Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics 9780754679844, 9781409404705, 9780754676010, 9781409400837, 9781472444936

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures and Table
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1 Introducing Children’s and Young People’s Critical Geopolitics
2 Crossing Points: Contesting Militarism in the Spaces of Children’s Everyday Lives in Britain and Germany
3 Children, Young People and the Everyday Geopolitics of British Military Recruitment
4 Ludic – or Playful – Geopolitics
5 Children’s Emotional Geographies and the Geopolitics of Division in Cyprus
6 Life, Love, and Activism on the Forgotten Margins of the Nation State
7 Young Falkland Islanders and Diplomacy in the South Atlantic
8 ‘Dear Prime Minister …’ Mapping Island Children’s Political Views on Climate Change
9 Critical Geopolitics of Child and Youth Migration in (Post)socialist Laos
10 Young People’s Engagement with the Geopolitics of Anti-Apartheid Solidarity in 1980s’ London
11 Becoming Geopolitical in the Everyday World
12 Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Critical Geopolitics Series Editors: Klaus Dodds, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Alan Ingram, University College London, UK Merje Kuus, University of British Columbia, Canada Over the last two decades, critical geopolitics has become a prominent field in human geography. It has developed to encompass topics associated with popular culture, everyday life, architecture and urban form as well as the more familiar issues of security, inter-national relations and global power projection. Critical geopolitics takes inspiration from studies of governmentality and biopolitics, gender and sexuality, political economy and development, postcolonialism and the study of emotion and affect. Methodologically, it continues to employ discourse analysis and is engaging with ethnography and participatory research methods. This rich field continues to develop new ways of analysing geopolitics. This series provides an opportunity for early career researchers as well as established scholars to publish theoretically informed monographs and edited volumes that engage with critical geopolitics and related areas such as international relations theory and security studies. With an emphasis on accessible writing, the books in the series will appeal to wider audiences including journalists, policy communities and civil society organizations. Other books in this series Europe in the World EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space Edited by Luiza Bialasiewicz ISBN 978 0 7546 7984 4 Reconstructing Conflict Integrating War and Post-War Geographies Edited by Scott Kirsch and Colin Flint ISBN 978 1 4094 0470 5 Mapping the End Times American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions Edited by Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm ISBN 978 0 7546 7601 0 / 978 1 4094 0083 7

Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Edited by Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins Newcastle University, UK

First published 2016 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2016 Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Benwell, Matthew C., Hopkins, Peter (Peter E.) Children, young people and critical geopolitics / by Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins. Series: Critical geopolitics. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9781472444936 (hbk) Children and politics.Children–Political activity. Youth – Political activity. – Political socialization. – Geopolitics. International relations. 320.40835–dc23

ISBN 9781472444936 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures and Table   Notes on Contributors   Foreword by Klaus Dodds Acknowledgements   1 Introducing Children’s and Young People’s Critical Geopolitics   Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins 2 3

1

Crossing Points: Contesting Militarism in the Spaces of Children’s Everyday Lives in Britain and Germany   Kathrin Hörschelmann

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Children, Young People and the Everyday Geopolitics of British Military Recruitment   Matthew F. Rech

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4 Ludic – or Playful – Geopolitics   Sean Carter, Philip Kirby and Tara Woodyer 5

vii ix xi xv

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Children’s Emotional Geographies and the Geopolitics of Division in Cyprus   Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou

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6 Life, Love, and Activism on the Forgotten Margins of the Nation State   Sara H. Smith and Mabel Gergan

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Young Falkland Islanders and Diplomacy in the South Atlantic   107 Matthew C. Benwell

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‘Dear Prime Minister …’ Mapping Island Children’s Political Views on Climate Change   Elaine Stratford

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Critical Geopolitics of Child and Youth Migration in (Post)socialist Laos   Roy Huijsmans

139

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Young People’s Engagement with the Geopolitics of Anti-Apartheid Solidarity in 1980s’ London   Gavin Brown and Helen Yaffe

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Becoming Geopolitical in the Everyday World   Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

155 169

12 Conclusion   Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins

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Index  

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List of Figures and Table Figures 2.1 Blackboard with tank, for children of 3 years and over 2.2 Outdoors Project at Brighton Beach Fest 2013 2.3 Bundeswehr-labelled lollipops

35 36 37

3.1

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Body Composition Assessment (BCA)

5.1 Antonia’s map of Cyprus 5.2 Andria’s map of Cyprus

83 84

6.1

Map of the Himalayan and Northeast regions of India, created by Timothy Stallman

9.1

Map of Laos. Modified version of Laos location map by NordNordWest, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons140 Cover of National Human Development Report for Laos 150

9.2

11.1 Rasmus’ map of Europe

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Table 4.1

Children’s responses to War Games, Museum of Childhood

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Notes on Contributors Matthew C. Benwell is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK Gavin Brown is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Leicester, UK Sean Carter is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK Miranda Christou is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cyprus Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, UK Mabel Gergan is a graduate student in the Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Peter Hopkins is Professor of Social Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK Kathrin Hörschelmann is Research Fellow in Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany Roy Huijsmans is Senior Lecturer in Children and Youth Studies in the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmum University Rotterdam, Netherlands Kirsi Pauliina Kallio is Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), University of Tampere, Finland Philip Kirby is Associate Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK Matthew F. Rech is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK Sara H. Smith is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

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Spyros Spyrou is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the European University Cyprus Elaine Stratford is Associate Professor in the Discipline of Geography & Spatial Sciences, School of Land & Food, University of Tasmania, Australia Tara Woodyer is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Portsmouth, UK Helen Yaffe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Leicester, UK

Foreword When I first started taking an interest in geopolitics and political geography as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s, there was absolutely no discussion, let alone recognition, that children and young people might be worthy of some reflection. To be candid, generally people barely registered, whether adults or children. Instead, we were asked to mull over ideas and accompanying representations of the world that addressed fundamental geophysical divisions such as land and sea, and geopolitical designations such as heartland, rimland, shatterbelts and the like. From my point of view it was fascinating but strangely unpeopled, except when it came to thinking about the consequences, often violent, of thinking of the state as a living organism. We were left in little doubt that geopolitics, as an academic field, had a murky history and one that was once connected to the murderous policies of Nazi Germany. Over the last two decades, in a large part through the pioneering work of scholars such as Simon Dalby, Gerard Toal, Joanne Sharp and John Agnew, a rather different kind of geopolitics emerged as an intellectual field of enquiry. This initial burst of work brought contemporary social theory into contact with geopolitical agents, ideas, objects and practices. As a young researcher in the early 1990s it was an exciting time to be thinking, reading and writing about critical geopolitics. But it was, I think, the intervention of feminist geographers and scholars, such as Cynthia Enloe, Lorraine Dowler, Jennifer Hyndman and Joni Seager in particular, that really brought home to me the urgent need to think about not only ‘peopling’ geopolitics but the profound importance of gender and other axes of difference to the ideational and material manifestations of geopolitics. I note with interest that the ‘new sociology of childhood’ literature has a similar recent intellectual history to critical geopolitics, in terms of timing and dissemination. I came to appreciate the significance of young people and children to geopolitics by accident. A new colleague, Harriot Beazley, joined our department at Royal Holloway and her expertise lay in children’s geographies. Harriot now works at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, and she taught me that street children in Indonesia were as important to geopolitics as, say, my own interest in the contested geopolitics of the Falklands/Malvinas or cinematic geopolitics. In other words, there was no reason to privilege one over the other a priori. But something else happened that was really influential to me. When Harriot left our department, two of our top students were interested in children’s and youth geographies – Tara Woodyer and Matthew Benwell. I was asked to supervise Tara’s Master’s thesis and I became Matthew’s PhD supervisor. It was, for me,

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a steep learning curve but an immensely satisfying one, because nothing is better for the intellectual soul than being surrounded by smart students who challenge one’s thinking. So it really does give me considerable pleasure and post-doctoral supervisory pride to see Matthew’s name along with that of another colleague, Peter Hopkins, whose own work on young people and the geographies of masculinities I read with great interest while editing this splendid collection of essays. In a short foreword it is thankfully not my role to summarise the chapters therein, but I should like to offer a few observations about the essays as a whole before concluding on a more personal note. A number of things impress me about these essays, and I should say that I learnt a great deal from all of them, even when I know the authors and their scholarship well. My first observation is that all the chapters are immensely readable. I say this with some feeling because I am surely not alone sometimes in wondering whether we help ourselves as academics by favouring obfuscation over simplicity. Note, I use the word ‘simplicity’, not ‘simplistic’. All the chapters concerned are unquestionably sophisticated pieces of work – theory and example are brought together in order to make a series of compelling arguments about why children and young people deserve our critical attention. Second, the sites and spaces considered in this edited collection are suitably wide-ranging. I take comfort from the fact that the authors have a gaze that is not restricted to the home, to the school classroom or to the street, important though they are. By attending to, for example, the mobility and immobility of children and young people, we obtain some powerful insights into how they engage with the world around them and beyond. Whether it involves acts of moving and migrating, attending and watching, or writing and making, young people are rightly shown to be complex and active geopolitical agents. One compelling message from this collection is that children and young people have agency and do not simply react to an adult world. Of course, this sense of agency and associated engagement with those sites and spaces is complex – gender, age, ethnicity, family structures, and so on shape the lives of children as well as adults. I wonder also whether as part of this agency debate we have to recognise that children and young people can, as do adults, conduct their own forms of geopolitics, some of which may sit more comfortably with us than others. Consider for a moment two contrasting models of youthful agency: the child soldier in West Africa and the anti-war protestor in Germany. Both might be equally convinced they are practising a form of ‘critical geopolitics’, even if the degree of agency varies enormously. Another notable feature regarding sites and spaces is that these essays do not concentrate exclusively on the European and North American worlds. As an editor myself, I know one of the easiest comments to make is about geographical spread. As geographers, for example, we often instinctively look to chapter headings to see where the empirical examples lie. Chapters on Laos, the Falkland Islands and South Africa alongside other comparatively neglected European countries such as Cyprus and Finland are to be welcomed, but I also think that strong analyses of, say, British, German and Australian case study material should inspire and provoke

Foreword

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others to contribute more to this emerging field. The point also raises inevitable issues of access, language and funding for critical geopolitical scholarship elsewhere, and the importance of building alliances and networks with scholars working in the Global South, in particular. The final observation I offer concerns objects. While geographers and other social scientists have written prodigiously on this topic, my intent here is simply to note that this collection reveals an extraordinary array of objects and their relationship to children and young people. Whether it is playing with toys, holding banners and placards, drawing maps or making things, there is a compelling sense here that objects are fizzing with potential. As the chapter on young people’s contestation of the apartheid regime in South Africa notes, standing outside and protesting in front of the South African High Commission was both serious and fun. And I can well imagine that holding placards and banners while standing in close proximity to others was a ‘moving’ and ‘exciting’ experience for those young people in the 1980s. But other objects can also be lively. A chapter exploring inter alia the role of children writing letters to the Australian Prime Minister on climate change in Tasmania struck a chord with me. Years ago, as a child of around 10 years old and upwards, my classmates and I had to write letters in class every week to either a family relative (many of us had family members overseas) or a political figure such as our local Member of Parliament. The very act of slowly writing a letter and having it checked over by the teacher for spelling, content and so on was, for many of us, significant in shaping our political sensibilities. But then, perhaps, playing with Action Man and Lego was as well, albeit in a very different context, this time in the home. Let me close with a personal observation, this time as a father of two children. While our public and private roles in life can be hard to disentangle, I have a 12-year-old son who is becoming increasingly interested in global geopolitics. I have been asked some truly challenging questions about what is happening in places like Syria and Iraq, as well as when someone is and is not a terrorist. I have been quizzed repeatedly about whether certain television shows and films are ‘realistic’, and whether some of the Tintin books are ‘racist’. This is not to say that my daughter, who is younger, is not interested in geopolitics, but I think it would be fair to say that the conversations we have, at this stage at least, are a bit different. They are still intriguing, as I am asked about flags and maps, for example, and why the Arctic matters to us. What have I learnt from these familial inquisitions? For one thing, I don’t always have very satisfactory ‘answers’ to their questions and interventions. In my experience of talking to my own children, but also lecturing to and teaching children and young people ranging from five years old to young adults, it is rare that one’s assumptions about geopolitics (as well as a whole lot more) escape unscathed. It is a bit like at conferences, when people say, ‘This might be a silly question’. My heart always sinks at moments like that – it rarely is a ‘silly’ question. This collection is a welcome addition to the literature on young people and critical geopolitics. I very much hope it will enjoy a broad readership, and that

