore of the marked increase in work
in that area in recent years. Together, the contributors to Discovering
Childhood in International Relations bring a constellation of research
experiences, conceptual commitments, and points of intervention to,
in sum, give readers a sense of the terrain of problems, pitfalls, prom-
ise, and prospects of/for thinking about children and childhoods in
International Relations—specifically in International Relations and with
an International Relations readership foremost in mind.
As with any emergent area, these explorations, though animated by
specific curiosities and commitments, are carried out against the back-
drop of a host of much larger questions. How should students and
scholars of International Relations approach this sort of research? What
are those problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects alluded to above in
the more specific undertaking to make sense of, draw upon, and speak
issues of children and childhoods in IR? Where and how should we look
to ‘discover’ children and childhoods and what might we perhaps have
to discover about our discipline (and ourselves) first? Thinking about
a readership already inclined to take this work seriously but also those
who situate themselves and their work in International Relations more
broadly and who might simply wonder why they ought to think about
children/childhoods, what can or should be said to both the former and
latter categories of colleagues?
With these questions in mind, contributors aim to speak to

International Relations quite broadly. Though some chapters land
closer than others to questions of, inter alia, security, or rights, or the
contours of the discipline itself, all turn on those four Ps (problems,
pitfalls, promise, and prospects) of taking children and childhoods seri-
ously in International Relations, informed in each instance by contribu-
tors’ own research projects. Thinking in terms of a collective disciplinary
enterprise of ‘discovering’ captures something of the four Ps as well as
the senses in which International Relations variously performs children
and childhoods (and the bounds of their possibilities) into being and is
itself performed into being through the manner of its inclusions, exclu-
sions, renderings, and deployments of children and childhoods. It also
pulls on the ways in which ‘discovering’ has been undertaken in other
disciplinary literatures, with reference to, variously, gender, race, culture,
class; likewise citizenship, discourse, aesthetics, among others. Similarly,
‘discovering’ is here intended to help draw out the ways in which chil-
dren and childhoods are not at all new to International Relations but
merely newly noticed. The task contributors to Discovering Childhood in
International Relations have set for us in the chapters that follow, then,
is both to think about how to approach this as a ‘new site of knowledge’
(Watson 2006) as well as to reflect on what it demands of the discipline
and what it tells us about how we might imagine International Relations
differently. Most fundamentally, this book is something of a preemp-
tion against ‘add children and stir’ projects of the sort previously seen
(and rightly problematized) in those initial moments when scholarship
on women, Indigenous peoples, or even research methods (ethnogra-
phy) and conceptual borrowings (resilience) emerged in International
Relations.
Discovering Childhood
Even without inquiring too deeply, it seems odd that IR should need to
be called on to discover children. More than a quarter of the world’s
human population, after all, is aged fourteen years and under, rising to
nearly one third when all those under age eighteen are counted (United
Nations 2017). What is more, despite having received little in the way
of focused attention from IR, the governance of children—from rights
regimes, to regulation of bodily autonomy and security, to the social
spaces they (may) occupy, and more—is nevertheless a key constituent
6 J. M. BEIER
of global political order. It is just as curious, then, that IR scholars have

shown so little interest in those global political processes and practices
involved in the governance of children and childhood. This is espe-
cially so where these things otherwise dovetail with issues traditionally
regarded as well within the usual disciplinary remit. The 1989 United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to take but
one example, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world
and suggests a number of intriguing puzzles that ought to be of inter-
est to students and scholars of International Relations. Among these, the
fact that the United States, which played a central role in the framing of
the Convention, remains the sole holdout on its ratification would seem
fertile ground for investigations on the interplay of norms, interests,
and more. Intriguing too is that many of the most celebrated aspects of
the UNCRC remain poorly implemented even where they are strongly
endorsed in rhetoric. International Relations is not at all well-equipped,
however, to make sense of these and other puzzles without, as the con-
tributors herein show, first discovering children and childhoods not as
incidental to global political worlds but everywhere and always integral
to them.
But what does it mean to discover? In its most literal sense, the com-
bined Latin prefix ‘dis’ (a removal or reversal) and root word ‘cover’ (in
the present context, a shrouding, cloaking, obscuring from view) point
to something revealed, not introduced. Discovery is a coming to aware-
ness of that which was already present but previously unknown, unrec-
ognized, or perhaps differently understood. The title of this volume,
Discovering Childhood in International Relations, thus resists suggesting
that childhood be brought to the discipline. Like the child in Singer’s
thought experiment, childhood has always been present, indeed indis-
pensable, to discourses of global politics, ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ alike.
The call to consider children and childhoods in International Relations
must begin, then, with the recognition that there is much that is already
‘known’—and a readiness to unlearn a great deal also. Discovering child-
hood, in this sense, demands critical interrogation of hegemonic ideas
that prefigure imaginable spaces for and renderings of children in IR.
And this already alerts us to some of the problems and pitfalls of which it
is necessary to build and sustain awareness.
To the extent that they have traditionally been visible, the chil-
dren populating conventional IR discourse are thoroughly objectified.
Whether as referent objects of security summoning the responsibility
of other subjects, hapless victims allegorical of atrocity, sentimentalized

metonyms of imagined futures, or some other like framing, they are sit-
uated in discourses and projects not of their making wherein they func-
tion as rhetorical devices in the same manner as Singer’s innominate and
one-dimensional ‘child’. It is as yet still rare to find them positioned
in IR’s stories about itself and its subject matters as complex and con-
sequential actors in and of the social worlds they occupy. Even in what
might seem exceptions where, figuring as child soldiers for example, chil-
dren may be read as performing roles to substantial political effect, their
agency still tends to be eclipsed by that imputed to those understood to
have manipulated or coerced them to these roles. Left unexamined are
the myriad ways children the world over participate in the (re)production
of global order in conflict, peacebuilding, moral entrepreneurship, labor
(waged and unwaged), caregiving, and in countless other circumstances
and settings that include both the spectacular and the mundane. They
are among the agents of status quo politics and of movements of resist-
ance. And yet they are relatively absent as such from IR.
Elsewhere, new developments in Childhood Studies over the last
few decades have fueled burgeoning and dynamic growth areas of spe-
cialization in a number of established disciplines. Broadly, this work
has turned on issues such as children’s locations in citizenship, con-
tributions to knowledge practices, and participation in myriad facets
of the social words of which they are part. It has critically investigated
the ideational bases of their disenfranchisement from social power and
challenged deeply held developmentalist ideas (Burman 1994) that,
approaching children less as human beings than as ‘human becomings’
(Uprichard 2008), work to delimit recognition of agency and efface sub-
jecthood. Attentive to the real and significant ways children participate in
and affect social life, research programs in Children’s Geographies, the
Sociology of Childhood, and others have given rise to specialized jour-
nals, new sections in professional associations, and lively communities of
scholarly research and exchange. These developments reflect the actively
interdisciplinary nature of Childhood Studies (Faulkner and Zolkos
2016) as well as a growing sense that the neglect of childhood in studies
of social life impoverishes all social inquiry, including all that may reside
beyond those spheres traditionally associated with children. In this sense,
childhood, like race, gender, class, and other social systems of identity
and difference is seen as always relevant.
8 J. M. BEIER
Working through the implications of these insights, a new

International Relations literature speaks to a discipline that has paid very
little attention to childhood and its relationship to status quo circula-
tions of power, to children as possessed of bona fide political subject-
hood, and to the under-interrogated ideational commitments that have
made these exclusions appear relatively unproblematic. Early contribu-
tions (see, for example, Watson 2004, 2006, 2009; Brocklehurst 2006;
Holzscheiter 2010) spoke both to IR’s silence on children and their
paradoxical importance to so much of what is normally taken to be its
disciplinary ambit. Besides doing essential ‘ground-clearing’ work in cre-
ating a space for thinking about children and childhoods in a discipline
that has been late to take notice, initial contributions have inquired along
lines of their implications for various spheres more readily associated with
International Relations scholarship. This has included explorations of
children’s indispensability to particular ways in which security is practiced
(see Brocklehurst 2006) and how childhood is constitutive of security
discourses and practices, enabling some political possibilities while simul-
taneously foreclosing others (see Basham 2015; Jacob 2015; Berents
2016, 2019; Beier 2018). Others look to how childhoods intersect and
are bound up in the reproduction of militarized global politics (see Beier
2011; Woodyer and Carter 2018). Another current plies ways in which
taking childhood seriously challenges accustomed ways of thinking about
human rights (see Holzscheiter 2010, 2018; Linde 2016; Beier 2019).
Unsettling simplistic renderings of child victimhood (see Rosen 2005;
Hart 2008; Baines 2009; Gilligan 2009), still other contributions have
highlighted how subject positions are instantiated in respect of political
projects, often benevolent in their founding, that reduce young people
to objects of protection in often highly problematic ways (see Macmillan
2009; Lee-Koo 2011, 2013; Jacob 2014; Brocklehurst 2015).
Recovering a more complicated and nuanced picture of lived child-
hoods, a number of works reveal the complex entanglements of child-
hood, peace, and conflict and the ways in which children affect and are
affected by them while simultaneously engaging in forms of resistance
and producing possibilities for alternate futures (see McEvoy-Levy 2006;
Huynh et al. 2015; D’Costa 2016; Berents 2018; Martuscelli and Villa
2018; Tabak 2020). In keeping with the shift in Childhood Studies from
developmentalism to approaches attentive to agency (see, for example,
James and Prout 1990; Matthews 1994; Qvortrup 1994; Jenks 1996)
and centering capabilities (see Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2003; McNamee
and Seymour 2013), these resist renderings of children’s disempower-

