Children, Securitization, War and Peace: Perspectives from the West

It is not just in ‘failed states’ and dictatorships that children become a key target for military recruitment and the politics of national security. The ‘securitisation’ in western societies today relies equally strongly on the multi-faceted enrolment of children in national and international security politics, and on the figuring of childhood as a phase for the formation of future citizen-soldiers.

This book explores the implications of western security politics for children’s rights and their citizenship. It focuses on the interplay between a wide range of state-strategies that seek to enrol children in security politics as future citizen soldiers. The book explores the diversity of ways in which children themselves engage with cultures of war and the politics of security and the realities of security in their everyday lives, through participation in militaristic cultures and movements, active participation in anti-war campaigns, pacifist and human rights organisations. This book makes explicit the connections between the recruitment of children to security politics in the USA and Europe to the plight of children in other parts of the world. It draws on, consolidates and develops new perspectives on the governing of childhood and will be of interest to students of childhood studies, conflict studies, international relations, politics, geography, and sociology.