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those who read it will use its insights to influence their own scholarship and praxis. Perhaps, like me, you will also gain some valuable insights when you next encounter some children and young people eager to engage with you about objects, issues and their imaginations. In the meantime I wish all those represented in this editorial collection well with their future research. Klaus Dodds Royal Holloway, University of London January 2015

Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to all the authors for the timely submission of their thoughtprovoking chapters. Many thanks to Katy Crossan at Ashgate, and to the editors of the ‘Critical Geopolitics’ series, for supporting this book. Many thanks to Megan Armstrong for her work in preparing the index. Matthew Benwell is indebted to the Leverhulme Trust and their Early Career Fellowship scheme (award number ECF-2012–329) that has helped make this collection possible. The funding provided by this scheme is supporting a three-year research project entitled ‘The making of the geopolitical citizen: The case of the Falklands/Malvinas’. The project is investigating the ways in which young people from Argentina, the Falkland Islands and the UK learn about and engage with everyday geopolitical discourses of the nation state. Matthew is extremely grateful to Clare Holdsworth at Keele University, who supported his initial Leverhulme proposal. His thanks are extended to his PhD supervisor, Klaus Dodds, for writing a fitting foreword to the collection and offering critical and astute feedback on chapter drafts. Thanks also to Rachel Pain, who has helped Matthew in numerous ways throughout his career to date, and to all the postgraduates, staff and friends at the University of Liverpool who he had the pleasure of working alongside over the last few years. Finally, Matthew wishes to thank Peter for making the process of editing so effortless and enjoyable. Peter Hopkins is grateful to his collaborators on an Arts and Humanities Research Council project (award number: AH/K000594/1) about young people’s everyday geopolitics in Scotland: Katherine Botterill, Gurchathen Sanghera and Rowena Arshad. This project focuses specifically upon the experiences of young people from different ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, and their engagement with political issues in everyday life. In addition, Peter acknowledges funding from the British Academy (SG-45109) and the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers for his research into young Sikh men in Scotland. Peter is especially grateful to Matthew for his collaboration in compiling this edited collection and looks forward to continuing to work together now that Matthew is working at Newcastle University.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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 through the social category ‘youth’ have a history largely outside of childhood studies and continue to be studied as young adults rather than late childhood subjects’ (Nayak and Kehily, 2008: 8). In similar ways to developments in the sociology of childhood, research from the interdisciplinary field of youth studies ‘embraces research on all aspects of young people’s lives, and youth researchers are to be found across all social science disciplines’ (Heath et al., 2009: 9). Heath et al. (2009), continue by pointing out that youth research can be found in disciplines and sub-fields as diverse as developmental psychology; educational research; cultural studies; youth transitions research; social and cultural geography; and feminist youth research and ‘girl studies’. However, compared to childhood studies – where the sociology of childhood remains the most dominant paradigm – the field of youth research is far more eclectic in terms of its methodological approach and thematic focus. Two of the most popular approaches to youth research are those focusing on youth transitions, on the one hand, and youth subcultures, on the other. These have emerged from different disciplinary traditions and tend to employ different methodologies and theoretical perspectives (although there have been some attempts to bring these together; see Nayak, 2003). Youth transitions research often focuses on mapping out the multiple transitions young people negotiate as they move from childhood, through youth to adulthood (e.g. Holdsworth and Morgan, 2005). This may include the transition from education to employment, from living with parents to home ownership, or from being dependent to independent (France, 2007; Jones, 2002). Youth transitions research tends to focus on structural inequalities and the ways in which they matter to how young people manage and negotiate work, education, family and community life (Nayak and Kehily, 2008). By contrast, research about youth subcultures often focuses upon the more spectacular aspects of post-war youth subculture such as skinheads, punks, mods and rockers (Nayak and Kehily, 2008). This work emerged from the Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies and often relies on ethnographic methods, tending to focus on the particular styles and practices of specific subcultures such as goths, emos or skaters (see, for example, Bennett, 1999; Hebdige, 1979; Hall and Jefferson, 1975; Hodkinson, 2002; McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen, 2007). Childhood research has tended to focus upon the everyday local environments used by children, with relatively little attention paid to their connections with broader global or transnational issues (Vanderbeck, 2008). Using the concept of scale, Ansell (2009) has usefully pointed to the limiting and constraining nature of this focus on children’s localities, arguing that it restricts the possibilities for children to speak to wider political concerns that may manifest at other geographical scales (e.g. the national, regional and global). In contrast, debates in

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youth studies, particularly those focusing on youth transitions, have often engaged with political debates and policy concerns (often of national significance) while focusing upon young people’s everyday lived experiences. Dominant discourses tend to represent children and young people as disengaged from, and apathetic about, politics and political issues (e.g. O’Toole, 2003). However, a small group of scholars has drawn attention to the ways in which children and young people engage with political issues and participate in political processes. We discuss this work in more detail below. The problem, however, is that this work has tended to focus on local and national politics rather than global politics and geopolitics (although see Katz, 2004). There is, therefore, an issue in childhood research and less so in youth research about the conceptualisation of scale and its implications for the focus of research. Incidentally, this scalar critique has been inverted in critical geopolitics, where recent interventions have highlighted the interest in the global and the transnational scales at the expense of the local and the everyday. Thinking differently about how these scales intersect (see Hopkins and Alexander, 2010; Hörschelmann, 2008; Williams and Massaro, 2013) may indeed be a useful way of altering our thinking about children’s and young people’s relationships with critical geopolitics. As noted above, a small body of scholarship has developed that challenges the assumption that young people are disengaged, apathetic and inert when it comes to engaging in politics and political affairs (see O’Toole, 2003; Kallio and Häkli, 2011a and reviews by Skelton, 2010, 2013). Philo and Smith (2003: 103) observed over ten years ago that: The sub-discipline of political geography has never shown any special interest in children and young people, for the understandable reason that people below voting age cannot and do not have much direct influence on the obviously ‘political’ phenomena and structures (to do with nations, states, federations, elections, geopolitics, boundaries and the like) that have long been the staple subject-matter of political geography.

A political geography of children and young people has now started to develop with research about children’s and youth councils (Matthews and Limb, 2003), youth citizenship (Mills, 2011, 2013; Staeheli, Attoh and Mitchell, 2013), negotiations of migration and asylum (Cahill, 2010; Crawley, 2010; Mai, 2010, van Blerk and Ansell, 2006) and politics in everyday life (Kallio and Häkli, 2013). Dedicated journals such as Children’s Geographies, Childhood and Journal of Youth Studies regularly engage with debates about the participation of children and young people in politics, and special issues have also appeared in the journals Space and Polity and Area. Moreover, political scientists have recently started to show more interest in young people’s politics (e.g. Henn and Foard, 2012; Sloam, 2010, 2012) with the Political Studies Association in the UK setting up a specialist group on young people’s politics in 2013 and a special issue being published in the journal Parliamentary Affairs in the

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same year. A key challenge for this group is to stand up against the dominant discourse that sees young people as disengaged from politics and apathetic about political issues. As a challenge to this, O’Toole (2003) made two important points through her research on political engagement: first, debates about young people’s participation in politics tend to work with a very narrow definition of the political; second, this work tends to assume that non-participation equates to apathy. This results in powerful assumptions being placed on young people as they are often seen to operate outside of the narrow confines of politics and, when they do not participate, rather than exploring why they have chosen not to participate the assumption is that they do not care and cannot be bothered. Although the work cited here focuses upon a range of geographical scales, it tends not to look at scales beyond the national (although for exceptions, see Hopkins, 2007; Hörschelmann, 2008; Pain et al., 2010) and so tends to neglect global politics and, therefore, critical geopolitics. The assumption that regional, national or supranational politics are not relevant to children’s and young people’s lives is thus reinforced once again. Critical Geopolitics, Children and Young People The clue to the foreclosure of young lives in the study of geopolitics (and here we refer to the study of geopolitics before the term ‘critical geopolitics’ was coined in English language literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s) might be explained by reference to its disciplinary origins, which saw it attempt to make sense of and map imperial rivalries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Dodds, Kuus and Sharp, 2013). The legacies of these associations ensured that geopolitics remained largely concerned with the machinations of ‘high politics’ and the elite accounts of politicians, diplomats, statesmen and academics during much of the twentieth century (Ó Tuathail, 1996). The majority of geopolitical writing until very recently has been authored by men, with some exceptions such as Margaret Sprout (1968) who wrote with her partner Harold about eco-geopolitics. Dittmer and Sharp (2014: 3) provide a contemporary definition of geopolitics, framing it as ‘the theory and practice of politics at a global scale, with a specific emphasis on the geographies that both shape and result from that politics’. Geopolitical study had, then, traditionally fixated on this global geographical scale in rather reductive ways, which saw it problematically overlook the multitude of other actors and spaces bound up with geopolitics. Unsurprisingly, children and young people did not figure prominently in these global theorisations of geopolitics, and, similarly, their presence in popular media accounts has been typically characterised by their construction as innocent victims caught up in the geopolitical crossfire (although there have been notable exceptions where specifically young people’s – not children’s – agency has been given more coverage, such as the demonstrations and protests associated with the Arab Spring

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in the early 2010s and the pro-democracy ‘umbrella revolution’ rallies in Hong Kong in 2014). The 1990s witnessed the advent of a critical form of geopolitics that looked to reinvent the field by interrogating the ‘discourse through which the world is made intelligible and therefore made amenable to foreign policy interventions’ (Dittmer and Sharp, 2014: 5). This critical strand looked to unsettle the assumptions within geopolitical discourse that legitimated (or critiqued) state actions, yet continued to prioritise the elite authors of these representations, such as politicians and film directors as well as the speeches and films they scripted (Dittmer and Dodds, 2008; Hyndman, 2004). The turn of the century saw more significant changes to critical geopolitics, driven largely by the interventions of feminist geographers and more than representational theorising (e.g. Carter and McCormack, 2006; Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001; Sidaway, 2009). Feminist scholars, in particular, insisted that the invisibility of women and other marginalised groups in geopolitical accounts was symptomatic of the traditional disciplinary gaze that continued to overlook their agency and expressions, rather than evidence of these citizens’ non-engagement (Dowler and Sharp, 2001). Consequently, there has been a shift to include ‘a range of actors hitherto not considered sufficiently ‘geopolitical’: actors like non-governmental organisations, professionals such as journalists or artists and a host of everyday actors and activists’ (Dodds, Kuus and Sharp, 2013: 10; see also Askins, 2013). Moreover, they argued the need to ‘rewrite the actions of women [as well as children and young people, in the case of this volume] back into geopolitical debates, but also to question their absence in the first place’ (Dowler and Sharp, 2001: 168). This encourages a consideration of the historical connections between geopolitics and marginal groups such as children and young people, which have been seldom documented, as several authors in this volume attest (see the chapters by Brown and Yaffe and Huijsmans). These contributions make it clear that children and young people’s engagements with geopolitics are not new; rather, it is the academic inquiry exploring these connections that is novel, as opposed to assuming children were just subjects to be educated about the realities of imperial Britain and its colonial territories (Kearns, 2010; Mills, 2013). Research has subsequently followed these different actors into the everyday geographies in which their lives are played out; spaces and scales that were previously ignored by geopolitical inquiry (see Dittmer and Gray, 2010; Pain et al., 2010; Pain and Smith, 2008; Williams and Massaro, 2013). This has been done with an acute sensitivity to geography in order to ‘disrupt the boundaries and scales of the geopolitical in linking seemingly local phenomenon and experiences … with wider geopolitical processes and discourses of securitisation, disrupting overly simplistic global/local binaries’ (Williams and Massaro, 2013: 752–753). It has asked how the ‘dominant scripts of geopolitics’ might be shaken up to bring about research that is embodied, located, grounded and concerned with the lives of diverse citizenries (Hyndman, 2004: 311; Dowler and Sharp, 2001). This has started off at the most intimate of scales, with attentiveness to