ment as a force so powerful that it may be seen to overwrite subjectiv-
ity, producing only objects of protection or oppression and obscuring the
innumerable ways in which children are meaningfully engaged in civic
life (see Chou et al. 2017).
Aligned with the aesthetic turn and the increasing interest in popular
and material culture in critical International Relations but tending also
to theorizing childhood, a number of important contributions reveal cir-
cuits of everyday political participation that raise a significant challenge
to children’s reduction to passive objects. This includes revealing explo-
rations of subjecthood expressed in youth cultures (McEvoy-Levy 2018)
or activated through music (Pruitt 2013). Investigations into young
people’s interaction with and through online gaming give a more com-
plicated picture of adult game developers’ influence than is sometimes
imagined, finding gamers’ interventions evince significant resistances to
themes of the adult world as well as, and even concomitantly with, par-
ticipation in their reproduction (Crowe 2011). The significance of these
insights is that they alert us to how a focus on adult agency alone misses
much of what is interesting and important. And in these and other con-
tributions, this is exposed only by learning how young people fashion
their engagements with and through their socials worlds and how they
understand and situate themselves in relation to them.
What this brief representative survey of the existing literature sketches
are the contours of a vibrant new community of scholarship taking
shape to address International Relations’ relative silence about children
and childhoods and raising both challenges and opportunities for how
we think about the discipline and its subject matters. Coming at a time
when interest in this new area of research is growing, this volume is,
among other things, a goad to further inquiry. Without any particular
pretense to agenda-setting, it is inspired by a collective desire to widen
and deepen conversations in International Relations around issues con-
cerning children and childhoods. As an edited collection, it brings
together a range of areas of experience and expertise developed through
contributors’ own pioneering curiosities, conceptual commitments,
and programs of research. Together, they explore issues and offer new
insights that build on initial treatments of childhood in International
Relations while shedding light on the unique problems, pitfalls, prom-
ise, and prospects that inhere in taking up this area of research in IR’s
specific disciplinary milieu. More broadly still, they contribute also to
10 J. M. BEIER
scholarship on the importance of children and childhoods in global polit-

ical contexts that has likewise been ascendant in other disciplinary con-
texts (see, for example, Benwell and Hopkins 2016) and thus highlight
openings for potentially fruitful interdisciplinary conversations as well.
Structure of the Volume

Challenging the dominant thinking about childhood as it is still
expressed in prevailing commitments and common senses, in Chapter 2
Katrina Lee-Koo brings children’s agency into relief through a criti-
cal examination of the paradox of children’s and childhood’s simul-
taneous invisibility in and indispensibility to both global politics and
disciplinary International Relations. Arguing that the narrative pol-
itics through which childhood is deployed reflect investment in
developmentalist-inspired ideas about children that play a crucial part
both in enabling action and sustaining status quo relations of power for
the discipline and the worlds it makes its subject matter, Lee-Koo shows
how constructions of childhood and the lived realities of children bear
in consequential ways on how we (might) practice global politics and
disciplinary IR alike—and how this figures vis-à-vis possibilities for chil-
dren’s emancipation. Tending directly to the problems, pitfalls, promise,
and prospects implied in explorations inspired by this critical insight, she
reveals what is at stake and for whom in the growing interest around this
emergent area in International Relations. In so doing, she shows how
attention to children and childhoods produces a fuller account of global
politics as well as a unique vantage point from which to reflect critically
on IR as social practice, shot through as it is with unequal relations of
power. Taking a view of children as consequential makers and bearers of
knowledge, the chapter concludes with a call for IR to be not only inclu-
sive of children but responsive to them as well.
In Chapter 3, Helen Berents takes up a key dimension of the chal-
lenge to imagine children differently, proposing a critical framework
for the way we literally see them. Calling on us to critically consider the
purposes behind the deployment of images of injured, suffering, and
threatening children, she interrogates the framings of ‘victims,’ ‘delin-
quents,’ and ‘icons’ in reflecting on how IR scholars ought to con-
sider such images. Arguing that they “are not always about the child,”
Berents urges us always to ask ‘what,’ ‘how,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘why’
when confronted with images of children. Doing so points not only to
a potentially more ethical practice of engaging with the photography of

children in circumstances of danger, abjection, or in which they may be
deemed exceptional, but also to a potentially deeper appreciation of how
unequal global power relations, more than merely being reflected in the
publication, sharing, and viewing of images of children in conflict and
crises, are reproduced in these practices also. Above all, we are urged to
read these images as always political and to locate ourselves in the rela-
tions of power they narrate.
Looking to the IR literature concerned with international norms,
transnational advocacy, and social movements, in Chapter 4 Anna
Holzscheiter inquires into the failure—even where children and chil-
dren’s rights are at the ostensible center of policymaking agendas—to see
children as agents who shape international institutions and contribute to
the building, contestation, and transformation of international norms.
Beyond what IR misses out on for itself when it fails to theorize chil-
dren and childhoods in these contexts, she points up the more profound
implication that the invisibility of children’s agency in International
Relations scholarship may play a part in reproducing children’s exclusion
from political circuits of global governance—reduced to, at best, an issue
area. Holzscheiter finds the framing of young people as especially vulner-
able is once again key to the sorts of protective practices that efface their
agency—and, with it, their participation rights—as well as to the insti-
tutional parceling off of children-as-issue-area from international rights
regimes. Alerting us to the dangers of an ‘add children and stir’ approach
while bringing another dimension to our understanding of why it mat-
ters that the discipline has not concerned itself with thinking in a focused
way about children and childhoods, this stands as an important reminder
that IR is a potent social force in its own right, at least partly constitutive
of the world which it presumes to have ‘found.’
In Chapter 5, Helen Brocklehurst moves from how we see (or
do not see) children to reflections on a long journey in efforts to find
them made visible in IR. Recalling how the discipline proved an
inhospitable terrain—even in moments of benevolence—for initial
turn-of-the-millennium efforts to draw insights and inspiration from the
new sociology of childhood, she looks to sources and determinants of
International Relations’ lack of interest in children and childhoods, save
for the very limited and objectified presence they have been permitted
as child soldiers, objects of protection, or homogenized ‘faces’ of abjec-
tion. Less concerned with what children and childhoods might bring to
12 J. M. BEIER
IR, however, the chapter pushes us to think about what IR has to offer
children. This calls for but also goes beyond IR’s own discovery of them.
Probing more deeply on the question of what disciplinary International
Relations has to offer children, Brocklehurst asks in what ways children
might find IR amenable to aiding in their own discovery of international
relations (that is, the worlds of global political life) and International
Relations (the discipline itself). This suggests a direction and projects
that IR would, as yet, find unfamiliar indeed, but for which we are by
now well-positioned to begin preparing more hospitable ground.
Revisiting what is, for IR, the more familiar issue of child sol-
diers (understood primarily as a phenomenon of the Global South), in
Chapter 6, Jana Tabak brings new critical insights to bear in ways that
are instructive as to the investments bound up in dominant discur-
sive framings and the particular kinds of political responses they under-
write. Reprising an approach elaborated in earlier work (Tabak 2020),
she employs the hyphenated “child-soldiers” as a way of foreground-
ing the disruption effected for the boundary between ‘child’ and ‘sol-
dier’ by subjects who are simultaneously both and neither. That is to say,
child-soldiers reside “between” a child subject position that cannot be
reconciled with the commission of political violence and a soldier sub-
ject position that is similarly irreconcilable with prevailing conceptions of
childhood. Framing child-soldiers as ‘emergency,’ Tabak argues that they
are not simply a humanitarian crisis, but a crisis of socio-political order
writ large, and this is revealing of how they are not actually the most
important referent object of the desire to emancipate them and rehabil-
itate not only their childhoods but ‘normal’ childhood itself together
with the ‘normal’ governance of children. We are thus able to glimpse
how, without taking a more critical lens, investigations of child soldiers
as simply an issue area, reproduce governance regimes of childhood and
of modern society wherein recourse to political violence is the preserve
of adults, state institutions aver and regulate the legitimacy of such vio-
lence, and children, as objects of protection, are excluded from political
life.
In Chapter 7, Victoria M. Basham takes the focus to the making of
child soldiers of the Global North. Delving deeply into the martial pol-
itics intersecting particular renderings of childhood and youth in the
historical example of Nazi youth organizations and in contemporary mil-
itary recruitment practices in the United Kingdom, she shows the pivotal
role of ideas about children and childhood in the literal and symbolic
practices and performances that make war possible. While acknowledging

the significant differences between these regimes, Basham draws atten-
tion to the underlying childism of a shared subordination of children’s
wellbeing and life chances to political exigencies of an adult world that
monopolizes political power and authority. Noting that the Nazis rec-
ognized the agency of children but also how particular kinds of political
subjects could be made of them in ways befitting the adult-world pro-
jects of state and Party, the analysis developed in the chapter also signals
the importance of coming to a nuanced view of children’s agency in our
efforts to recover it—one that does not lose sight of children as complex
social actors who, like all human subjects, are co-constituted with the
social worlds of which they are part. There is thus an important lesson
for IR to be read from the militarization of the lives of children of the
Global North wherein there exists a tension between subject positions
amenable to status quo and resistance politics, respectively. In the con-
text of this tension, theorizing their agency as both potentially autono-
mous and a valued object of capture by other actors reveals it to be in
itself a site of geopolitical struggle both by and about children.
Chapter 8 also turns on the militarized aspects of children’s lives
in the Global North. Extending their collaborative Ludic Geopolitics
research project, Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter assess the milita-
rized meaning of a toy action figure licensed by the United Kingdom’s
Ministry of Defence and having palpable correspondence with contem-
poraneous wars in which the UK was directly involved. Led in this explo-
ration by the ‘research puzzle’ posed by the action figure—as opposed to
established theories or disciplinary habits and convention—they take care
to bring the insights of their work to IR such that the former are not
made to conform to spaces and predilections mapped out in advance by
the latter. In so doing, they reveal how the entanglement of childhood
with geopolitics finds children more engaged as political subjects than
even critically-inspired assumptions about children as ‘passive skin’ for
the ascriptions of militarism might appreciate. This leads Woodyer and
Carter to press for child-centered methodological approaches, arguing
for a multi-sited research perspective centering children and children’s
agency, which they elaborate together with advice on the need to keep
sight of the ways in which power circulates and children remain vulnera-
ble in subjecthood. Thus, they advocate for an understanding of children
not merely as having internalized but as engaged in encounters with mil-
itarism, wherein they are active in interpreting, negotiating, and resisting.
14 J. M. BEIER
Chapter 9 is both an exploration of and an exercise in agency, voice,

