Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Matthew C. Benwell, Peter Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134801664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

Young people, and in particular children, have typically been marginalised in geopolitical research, positioned as too young to understand or relate to the adult-dominated world of international relations. Integrating current debates in critical geopolitics and political geography with research in children's geographies, childhood studies and youth research, this book sets out an agenda for the field of children's and young people's critical geopolitics. It considers diverse practices such as play, activism, media consumption and diplomacy to show how children's and young people's lives relate to wider regional and global geopolitical processes. Engaging with contemporary concepts in human geography including ludic geopolitics, affect, emotional geographies, intergenerationality, creative diplomacy, popular geopolitics and citizenship, the authors draw on geopolitical research with children and young people from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. The chapters highlight the ways in which young people can be enrolled, ignored, dismissed, empowered and represented by the state for geopolitical ends. Notwithstanding this state power, the research presented also shows how young people have agency and make decisions about their lives which are influenced by wider geopolitical processes. The focus on the lives of children and young people problematises and extends what it is we think of when considering 'the geopolitical' which enriches as well as advances critical geopolitical enquiry and deserves to be taken seriously by political geographies more broadly.

Chapter 1
Introducing Children’s and Young
People’s Critical Geopolitics

Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins

Ramandeep (21 years): I always had to look behind my shoulder to make sure that, you know, I’d not been followed or anything’s going to happen. I was always uncertain that something would kick off, you know what I mean? In that sense, I didn’t like Glasgow at that point but that is just because I was at school and the Ned culture was just very large at my school ... yeah, in town, yeah, swearing, terrorist, being called a terrorist. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and people just purely laughing at my image. It doesn’t bother me; it really doesn’t bother me anymore. (Ned is a pejorative term associated with working-class young people and usually young men; see McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen, 2007)

We open this collection with some reflections on an image and a quotation that encapsulates the interconnections between critical geopolitics and the everyday lives of children and young people. The photograph on the front cover, taken by Matthew Benwell during the course of his research into the contested geopolitics of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, shows young people and their families from Argentina attending a commemorative event held annually in Buenos Aires (and throughout Argentina) to mark the anniversary of the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict. The quotation above, drawn from a research project by Peter Hopkins exploring the everyday lives of young Sikh men in Scotland, demonstrates how Ramandeep is taken for either Arabic or Muslim and, as a result, becomes an unfortunate recipient of racist abuse (Hopkins, 2014).

Both examples are imbued with geopolitics, albeit in different ways, to varying extents and with distinctive impacts for the young people involved. And yet, very often, geopolitics has come to be associated rather narrowly with certain actors, issues, performances, bodies and even geographies. The long-running dispute between Argentina, the UK (and increasingly the Falkland Islands Government) over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands is precisely the kind of issue that comes to mind when one imagines geopolitics: bound up with questions of territorial sovereignty, borders, inter-state conflict and its legacies (notwithstanding the impetus to shift this focus; see for instance McConnell, Megoran and Williams, 2014). Children and young people, however, would traditionally be a distant afterthought in the midst of these kinds of geopolitical questions if, indeed, they were mentioned at all. It is important to point out that, during the first half of the twentieth century, prominent geographers such as Halford Mackinder were keen to see that children were educated with a geographical and geopolitical sensibility, albeit one informed through the prism of Empire and citizenship (see Kearns, 2010).

Academic research (in, for instance, critical geopolitics, political geography and international relations) and popular/media interest tends to be drawn to the corridors of political power and those who occupy them, with children and young people often labelled as too immature or insignificant to comprehend the ‘grownup’ world of diplomats and international politics. However, see Doucet (2005), for an exception from an IR perspective, examining the formation of children’s geopolitical subjectivities through popular culture. If we consider how children and young people are most commonly linked to the geopolitical, particularly outside conflict zones (Hyndman, 2010), our minds might turn to their participation in commemorative services remembering the war dead, such as on the front cover (see Carr, 2003). Illustrative here was the decision to ask a young British male cadets to place the final poppy in a field of 888,246 (the number of British or Colonial soldiers killed) ceramic flowers in the grounds of the Tower of London during the poignant centenary commemorations of World War I. These kinds of commemorations, the performances they invoke, the people they involve and the spaces in which they are played out are undoubtedly bound up with certain understandings of geopolitics.

However, we wish to argue through the contributions in this collection that our vision of the geopolitical needs to be widened to include, for example, young people, places and performances that might not initially appear to have a great deal to do with the mainstream world of geopolitics; considering things like play, migration, days out with the family, hanging out in the city, forming relationships with other young people, attending school and college and so on.

The quote from Ramandeep above is expedient here. He grew up in rural Aberdeenshire in northern Scotland before moving to Glasgow for his university education, where he continued to follow – and become more serious about–Sikhism. Following the quote above he clarifies that ’people think I’m Muslim. I definitely believe that'. He explains that this is due to his skin colour, facial features and embodied identities being read by others as Muslim, and Muslims being misrepresented in the media as associated with violence and terrorism, leading to him being the victim of racial abuse. In contrast to the Falklands/ Malvinas context, his everyday life in Scotland may at first appear distant from debates about international borders, contested territories and military concerns, so often seen to be of key import to critical geopolitics. However, as this example illustrates, issues pertaining to global terrorism and religion interact with everyday anxieties about citizenship and belonging, to bring geopolitics to the fore as Ramandeep negotiates his embodied identities in everyday life. And the manner in which everyday geopolitical imaginaries regarding terrorism and security stick to some more than others (Ahmed, 2003; Haldrup, Koefoed and Simonsen, 2006).