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framings of ‘the body as both a subject and object of geopolitics’ (Hyndman, 2004: 316) and a potential site of geopolitical performance (Dowler and Sharp, 2001). Researchers are now far more likely to be found exploring the lives of, and working directly with (see Carte and Torres, 2013), citizenries in an array of different everyday contexts encompassing, among others, domestic (Brickell, 2012; Harker, 2011; Hörschelmann, 2008; Katz, 2008), ‘street’, public space and/or community settings (Hopkins, 2007; Koopman, 2011), educational environments (Benwell, 2014a; Hopkins, 2011; Müller, 2011) and virtual contexts (Dittmer, 2010; Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014; Woon, 2011). This body of work has attended to the ‘uneven ways in which geopolitical processes shape the lives of differently situated populations, drawing attention to how even the most intimate and everyday aspects of life are key sites where geopolitical power is (re)produced and negotiated’ (Williams and Massaro, 2013: 753). There has been careful treatment of scale in this research to ensure that examination of these more intimate manifestations of geopolitics, or ‘the little things’, (Thrift, 2000) do not denote a simplistic shift of inquiry from global to local spheres or from diplomatic to domestic settings (Hopkins, 2007; Pain, 2009, 2015; Secor, 2001). Instead, the social and political construction of scale and the ways in which geopolitical processes can blur and connect spatial categorisations (i.e. global, national and local) have received considerable commentary (Hopkins, 2007; Hopkins and Alexander, 2010; Hörschelmann, 2008). Focusing on how young Germans in the city of Leipzig responded to the War in Iraq in 2003, Hörschelmann’s (2008) work has been particularly significant in shaping the sub-field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics (see also Hörschelmann and Schafer, 2005, 2007). Working with groups of young people recruited through youth clubs, Hörschelmann (2008) used focus groups as well as questionnaires, diaries, mental maps, photography and film analysis to explore young people’s understandings of, and relationships to, international politics. Her work demonstrated that ‘young people engaged with the war in Iraq through a number of key sites that brought the geographically distant into the centre of their everyday lives’ (Hörschelmann, 2008: 593). The media, the city, the home and the gendered body itself were important sites through which young people ‘encountered, negotiated, embraced or challenged the policies of international state actors in their everyday lives’ (2008: 594). The views of the respondents ‘point to the need to reconsider the scales, spheres and subjects that are politically entangled in global political events’ (2008: 588). The identification of these connections between international politics and children’s and young people’s everyday and embodied lives (acknowledged by Katz, 1993) has been extended in recent years across a range of global contexts (for instance see Benwell and Dodds, 2011; Christou and Spyrou, 2012; Harker, 2011; Marshall, 2013; Pain et al., 2010; Smith, 2013; Stratford and Low, 2013). The incorporation of these actors and geographies has reinvigorated critical geopolitics and broadened definitions of what might be understood as geopolitical, as well as how it can be researched. We wish to draw out a few emergent themes

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here that appear relevant to this volume in particular, although it is by no means an exhaustive account of the exciting directions that critical geopolitics has taken in recent years. First, there has been greater attention to the ways in which citizens or audiences receive, interpret and engage with geopolitical discourses and objects (Dittmer and Dodds, 2008; Dodds, 2014; Dodds and Dittmer, 2013). Rather than making simplistic assumptions about how geopolitics might be ‘read’ through discourse analysis or interviews with film directors, for instance, this work has emphasised the agency of citizens and their capacity to reproduce and contest dominant geopolitical narratives. This has started to encompass the geopolitical subjectivities of children and young people by considering the ways in which they interpret international politics and foreign policy, in the classroom and elsewhere (e.g. Benwell, 2014a; Benwell and Dodds, 2011; Hopkins, 2007, 2011; Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2013). Notwithstanding these developments, critical questions must be asked about the nature and extent of children and young people’s agency in relation to geopolitical events and processes (and importantly, these questions about agency will be different for children when compared with young people, as well as adults). How can accounts better theorise the tensions inherent to recognising children or young people as social and political actors within the context of structures, institutions and relationships (with adults or siblings, for instance) which largely determine how that agency can be expressed? What constitutes agency for children and young people alongside considerations of geopolitics and the geopolitical? The contributors to this collection interrogate and problematise, either directly or indirectly, the question of who counts as a geopolitical agent, and how children and young people’s agency might be understood alongside diverse geopolitical and other structural constraints, as well as through their relationships with others. Recent scholarship by geographers and those engaging with the social studies of childhood has provided some welcome advances on debates about agency (e.g. King, 2007; Ruddick, 2007; Punch and Tisdall, 2012; Vanderbeck, 2008). This work suggests that children and young people have been accepted as having agency without a clear definition of the concept (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012) or what it means for different groups of children and young people (Tisdall and Punch, 2012). The eagerness to dispute the notion of children and young people as passive dependents led to their acceptance as autonomous subjects with little space for consideration of the limitations or structural constraints placed upon their agency (Ansell, 2009; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Vanderbeck, 2008). Furthermore, studies looking to emphasise expressions of agency have focused on places stereotypically associated with children and young people, typically those within children and young people’s local neighbourhoods, such as parks and playgrounds (Ansell, 2009; Kallio and Häkli, 2011b; Ruddick, 2007). There has been an associated tendency ‘to discount the “political child” who speaks out against war, injustice or environmental degradation as naïve, or idealistic’ (Ruddick, 2007: 516). Consequently, ‘local, concrete and agency are conflated into an acceptable focus for research, in opposition to a global, abstract or structuralist

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perspective that is viewed with suspicion as too “distant” from real children’ (Ansell, 2009: 194). These kinds of binaries, which come with implications for the spaces, scales and subjects associated with young lives through research, provide another explanation for the relative absence of connections between literatures on critical geopolitics, children and young people. Discussions of agency when linked to the lives of children and young people have been heavily informed by discourses about children’s rights which tend to reproduce ‘narrow, dominant, modernist concepts of agency, as self-cohesive and independent’ (Holt, 2011: 3). These have neglected the social and spatial contexts that often determine the extent to which children and young people can express agency. Tisdall and Punch (2012) call for greater consideration of children and young people’s generational position in society and how their agency might be facilitated or constrained by their inter-generational and intra-generational relationships (see also Hopkins et al., 2011). These are more likely to tease out, ‘the deeply social nature of young people’s agency. Young people are able to endure hardships, rework structures, and resist oppression precisely through forming bonds with other young people and with older adults. Young people in many contexts equate agency with the cultivation of interdependencies rather than individual action and autonomy’ (Jeffrey 2012: 250). These debates have also centred almost exclusively on ‘positive’ expressions of agency or, in other words, ‘the kind of behaviour young people should demonstrate, the activities they should be engaged in, and the spaces and places deemed appropriate for them to inhabit’ (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012: 366). What happens when children and young people’s agency and participation disrupts and/or directly challenges the moral and social ideals of childhood associated with (problematic) notions of global childhood? What, as Jeffrey (2012) asks, happens to our understandings of agency when young people are engaged in strategies that serve to sustain and reproduce existing power structures? Thus, theorisations of children and young people’s agency in critical geopolitics must avoid making normative assumptions about the constructive nature of agency and remain open to its diverse manifestations (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012). More controversial and critical questions have been directed towards the desirability, as well as the possibility, of foregrounding children and young people’s voices and agency. Vanderbeck (2008: 397) provocatively suggests that ‘the theoretical/empirical/political case for maintaining aspects of adult authority is rarely discussed’. Subsequent research has drawn attention to situations where children and young people might appreciate the reassuring authority of adults and do not necessarily look upon agency in the same positive light as researchers schooled in the social studies of childhood tradition (see Benwell, 2013). Care must be taken to avoid making assumptions about how agency is considered by children and young people themselves (Tisdall and Punch, 2012). In addition, the potential vulnerability of children and young people must not be obscured by research which prioritises their agency (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin, 2007). Can children and young people always independently know what might be in their best interests? As

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Tisdall and Punch (2012: 256) point out, this kind of question highlights ‘tensions between recognising children and young people’s agency versus acknowledging their position of vulnerability in a context of extreme structural constraints (such as times of acute poverty, political instability, war or natural disasters)’. Bringing together literatures from critical geopolitics and the social studies of childhood and youth, two sub-disciplines with very different traditions in relation to questions of children and young people’s agency, can, we argue, help confront some of these difficult questions in sensitive and productive ways. Another notable development in this more recent geopolitical inquiry has been the sensitivity placed on emotion and what Pain (2009) has coined ‘emotional geopolitics’ (see also Pain, 2014; Pain and Smith, 2008; and Brickell, 2014, for an examination of what she coins ‘intimate geopolitics’). The historical interfaces between emotion, affect and geopolitics have been broken down and this work now identifies how geopolitical events are responded to, felt and experienced in emotional and embodied ways by citizens, as well as the researcher undertaking fieldwork (e.g. Benwell, 2014b; Carter and McCormack, 2006; Thrift, 2007; Woon, 2013). There is an imperative here to think through the subjective and situated nature of knowledge created by the researcher, as opposed to the retention of a disinterested and distanced gaze that characterised classical and some critical geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp, 2001). Of course, there is a danger that this inquiry leads to a one-way understanding, where citizens are only effected/affected by geopolitical events and at the same time denied the agency to enact change (Pain, 2009). Indeed, Pain and Smith (2008: 6) are critical of a conceptualisation that overlooks ‘people and their power, or uses representations as a kind of proxy for people’s feelings and actions’, instead contending that ‘politics is also made up of actions and practices among ordinary people every day’. This understanding recognises the fact that ‘small acts and practices can make a difference; the materialities of local geographies can find their way into the circuits of high politics’ (ibid: 14). Moreover, the impetus provided by feminist geopolitics has come with a radical imperative that, through these mundane and everyday geographies, thinks about how things might be otherwise, calling on scholars to get ‘angry at injustice, exploitation and subjugation’ (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Keith, 1992; Koopman, 2011). Linked to this agenda has been greater critical reflection on the predominance of war in geographical and geopolitical inquiry, and the need for scholars to highlight more peaceful encounters and possibilities (McConnell, Megoran and Williams, 2014; Megoran, 2010, 2011; Williams and McConnell, 2011). Williams and McConnell (2011: 930) ‘propose a more expansive and critical focus around “peace-ful” concepts such as tolerance, friendship, hope, reconciliation, justice, cosmopolitanism, resistance, solidarity, hospitality and empathy’. There has also arisen a related sensitivity to the presence of militarism and war in everyday life, especially in environments popular with families and young people (Jenkings et al., 2012; Rech, 2014, and see the chapters by Hörschelmann and Rech in this volume). Woodward (2004: 21) has shed light

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on the importance of this endeavour by showing how ‘militarism and military activities in nonconflict situations exert control over space in ways and through means which frequently render this control invisible’. Research exploring militarism is no longer automatically drawn to its most overt manifestations (e.g. military conflict or exercises) and can encompass ‘banal’ activities that have largely remained ‘off the radar’ for scholars of geopolitics. For instance, there is an emerging body of work taking an interest in what Woodyer (2012) has coined ‘ludic geographies’. Children’s toys and play have been subject to scrutiny for the ways in which they work to sustain and legitimise certain geopolitical agendas and imaginations (see Carter, Kirby and Woodyer this volume, and MacDonald, 2008; Shaw, 2010). This work, then, is ‘playing’ an important role in making visible and critiquing the prevalence and normalisation of references to the military, security and warfare through activities that have not been previously thought of as geopolitical. Finally, we wish to highlight the methodological developments that have seen critical geopolitics embrace different methods and approaches, partly as a result of its engagement with the diverse geographies, actors and activities mentioned above. The project to ground geopolitics has meant moving beyond a limited set of methods that serves to disconnect the researcher from the people and places being studied. This has seen geopolitical research become far more likely to employ in-depth ethnographic techniques, embedding the researcher in localised contexts in order to understand how they live with and/or resist geopolitical processes (see Koopman, 2011; Kuus, 2013; Megoran, 2006; Müller, 2011, for some examples in a range of very different contexts). Those undertaking geopolitical research are now thinking more carefully about effective ways to communicate with and understand the communities with which they work – something of direct relevance to a collection exploring geopolitical issues with children and young people. These kinds of techniques have made it possible to perceive embodied or emotional expressions of geopolitics (Pain and Smith, 2008) or geopolitical processes that might be hidden or harder to perceive if relying on interviews and secondary data analysis alone (e.g. Koopman, 2011; Megoran, 2006). We would also like to suggest at this juncture that critical geopolitics could usefully engage with the methodological innovativeness and eclecticism of social science research conducted with children and young people. A significant debate in the social studies of childhood has focused on the extent to which children are similar to, or different from, adults. Punch (2002) has queried whether it is necessary to use child-friendly methods making the point that the views of a researcher about the position and status of children in society will influence the methods they use (and so will shape how researchers treat and value their participants). So, those who see children as ‘essentially indistinguishable from adults, or indeed all people’ (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998, 31) will probably use the same methods to research issues with adults as they would with children or young people. Punch (2002) extends this debate by arguing that research should recognise that children and adults have much in common but that children and