and participation, bringing Siobhán McEvoy-Levy into conversation with
a group of young colleagues—Cole Byram, Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus
Perry, Trinity Perry, Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore—all with
responsible roles in the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab. Even before its sub-
stantive contribution, then, this chapter is an engaged practice of young
people’s presence, recognizing them as already bearers and producers
of knowledge. Exploring their individual childhood experiences of and
identifications with pop culture icons or heroes, these contributors make
the links between affinities felt and influences rooted in their own rela-
tionships, identities, and experiences. Connecting to and participating
in knowledges about world politics via popular culture, their personal
experiences of violence as well as in collective action peacebuilding and
justice struggles are situated in global context in ways that contribute
to everyday meaning-making about world politics. Thus, through per-
sonal accounts of the use of pop culture narratives and artifacts in the
course of everyday struggles, we can see how children’s interactions with
and through popular culture are also a sphere of their participation in
global politics. Not least in the very structure and approach of the chap-
ter, adopting a “‘world’-traveling” perspective on conversation, mindful
of a plurality of selves across time, space, and encounters, these explora-
tions also address important issues around the ethical dimension of doing
work on childhoods in IR.
Leslie Pruitt’s contribution in Chapter 10 calls for a deeper curiosity
about girls and why it has seemed all too easy for them to be forgot-
ten. Pointing out that the risks and vulnerabilities that confront children
in conflict zones—and elsewhere—are compounded for girls, she notes
the inadequacy of theoretical treatments of childhood and of gender
to accessing girls’ marginalization, leaving them “caught in between.”
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia, the chapter reveals
complex subject positions of girls in the (post)conflict zone, paradoxi-
cally written out of political participation in dominant discourses but
identified in peacebuilding projects as sites of potential for the transfor-
mation of their societies—all without reflexive attention to the formida-
ble structural barriers they face via the dual exclusions of age and gender.
Accordingly, Pruitt argues for a feminist intersectional approach which,
eschewing adult-centric renderings of agency implied in existing critiques
of women’s conflation with children, avoids inadvertent marginalization
of girls. Tending to the complexities of intersectionality offers a means by
which to arrest the subjugation of girls’ unique social locations without
losing sight of what they share in common with/as women and children
when we consider them in analyses of peace and security.
Chapter 11 is offered as a caveat on the trope of the resilient child.
Resilience, which has gained conceptual prominence in a range of con-
texts and across multiple disciplines, including IR, has considerable
promise as an opening for the recovery of the subjecthood of marginal-
ized groups, children among them. At the same time, it entails the risk
of deactivating responsibility toward the vulnerable by the comparatively
privileged and powerful. Working through the example of the unique
social location of children of military families in the Global North, this
chapter inquires into complicated circumstances of vulnerability in the
midst of relative privilege, the interplay of power and subjecthood, and
how resilience work by children is also the work of sustaining and repro-
ducing militarized status quo politics. Still seeing value in the idea of
resilience, the chapter argues for holding it visibly in tension with secu-
rity while linking children’s subjecthood and vulnerability, rather than
treating them as mutually exclusive.
Finally, in Chapter 12, making reference to themes identified in her
2006 call for disciplinary International Relations to approach child-
hood as a “new site of knowledge,” Alison M. S. Watson reflects on
the achievements of the last decade and a half of work on children and
childhoods in IR and on the critical work that remains to be done.
Combining conceptual insights and key tenets developed in childhood
research of recent years with the disappointingly poor pace of progress
on material matters of children’s rights and wellbeing across multiple
global contexts, Watson turns to the rising currency of decolonizing
knowledge practices both to suggest how IR might be made more hos-
pitable to children and childhoods and what children and childhoods
have, in turn, to contribute to decolonial projects in IR. The chapter
concludes, in light of all that is weighed, with a reprised call for children
to be recognized among the most important actors in respect of issues of
current concern to IR scholars, including climate change, development,
displacement, and post-conflict reconciliation—not merely as political
subjects in projects, mobilizations, and resistances, but in the knowledge
practices by which these come to be made intelligible as well.
* * *
Building from the new IR literature on children and childhoods, the
contributors to this volume offer a range of points of entry to wider
conversations. They reveal the important senses in which we have been
16 J. M. BEIER
doing work on childhood in International Relations all along: children

appear as scenery, metonyms, objects of value and of security. Not to be
overlooked, children the world over are, at the same time, ‘doing’ inter-
national relations in myriad ways and contexts of everyday life. Others
are engaged even more purposively in activism and mobilizations around
political projects both status quo and counter-hegemonic in nature. And
yet, despite the importance of the contributions made to date, the IR
literature around these issues remains quite marginal to disciplinary pre-
occupations and childhood is conspicuous only by its absence from the
accustomed subject matters with which International Relations concerns
itself. In addressing this omission, how should we think about childhood
in IR if we hope to avoid ‘add children and stir’ approaches? What are
the implications of children’s (in)visibility in the academic and broader
everyday worlds of global politics? How might we work to make possible
children’s audibility in IR, including as bearers and producers of knowl-
edge with a contribution to make to our disciplinary knowledges? These
are among the bigger questions addressed by contributors in the pages
that follow. And if they, in turn, raise further questions, then the ultimate
aim of the volume to inspire more and wider curiosities about the discov-
ery of children and childhoods in IR will have been fulfilled.
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).
References
Baines, Erin K. 2009. “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic
Ongwen.” Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (2): 163–191. https://doi.
org/10.1017/s0022278x09003796.
Basham, Victoria M. 2015. “Telling Geopolitical Tales: Temporality, Rationality,
and the ‘Childish’ in the Ongoing War for the Falklands-Malvinas Islands.”
Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/2162488
7.2015.1014698.
Beier, J. Marshall, ed. 2011. The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the
Global South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Beier, J. Marshall. 2018. “Ultimate Tests: Children, Rights, and the Politics of
Protection.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10 (1–2): 164–187. https://doi.
org/10.1163/1875984x-01001009.
Beier, J. Marshall. 2019. “Binding Gestures: A Customary Norm Regarding the

UN Convention on the Rights on the Child?” Children’s Geographies 17 (3):
309–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1495315.
Benwell, Matthew C., and Peter Hopkins, eds. 2016. Children, Young People and
Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge.
Berents, Helen. 2016. “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls
and Gendering Representations of Global Politics.” International Feminist
Journal of Politics 18 (4): 513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.20
16.1207463.
Berents, Helen. 2018. Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity
and Peacebuilding in Colombia. New York: Routledge.
Berents, Helen. 2019. “Apprehending the ‘Telegenic Dead’: Considering Images
of Dead Children in Global Politics.” International Political Sociology 13 (2):
145–160. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly036.
Brocklehurst, Helen. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and
International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Brocklehurst, Helen. 2015. “The State of Play: Securities of Childhood—
Insecurities of Children.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 29–46. https://
doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1014679.
Burman, Erica. 1994. Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London:
Routledge.
Chou, Mark, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Catherine Hartung, and Lesley Pruitt. 2017.
Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combating Civic
Deficit? London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Crowe, Nic. 2011. “‘We Die for the Glory of the Emperor’: Young People,
Warhammer, and Role- Playing War Online.” In The Militarization of
Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, edited by J. Marshall Beier,
153–173. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
D’Costa, Bina, ed. 2016. Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia.
New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.
Faulkner, Joanne, and Magdalena Zolkos, eds. 2016. Critical Childhood Studies
and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child. Lanham:
Lexington Books.
Gilligan, Chris. 2009. “‘Highly Vulnerable?’ Political Violence and the Social
Construction of Traumatized Children.” Journal of Peace Research 46 (1):
119–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343308098407.
Hart, Jason. 2008. “Displaced Children’s Participation in Political Violence:
Towards Greater Understanding of Mobilisation.” Conflict, Security and
Development 8 (3): 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678800802323308.
Holzscheiter, Anna. 2010. Children’s Rights in International Politics: The
Transformative Power of Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
18 J. M. BEIER
Holzscheiter, Anna. 2018. “Affectedness, Empowerment and Norm

Contestation—Children and Young People as Social Agents in International
Politics.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 3 (5–6): 645–663.
https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1600382.
Huynh, Kim, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo. 2015. Children and Global
Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jacob, Cecilia. 2014. Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in
Cambodia and Myanmar. London: Routledge.
Jacob, Cecilia. 2015. “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security
Studies.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (1): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080
/21624887.2015.1014675.
James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1990. Constructing and Reconstructing
Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London:
Falmer Press.
Jenks, Chris. 1996. Childhood. New York: Routledge.
Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2011. “Horror and Hope: (Re)presenting Militarised
Children in Global North-South Relations.” Third World Quarterly 32 (4):
725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.567005.
Lee-Koo, Katrina. 2013. “Not Suitable for Children: The Politicisation of
Conflict-Affected Children in Post-2001 Afghanistan.” Australian Journal of
International Affairs 67 (4): 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718
.2013.803031.
Linde, Robyn. 2016. The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion
of Norms and Law Against the Child Death Penalty. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Macmillan, Lorraine. 2009. “The Child Soldier in North-South
Relations.” International Political Sociology 3 (1): 36–52. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00062.x.
Martuscelli, Patricia Nabuco, and Rafael Duarte Villa. 2018. “Child Soldiers as
Peace-Builders in Colombian Peace Talks Between the Government and the
FARC–EP.” Conflict, Security & Development 18 (5): 387–408. https://doi.
org/10.1080/14678802.2018.1511164.
Matthews, Gareth B. 1994. The Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán, ed. 2006. Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and
Post-accord Peace Building. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
McEvoy-Levy, Siobhán. 2018. Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading
the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
McNamee, Sally, and Julie Seymour. 2013. “Towards a Sociology of 10–12
Year Olds? Emerging Methodological Issues in the ‘New’ Social Studies
of Childhood.” Childhood 20 (2): 156–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0907568212461037.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and

Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 33–59. https://doi.org/10.1080
/1354570022000077926.
Peterson, V. Spike, ed. 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of
International Relations Theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Pruitt, Lesley J. 2013. Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender, and Change. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Qvortrup, Jens. 1994. “Childhood Matters: An Introduction.” In Childhood
Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Policy, edited by Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta
Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta, and Helmut Wintersberger, 1–24. Aldershot:
Avebury.
Rosen, David M. 2005. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and
Terrorism. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Singer, Peter. 1997. “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” New
Internationalist 289. Accessed 20 November 2018. http://www.newint.org/
features/1997/04/05/drowning.
Tabak, Jana. 2020. The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for
Progress. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
United Nations, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social
Affairs. 2017. World Population Prospects, The 2017 Revision. New York:
United Nations.
Uprichard, Emma. 2008. “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children,
Childhood and Temporality.” Children & Society 22 (4): 303–313. https://
doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x.
Watson, Alison M. S. 2004. “Seen But Not Heard: The Role of the Child in
International Political Economy.” New Political Economy 9 (1): 3–21.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1356346042000190358.
Watson, Alison M. S. 2006. “Children and International Relations: A New Site
of Knowledge?” Review of International Studies 32 (2): 237–250. https://
doi.org/10.1017/s0260210506007005.
Watson, Alison M. S. 2009. The Child in International Political Economy: A
Place at the Table. London: Routledge.
Woodyer, Tara, and Sean Carter. 2018. “Domesticating the Geopolitical:
Rethinking Popular Geopolitics through Play.” Geopolitics (online in advance
of print): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1527769.
CHAPTER 2
Decolonizing Childhood
in International Relations
Katrina Lee-Koo
Introduction
Childhood is often invoked to convey meaning in global politics.
Conjure up an image of the second Indochina (Vietnam) war of the
1960s and 1970s, the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, the so-called
diamond wars of the 1990s, the recent Syrian refugee crisis, or the
conflict in Yemen and chances are you will recall a powerful image or
statement regarding a child. From the iconic 1972 photograph of
nine-year-old Kim Phúc running naked down the street after a napalm
attack on her Vietnamese village, to the 2015 image of the lifeless body
of three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach, the experiences
of children and our understanding of childhood filters our interpretation
of global politics. It helps us to cast political actors as ‘good’ or ‘bad’
and provides us with a compass that orients us towards what we imagine
to be moral, merciful, and humane politics. In particular, where we see
that childhood has been lost—because children are carrying AK-47s,
have bellies protruding from famine, or are orphaned in refugee camps—
we know that there has been an aberration of care in global politics.
K. Lee-Koo (*)
Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: Katrina.Leekoo@monash.edu
© The Author(s) 2020 21

J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_2
22 K. LEE-KOO
This can give us pause to question the direction of global politics, and
provide justification for the need to take action.
But, of course, children are more than just a series of images and sym-
bols that help global audiences to interpret and respond to global politi-
cal events. Children—as human beings—are mutually constitutive of every
aspect of global politics. They contribute to its operation, and are shaped
by its machinations. Like adults, they are witnesses, victims, and agents to
every single global event. Children were among the protestors in Tahrir
Square on the eve of the Arab Spring, they throw rocks at Israeli tanks
in Gaza, they demand gun control in the United States, and agitate for
global action on climate change. As such, they shape global politics just
as global politics shapes them. Yet the disciplinary study of International
Relations pays little attention to the relationships children have with
global politics. Instead, the discipline generally prefers to place them apart
from adults who are seen as the only legitimate agents of International
Relations. In fact, as a discipline, International Relations is only recently
beginning to demonstrate a curiosity towards the roles that children and
childhood play in shaping global politics and our understanding of it.
The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the existing body
of research that shatters the myth that children and childhood do not
meaningfully inform the disciplinary understanding of International
Relations. In doing so, the goal of the chapter is to demonstrate the
value of considering children and childhood as relevant and useful in the
study of IR. To do this, this chapter begins by making two important
distinctions: the first is between the disciplinary study of International
Relations and the practices of global politics; the second is between the
discursive constructions of childhood as something that may be quite
different from the lived experiences of children as embodied actors and
agents in global politics. These distinctions are necessary in exploring
what the chapter identifies as three inter-related, but nonetheless quite
distinct, sets of politics: the lived experiences of children in global poli-
tics; the discursive construction of childhood in global politics; and, the
consideration given to both in the discipline of International Relations.
With these distinctions in mind, this chapter argues that there is a
dualistic approach to ‘the child.’ Quite simply, this duality exists because
children can be simultaneously powerful and powerless. As suggested
above, children shape global politics. With 26% of the world’s popula-
tion under the age of fifteen, how could they not? Children demonstrate
both positive and negative agency in every crisis point around the world;
2 DECOLONIZING CHILDHOOD IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23
their ordinary and extraordinary actions shape the course of complex

politics in their local, and global, communities. But they are also power-
ful because of what they represent. The imagery and symbolism of chil-
dren—particularly children that are under threat—has an emotive power
that shapes global attitudes and political decision-making. However, at
the other end of the spectrum children and childhood are frequently ren-
dered powerless and invisible. Children have been virtually ignored by
the discipline of International Relations and largely considered as only
ever victims of global politics. The persistence of this dualism—where
children are influential but not recognized as such—does the discipline
of IR a disservice. Addressing this ongoing blindness by the discipline
provides opportunities for an inclusive and complete account of global
politics, as well as pause for a critical reflection on how the discipline
conducts its analysis.
The project to render children visible to the discipline of IR is accom-
panied by problems, pitfalls, and promises. The chapter begins with an
examination of how and why the discipline has come to neglect children
and childhood in its theorizing. It suggests that the problems lie with
how dominant notions of childhood are constructed by the liberal tradi-
tion, and how this, in turn, has encouraged the marginalization of chil-
dren and childhood in IR’s theorizing. Second, the chapter details how
and why this miscalculation generates pitfalls for children. Assumptions
regarding children allow for their political manipulation in global politics
in ways the study of International Relations fails to scrutinise. However,
the capacity of critical approaches to IR in particular to demonstrate
how the concept and experiences of childhood shape global politics can
challenge the discipline to take children seriously. This offers a promise
that children can be emancipated from the enslavement they have experi-
enced at the hands of the discipline. Finally, the chapter assesses the real-
istic prospects of emancipating children from both the disciplinary study
of IR, and the practice of global politics.
Problems: Failure to Recognize the Social

Construction of Childhood
The dominant approaches to International Relations do not see child-
hood as a relevant or useful concept in explaining global political action,
nor do they see children as meaningful political actors capable of shaping
24 K. LEE-KOO
global political events. This—quite simply—is at the heart of the prob-

lems regarding why children are marginalized by IR. This is not to say
that the discipline ignores children, or sees them as worthless, but rather
that the discipline does not see them as either actors or units of analysis
that can explain the course of global politics. This attitude largely stems
from two traditions in IR theorizing. The first is the biases inherent in
liberal political theorizing about political actors and action, and the sec-
ond is the dominance of the Realist tradition in IR.
As a concept, dominant views of childhood draw upon the Western
liberal philosophical tradition. The liberal approach relies heavily upon a
rights-based, legally-oriented, and individualist framing of childhood (see
Brocklehurst 2006; Watson 2006). This encourages a universal approach
to childhood which seeks to identify all children through a common set
of characteristics. The primary characteristic is age, but it also assumes
that children must be seen as separate from adults because of less devel-
oped social, cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities. Tamar Shapiro
(1999: 716) notes that “our basic concept of a child is that of a person
who in some fundamental way is not yet developed, but who is in the
process of developing.” In this sense, children are the negative space that
is unoccupied by adults and can be defined in part through what adults
are not. Accordingly, children are typified by their absence of adult rights
such the right to vote, the right to stand for public office, and the right
to join the military, among others, but also by their absence of responsi-
bilities in liberal societies which may include legal and moral obligations
to one’s community through taxation or providing care and financial
support for family members. In return, children are afforded their own
unique set of rights which is specifically designed to ensure their protec-
tion, allow for their development, and preserve their ‘innocence’ for as
long as possible. Globally, these are most well-recognized in the 1989
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), with
currently 196 parties signed to it. Under the Convention, children’s
rights include the right to an education (Article 28), the right to ade-
quate care (Article 19) and where possible parental care (Article 7), and
the right to play (Article 31). While these are couched in the language
of rights, they are nonetheless animated by an overall ethic of protect-
ing and separating children from what is considered to be adult politics,
expectations, and behaviours.
There are undeniably benefits to the liberal imagining of childhood.
The universal approach enables the codification of rules regarding the
treatment of children which, when enforced, can ensure their consistent

