CitationBrocklehurst, H. (2015) This article is broadly concerned with the positioning of children, both within and outside the subject area of International Relations. It considers the costs of an adultcentric standpoint in security studies and contrasts this with investments made seemingly on behalf of children and their security. It begins by looking at how children and childhoods are constructed and contained -yet also defy categorization -at some cost to their protection. The many competing children and childhoods that are invoked in security discourses and partially sustain their victimcy are then illustrated. It is argued that at their entry point into academia they are essentialized and sentimentalized. Power relations which subvert, yet also rely on children and childhoods can only be disrupted through a reconfiguration of politics and agency which includes an engagement with political literacy on a societal level and acknowledgement of the ubiquitous presence of war in all our lives.
Despite the reflexive nature of historical enquiry and the degree of national inter-connectness now theorised by UK historians, education debates over History teaching in Britain often yield a comforting defence of Britain's 'island story'. The singular 'island story' is an economical narrative device favoured by politicians and further mediated through newspapers which profit from such national cryogenics. Maintenance of a currency, or crisis, of Britishness can also be contrasted with the relative absence of longitudinal or comparative enquiry into identity and school curricula. In addition, the teaching of states, connections, and post-sovereign communities is largely under theorised, potentially contributing to the sterility of future debates about citizenship, agency and Britain's wider political reach. It is argued here that the public framing of history as nationhood, and the under-development of children's political literacy, are mutually reinforcing conditions by which the state has constructed a stabilising yet shifting presence of the 'national'.
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