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young people have different competencies; similar methods may therefore be employed when researching both groups but these may be adapted slightly when researching children and young people in order to make the approach youth or child-centred. A key ethical consideration in research with children and young people focuses on power relations (Punch, 2002, Hopkins, 2010). This includes relations of power that are present in research settings and in the process of data collection but also broader societal, political and institutional power relations that work to marginalise children and young people. Younger people are institutionalised in society in particular ways – such as through schools or through their exclusion from voting – and these constructions of childhood and youth shape the relationships between younger people and adults (Vanderbeck, 2008). Related to this, adults also hold stereotypes, assumptions or concerns about the ways in which they expect children and young people to behave. This could include exclusionary views, for example, about children’s apparent unsuitability to engage with political matters. Often, such stereotypes about the place of children in society are deeply held by adults as Beier (2015) has pointed out in relation to research about children, childhood and security. There are also important differences, particularly between younger children and adults; children are often physically smaller, have relatively limited vocabulary and less life experience compared to adults. Although these differences may not exist when it comes to comparing young people in their teens with adults, there may still be differences relating to issues of ‘physicality, language, experience, confidence or other factors’ (Hopkins, 2010: 31). Alongside issues of power relations, researchers in childhood studies and youth research have also developed detailed insights into – and protocols about – the conduct of ethically sound research (e.g. Alderson and Morrow, 2011; Christensen and Prout, 2002; Hopkins and Bell, 2008, Tisdall, Davis and Gallagher, 2009). This sophistication of this work is such that many fields – including but not limited to critical geopolitics – could learn from engaging with this scholarship. Research in this area has shown sensitivity to for example, issues such as negotiating access through gatekeepers and into different institutional settings (such as child care units, schools or hospitals) (e.g. Benwell, 2014a, Kendrick, Steckley and Lerpiniere, 2008), the process of gaining consent from parents (Alderson and Morrow, 2011) and how the positionality of the researcher plays out in the research process (Holt, 2004; Hopkins, 2008, Punch, 2002). In addition to attentiveness to ethical and methodological considerations, childhood and youth researchers have also been influential in developing innovative participatory methods with which to engage research participants, including mapping, photography, drama, drawing, neighbourhood walkabouts and many more (the list of possible references is too numerous, but see, for example, Clark and Moss, 2005; Langevang, 2007; Punch, 2001; van Blerk and Kesby, 2009; Young and Barrett, 2001). The level of sensitivity to ethical and methodological debate from those with experience of working with children and young people will, we contend, be an invaluable resource for the future development of a critical

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geopolitics of children and young people, and critical geopolitics as an academic field more generally. Introducing the Chapters of this Collection We now briefly explore some of the key themes that the chapters of this collection bring to debates about children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. We prefer to write this as an overview of key themes – and an agenda for children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics – rather than simply providing a descriptive list of the contents and arguments of each chapter. We have also resisted explicitly structuring the collection around specific key themes, concepts or approaches, as many of the chapters speak across and connect with debates and issues raised in other chapters. However, throughout the collection we identify four overarching themes that take us from issues of everyday militarism, recruitment and play, to contestations over territories, borders and migration, onto diplomacy and global geopolitical issues, and finally to debates about activism, protest and everyday politics. These themes, in addition to those we identify in the Conclusion, are significant foci for children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. The chapters in this collection are therefore significant in setting up these debates and establishing key directions for the sub-field going forward. As geographers we are also particularly keen to draw attention to the geographical scope of the collection, encompassing contributions from Germany, the UK, Cyprus, India, the Falkland Islands, Australia, Laos, South Africa and Finland. Despite this diversity there are, of course, parts of the world that are not represented (e.g. North and South America), and the collection should be seen as a call to extend the scope of critical geopolitical inquiry still further (see Sharp, 2013). We now explore each of the four themes in turn, briefly introducing each chapter. Everyday Militarism, Recruitment and Play While debates about militarism are often central to critical geopolitics, the influence of such issues in the everyday lives of children and young people tends to receive less attention (although see Hyndman, 2010). Woodward (2005: 721) defines ‘geographies of militarism, as the shaping of civilian space and social relations by military objectives, rationales and structures, either as part of the deliberate extension of military influence into civilian spheres of life and the prioritising of military institutions, or as a byproduct of those processes,’ and Pain notes that ‘militarism, the extension of military influences into everyday civilian life, inflects civilian spaces and social relations’ (Pain, 2015: 70–71; also see Bernazzoli and Flint, 2009). Issues of everyday militarism are therefore wide ranging and may be felt directly and indirectly in different contexts of relevance to children and

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young people. Issues of militarism might be experienced, felt or engaged with through the school curricula, when visiting museums, when buying children’s toys or when playing video games. Taking up these debates and establishing everyday militarism as a key issue for young people’s critical geopolitics, Kathrin Hörschelmann in Chapter 2 provides a deeply personal and moving account of the often problematic ways in which aspects of militarism intrude into the spaces of children’s everyday lives. Focusing specifically upon experiences at the zoo, on the street, through the media and in schools, Hörschelmann argues that the ways such artefacts of militarism are encountered in everyday life can provoke a critical questioning of politics, power and culture. Following on from this, in Chapter 3 Matthew Rech focuses on the geopolitics of recruitment to the British military (see also Rech, 2014). Specifically exploring debates about children and young people as being both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’, this chapter uses ethnographic material from military airshows and a critical analysis of recruitment materials to explore the contested intersections between youth and the geopolitics of recruitment. Continuing with the theme of everyday militarism, but focusing on younger children and play, Sean Carter, Philip Kirby and Tara Woodyer in Chapter 4 look specifically at the War Games exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London. The ethnographic study included participant observation, interviews and a textual analysis of feedback postcards completed by children or their parents and guardians. The authors argue for the importance of moving beyond a focus only on the discursive reading of toys; including both the voices of those who play with specific toys and the emotional and embodied aspects of play are particularly important here. Territories, Borders and Migration Concerns about the ownership and occupation of territory, and interrelated anxieties about the management, policing and crossing of borders, are understandably a key consideration for critical geopolitics: Territory is land or space that has had something done to it – it has been acted upon. Territory is land that has been identified and claimed by a person or people … It is a bounded space to which there is a compulsion to defend and secure – to claim a particular kind of sovereignty – against infringements by others who are perceived to not belong. Borderlines are often contested not only because they are the sites where the regulation of belonging is most clearly in evidence, but also because of claims to territorial expansion and resistance to such claims. (Cowen and Gilbert, 2008: 16; see also Elden, 2013)

Contests over territory and borders tend to be viewed as the concerns of adults; however, some of the chapters in this collection make an important point about including the experiences of children and young people in such debates, thereby

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identifying a further priority for the sub-field. In Chapter 6 Sara Smith and Mabel Gergan explore how young people are playing a significant role in geopolitical debates on the future of territory in India’s Himalaya region. They discuss how young activists are protesting against state hydropower projects through the claiming of territory, with the assistance of local and transnational solidarity networks. Geopolitics is shown to percolate into the most intimate aspects of these young people’s lives, as it shapes decisions about where they go to university and with whom they form relationships. Also connecting with debates about territory by focusing more explicitly upon contested borders, Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou in Chapter 5 examine children’s constructions and contestations of the ‘Green Line’ separating Greek- and Turkish-administered Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Through the use of interviews and mapping exercises with 13 Greek Cypriot children, this chapter demonstrates the powerful role of educational institutions and intergenerational family relations in shaping children’s imaginative and emotional understandings of, and disconnections from, the ‘other’ side of the border, Turkish Cyprus. Global issues connected with territories and borders are all significant topics for geopolitics, and this is often heightened when it comes to the crossing, passing or transgressing of borders and boundaries through different forms of transnational, regional or internal migration, and through different forms of mobility and immobility. Hyndman notes that ‘migration has long been a barometer of geopolitics, from human displacement generated by war to containment practices in particular territories or camps’ (Hyndman, 2012: 243). Research in geopolitics has tended not to focus on the lived experience of migration. As Hyndman notes in her significant work in this area, she was eager to disrupt the dominant discourse by ‘displacing attention on borders to the crossers of borders themselves’ (Hyndman, 2012: 243). In childhood studies and youth research, relatively little has been said about migration and mobility until recently, and population geographers and demographers have tended to be age-blind and have not listened to children’s and young people’s voices (McKendrick, 2001). Some exceptions include research on street youth in Cape Town (van Blerk, 2013), children moving in the wake of AIDS in southern Africa (van Blerk and Ansell, 2006), and the migration experiences of asylum-seeking children in Scotland (Hopkins and Hill, 2008). Roy Huijsmans in Chapter 9 examines two different waves of migration of children and young people from Laos across the border into neighbouring Vietnam under diverse geopolitical circumstances. Particularly novel here is the critical reflection on historical and contemporary migrations through a consideration of their links to geopolitics and geopolitical discourses of the state. Research with children and young people in the field of critical geopolitics has yet to look back significantly at historical eras, tending to focus on young people’s geopolitical imaginations and emotions in the here and now.

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Diplomacy and Global Geopolitical Issues Given the relative neglect of children and young people in geopolitical research, it is perhaps unsurprising that their ability to participate in diplomacy has been under-explored. Diplomacy has been framed until recently as business undertaken by a narrow group of statesmen (and it has indeed usually been men) in congress halls, summit hotels and parliament buildings (e.g. Craggs, 2014). On the back of interest in citizen diplomacy and creative statecraft (see McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer, 2012; Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014), in Chapter 7 Matthew Benwell considers how and why young people from the Falkland Islands have been undertaking diplomacy for this British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic. These developments have seen young Islanders travel with official Falkland Islands Government delegations to places such as the United Nations in New York and several Latin American nations. Alongside these formal activities, young people from the Islands are active users of the internet and social networking sites, which they use to make and to counter geopolitical points. The chapter suggests that children and young people’s use of the internet and its associated technologies to act diplomatically (or otherwise) will be a key direction for future research agendas in critical geopolitics. Debates about climate change have been ever-present on the global political agenda for the last few decades and so are understandably important concerns for geopolitics. Elaine Stratford’s contribution to this collection (Chapter 8) encourages readers to think through the ways in which young people living in Tasmania, Australia, imagine and understand the implications of future projected climate change, especially for island communities. Through the use of a participatory research exercise she suggests how children can develop or refine a sense of shared responsibility in relation to climate change. Stratford here calls for further experimentation with innovative participatory and artistic research methods with young people as a way to better understand their values and aspirations in relation to geopolitical issues of significance. In addition, there is a more radical agenda that seeks to use these kinds of methodological tools in order to listen to young people and ‘foster geopolitical engagement on matters that matter’. Activism, Protest and Everyday Politics As noted above, geopolitical research has been increasingly influenced by feminist research, which has helped to draw attention not only to women’s experiences but to the ways in which geopolitics is embodied, grounded and located (Dowler and Sharp, 2001), including previously ignored emotional components of geopolitics (Pain, 2009). This work has been particularly useful for drawing attention to the connections between the global and the intimate (Cowen and Story, 2013) and to showing sensitivity to how people respond to,

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challenge and resist geopolitics in their everyday lives. One set of mechanisms for doing so – and a key issue for future research in this field – is participation in social movements, activism and protest. Askins (2013: 529) observes: Twenty-first century society has a long list of causes to protest against: war, autocratic government, privatisation and commodification of land and natural resources, climate change, corporate greed, social oppression and violence on the basis of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability and so on.