and equal protection from the physical, emotional, and structural harms
present in the adult world. For liberals, benefits to an overarching global
convention also lie in its potential to trump localized practices which the
broader global community may consider an aberration of children’s well-
being. According to the liberal approach, issues such child marriage, the
genital mutilation of female children, and child labour can be challenged
at local levels through appeal to a universal liberal imagining of what
childhood should be. For liberals, this is a powerful weapon that can set
a pragmatic and common set of standards for child protection. However,
despite the appeal offered by its claim to be both universal and objec-
tive, it remains, nonetheless, an arbitrary definition of childhood that sti-
fles the suggestion that childhood is a subjective experience. After all, as
Jason Hart and Bex Tyrer (2006) argue, childhood is not a lived experi-
ence that follows a universal sequence in accordance to biological forces.
It is, instead, a complex interplay of biological, individual, social, and
cultural factors. The biological and individual factors see human beings
develop at different rates while the social and cultural factors shape local
conceptualizations of children’s experiences and when children become
adults. Therefore, despite the liberal promise, there is no universal or
common point at which a child unequivocally becomes an adult.
If childhood is a social construction, then this means that there are
many imaginings of what it means to be a child beyond the liberal con-
ception outlined above. Helen Brocklehurst (2006: 11) notes that
non-Western societies conceptualize childhood in ways that bear little
resemblance to the liberal model. These include approaches where chil-
dren’s lives are full of responsibilities and expectations to families and
communities, and where the transition from childhood to adulthood
occurs following a biological event (such as puberty) or community cer-
emony (such as marriage or initiation ceremony). In such circumstances,
childhood is not an individual, legal, universal, or obligation-free state
of being, and can be a subjective experience attached to specific children
and contingent on local experiences. Even within liberal approaches,
there is space to recognize that the concept of childhood is socially con-
structed. How liberal societies ‘see’ a child, and the points at which
children develop those qualities that are associated with adulthood can
change significantly within liberal societies and over time. This is even
evident in legal frameworks where liberal nations (and states or territories
within nations) might differ on the appropriate ages by which children
26 K. LEE-KOO
can marry, consume alcohol, drive, join the army, be charged with a
criminal offence, or have sex. The difference in legislation cannot be
explained by biology but rather by the values and experiences of the soci-
ety, including socio-economic class, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
Despite there being widespread acceptance that childhood is a fluid
concept, the liberal approach has remained dominant. Consequently, it
has shaped how childhood has been imagined in the West, and strongly
influenced the model that has been developed globally through docu-
ments like the UN Convention. While the potential benefits of this were
outlined above, Vanessa Pupavac (2001) argues that this has had a neg-
ative impact upon other ways of practicing childhood. She claims that it
has not erased or consumed other concepts of childhood, but rather set
a Western standard (which has assumed strong moral weighting) against
which other conceptions of childhood will be judged and ultimately
found wanting (Pupavac 2001: 102). In fact, there has been widespread
critique of the liberal-inspired UN Convention on the grounds that it
establishes culturally and politically specific experiences of childhood as
the norm. Alison M. S. Watson (2006: 231) notes that, “in many ways,
then, the existing body of international law adheres to an idealised
notion of childhood, which employs an (affluent) Western view of it, as
opposed to one that could manage to incorporate an actual portrayal of
(poor) children in the South.” According to this critique, children whose
experiences are outside this standard are seen as aberrations and their
childhoods marked as abnormal or even immoral. Similarly, societies
which are unable or unwilling to practice the liberal model of childhood
are marked as uncivilized or undeveloped (see, for example, Pupavac
2001; Cheney 2005: 38; Watson 2006; Carpenter 2009: 39; Beier
2018: 181). As will be discussed in further detail below, David Campbell
(2012) and others argue that this creates the foundation for metaphors
by which cultures, nations and even entire regions are depicted as either
being child-like, or barbaric because of their failure to maintain ‘normal’
childhood.
Critiques of the liberal vision of childhood also argue that it confuses
the idealized perception of children as apolitical beings with a belief that
this is their inherent nature. In this sense, it has encouraged a vision that
children should not just be free of political obligations, but are actu-
ally incapable of undertaking them (see Huynh 2015: 37–42). Further
feminising their identities, it securely locates them in the private, or
domestic sphere, outside the realm of public political action. The cul-
tural attitude within liberal states is that children should be protected
from, rather than exposed to politics, and that politics is beyond their
comprehension. This was demonstrated, for example, in November 2018
following a n ation-wide protest by Australian school students for action
on climate change. In response to their calls, Australian Prime Minister
Scott Morrison declared in Parliament that children should undertake
more learning and less activism in school. Such statements reinforce ideas
that children’s age and apolitical status render them incapable of usefully
contributing to political life. J. Marshall Beier (2018: 174) argues that
“constructed outside of political subjecthood and therefore outside of
political life, children are positioned as the quintessential innocents…”.
As will be discussed further below, the labelling of innocence—and even
defencelessness—makes children powerful, evocative, and unquestiona-
ble symbols in global politics.
Closely aligned with the idea that children are innocent of pol-
itics, is the notion that children are also victims of politics who are in
need of protection. If the liberal goal is to separate children from the
political realm, then any engagement that children have with global
politics—such as during times of conflict or crisis—renders them vulner-
able. This is why images of children in political crisis can instigate the
often-problematic politics of protection. Campbell (2012: 82) argues

that “the efficacy of the child as symbol flows from a number of associ-
ated cultural assumptions: children are abstracted from culture and soci-
ety, granted an innate innocence, seen to be dependent [and] requiring
protection.” Indeed, it is difficult to deny that children who become
entrapped in conflict, forced migration, slavery, or poverty are vic-
tims of global politics and should be afforded some kind of protection.
However, the constellation of innocence, victimhood, and protection
denies children agency by setting an all-encompassing image whereby
children are only ever victims. This blanket portrayal masks any claims
they may make to political agency. Watson (2015: 47) describes victim-
hood as a totalizing concept whereby one cannot reasonably be consid-
ered a victim and simultaneously enact rational agency. Similarly, Beier
(2018: 166–167) notes that “notwithstanding what may oft-times be
quite conspicuous performances of agency, inscriptions of victimhood
have an inherently objectifying effect, reducing those so inscribed to
28 K. LEE-KOO
passive skin on which the centred subjecthood of the perpetrators of vio-

lence is performed and, in consequence of which violence, the imperative
subjecthood of would-be protectors is mustered.”
In addition to liberal theorizing, the Realist tradition has had a
significant impact upon the way that the study of IR has developed,
particularly in relation to state behaviour in the international sys-
tem (see Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008). The dominance of the liberal
approach to childhood, and its influence upon Realist theorizing, has
collectively encouraged the discipline of IR to consider children and
childhood as apolitical and therefore irrelevant analytical units. This
explains why children have been silenced by the Realist tradition. This
tradition, in its classical, neo-realist, defensive, and offensive formats,
responds to power as the primary shaper of global political life. Realist
approaches see the major trends and shifts of global anarchy typically
moving along the currents of hard power and state action. This is far
from the everyday actions of children who—we are told—are located
in private space and without agency or intent to affect the mac-
ro-machinations of global politics. In seeing no evidence that children
routinely determine the fate of states, they are dismissed as irrelevant
units of analysis.
This does not mean that children are completely absent from the
tradition’s zeitgeist. It is not that Realists do not care about the fate of
children or consider them wholly irrelevant. On the contrary, the Realist
tradition identifies the raison d’être of the state (and, indeed, its theo-
rizing) as being the provision of state security and global stability. The
very purpose of the accumulation of power and geo-strategic advantage
is to enable the state to provide for—among other things—the wellbeing
and safety of children. For Realists, the best way for states to be able to
feed, clothe, educate, and care for children is through its own strength
vis-à-vis other states within the international system. In this sense, chil-
dren are not wholly absent from traditional IR theorizing, they are just
not visible as powerful or meaningful actors or agents in public and polit-
ical life. Conceptualizing childhood as a state without agency or politi-
cal subjecthood undermines any curiosity that IR might have about the
relationship between children and global politics, whether mediated by
the state or not. This has allowed the discipline to become blinded to the
ways that children and global politics/International Relations are mutu-
ally constitutive of one another.
Pitfalls: International Relations

as a Constraint Upon the Rights of the Child
Putting aside traditional approaches to thinking about IR, this chapter

now turns to examining two ways in which the mutual constitution of
children and global politics takes place. The first is the ways in which the
concept of childhood—through discursive construction—is mobilized as
a narrative feature of global political life. The second is an examination of
how the failure to afford children agency blinds the discipline to the ways
that children do in fact shape global politics.
As argued above, both liberal and Realist approaches position chil-
dren as in need of protection from the excesses of global politics. It is
the same mechanism that allows the concept of childhood to become
simultaneously powerful. As suggested in this chapter’s introduction, the
discursive positioning of images, accounts, and symbols regarding chil-
dren and childhood can play a central role in narrating global politics
and conditioning state behaviour. It does this in a number of ways. First,
it provides casting notes on who are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors in global
politics depending upon how they are seen to treat children. This facil-
itates metaphoric tropes that can create what Campbell (2012) refers to
as imagined geographies. These are easily recognizable political binaries
that distinguish between those who hurt children (even if it is uninten-
tional), and those who protect them. For Campbell (2007: 358) these
binaries emerge in International Relations around distinctions between
East/West, North/South, civilised/barbaric and developed/undevel-
oped. This is why, as Laura Suski (2009: 202) argues, “children sit at the
centre of many appeals and programs deemed ‘humanitarian’.” Similarly,
Beier (2018: 182) argues that “childhood continues to circulate through
the visual economies of humanitarian disaster in predictable ways, rein-
forcing the hubristic mappings of North/South, protector/protected,
subject/object, and adult/child.” In this way, the ‘imagined geogra-
phies’ and ‘visual economies’ are not really about children, their suffer-
ing, and their rights. The value of children’s suffering is in scripting state
identity and emboldening state action. For example, in her research on
babies born of wartime sexual violence, R. Charli Carpenter (2009: 28)
argues that narratives developed around ‘rape babies’ are not used with
the intent to invoke children’s rights, but rather used to build a narrative
about the Bosnian war that revealed it as “simultaneously horrific and
distant from the ‘civilised’ industrialised West.”
30 K. LEE-KOO
Similarly, discursive deployments recounting the abuse of children are