The notion that young people and their families might engage with geopolitics in their everyday lives is not entirely novel, especially if we consider some of Mackinder’s ruminations of a century ago, although this emerging literature has been restricted to a small group of researchers until now (see, for example, Benwell, 2014a; Harker, 2011; Hopkins, 2007; Hörschelmann, 2008; Kallio and Häkli, 2013; Katz, 2004; Kearns, 2010; Loyd, 2009; Mills, 2011; Ploszajska, 1996; Smith, 2013). These interventions have shown increasing attentiveness to the lived experiences of children and young people alongside the role, form and scope of politics enacted at the local, national and global scales. Our hope is that this collection might encourage other scholars of critical geopolitics and social studies of childhood and youth to look across and beyond their sub-disciplinary comfort zones to consider how these literatures might productively intersect, going forward. The confluence of different academic sub-fields brought together in this volume - including but not restricted to critical geopolitics, political geographies, international relations, childhood studies, youth studies and children’s geographies - contributes to advancing our understanding of the landscape of critical geopolitics and the world of children and young people.

By emphasising the interconnections between childhood and youth research and critical geopolitics, we contend that both fields are strengthened. Significantly, childhood and youth research can bring age and the life course to the fore of scholarly attention in critical geopolitics in ways that chime with the embodied, located and grounded geopolitics advocated by feminist political geographers (Dowler and Sharp, 2001). This engagement usefully sensitises geopolitical research to the spatialities and practices of children’s and young people’s lives, as well as debate concerning methodologies and ethical issues associated with undertaking childhood and youth research. At the same time, critical geopolitics underscores the importance of considering global politics, international relations and ’geopolitical' concepts such as territory, borders and sovereignty for those researching the lives of children and young people (although, as this collection makes clear, understandings of what can be thought of as geopolitics or geopolitical can be extended far beyond these core concepts). Simply put, emphasising children’s and young people’s place, role and influence when it comes to matters relating to international politics reinforces the relevance of childhood and youth research to the wider discipline of geography.

In this introductory chapter we provide a brief overview of the principal literatures to which many of the subsequent chapters refer, contribute and build upon. We begin with a review of theoretical developments in what we broadly identify as the social studies of childhood and youth, before moving our focus to critical geopolitics and, in particular, studies that have embraced the everyday lives of children and young people. We have deliberately avoided writing another historical overview of the rise of a broader critical geopolitics, as this has been adequately undertaken elsewhere (see Dittmer and Sharp, 2014; Dodds, 2014; Flint, 2012). By presenting the introduction in this way we hope to give readers a sense of the many existing linkages between critical geopolitics and children’s and young people’s lives, as well as thinking through how such connections might be consolidated and, indeed, intensified. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this collection, drawing out four overlapping themes in the process.

Social Studies of Childhood and Youth

Recent research in the social sciences with children and young people owes much to the theoretical impetus provided by the ’new sociology of childhood' (James and Prout, 1997; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998) developed in the 1980s. This paradigm of research, with its original emphasis specifically on childhood, has shaped much subsequent work about children’s and young people’s lives, not only in sociology, but in neighbouring disciplines, including children’s geographies (Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Holt, 2011). Key characteristics of ’the social studies of childhood' (we use this terminology to reflect the contributions of scholars from across the social sciences) include: the recognition that childhood is a social construction and a variable of social analysis; an appreciation of children’s and young people’s relationships, practices and everyday lives that are, in turn, worthy of being studied in their own right (see Punch and Tisdall, 2012); and an acknowledgement that children and young people are active rather than reactive social agents (Nayak and Kehily, 2008).

A major contribution made by this literature, then, and one that is important to reiterate here, is the recognition that definitions and concepts such as ’children', ’childhood', ’young people' and ’youth' are contested and can vary across cultures and contexts, sites and spaces, and change over time (e.g. Ansell, 2009; Scourfield et al., 2006; Valentine, 2003). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that children are aged 17 and under, however the provision of specific rights and entitlements varies widely between different countries, in particular between the Global North and South. As an example, Scourfield et al. (2006), note that in the mid-2000s the age of criminal responsibility was 15 years in Norway, 8 in Scotland and 10 in England and Wales. Some scholars, such as Borland et al. (1998), observe different phases within childhood and refer to middle childhood as between the early years (preschool) and adolescence (the teenage years) (see also Hill, Laybourn and Borland, 1996). Similarly, Ansell (2005) shows how definitions of youth can vary significantly between countries, using the examples of Brazil, where the age of majority is reached at 21, and Malaysia, where the country’s Youth Council defines youth as those aged 15-40. Moreover, Valentine (2003: 38), observes that ’the terms “youth” or young people are popularly used to describe those aged 16-25, a time frame that bears no relation to diverse legal classifications of adulthood'. Youth is often regarded as the phase between childhood and adulthood (e.g. Jones, 2009). However, given the increasingly elongated paths that young people take towards adulthood, for some people the status of adult is only achieved when they are in their late twenties or early thirties when some milestone event is achieved, such as purchasing their own home, becoming a parent and/or securing a permanent job (e.g. Arnett, 2004; Henderson et al., 2007). Given the contested nature of terms such as children, young people and youth, we resist adopting a narrow or specific definition for the purpose of this collection but wish to note their spatially and temporally disputed nature; each contributor writes from different geographical contexts (and, in some cases, different sub-disciplinary influences) and outlines their approach to and conceptualisation of children and young people in their specific chapter.

Despite the fluidity of these definitions, research with children and young people has tended to be situated within two distinctive fields of scholarship: ’Studies of young people and particularly those defined...