In Chapter 10 Gavin Brown and Helen Yaffe explore, through their involvement in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement in London in the 1980s, how young people in particular can ‘act in geopolitical ways’ (Askins, 2013: 531). Once again offering a significant historical perspective to young people’s critical geopolitics, this chapter draws upon interviews with 90 former participants in the Non-Stop Picket organised by the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, the majority of whom were teenagers or young adults at the time of the Picket. It outlines how young people’s activism was accommodated around daily routines, and the sometimes serendipitous nature of young people’s introduction to the Picket. Despite this, the authors of the chapter go on to show how young people were well informed about the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War and what this meant for their resistance to the apartheid regime in the UK and beyond. A focus upon social movements, activism and protest often brings with it attention to the (geo)political topic, matter or issue being resisted, as well as consideration for the everyday contexts in which the activism or protest takes place (e.g. Hopkins and Todd, 2015). This links back to Hörschelmann’s (2008) important work and the ways in which she demonstrates how the media, the city, the home and the body become significant sites through which young people contest international political issues. This returns us to the importance of the interconnections between international politics, as well as the ways in which politics is negotiated, experienced and lived out in everyday life. Chapter 11, by Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, focuses upon the life of a 12-year-old boy and explores the everyday ways in which his life is touched by geopolitical issues. The chapter calls for more attention to how children become members of political communities and develop as geopolitical subjects by considering the relations they have with others and the spaces in which they grow up. It is a timely reminder that geopolitics does not only implicate those involved in conflict or more radical activities, but should be thought of as part of the everyday lives of children and young people throughout the world.

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Chapter 2

Crossing Points: Contesting Militarism in the Spaces of Children’s Everyday Lives in Britain and Germany Kathrin Hörschelmann

Is it War or Children out of Place? The house has blacked out windows. A sand bucket, for extinguishing fires, is placed next to it. It is a dolls’ house made out of cardboard by a girl in London during the Blitz during World War II. The house is now exhibited in the War and Play section of the Military History Museum in Dresden, a city itself badly bombed by Allied Forces at the end of the war. A V2 rocket is pointing up at the house from the floor below. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, a small statue shows a boy and a girl standing next to a suitcase. Rail passengers rush past them, barely noticing. The statue commemorates 10,000 Jewish and other displaced children who fled to Britain from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany during World War II. A few yards along, Starbucks is offering its customers a free game to download onto their mobile phones: ‘Bomber Defence Pacific. For players from 13 years old’.

Children’s relationship to war and the place of war in children’s lives are difficult topics to broach as they raise complicated questions about agency, responsibility, rights, ethics and care. Western conceptions of childhood, of the place of war in children’s lives and of responsibility for war are highly contradictory, enrolling children in the politics of war at the same time as excluding them from decision making on security politics and positioning (some) children as perpetrators of violence and insecurity themselves. Perhaps it is for this reason that the place of war in the lives of western children has only recently received more scholarly attention (cf. Brocklehurst, 2006; Beier, 2011; Collins, 2011; Watson, 2006), while the recruitment of children into armed combat in majority world conflict zones has, rightly, been the focus of much research and children’s rights campaigns over the last two decades or so (cf. Machel, 2001; Wells, 2009). This chapter considers the paradox of children’s simultaneous exclusion from, and inclusion in, security politics from the angle of everyday militarism, since it is through militaristic politics and cultures that the geopolitical comes to

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touch most intimately on children’s lives. The chapter starts with the recognition that childhood, war and (in)security are emotive terms that draw much of their meaning from the relations between them. As children are vital to securing societal futures and much hinges on how ‘secure’ both childhood, as a construct, and the lives of children are deemed to be, and on whether, as well as how, children themselves conform to expectations of how they ought to contribute to securing futures. Children are, however, still very much marginalised in international security debates. Their diverse voices are rarely heard and even children’s rights legislation against the military recruitment of minors has taken a long time to become established internationally (cf. Wells, 2009). Secure futures are instead predominantly thought to be an adult responsibility, and this includes their involvement in managing the risks that are perceived to threaten children and the risks that appear to emanate from the actions of (some) children (cf. Macmillan, 2011; Watson, 2011). One area in which these contradictions and their implications for children are felt particularly strongly is the proliferation of everyday militarism. This chapter argues that an important step towards addressing the contradictions is to ‘start at home’ by tracing the presence of war in western children’s lives and considering when, how and why it can be contested (also see Beier, 2011). Such tracings and critical reflections show the intimate entanglements of geopolitics with other scales, spheres and aspects of children’s lives and bring to the fore complicated issues of care and responsibility (cf. Ansell, 2009; Hopkins and Alexander, 2010; Hörschelmann, 2008; Lawson, 2007). With Brocklehurst (2006), I argue that it is the de-politicisation of childhood that enables a re-inscription with politically expedient meanings that can be used and changed at whim for all manner of political ends, including whether to normalise or problematise war. As Brocklehurst’s international and historical comparisons demonstrate, notions of childhood can change quite dramatically in line with political requirements, particularly at times of heightened security concerns and in the lead up to war. There is thus a dialectic between war and childhood, but this dialectic also creates spaces for contestation, as historical shifts and changes provoke tensions, and as understandings of childhood, ethics, violence, war and peace differ vastly. While some of my recent work has focused on young people’s diverse attitudes to war, especially in relation to the western invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) (Hörschelmann, 2008; Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014), here I wish to consider the presence of war in children’s everyday lives by sketching and reflecting on moments when ‘war’ appears to transgress invisible lines between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ visions of childhood, through the immersion of militaristic cultures into spaces where children might otherwise be deemed to be ‘protected’ from them. My reflections are based partly on auto-ethnographic observations and partly on political and media debates on the issue in Britain and Germany. While I would wholeheartedly endorse the foregrounding of how children themselves

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encounter and engage with militarism in their everyday lives (cf. Beier, 2011), here I am concerned primarily with the myriad ways in which state authorities and producers of cultural commodities address children as participants and potential partners in the production and circulation of militarism. My personal reflections foreground parents’ roles within these processes in order to keep in focus questions of wider responsibilities, continuities and discontinuities in the entangled (geo)politics of everyday life that weave together our most intimate and personal relationships with national and global politics. The chapter opens with a review of recent debates on the place of militarism in the lives of western children. I then present three examples of militaristic ‘intrusions’ into children’s everyday spaces that disrupted my own and others’ senses of the ‘normal’ appearance of militarism and violence in children’s lives. By focusing on sensed moments of transgression, I aim to consider possibilities for contestation and for developing alternative practices and imaginations. My main argument here is that militaristic artefacts, imaginations and practices encountered in everyday life can also provoke a critical questioning of state power and of the normalisation of militaristic cultures, perhaps especially when they are ‘unexpected’ and ‘shocking’; that is, when they seem to transgress a boundary between ideal and less-than-ideal childhoods. When militaristic objects and images appear out of place in different cultural contexts of childhood, they evoke questions that may otherwise rarely be asked. It pays dividends for critical scholarship, I argue, to attend to these differences and to put them to work for an alter-geopolitics (Koopman, 2011; also see Megoran, 2011; Williams and McConnell, 2011). Militarism in Children’s Everyday Life: Sensing Transgressions A number of exclusions and exemptions are frequently applied in public and policy debates about childhood and war that place war, its perpetrators and its consequences primarily elsewhere in time and space. The moral dilemmas that such divisions keep at bay, however, come back to haunt us when attention is directed at the place of war and militaristic practices in the lives of children who grow up in apparently peaceful societies. For, while western constructions of childhood rely heavily on the exclusion of children from politics, war enters the lives of children in outwardly peaceful parts of the minority world in many shapes, forms and spaces, for instance through media discourses, popular cultures of militarism, school education and embodied militaristic practices (cf. Beier, 2011; Jenkings et al., 2012; Lemish and Götz, 2007; Watson, 2006, 2011; Woodward, 2004). This has been noted, among others, by critical scholars of commercial play and gaming, where a continuum of tools for actual and imaginary enactments of ‘playful’ violence through to outright militaristic toys and repertoires has been observed and analysed (cf. Davies and Philpott, 2013; Shaw, 2010; Solomon and Denov, 2009). While these do, occasionally,

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lead to moral panic in public discourse about the effects of violent imagery and cultures on children, militaristic play is often seen nonetheless as simply a ‘natural’ extension of children’s tendencies to fight and ‘test’ their strength. This deeply problematic claim works to normalise both war (as apparently engrained in human nature) and the presence of war and violence in children’s lives. It is based, however, on a very narrow, culturally specific and highly gendered conception of childhood that promotes certain identities and agentic capacities over others and excludes from view the plurality of forms of interaction between children, as well as their diverse values, beliefs and identities. ‘Militarism’ offers not just a set of tools and imaginaries for children to use and engage with. It also intervenes in their relations with each other. Equally problematic is the way in which it sets up an apology for violence and absolves adults (together with state and market institutions) from responsibility, as children themselves are made responsible for the use of militaristic cultural products and for engaging in violent practices and imaginations. This conflation enrols children in a politics which, at the same time, is closed to them. They are permitted (and often encouraged) to enact militarism (cf. Basham, 2011; Mills, 2013) and made partly responsible for this enactment, yet their opportunities for questioning and challenging it are restrained because of an assumption that they cannot take decisions responsibly. A further effect of this is that a separate zone of militaristic ‘child’s play’ is constructed in which the politics of war can be ‘safely’ practised without the ‘risk’ of political challenge (for a similar argument, see Macmillan, 2011). Those who do challenge it, in fact, often find themselves ridiculed as spoilsports, as oversensitive, as overreacting, or even as insulting by suggesting that those who police the boundaries between ‘child’s play’ and adult war politics might not be competent at drawing and enforcing that line. The temporal suspension of children’s active citizenship thus enables the inscription of militaristic practices into some of the most intimate spaces of their lives, where war, violence and militarism may become normalised before a political challenge can be mounted. And while children and their adult carers might be able to contest such practices by creating space for moral discussions and different forms of interaction, the proliferation of militaristic practices and cultures of violence makes it difficult to exclude them entirely from children’s lives. Children themselves often have to walk a difficult line between participation in, and disavowal of, war play; parents’ best hope is to be able to support them in walking that line. Lutz (2002) and Enloe (2000) have argued that militarisation occurs at both material and ideational social registers and entails the production of approaches to everyday life that make violence and militarism appear as commonsense solutions to civil problems (cf. Agathangelou and Killian, 2011). To Enloe (2000: 3), ‘[m]ilitarization is such a pervasive process, and thus so hard to uproot, precisely because in its everyday form it scarcely looks life threatening’.