central factors in providing moral justifications for military intervention.
This technique can be routinely seen in liberal Western discourses that
rely upon messaging about child abuse to support military action against
those deemed to be violent and immoral. For example, on the eve of the
2001 U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, then-First Lady Laura Bush
addressed the nation, noting the manner in which the Taliban engaged
in the savage denial of children’s rights. She described her radio address
as “kicking off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against
women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it
supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban” (Bush 2001). In her persistent ref-
erences to children (and women and children), Bush highlighted points
of contrast between the Taliban’s and our own treatment of children
in terms of their access to healthcare, education, and the right to play.
Demonstrating why the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is a humane
rather than strategic or vengeful response to 9/11, Bush noted “all of
us have an obligation to speak out. We may come from different back-
grounds and faiths – but parents the world over love our children.” In
April 2017, current U.S. President Donald Trump similarly invoked the
defence of childhood innocence in justifying U.S. military strikes against
Syria. In response to Syria’s alleged chemical weapons attacks—while less
scripted than Mrs. Bush—Trump stated: “When you kill innocent chil-
dren, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so
lethal – people were shocked to hear what gas it was. That crosses many,
many lines, beyond a red line, many, many lines” (Calamur 2018). The
abuse of children has been used throughout history to lend moral justifi-
cation to political action.
However, the power of these discursive constructions relies upon the
condition that the children themselves remain static and mute—seen
but not heard. The discourses are powerful in part because the chil-
dren remain wholly subjected. Their suffering is presented to global
audiences as packaged politics, with the meaning pre-determined and
self-evident (see Butler 2005: 822–827). Moreover, the children are

presented as small and helpless, in contrast to the politics that surround
them (Lee-Koo 2018: 53). This is particularly the case with images,
where children are static and can appear wholly dominated: the three-
year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi is tiny against the wide ocean that
has expelled him; Palestinian boys are dwarfed by the tanks that bear
down on them, and the famine stricken child is no match for the waiting
vulture.1 These children have no capacity to speak and instead need to

be spoken for. Yet, long after the action is over, there is little consistent
evidence that children’s rights have been successfully defended. Despite
Mrs. Bush’s pleadings, children in Afghanistan continue to face major
barriers to their education (see Lee-Koo 2013; UNICEF 2020) and,
despite President Trump’s outrage, in excess of 40% of those displaced in
Syria are children.
The above discussion shows how the discursive construction of chil-
dren can influence the practice and understanding of global politics.
Yet it is not just the construction of childhood that should matter to IR
scholars, it is also the experiences of childhood that can be insightful.
The second way in which children shape IR is through their everyday
actions. In every subfield of International Relations, the ordinary and
extraordinary actions and experiences of children shape events and out-
comes. Encouragingly, recent research by IR scholars has begun to build
a rich literature that evidences the ways in which global politics is shaped
by the actions of children. This action comes in a variety of forms, from
overt activism to subtle and everyday forms of resistance or engagement.
Regardless of the form, scholars have begun to trace the impact that
these actions have upon the course of all areas of global politics, includ-
ing peace, conflict, the operation of the international political economy,
action for the global environment, and others.
Central to this project is re-opening the question of what constitutes
agency in global politics. John Vasquez argued in the mid-1990s that
the value of the post-positivist turn in IR was a questioning of the sup-
posed objective laws that had dominated the discipline. He noted that
for much of traditional IR, what posed as “truth” was actually “choice”
(Vasquez 1995: 220). This came with the acknowledgement that the
structures and issues—in short, the politics—that we face are in fact
the product of choices that were made either consciously or uncon-
sciously by participants in the international order. When translated to
thinking about children, there is nothing natural about children’s mar-
ginalization from political life, it is rather a consequence of political
choice. Nonetheless, the question of what constitutes political agency in
International Relations and the role that it plays in determining political
outcomes remains contested (see Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008: 21), not
least of all when it comes to children. For the purposes of this chapter
however, agency will be defined quite simply as “the capacity of individ-
uals to make independent decisions about one’s life, and to seek to enact
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
nothing produced by the sculptors, painters, and ornamentists who
were employed on the decoration of those great buildings which
even the Jewish prophets could not help admiring, while they abused
the princes who built them and the gods to whom they were
consecrated. The earliest Greek travellers, such as Herodotus and
Ctesias, only saw the ruins of these magnificent structures and of
their rich adornment of enamels, frescoes, and sculptured figures;
and yet how great was their wonder! We can hardly reflect without
emotion upon what we have lost in great works in stone and metal
carried out in the style of which certain fragments from Tello and a
few terra-cotta statuettes give us some faint idea.[230]
Fig. 111.—The Caillou Michaux, obverse. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.

Fig. 112.—The Caillou Michaux, reverse. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
That such works did once exist we are told by the Greek
historians. Herodotus, after having described the temple of Bel and
the sanctuary on its summit in which no image of the deity was set
up, goes on, “In this temple at Babylon there is another sanctuary
lower down, where a great seated statue of Zeus may be seen.[231]
Near this statue there is a large table of gold, the throne and its
steps are of the same material. The whole, according to the
Chaldæans, is worth eight hundred talents of gold ... at one time the
sacred inclosure also contained a statue of massive gold twelve
cubits high. I did not see it. I content myself with repeating what the
Chaldæans told me about it. Darius, the son of Hystaspes, formed a
project to carry it off, but he did not dare to execute it. Xerxes, the
son of Darius, caused the priest to be put to death by whom the
enterprise was opposed, and took possession of the statue.” We
here have the evidence of an eye-witness. The seated statue of Bel,
without being of the colossal size ascribed by the Chaldæans to the
image destroyed by Darius, must yet, if we may judge from the
expression of Herodotus, have been larger than nature. We may
gather some notion as to its pose and general appearance from
certain figures carved upon the cylinders (Fig. 40), just as, in
Greece, the more famous and venerable of her religious statues
were reproduced upon coins and gems. As to this Babylonian statue,
the one doubt we have relates to the value put upon it by the
Chaldæans. Had the statue and its surroundings really been of
massive gold, would the Persians have spared it when the other was
overthrown and broken up? It is possible that in spite of the
historian’s assertion the work he describes was only gilded bronze.
And as for the image twelve cubits high, we may express the
same doubts. Ctesias seems to have received better information as
to how these figures were made than Herodotus, and, through
Diodorus, he tells us that they consisted of metal plates beaten into
shape with the hammer.[232] Whether Ctesias or his informants did
or did not exaggerate their true dimensions (Diodorus speaks of a
Bel forty feet high), or whether these figures were of gold or gilded
brass, is of comparatively slight importance; we are interested chiefly
in the information he gives as to the method of fabrication. Ever
since the discovery of the Balawat gates proved to what a height the
student art of Assyria carried the manipulation of metal by the
repoussé process, we have had no difficulty in believing that the
sculptors of Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar could build up
images of colossal size and fine decorative effect by means of
plaques united with rivets. If we may believe the rest of Diodorus’s
description, the Chaldæan artists combined the glory of gold and
silver with the purity of ivory and the bright and varied colours of
precious stones. And all this we see good reason to admit when we
have examined at the British Museum those ivories in which lapis
lazuli and other substances of the same kind even now fill up the
hollows of the design, while the field still glitters here and there with
some last fragments of the gold with which it was once incrusted.
The skilful workmen who discovered the secret of this kind of
mosaic, may very well have learnt to combine these beautiful
materials so well that the statues upon which they were used would
even have rivalled the chryselephantine masterpieces of Phidias; in
richness and harmony of tones, at least, if not in nobility and purity of
form.
§ 6. Assyrian Sculpture.
Assyrian sculpture is far from leading us into the remote centuries

from which some of the Chaldæan works must date. It had no period
of infancy or childish effort. The Semites of the north were the pupils
of their southern brothers, from whom they obtained an art already
mature. The oldest known Assyrian monument dates from the reign
of Tiglath-Pileser I., or about the end of the twelfth century b.c.; it is a
bas-relief chiselled upon a rock near the sources of the Tigris, about
fifty miles north of Diarbekir and near the village of Korkhar. It
represents the king standing upright, his right hand extended and his
left holding a sceptre; at present, however, we only know it by the
very poor sketch given by Professor Rawlinson.[233] It is almost the
only monument extant from the time when the capital of the
monarchy was on the site now known as Kaleh-Shergat. One other
may be named, the female torso in the British Museum, to which we
have already referred;[234] on it the name of Assurbilkala, who
succeeded Tiglath-Pileser I., may be read.
The monumental history of Assyria really begins two centuries
later, with the great buildings erected by Assurnazirpal at Calah
(Nimroud), his favourite residence. Assyrian art then reached a level
that, speaking generally, it never surpassed. In the following
centuries it innovated, it became more complex and certainly more
refined, but it produced nothing essentially nobler than certain
Nimroud bas-reliefs, in which the king is seated among his great
officers or before his gods, and always in the attitude of prayer and
sacrifice. We have already given several examples of these reliefs
(Vol. I. Fig. 4, and above, Figs. 15 and 64); we may here add one
more (Fig. 113). Leaning on his bow with his left hand, the king,
richly dressed, lifts in his right the patera whose contents he is about
to pour as a libation to the deity. Facing him stands a gigantic
eunuch, who waves over his master’s head one of those fly-flappers
that, with the parasol, have always been among the insignia of
Oriental royalty (see Plate X.).
These figures are rather short in their proportions, and the
muscular development of their arms, which alone are bare, is
violently exaggerated, but yet as a whole the work has a certain
grandeur and nobility. The lines are well balanced. Both the king and
his attendant seem fully impressed with the gravity of the rite over
which they are busy. There is dignity in their attitudes, but no
stiffness; their gestures are easy and expressive without being too
much accented. In our engraving we have only been able to include
the two isolated figures, in the original there are several more all
occupied over the same rite. Even the British Museum has only a
few fragments from these vast compositions. For those who saw
them in their original completeness, well lighted and distributed in
their right order along the walls of spacious saloons, they must have
seemed majestic enough.
In his palace decorations the Assyrian artist set himself to free his
figures from all unnecessary surroundings and to simplify his theme
as much as he could. But we must make a distinction between those
reliefs that may be called historical, such as the pictures of battles
and sieges, and those in which the king is shown in the
accomplishment of some duty belonging to his position, and part of
his daily or periodical routine. It is to the latter class that the most
carefully-executed works belong. In these no particular locality is
specified; like that of the Panathenaic procession, it is left
undetermined, and the mind of the spectator is silently invited to fill it
in for himself. Those who frequented the palace were accustomed to
see the king upon his throne, or traversing the wide quadrangle, or
pouring libations on the altar that stood in front of the temple; so that
they had no difficulty in imagining all that the sculptor had left unsaid.
In the hunting pictures the same method was followed with but little
modification. A flat surface suggesting the unbroken expanse of the
desert, was the only indication of a locus in quo.
Fig. 113.—Assurnazirpal offering a libation. Height 7 feet 8
inches. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
It would have been difficult, or rather impossible, to adhere to
such a rule in those reliefs in which the actual incidents of military
expeditions were retraced. In them the sculptor thought it necessary
to insert such details as would permit the various episodes
commemorated to be identified. One of the simplest means of
insuring the desired result was to render not only buildings, such as
castles and fortified towns, but also the natural features of the scene,
with the greatest possible truth. This the Assyrian artist did, as a rule,
with excellent judgment. Thus, if an action or campaign had been
fought in a mountainous country, he made use of a kind of lattice-
work or reticulation, which every spectator thoroughly understood
(see Vol. I. Figs. 39 and 43); if among forests, he introduced
numerous trees among his figures. He made little attempt to
distinguish between one kind of tree and another, but in most cases
employed forms as conventional as that by which he indicated hills
(Fig. 114).
Fig. 114.—Tree on a river bank;

