Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security and Resilience

Beier, J. Marshall

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_11

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The very architecture of some new schools incorporates features first perfected in the design of frontline trenches of the First World War (Horton, 2019). Together with how resilience-building is increasingly valorized as individualized work (Beier, 2020), even the framing of survival in school shootings can reflect promotion of a militarized ethos (Turenne Sjolander, 2011). While none of these do the work of militarization by themselves, they nevertheless reaffirm key aspects of its enabling ontologies.…”

Section: Childhood(s) Militarism(s)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

Beier

Tabak

2020

Childhood

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Like childhood, thinking critically about militarism can entail a great deal of unlearning before coming to a more nuanced understanding of what lies beyond the signifier. Just as childhoods are multiple, overlapping, contingent, and bound up in many more aspects of our social worlds than is apparent if we look only for the child, so too militarism. The ways in which militarisms intersect childhoods and vice versa, therefore, call us to reflect not only on the conspicuous presence of militaries as institutions or on life in zones of conflict, but on the everyday lives of children everywhere in all their complexity and diversity.

show abstract

Section: Childhood(s) Militarism(s)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

Beier

Tabak

2020

Childhood

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The state, accordingly, betrays no notice of its reliance on this work. Similarly, though with a somewhat greater measure of organized direction, children of contemporary military families are routinely called to take on responsibilities and to comport themselves in ways necessary to facilitate the deployment of their soldier-parents to conflict zones (Beier, 2020). This, however, tends not to be visible as important work underwriting the military wherewithal of the state, narrated instead as individualized resilience (see Enloe, 2019).…”

Section: States Of Emergencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exceptional childhood and COVID-19: Engaging children in a time of civil emergency

Beier

2020

Childhood

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the days and weeks following the March 2020 World Health Organization declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national leaders in the Global North, all of them working under unprecedented and extraordinarily challenging circumstances, took time to directly address the children of their respective countries. Besides answering questions about the crisis put to them by their youngest citizens, a recurrent theme on these occasions was the imperative role of children in helping to arrest the spread of the pathogen. Recalling how children have been similarly engaged in other moments of emergency, the overtures made in the context of COVID-19 are instructive both as to the recognition of children as bona fide, effectual, and necessary social agents as well as to the limits of acceptance of their subjecthood, revealed as they are in circumstances of exception.

show abstract

“Children Without Childhood”: Representations of the Child-Soldier as an International Emergency

Tabak

2023

Studies in Childhood and Youth

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Considering the prevailing discourse about the child-soldier, whose most iconic figure is a poor, vulnerable, prepubescent, male African who carries a gun bigger than he is, this chapter investigates how child-soldiers are invariably framed as an essentially deviant and pathological child—and as such a threat to world security—in need of solution. Regardless of many historical examples of children’s participation in war, the child-soldier is assumed to be a new international emergency, an exception to the norm of the child, owing primarily to the outbreak of “new wars” in the post–Cold War era. The focus of this chapter turns to two main discourses that articulate and authorize the limits that (re)produce the child-soldier as an international problem, setting boundaries within which only certain subjects, narratives and responses are admitted: (1) the discourse of the law, that is, international legal standards that articulate children’s participation in war as something that is wrong and must be banned under international law; and (2) what I call the “discourse of the norm,” which is analyzed through the three contrasting images of the child-soldier as dangerous and disorderly, the hapless victim, and the redeemed hero, as identified by Myriam Denov (Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The discourse of the norm, in particular, makes visible child-soldiers as a pathology, excluding their aspects of disorder, dysfunction, and risk from the accepted boundaries of what is to be a child and its childhood. In this case, it is not only that children’s participation in wars is wrong, but it is absolutely abnormal once their childhood has been lost together with any semblance of the “civilized world.” At the end of the day, the logic of opposite extremes—to be a child-soldier is to be an innocent victim or to be a feared monster—operates to (re)produce children as targets of international intervention (or protection) with no chance of autonomous decision-making; child-soldiers are either the objects of exploitation or the objects of salvation.

show abstract

Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security and Resilience

Cited by 5 publications

References 44 publications

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

Children, childhoods, and everyday militarisms

Exceptional childhood and COVID-19: Engaging children in a time of civil emergency

“Children Without Childhood”: Representations of the Child-Soldier as an International Emergency

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About