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While recognising and tracing the proliferation of militaristic practices in everyday lives is an important step towards challenging their apparent normality, it does, however, only take us this far. As Agathangelou and Killian (2011: 23) have argued, ‘If militarization seeps into everything, how does one disrupt it?’ How can one move from noting and critiquing the normalisation of militarism to contesting it, and to developing more of the ‘alter-geopolitical’ practices that Koopman (2011) has recently called for? Referring again to Cynthia Enloe’s work on this, however, ‘militarization does not just happen: it requires decisions, many decisions, decisions made by both civilians and people in uniform’ (2000: 289). I would like to suggest that a way to contest militarism in children’s (and adults’) everyday lives is to make different decisions based on careful attention to sensed moments of transgression. These sensed moments of transgression cannot be universalised, but reflections on what appears as a transgression may lead to greater sensitisation towards the normalisation of practices and phenomena that would otherwise appear unproblematic and acceptable, and thus to different responses. If militarisation occurs most effectively and insidiously when it is presented as a normal or unavoidable part of growing up, attending carefully to moments when it appears to go ‘too far’, when moral boundaries appear to have been crossed unacceptably, may be an effective means towards challenging the proliferation of militaristic cultures, not just in the lives of children but in wider society. For, if certain practices are found to be unacceptable for children it can also be asked whether, and why, they are deemed acceptable otherwise. Thus, attending to moments of transgression is not about the reification of such boundaries per se, but about identifying starting points for questioning the proliferation of militarism in society. Comparisons between countries with different cultural histories of war, in this case Britain and Germany, can also be an effective way of challenging the normalisation of militarism, as the transgressions that are sensed in one context may provoke reflection on what is or is not deemed acceptable in another. I focus on play and education in the following three examples because of the centrality of these two domains in idealised imaginations, and institutionalised practices, of (western) childhood (Holloway et al., 2010; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; James and James, 2004). What I would like to suggest is that the sensed transgressions I am describing here bring to light the problematic paradox between idealised childhood ‘innocence’ and the actual enrolment of children in market- and state-led militarisation practices. The first two examples are based on personal observations, while the third engages with media representations and information provided by online youth-platforms, including those of the German armed forces, the UK government’s Education Department and organisations against military recruitment in schools. I have chosen to include personal examples in order to prompt discussion about moral boundaries that readers are likely to draw elsewhere and for other reasons. By making my own observations contestable, I hope to keep open rather than foreclose a space for critical reflection. The examples also move from seemingly mundane forms of

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militarisation to those that have become the focus of key political debates, thus enabling insights into the transition points at which ‘normalised’ militarisation becomes more widely contested. Example 1: Playing War at the Zoo While problematic in so many more ways than one, zoos often populate imaginations of childhood as ideal places for play and education. They are themselves bounded spaces, and they are internally structured around clear boundaries between animal and human life, interrupted on occasion by petting stations and other opportunities for interaction that allow children to ‘safely’ transgress these boundaries. Care for children is closely linked to care for caged animals in zoos, though not infrequently messages about the ‘normality’ of violence are at the same time imparted through education about ‘nature’. The zoo in Dresden, where I currently live with my partner and two preschool children, carries more serious connotations of violence, however, as it was severely damaged during the Allied bombing raids of February 1945. Many of the animals died, were injured or escaped, and a display in the centre of the zoo reminds visitors of this part of its history and the rebuilding efforts that ensued. For us as a family, the zoo today mainly offers an opportunity for traffic-free play and for a multitude of sensory experiences that can be difficult to come by in other parts of urban life. It is also an easy way of spending time (and money). Several cafeterias and kiosks offer their fare around the zoo and it was when stopping at one of these during a recent visit that I noticed the transgression that I wish to reflect upon here. A popular, if very wasteful, food option in western family-oriented cafes is a kids’ snack-box. It usually contains a toy alongside some pre-packaged food and drink. We purchased two of these boxes for our children. While unpacking one of them with my two-year-old daughter, I noticed a dark piece of cardboard at the bottom of the box. As we lifted it out, it became clear that the cardboard was in fact a small blackboard with a shape marked on it for the child to colour in or redraw. In our case, this shape was not the outline of a zoo animal or cartoon character that I had expected (and accepted as ‘normal’), but of a tank. My own sense of shock at this unexpected insertion of militaristic culture into our family’s play time in a space marked out for that very purpose, and itself so badly damaged by war, was quickly subsumed by the felt need to ‘protect’ my child, in this case by confiscating the blackboard and replacing it with a different toy (see Figure 2.1). On this occasion, my sense of shock and anger at the transgression was too great for me to discuss the matter with my two children. I also had the opportunity to intervene quite simply and quickly. At many other times, however, I have found it difficult to do so, as to make a stand against militaristic play often causes offence among family and friends, such as when receiving militaristic toys as gifts or being handed toy weapons to play with. We do, as a rule, at least talk about such moments after they have occurred and explain to our children why we do not

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Figure 2.1

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Blackboard with tank, for children of 3 years and over

‘like’ war play and shooting games. The map of moral boundaries that we (my children, partner and I) draw in these discussions and in our everyday actions, however, is fragile and unstable. And while we do not constantly encounter militarisation and violence in our lives, their symbolic and material proliferation in popular media, in advertising materials (including those displayed on hoardings and public transport), in commercialised games, toys, films and fashions as well as in all manner of everyday interactions and discourses that the children encounter and are a part of, often seems to dwarf our attempts at containing, tackling and, where possible, excluding cultures of war from the spaces of our everyday lives. Attending to where, when and why they appear, and why and when they seem to transgress boundaries of ‘acceptability’, is an important part of contesting the production of militaristic cultures and of mounting effective challenges to their proliferation by consumer markets and the state. Example 2: Promoting Cultures of War on the Street While the example above could be seen as illustrative of attempts to infiltrate children’s imaginative worlds of play, militaristic cultures are also, and perhaps increasingly, promoted through communal activities in shared public spaces such as street festivals, community events and trade or career fairs. In Britain, companies offering military-style adventure and sporting activities have grown significantly in popularity in recent years. They can frequently be found at

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Figure 2.2

Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Outdoors Project at Brighton Beach Fest 2013

festivals and community events, offering military ‘fun’ activities for both adults and children alongside the more usual array of bouncy castles, food stalls, chillout lounges and performance areas. Thus, at the 2013 ‘Paddle around the Pool – Brighton Beach Charity Festival’ visitors could test their ‘military fitness’, observe a tank parade up and down the main road and trial the ‘Outdoors Project’ with its boot camp activities for children, including covering up in camouflage gear and passing an obstacle course of makeshift tunnels and hurdles (see Figure 2.2). The ‘Project’ also organises children’s birthday parties, including ‘Nerf parties’ that come complete with ‘Nerf battles [toy gun shooting games], woodland adventure games, water bomb catapult assaults, shelter building and more’ (Outdoors Project, 2014). The ‘Outdoors Project’ seamlessly incorporates militaristic activities into its range of nature-based events without noticeable distinction between war play and non-militaristic activities. My own sense of transgression upon observing these activities and promotions while attending the festival with my partner and two children arose not only from the fact that I had indeed been looking forward to the ‘fun’ of the fair and did not anticipate militaristic activities. It also came from a more deep-seated feeling of unease that stems at least in part from my history of growing up as a secondgeneration post-war child in Eastern Germany, somewhere between seeking to grasp the horrors of fascism and war and the ‘new times’ that socialism promised, as all the while the German Democratic Republic enrolled its young people into strictly enforced, regular military activities. We paraded, wore camouflage, practised shooting and took part in school manoeuvres. They were a regular part of our training to become ‘anti-fascist’, ‘peace-loving’ socialist citizens, and as a child with grand illusions (and few rebellious impulses), I tried to participate diligently,

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Figure 2.3

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Bundeswehr-labelled lollipops

even though in time the contradictions between promises and realities dampened my enthusiasm for ‘really-existing socialism’. I knew of children who did resist, and of the difficulties that they faced with those who supported their right to resist, but I was not one of them. As a girl, I was somewhat protected because I only had to participate in a few actual military practice events. Most of the training for girls was, classically, aimed at learning how to provide first aid. Nonetheless, I had to participate in a school manoeuvre during the summer of 1989 while the first East German refugees were already fleeing across the Hungarian border. So, is this an exception? An aberration explained by Germany’s fascist past and the GDR’s subsequent socialist history? Almost certainly, yes. But I would like to propose that it is by reflecting on ‘exceptions’ such as this that transgressions can be sensed that challenge the normality of celebrating militaristic practices as simply a part of the ‘fun of the fair’. The question that this sensed transgression raises for me is whether militaristic practices and the enrolment of young people in them is any less oppressive and problematic because it is depoliticised and undertaken in a democratic society. It is a question that can also be asked of the German Bundeswehr (Federal Defence Force), which has taken to participation in, and providing ‘fun’ activities at, community festivals, trade fairs and career events in order to promote itself as an employer of choice to young people. The Bundeswehr can frequently be found handing out leaflets and other promotional materials such as the two Bundeswehr-labelled lollipops shown in Figure 2.3 during such events. It publishes a schedule of planned appearances regularly on its website (www. bundeswehr.de). It particularly targets events likely to be attended by children and families, such as the Model-Hobby-Play Fair in Leipzig (2013, 2014), the

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Gamescom Fair in Cologne (2014), the You Fairs in Düsseldorf and Berlin (2014), as well as Karriere Treffs (career fairs) in various locations around the country. In addition to this, the Bundeswehr organises regular roadshows and open days at its training grounds that mimic community events, such as those of the Training Corps of the Tank Grenadier Division (Leipzig, 2013), advertised by the Bundeswehr career service as offering live music and childcare alongside experiences of ‘life in the battlefield, helicopters, tanks, motorcycle escorts, dog races and Segway tours’ (Flyer, Tag der offenen Tür, Karrieredienst der Bundeswehr, 2013). These open days are described as highlights for families and the Bundeswehr’s press reports frequently feature stories about parents and children enjoying tours of naval ships, trial rides on military vehicles or handson flight experiences (cf. Bundeswehr, 2013). These activities and many of the Bundeswehr’s other, explicitly youth-targeted promotion strategies have provoked much controversy in public debates. It is to these and to the senses of transgression that they have provoked in public debates that I now wish to turn, in the example of military advertising and recruitment in youth media and schools. Example 3: Recruiting for War in Youth Media and Schools In 2012 the Bundeswehr started publishing advertisements for adventure camps in the Alps, on the Italian island of Sardinia and other locations on the website of the best-selling German youth magazine Bravo, published by Burda. The main readership of the magazine is 13–17 years old, while the camps are open to ‘topfit’ 16–21 year-old ‘team-players’ (cf. Bittner, 2012, Spiegel Online, 2014a). Controversy has been caused by these advertisements, not just because of the young age of the magazine’s readership and the recruitment of minors to the camps, but because the camps are promoted primarily as ‘fun’, ‘cool’, and an adventure, complete with ‘crazy beach games’, ‘crass (or exhilarating) water competitions’, ‘vertiginously high cliffs’, camp fires, mountain chalet stays, and so on. Children’s rights campaign groups have argued that: The images used in the commercials show summer, sun, beach and sea. They bear no resemblance to the reality of military operations … . The dangers that loom in war regions, such as injury, death, traumatisation or the killing of people are not raised in the campaign. (German Association Child Soldiers, cited in Spiegel Online, 2014a)

The transgression noted by these groups and media commentators arises quite significantly from concerns about young people’s ability to decode the military’s messages critically and about the re-packaging of military work as little more than entertainment, through which it is feared that young people are easily seduced to sign up for military work. Young people are, in effect, here judged as too immature for the military’s glamorised messages, yet mature enough to be told about the

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realities of war and military labour. While the military is at pains to present the camps as little more than a leisure activity for adventurous teens, critics note that the lines between ‘play’ and actual military work are transgressed by the camps as they entice minors to join the military. Indeed, it is the playfulness of the camps that makes it difficult to contest the promotion of military careers that is most certainly their main aim. Those who defend the military’s advertising campaigns, by contrast, seek to ‘normalise’ the practice, referring to the army as just another employer and as an institution that is sanctioned by the democratic structures of contemporary Germany: ‘In our opinion, the Bundeswehr is part of democratic society and an important employer, with a broad range of opportunities for professional training (Bravo representative, cited in Spiegel Online, 2014a). When the military enters yet another seemingly protected space of childhood – school – transgressions are sensed even more acutely, yet to different degrees in Germany and Britain. While it is tempting to suggest that the countries’ diverse cultural histories of war explain these differences, I want to be a little more cautious and to note that there are also similarities in the debates, not least because in both contexts different political players mould those cultural histories for contemporary purposes. In Britain, Army officers regularly visit schools, often in connection with career advice and during citizenship education events. The Coalition Government led by the Conservative Party, actively promoted this further through a ‘military ethos’ campaign, which entails a grant of £4.8 million by the Department for Education, ‘for projects led by ex-armed forces personnel to tackle underachievement by disengaged pupils’ (Department of Education and Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, 2013). According to Education Minister Elizabeth Truss, The lives of thousands of disengaged children have been turned around thanks to these projects which instil our wonderful armed forces’ values of hard work and discipline … . The projects instil teamwork, discipline and leadership in pupils through mentoring, Outward Bound activities and other group exercises focused on improving attainment and behaviour. (Department of Education and Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, 2013)