from Layard.
One of the chief merits and most striking features of Assyrian
sculpture is, then, its power of selection, its rejection of all that is
superfluous, its comprehension, in fact, of the true spirit and special
conditions of the art. The field has none of those encumbering
accessories which, under the pretext of furnishing and defining, only
serve, so to speak, to take away air and elbow-room from the
figures. When certain complementary features are required to make
the subject clear, the sculptor introduces them, but he never gives
more than is strictly necessary. He never gives way to the temptation
to exaggerate such details, or treats them as if they had an interest
and importance of their own. Such sobriety found its reward. His
work no doubt remained faulty in many respects and inferior to that
of his Egyptian forerunner, still more to that of his Greek successor;
but yet it had an air of frankness, of pride and dignity, to which the
more complex and superficially more skilful compositions of the
following epoch too seldom attained.
The good qualities of this early Assyrian school are no less
conspicuous in the colossal figures with which the doorways of
palaces and temples were decorated. The head of the winged bull
has nowhere a more lofty expression or one more full of dignity than
at Nimroud (see below, Fig. 133). The chisels of these northern
artists never created anything more bold, energetic, and lifelike than
the figures from the small temple built by Assurnazirpal (Vol. I. Fig.
188); we need only mention the colossal lion in the British Museum
(Plate VIII.) and the grimacing demon whom a beneficent god seems
to be expelling from the sanctuary in spite of his threats and grinning
teeth.[235]
And yet this art which is so masterly in some respects is very
primitive and naïve in others. We cannot help being amazed, for
instance, at the wide band of wedges that the scribe has been
allowed to cut across all the lines and contours left by the sculptor.
This proceeding is to be explained, of course, by the essentially
historical and anecdotic character of Assyrian art, but nevertheless it
betrays the contempt for æsthetic effect which is one of the
characteristics of archaic art in Assyria. This feature is by no means
without importance, and Sir Henry Layard seems to us to have been
ill advised in deliberately suppressing it. In his otherwise faithful
reproductions of the best preserved among the bas-reliefs of
Assurnazirpal he has everywhere left out the continuous band of
inscription which runs across them at about two-thirds of their height.
By such a proceeding he has sensibly modified their decorative
value.[236]
We must be on our guard against attributing such primitive
simplicity to inexperience in the use of the chisel. In the finest works
of later years that instrument was never wielded with more assured
skill than in the delicate carvings in which the embroidery on the
royal robes are reproduced. We have already put several of these
motives before our readers; in Fig. 115 we give a last exquisite
morsel. It shows a winged lion with the head of a woman, and a king
or priest who holds one of her paws in his left hand, while with his
right he seems to threaten her with a mace.
Fig. 115.—Detail from the royal robe of Assurnazirpal; from Layard.

Such dexterity as this is not to be seen in works in the round (see
Fig. 60). But with the reign of Assurnazirpal commences another
series of royal monuments in which the artist, not being compelled to
quit work in relief, felt himself more at home. We refer to those
round-headed steles on which the standing figure of the king is
relieved against a flat ground bordered by a raised edge. An
inscription is engraved sometimes upon the bed of the relief,
sometimes on the reverse of the stele. An effigy of Assurnazirpal
belonging to this class is now in the British Museum. It was
discovered still standing in the entrance to one of the temples built
by that sovereign on the platform of Calah. Before the stele there
was an altar similar to that shown on page 256 of our first volume.
This altar is also in the British Museum.[237] From the existence of
these steles it has been concluded, with no little probability, that the
Assyrian kings, or at least some of them, received divine honours
after their deaths. We have chosen that of Samas-vul II. for
reproduction, on account of its good condition (Fig. 116). It differs but
little from the stele of Assurnazirpal. High up in the field and in front
of the head may be noticed symbols like those on the land marks
(see Figs. 111, 112, and 143). The king’s right hand is raised in the
attitude of adoration. In his left he holds a sceptre, with a ball of ivory
or metal at one end and a tassel at the other. These steles must
have been set up in great numbers. We find them represented in the
reliefs (Vol. I. Figs. 42 and 112, and Plate XII.) and upon cylinders
(ib. Fig. 69). They were raised as a sign of annexation in conquered
countries, and an invocation engraved upon the stone put them
under the protection of the Assyrian gods, who were charged with
the punishment of any who might lay hands upon them.[238]
In the British Museum there are fragments of a sculptured obelisk
on which the wars and hunts of Assurnazirpal are figured. It is taller
than that of his son Shalmaneser II., being nearly ten feet high, but
as the material is a soft limestone, it is in far worse preservation; we
only mention it to show that Assyrian art was in possession of all its
resources in the time of this king.
Under none of the princes who reigned at Calah did sculpture
show any sensible change of style; but yet, perhaps, in certain
passages of the Balawat gates we may recognize the first signs of a
tendency that was to become strongly marked under the Sargonids.
The field of the relief there contains a far greater number of
picturesque and explanatory details than the great bas-reliefs of
Nimroud. The campaigns and victories of Shalmaneser II. was the
theme put before the sculptor. In order to do it justice he had to carry
the spectator into countries of various aspects, and to give their true
character to military struggles whose conditions were incessantly
changing. He did not think success was to be attained by confining
himself to figuring the cities and fortresses besieged and taken by
the Assyrian army; he introduced features for the purpose of
determining the seat of war. Such accessories were better placed
among figures on a small scale than among those surpassing or
even approaching life size; and without knowing exactly why, the
artist seems to have been warned of this by a secret and delicate
instinct. These strips of bronze are ten inches high; each is divided
into two horizontal divisions by a narrow band of rosettes, which is
also repeated at the top and bottom of each strip. The figures are on
an average about three and a half inches high (see Fig. 117 and
Plate XII.).
Fig. 116.—Stele of Samas-vul II. Height
7 feet 2 inches. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
PLATE XII
FROM THE BALAWAT GATES