Campaign groups protesting against military recruitment and the promotion of a ‘military ethos’ in schools, such as ForcesWatch and terre des hommes, have contested the programme on grounds of its one-sidedness, inappropriateness in an educational context, unsuitability for resolving complex social problems and its promotion of military employment to children: We question the one-sided view of ‘military ethos’ being promoted here and whether it is appropriate within an educational context … . Where is the evidence that similarly well-funded non-military schemes would not equally benefit the young people involved without the dangers of exposing them to a one-sided view of the benefits of the military? (ForcesWatch, 2012)

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In Germany the deployment of army officers and military recruiters to schools is a rather more recent and highly contested phenomenon. The national draft was only abolished here in 2011 and so, up to this point, the Bundeswehr was able to rely on a relatively large army of reservists (including those who had opted for non-military ‘civil service’) and to recruit much of its specialised staff from the ranks of those completing military service. Despite reductions in the size of the force and an ongoing ‘attractiveness’ campaign, however, the Bundeswehr is currently experiencing recruitment problems and, as a response to this, is sending ‘youth officers’ into schools to ‘inform’ students about employment opportunities in the army. While right-leaning media underline the ‘normality’ of this practice and bemoan allegedly over-problematic relationship of ‘the Germans’ with their army (cf. Exner et al., 2013, for Die Welt), left-leaning media openly criticise military recruitment in schools, and the political opposition extends from students at many schools to teachers’ unions and the parliamentary ‘Left’ party. In 2014, the federal state of Baden-Würtemberg adopted new sanctions against the promotion of military service by Bundeswehr officers offering information sessions in schools, while numerous schools have declared themselves ‘militaryfree’ (Spiegel Online, 2014b). Two of them received the Aachen Peace Prize in recognition in 2013. Terre des hommes and other children’s rights organisations are also actively monitoring and contesting the practice in Germany. While reminders of the country’s problematic past can certainly be found in the arguments of those opposing military recruitment in German schools, a more significant point raised relates directly to the sense of transgression by the military into a ‘protected’ space for citizenship learning, where that protection is meant to safeguard democratic learning and the development of complex understandings of war and war-work. (Older) children are not necessarily seen as ‘too young to know’, but as needing to be exposed to a wider range of perspectives than military recruiters are likely to deliver. While the teachers’ union (Gewerkschaft für Erziehung und Wissenschaft) argues that political education is the prerogative of teachers, not soldiers (cf. Spiegel Online, 2014c), children’s rights organisations such as Terre des hommes have called for more peace education and an end to manipulative, one-sided information, recognising that: Children and youth also have a right to be informed and to form their own opinions. So long as they are informed in a balanced way and have learnt to deal critically with information, they are able from a certain age to form opinions of their own … schools visits by soldiers should not be prohibited per se (although schools should be able to decide this). They should, however, only occur within a strict regulatory framework, which bans manipulative, one-sided information. (Terre des hommes, 2014)

A difficult line is being walked between seeking to protect schools as a special place for independent learning, on the one hand, and on the other hand conceding that young people’s rights for information and capacities to form their own opinions

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would make military visits to schools and information events for young people an acceptable component of political education. This is only the case if conducted within formats that enable balance and the discussion of complex aspects of war and military service, including alternatives to violent conflict resolution. Conclusion: From Sensing Transgressions to Alter-geopolitics? In her 2011 paper Koopman proposed that attention to ‘alter-geopolitical’ practices happening ‘off the page’ and ‘on the street’ can be an important step towards challenging dominant geopolitical power relations and ways of thinking (2011: 277). In this chapter I have sought to outline how paying attention to sensed transgressions in the spatial and moral ordering of militarism’s place in (western) children’s lives can contribute to developing such alter-geopolitical visions. From recognising and reflecting on such moments of sensed transgression, we can move onto more effectively challenging the proliferation and normalisation of militarism as well as the ways in which war is deployed and (re)produced through governmental efforts to inculcate children in the national body-politic, and in particular geopolitical security agendas. As numerous scholars have recently pointed out, the governing of childhood is a central preoccupation of state politics and one that is conducted across a wide range of socio-political spheres, as well as through a multitude of techniques for ‘governing at a distance’ (cf. Rose and Miller, 2013; Wells, 2011). This does not, however, mean that children and those charged with their care comply in straightforward ways with the demands placed on them, nor that those demands are one-dimensional or easily identified. They present a complex web of sometimes quite contradictory expectations, especially as states do indeed have to manage populations at a distance, sovereignties are less and less clearly defined, political agendas are differentiated and negotiated in concrete social contexts, and where different imaginations of childhoods, (ideal) futures and (ideal) paths towards securing them often collide. Noting and reflecting with children on those moments when invisible lines between more or less accepted presences of war in the lives of children (and adults) are crossed is one of many ‘alter-geopolitical’ practices that can be exercised in the everyday. This is in addition to more organised political activities such as those of ForcesWatch, Terre des hommes and other groups, and to political parties campaigning against military recruitment in schools, arms trading and the dominance of militaristic geopolitical agendas. It is not immune from risks such as those of using ‘childhood’ once more as a depoliticised trope waiting to be inscribed with politically expedient meanings. Yet, instead of reifying the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, it may prompt us to think through more carefully how the contradictions entailed in constructions of childhood both uphold and can be made to challenge the proliferation, normalisation and dominance of militaristic practices so that wider challenges

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of realist geopolitics can be posed. We may also ask whether our sense of transgression is in fact limited to childhood, or whether a sense of the violation of children’s needs and rights may become the basis for other rights claims. I would therefore conclude this chapter with Koopman’s recognition that ‘altergeopolitical projects are far from unproblematic’, but that ‘it is precisely the process of struggling with such contradictions, and the thinking through of what works on the ground and why, that are worth both learning from and contributing to’ (2011: 280). References Agathangelou, A.M. and Killian, K.D. 2011. (Neo)zones of violence: Reconstructing empire on the bodies of militarized youth. In: J.M. Beier (ed.), The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–42. Ansell, N. 2009. Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children’s geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209. Basham, V. 2011. Kids with guns: Militarization, masculinities, moral panic and (dis)organised violence. In: J.M. Beier (ed.). The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 175–94. Beier, J.M. (ed.) 2011. The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bittner, J. 2012. Bundeswehr: Im Action-Camp. Zeit Online 27 September, http:// www.zeit.de/2012/40/Bundeswehr-Jugendliche-Action-Camp, accessed 21/08/2014. Brocklehurst, H. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bundeswehr 2013. Rückblick Kieler Woche. http://bundeswehrevent.de/aktuelles/ artikel/rueckblick-kieler-woche-2013; accessed 1 September 2014. Collins, R.F. 2011. Children, War and Propaganda. New York: Peter Lang. Davies, M. and Philpott, S. 2013. Militarization and popular culture. In: K. Gouliamos and C. Kassimeris (eds), The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo‑militarism. London: Routledge, p. 42. Department of Education and Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP. 2013. New funding for military ethos projects. 15 November 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/ news/new-funding-for-military-ethos-projects, accessed 11/09/2014. Enloe, C.H. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Exner, U., Hollstein, M. and Meyer, S. 2013. Die Bundeswehr, Deutschlands ungeliebte Armee. Die Welt, 16/06/2013. ForcesWatch. 2012. Concern over government schemes promoting ‘military ethos’ in education. Press Release, 7/12/2012, http://www.forceswatch.net/news/

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concern-over-government-schemes-promoting-military-ethos-education, accessed 11/09/2014. Holloway, S., Hubbard, P., Jöns, H. and Pimlott-Wilson, H. 2010. Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 583–600. Holloway, S. and Valentine, G. (eds), 2000. Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. London: Routledge. Hopkins, P. and Alexander, C. 2010. Politics, mobility and nationhood: upscaling young people’s geographies: Introduction to Special Section, Area 42(2), 142– 44. Hörschelmann, K. 2008. Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the War in Iraq. Political Geography 27(5), 587–609. Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Transnational citizenship and the political geographies of youth beyond borders. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39(3), 444–56. James, A. and James, A.L. 2004. Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkings, K.N., Megoran, N., Woodward, R. and Bos, D. 2012. Wootton Bassett and the political spaces of remembrance and mourning. Area 44(3), 356–63. Koopman, S. 2011. Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening. Geoforum, 42, 274–84. Lawson, V. 2007. Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(1), 1–11. Lemish, D. and Götz, M. (eds), 2007. Children and Media in Times of Conflict and War. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Lutz, C. 2002. Making war at home in the United States: Militarization and the current crisis. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 723–35. Machel, G. 2001. The Impact of War on Children. London: Hurst. Macmillan, L. 2011. Militarized children and sovereign power. In: J.M. Beier (ed.). The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 61–76. Megoran, N. 2011. War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography. Political Geography 30(4), 178–89. Mills, S. 2013. An instruction in good citizenship: Scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(1), 120–34. Outdoors Project. 2014. The Outdoors Project. http://www.childfriendlybrighton. co.uk/the-outdoors-project, accessed 12 September 2014. Rose, N. and Miller, P. 2013. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal life. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Shaw, I.G.R. 2010. Playing war. Social and Cultural Geography 11(8), 789–803. Solomon, I. and Denov, M. 2009. Militarised bodies: The global militarisation of children’s lives. In: K. Hörschelmann and R. Colls (eds), Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–78.

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Spiegel Online. 2014a. Bundeswehr-Werbung für Jugendliche: Ins ‘AdventureCamp’ mit der Armee. 8 August, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/bravobundeswehr-werbung-fuer-adventure-camp-auf-sardinien-a-985112.html, accessed 21 August 2014. Spiegel Online. 2014b. Baden-Württemberg: Bundeswehr darf an Schulen nicht für den Wehrdienst werben. 14 August, http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/ bundeswehr-darf-an-schulen-in-baden-wuerttemberg-nicht-offenwerben-a-986135.html, accessed 21 August 2014. Spiegel Online. 2014c. Bundeswehr-Karriereberater werben an Schulen um Nachwuchs. 9 April, http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/bundeswehrkarriereberater-werben-an-schulen-um-nachwuchs-a-963501.html, accessed 21 August 2014. Terre des hommes. 2014. Leitlinien für Besuche von Bundeswehrsoldaten an der Schule. http://www.tdh.de/fileadmin/user_upload/inhalte/04_Was_wir_tun/ Themen/Weitere_Themen/Bundeswehr/Leitlinien_fuer_Schulbesuche_von_ Bundeswehrsoldaten_EEEEx.pdf, accessed 12 September 2014. Watson, A.M.S. 2011. Guardians of the peace? The significance of children to continued militarism. In: J.M. Beier (ed.). The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 43–60. Watson, A. 2006. Children and international relations: A new site of knowledge? Review of International Studies 32(2), 237–50. Wells, K. 2009. Childhood in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Polity. Wells, K. 2011. The politics of life: Governing childhood. Global Studies of Childhood 1(1), 15–25. Williams, P. and McConnell, F. 2011. Critical geographies of peace. Antipode 43(4), 927–31. Woodward, R. 2004. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 3

Children, Young People and the Everyday Geopolitics of British Military Recruitment Matthew F. Rech

In the wake of the ‘War on Terror’ and amid growing public disenchantment with war and foreign interventionism, Anglo-American military institutions have worked hard to reshape perceptions of military culture. As part of a Report of Inquiry into the National Recognition of the Armed Forces issued by the Labour Government in 2009, for example, 40 recommendations were proposed for ‘“increasing visibility”, “improving contact”, “building understanding” and “encouraging support” of the [British] Armed Forces’ (Sangster, 2013: 86; Davies et al., 2009). These would include a new national Armed Forces Day (gov.uk, 2014a), greater support for homecoming parades, and a ‘wider use of uniforms’, among other things. Later government policies have included the Armed Forces Community Covenant – a scheme modelled on small-town civic militarism in the US – designed to enable local authorities, private companies, charities and individuals to pledge their support regularly to the ‘Armed Forces family’ in the UK (Strachan et al., 2010). Though contemporary scholars of militarisation have roundly critiqued these initiatives (e.g. Ware, 2012), few have done so from a critical geographical perspective, and infrequently in a manner that reveals a primary objective – the exposure of children and young people to the military, and to military values and ideals. Alongside the National Recognition report and the Covenant, November 2012 saw the release of the Department for Education’s Military Skills and Ethos programme (gov.uk, 2014b). This initiative seeks to ‘create a military ethos’ in state-funded schools in England via a ‘Troops to Teachers’ scheme (see Stanfield and Cremin, 2013), government support for fledgling Military Academies and Free Schools, and an £11 million expansion of military cadet forces. The British military’s ‘Youth Engagement’, which costs £250 million annually (Plastow, 2011; ForcesWatch, 2012a), goes far beyond the ethos programme and includes military presentation teams in school assemblies, careers talks and fairs, mock interviews, work experience, education bursaries, ‘awaydays’ to bases, and the provision of lesson plans and teaching resources (ForcesWatch, 2012b). Not counting exposures to military publicity outside schools, ‘around 900,000 young people came into contact with the armed forces within the [British] education system’ through ‘11,000 visits to state and independent secondary schools and colleges … in 2011–12’ (ForcesWatch, 2013).