British Museum
Our Plate XII. is an exact copy from a part of the band marked B
in the provisional numeration adopted by Dr. Birch.[239] According to
the inscription upon it this part of the work commemorates a sacrifice
offered by Shalmaneser on the borders of the Lake Van, in Armenia.
The figure of the king is not included in our plate, but it contains all
the sacred vessels of which he made use for the ceremony.
Beginning on the left we find a sort of great candelabrum, a three-
legged altar, and two standards upon tripods. Must these be
accepted as military ensigns of the same class as that shown in Fig.
46 or as religious emblems of the sun and moon? The question is
hardly one for us to discuss. Next comes a stele raised upon a rock,
or perhaps carved upon its surface. Other reliefs of the same series
show us that Shalmaneser erected these steles in every country he
conquered. Further to the right we see soldiers throwing into the lake
the limbs of the animals sacrificed. This must be an offering to the
deity of its waters, perhaps to Anou, who was believed to reside in
rivers and lakes as well as in the sea. The denizens of the lake seize
upon the morsels thus put in their way; among them we may
recognize a large fish, a tortoise, and a quadruped, that may
perhaps be an otter.[240]
In the lower division we see the Assyrian army on the march. On
the right Mr. Pinches recognizes a fortified camp in which horses
were left for flight in case of defeat. There is, indeed, one of these
fortified walls shown in projection, of which we have already spoken,
but the horse is placed upon a clearly indicated arch. What is this
arch doing in the middle of the camp? We ask ourselves whether this
circular structure may not be intended to represent a fortified tête-de-
pont. It is abundantly proved that the Assyrians and Chaldæans
made great use of the vault. Why should they not have employed it
for bridges elsewhere than at Babylon? and wherever there were
bridges on the great roads and near their own frontiers what could
be more natural than to defend them by works flanked, like this, with
towers? The horse would then be about to cross the bridge, and his
introduction would be explained simply by the sculptor’s desire to
give all possible clearness to a representation which could never be
complete. He seems to advance with some precaution as if the floor
of the bridge, which is indicated merely by a straight line, was made
of tree trunks or roughly squared planks badly joined. We offer this
hypothesis for what it may be worth. Next come two archers, and
then chariots. The ground must be difficult, for not only does the
driver support his horses with a tightened rein, but a man on foot
walks in front and holds them by the head.
We find a scene entirely similar but still better treated in the upper
division of another plaque (see Fig. 117).[241] Here we may see that
the chariots are progressing not without difficulty and even danger, in
the very bed of a torrent. The movement of the men who lead the
horses is well understood and skilfully rendered; we feel how
carefully they have to conduct their advance among the blocks of
stone that encumber the bed of the stream and the tumbling water
that conceals the nature of the ground. In the lower division we are
presented with one of those scenes that are so common in Assyrian
reliefs. The king in his royal robes appears on the left; a line of
prisoners guarded by archers approach him and beg for mercy, while
the foremost among them “kiss the dust beneath his feet,” to use an
oriental expression in its most literal sense.
Fig. 117.—Two fragments from the Balawat gates. British Museum. Drawn by
Saint-Elme Gautier.
We should have been willing, had it been possible, to make
further extracts from this curious series of reliefs; to have shown,
here naked prisoners defiling under the eyes of the conqueror, there
Assyrian archers shooting at the heaped-up heads of their slain
enemies. But we have perforce been content with giving, by a few
carefully chosen examples, a fair idea of the work that intervened
between the sculptors of Assurnazirpal and those of the Sargonids.
It is probable that the scheme of this vast composition was due to
a single mind; from one end to the other there is an obvious similarity
of thought and style. But several different hands must have been
employed upon its execution, which is far from being of equal merit
throughout. It is on examining the original that we are struck by these
inequalities. Thus, in some of the long rows of captives the handling
is timid and without meaning, while in others it has all the firmness
and decision of the best among the alabaster or limestone reliefs;
the muscular forms, the action of the calf and knee, are well
understood and frankly reproduced. The passages we have chosen
for illustration are among the best in this respect. Taking them all in
all these bronze reliefs are among the works that do most honour to
Assyrian art.
The only monument that has come down to us from the reign of
Vulush III., the successor of Samas-vul, is a statue, or rather a pair
of statues, of Nebo; the better of the two is reproduced in Fig. 15 of
our first volume. These sacred images are of very slight merit from
an art point of view; we should hardly have referred to them but for
their votive inscriptions. From these we learn that they were
consecrated in the Temple of Nebo by the prefect of Calah in order
to bespeak the protection of that god for the king. But the latter is not
named alone; the faithful subject says that he offers these idols “for
his master Vulush and his mistress Sammouramit.”
In this latter name it is difficult not to recognize the Semiramis of
the Greeks, and we are led to ask ourselves whether the queen of
Vulush may not have afforded a prototype for that legendary
princess. This association of a female name with that of the king is
almost without parallel either in Chaldæa or Assyria. In royal
documents, as well as in those of a more private character, there is
no more mention of the royal wives than if they did not exist. Only
one explanation can be given of the apparent anomaly, and that is
that Sammouramit, for reasons that may be easily guessed, enjoyed
a quite exceptional position. It was in those days that, from one reign
to another, the princes of Calah attempted to complete the
subjugation of Chaldæa. It may have happened that in order to put
an end to a state of never-ending rebellion, Vulush married the
heiress of some powerful and popular family of the lower country,
and, that he might be looked upon as the legitimate ruler of Babylon,
joined her name with his in the royal style and title. This hypothesis
finds some confirmation in what Herodotus tells us about Semiramis.
She was, he says, queen of Babylon five generations before Nitocris,
which would be about a century and a half. He adds that she caused
the quays of the Euphrates to be built.[242] This takes us back to
rather beyond the middle of the eighth century b.c., that is very near
to the date which Assyrian chronology would fix for the reign of
Vulush (810–781). As the last representative of the old national
dynasty, this Semiramis, associated as she was in the exercise, or at
least in the show, of sovereign power both in Assyria and Chaldæa,
would not be forgotten by her countrymen, and the population of
Babylon would be especially likely to magnify the part she had
played. There is nothing fabulous in the tradition as Herodotus gives
it, although it may, perhaps, go beyond the truth here and there.
Ctesias, however, goes much farther. He brings together and
amplifies tales which had already received many additions in the half
century that separated him from Herodotus, and he thus creates the
type of that Semiramis, the wife of Ninus and the conqueror of all
Asia, who so long held an undeserved place in ancient history.[243]
The last Calah prince who has left us anything is Tiglath-Pileser
II. (745–727). We have already described how his palace was
destroyed by Esarhaddon, who employed its materials for his own
purposes.[244] At the British Museum there are a few fragments
which have been recognized by their inscriptions as belonging to his
work (Vol. I. Fig. 26)[245]; they are quite similar to those of his
immediate predecessors.
With the new dynasty founded by Sargon at the end of the eighth
century taste changed fast enough. In those bas-reliefs in the
Khorsabad palace which represent that king’s campaigns, many
details are treated in a spirit very different from that of former days.
Trees, for instance, are no longer abstract signs standing for no one
kind of vegetation more than another; the sculptor begins to notice
their distinguishing features and to give their proper physiognomy to
the different countries overrun by the Assyrians. But these landscape
backgrounds are not to be found in all the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad.
[246]
The art of Sargon was an art of transition. While on the one hand
it endeavoured to open up new ground, on the other it travelled on
the old ways and followed many of the ancient errors; it had a
marked predilection for figures larger than nature, and bas-reliefs
treating of royal pageants and processions remind us by the
simplicity of their conception of those of Assurnazirpal. We have
already given many fragments (Vol I. Figs. 22–24, and 29), and now
we give another, a vizier and a eunuch standing before the king in
the characteristic attitude of respect (Fig. 118). The inscription which
cut the figures of Assurnazirpal so awkwardly in two has
disappeared; the proportions have gained in slenderness, and the
muscular development, though still strongly marked, has lost some
of its exaggeration. All this shows progress, and yet on the whole the
Louvre relief is less happy in its effect than the best of the Nimroud
sculptures in the British Museum. The execution is neither so firm
nor so frank; the relief is much higher and the modelling a little heavy
and bulbous in consequence. This result may also be caused to
some extent by the nature of the material, which is a softer alabaster
than was employed, so far as we know, in any other part of Assyria.
At Nimroud a fine limestone was chiefly used.
We shall be contented with mentioning the stele of Sargon, found
near Larnaca, in Cyprus, in 1845. It is most important as an historical
monument; it proves that, as a sequel to his Syrian conquests, the
terror of Sargon’s name was so widespread that even the inhabitants
of the islands thought it prudent to declare themselves his vassals,
and to set up his image as a sign of homage rendered and
allegiance sworn. But the stone is now too much broken to be of any
great interest as a work of art.[247]
The artistic masterpiece of this epoch is the bronze lion figured in
our Plate XI. It had been suggested that its use was to hold down the
cords of a tent or the lower edge of tapestries, a purpose for which
the weight of the bronze and the ring fixed in its back make it well
suited. This idea had to be abandoned, however, when a whole
series of similar figures marked with the name of Sennacherib was
found. Their execution was hardly equal to that of the lion we have
figured, but their general characteristics were the same, and they
had rings on their backs.[248]
These lions are sixteen in number; they form a series in which
the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example;
the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The
decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them
too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calculation upon
their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the
inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with
which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscriptions all
begin with the word mine; then comes a figure indicating the number
of mines, or of subdivisions of the mine that the weight represents;
finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have
been a magistrate charged with the regulation and verification of
weights.
Fig. 118.—Bas-relief from Khorsabad. Height 9 feet 5
inches. Louvre.
With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes
over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the exception
becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a complex and
carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied
with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and
pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41–43), palms (ib. Figs. 30 and 34; and above,

Discovering Childhood in International Relations 1St Ed Edition J Marshall Beier Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Discovering Childhood in International Relations 1St Ed Edition J Marshall Beier Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Discovering Childhood in International

Relations 1st ed. Edition J. Marshall

ISBN 978-3-030-46062-4 ISBN 978-3-030-46063-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com

My deepest and sincerest gratitude is owed to each of the contributors

well on the administrative support provided by Manuela Dozzi, Rebekah

Hamilton, ON, Canada J. Marshall Beier

1 Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

2 Decolonizing Childhood in International Relations 21

3 Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework

4 Children as Agents in International Relations?

5 Doing IR: Securing Children 89

6 A Tale of a (Dis)Orderly International Society:

7 From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child

8 Toying with Militarization: Children and War

9 Between Borders: Pop Cultural Heroes and Plural

10 Revisiting ‘Womenandchildren’ in Peace

11 Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security

12 Centralizing Childhood, Remaking the Discourse 243

Victoria M. Basham is Reader (Associate Professor) in International

Children’s Geographies, Contemporary Security Policy, Critical Military

examine how the geopolitical world is framed, visualized, and performed.

Jaimarsin Lewis is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,

participation in politics and peacebuilding and advancing gender equity

examining the human rights of marginalized communities, with a long-

Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

In a much-cited 1997 contribution to the New Internationalist, moral

© The Author(s) 2020 1

have brought the cultural competencies to decode ‘child’ as embodied

childhood as, perforce, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapac-

With these questions in mind, contributors aim to speak to

of global political order. It is just as curious, then, that IR scholars have

of other subjects, hapless victims allegorical of atrocity, sentimentalized

Working through the implications of these insights, a new

and Seymour 2013), these resist renderings of children’s disempower-

scholarship on the importance of children and childhoods in global polit-

Structure of the Volume

a potentially more ethical practice of engaging with the photography of

practices and performances that make war possible. While acknowledging

Chapter 9 is both an exploration of and an exercise in agency, voice,

doing work on childhood in International Relations all along: children

Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight

Beier, J. Marshall. 2019. “Binding Gestures: A Customary Norm Regarding the

Holzscheiter, Anna. 2018. “Affectedness, Empowerment and Norm

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and

© The Author(s) 2020 21

their ordinary and extraordinary actions shape the course of complex

Problems: Failure to Recognize the Social

global political events. This—quite simply—is at the heart of the prob-

treatment of children which, when enforced, can ensure their consistent

passive skin on which the centred subjecthood of the perpetrators of vio-

Pitfalls: International Relations

Putting aside traditional approaches to thinking about IR, this chapter

Similarly, discursive deployments recounting the abuse of children are

vulture.1 These children have no capacity to speak and instead need to

Fig. 111.—The Caillou Michaux, obverse. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.

Assyrian sculpture is far from leading us into the remote centuries

Fig. 114.—Tree on a river bank;

Fig. 115.—Detail from the royal robe of Assurnazirpal; from Layard.

FROM THE BALAWAT GATES

You might also like

Problems: Failure to Recognize the Social