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Though not explicitly badged as ‘recruitment’ (indeed, ‘youth engagement’ is often said to have a different rationale altogether), the above initiatives can scarcely be uncoupled from it. As Ministry of Defence (MoD) policy reveals, the access given via military outreach enables the military to: encourage good citizenship, provide an environment which raises awareness of the MoD and Armed Forces among young people, provide positive information to influence future opinion formers, and to enable recruiters access to school environments. (MoD, 2008: ev167; see also Sangster, 2013)

Set in a context of the structured integration of militaries into state and federal education systems and proven upturns in enlistment (Armstrong, 2007; Lutz and Bartlett, 1995), there should be little doubt that children and young people in the UK currently inhabit a world where the solicitations of organised militaries ‘permeate … daily lives’ (Solomon and Denov, 2009: 165). Military recruitment is geopolitical because it relies upon the popularisation of specific geographical knowledges including ‘elusive spatial principles, such as the perception that the world is a composite of hostile environments’ (Farish, 2010: xviii). It entails the violent designation of people and places, and is ‘a social and political [consequence] of both the preparation for and the actual use of military force’ (Dalby 1996: 656). As a topic for critical geopolitical analysis, military recruitment is an opportunity to understand the ‘state’s obligation to account for itself and its role … [just as it is an opportunity] to try to understand the often violent visions, metaphors and templates [which are integral] to state-centric narrative of global politics’ (Rech, 2014a: 11). In aiming to take the critical geopolitics of military recruitment further, this chapter moves beyond an analysis of representational materials (e.g. Power, 2007), and will demonstrate that recruitment is geopolitical also because it happens in places specifically inhabited by children and young people. Recent conceptualisations of critical geopolitics, ones echoed in cognate areas of international relations, have begun to see violence and militarisation as ‘not only fixed at the scale of international hierarchies, but also rooted in embodied placemaking practices’ (Dowler, 2012: 492; see also Sylvester, 2011; McSorley, 2013; Katz, 2007; Nicley, 2009). Though the essence of this polemic can be found in work on geopolitics and visual culture (e.g. MacDonald et al., 2010), geopolitics and peace (Megoran, 2011), and terrains of resistance (Routledge, 1996), it is perhaps best captured by feminist geopolitics. Inquiring as to the geopolitics of everyday militarism – and this is particularly the case with recruitment, considering its everydayness – necessitates the: traversing [of] scales from the macro security states to the microsecurity of people and their homes; from the disembodied space of neorealist geopolitics to a field of live human subjects with names, families and hometowns. (Hyndman, 2007: 36)

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In what follows, these efforts to ‘populate’ geopolitics will be rooted in a further exploration of contemporary military recruitment practices in Britain, particularly those targeting children and young people. This enterprise is all the more important since, much as in some of the world’s most oppressive regimes, the UK allows the recruitment of 16-year-olds (with enrolment from the age of 15 years, 9 months, for some positions) (Owen, 2014). Building upon the geographies of young people and military cadet forces (Hörschelmann, 2008; Solomon and Denov, 2009; Wells, 2014), what this chapter also aims to do is to be explicit about the geographies of military recruitment, outlining in turn how a critical geopolitics of everyday militarism can speak directly to the aspirations of a critical geopolitics of children and young people. The chapter builds upon a research project (Rech, 2012) that included archival work in the film and sound collection at the Royal Air Force (RAF) museum in Hendon, London; a critical analysis of contemporary recruiting materials; and ethnographic studies at a number of the UK’s military airshows. It turns first to a discussion of how recruitment is scaled, and to how it is targeted at intersections of ‘risk’. Secondly, drawing upon a reading of campaign materials and reportage, the chapter will outline efforts to resist military recruitment in terms of counterrecruitment activism. Scaling Recruitment for the At Risk A central theme in literatures around the geographies of children and young people is risk. ‘Seen as both risky and at risk, young people’s bodies become markers of the state and the social body now and in the future’ (Hörschelmann and Colls, 2009: 4). Taking issue first with the scripting and interpolation of young people as at risk and vulnerable, this opening discussion explores how military recruitment does more than to script risk at the global scale (e.g. Rech, 2014a), and shows that it exploits this discourse at a more intimate level. Risk, fear and vulnerability, Alexander (2008) argues, are crucial moments in the scaling of young people’s experiences of the political and, when understood as intimate and everyday encounters, illustrate how the global and local are linked (see also Pain et al., 2010). Through Hopkins’ (2010) notion of ‘placing young people’, the following account will explore how – in an effort to ‘populate’ a geopolitics of militarism – British military recruitment is placed at the intersection of the body and the nation. Body‑Nation Being fundamentally about bodies – their acquisition, training, use, destruction and loss – the military places a marked emphasis on the body in recruitment. As a précis of basic training, recruitment is the main ‘procedure by which civilian bodies are transformed … [and] incorporated into military service and the principles of militarism’ (Armitage, 2003: 3). Insofar as the young military body is emblematic

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of the nation’s future (Adey, 2010), recruitment is tied to institutionalised practices of discipline and to the production of ‘physically strong and healthy youthful bodies, able to “defend” or reproduce the nation’ (Hörschelmann and Colls, 2009: 11). Disciplinary practices in recruitment materials can be seen in the British archive from the late 1930s onwards. In the RAF recruiting film, Raising Air Fighters (COI, c.1938–39), for example, we are told that all new RAF hopefuls needs to pass a ‘rigorous medical examination’ prior to acceptance: posture, breathing and heart rate is checked by men in white coats; hand–eye coordination is monitored by means of a blindfolded link trainer exercise. Youthfulness and virility, however, are clearly essential prerequisites. Although we are only shown medical assessment of older men, the film concludes by profiling the successful (and young) recruit ‘Cadet Coburn’, who, we are told by the narrator, ‘isn’t a bad looking chap either – not all his conquests will be in the air’. In Raising Air Fighters we are given an indication of a broader tendency of British military recruitment to render the prospective recruit’s body docile and analysable in the face of sovereign authority and a medicalised gaze. We also see nascent military bodies marked, inscribed and forced to carry out tasks in ways that classify them as ‘bad’, ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’. Youthfulness, here, is a crucial metric, one that signifies the ideal ‘subject–citizen’ ‘whose destiny it [is] to secure and defend the nation’ (Adey, 2010: 26). The classification of bodies by the military, both as part of the recruitment process and during training, serves the basic purpose of marking out which bodies are fit for which roles: a pilot’s body must be of a certain height and must be capable of seeing without glasses; the RAF regiment body must be male and capable of lifting a load of a particular weight. It works to preclude bodies that are unable to do a certain number of press-ups and pull-ups; those that are unable to run a certain distance, or that are marked in certain places by tattoos (RAF, 2014a, b). However, the classification of the body through recruitment also serves to mark particular bodies out as being at risk and emblematic of societal concerns on body size. The RAF has absolute prerequisites for entry into the service which are in part calculated via Body Mass Index (BMI) (see https://www.raf.mod.uk/recruitment/ how-to-apply/eligibility-check/). As the RAF stipulates, ‘those who fail to meet the minimum and maximum BMI criteria will not be accepted into the Service’ (RAF, 2014a). ‘The dominant means of defining and diagnosing obesity in national and international public health policy’ (Evans and Colls, 2009: 1015), and the use of BMI by the British military points to a distinct medicalisation of bodies of particular sizes (this information appears in the ‘Health’ section of the RAF careers site, rather than ‘Fitness’). More starkly, recruitment practices perpetuate risk, and in this case, the ‘seemingly unquestionable truth about the dangers’ of bodies that are too large, or too small (Colls and Evans, 2009: 1011). Where the risky body comes to matter for children and young people, however, is where it is willed to perform as part of recruiting practices. Alongside the recent Cadet Force expansion, which is synergistic with the government’s ‘Health and Wellbeing’ policy for young people (gov.uk, 2014c), potential recruits are faced

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with a range of strategies designed to reveal the dangers of risky (unhealthy, not optimally-shaped) bodies. First among these are health and fitness initiatives designed to find their way into daily routines, such as the RAF’s ‘Fitness Challenge’ (RAF, 2014c). As we are told here, ‘RAF personnel are required to reach and maintain a good level of fitness throughout their career, and by following our advice, you can do the same’. Such advice comes, partly, in the form of a ‘fitness widget’ – a computer-based tool that allows the prospective recruit to design their own 24-week training programme around the rigours faced by officers, aircrew and gunners. Other assistance comes in the form of the health and fitness ‘Progress Tracker’ (RAF, 2014d), through which users receive daily text messages from a virtual physical training instructor. Messages might include reminders about ‘healthy living’; so as not to ‘destroy your efforts’ in exercising, you are reminded to stop eating takeaways, to drink plenty of water and to get rid of certain things from your fridge. If, as Adey (2010: 26) suggests, a connection is made between body and nation ‘through a host of different ways of doing’, then performing the healthy RAF body points to two crucial arguments. First, the ‘Fitness Challenge’ and other initiatives reveal the commensurability of the ideal civilian and ideal military body. Just as with the use of BMI by the RAF, recruiting materials that focus on the body tend to offer a vision of healthy military bodies and healthy bodily techniques as broadly applicable to civilian life. Being ‘fit for ops’, as one promotional tagline has it, is the same as being ‘fit for health’ and ‘fit for life’. Moreover, recruiting is gendered, and insofar as it discriminates between male and female bodies and their supposed capacities, is but one facet of a broader discourse of the gendering of military service and citizenship (e.g. Dowler, 2002; Sasson-Levy, 2003). Secondly, these initiatives point to the deliberate placing of a military bodypolitics in fora in which children and young people are likely to be engaged. The decision made in 2014 to use Echo Customer Contact Services to extend and manage the RAF’s social media presence – including the development of a mobile version of the careers site, a Facebook careers page and @RAFReserves and @RAFCareers Twitter feeds – is a direct attempt to ‘match recruit expectations – especially as social media channels are an increasingly popular choice for the younger generations … [a] key target demographic for recruits is the 16–24 age group’ (Heggie-Collins, 2014: npn). In that these strategies are an attempt to engage the young body directly, they represent: an anticipatory, bio-political strategy of military recruitment – one that is in line with wider pacific, neo-liberal discourses of health and body image … it is a form of recruitment but recruitment as a generalized, embodied condition. (Burridge and McSorley, 2013: 74)

It is clear that social media form an increasingly important facet of military public relations (and much more besides) in the UK and beyond (e.g. Maltby, 2010; DUN Project, 2014). However, where social media can indeed act to reinforce (rather

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Figure 3.1

Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Body Composition Assessment (BCA)

than only to reconfigure) dominant geopolitical and state narratives (Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014), the placing of recruitment as part of social media engagements is important. As ‘affective technologies, the use of which predisposes the user to a variety of particular engagements with the geopolitical’ (Dittmer and Gray, 2010), the social media of recruitment is only an indication of a broader geopolitics of everyday militarism working in various spaces at intimate scales. The final way the body of the recruit is put to work, and where risky, unhealthy bodies are identified in recruitment, is through a host of practices of ‘doing’ at public events such as military airshows. Airshows are an important space for the engagement of young people who make up over 20 per cent of the visitors at some events (Bournemouthair.co.uk, 2014). Shows like the one held at Farnborough often explicitly target youth and school groups through initiatives like ‘Futures Day’, a scheme allowing free entry to 11–21 year-olds interested in careers in the defence and aerospace sectors (Farnborough.com, 2014). Airshows, vitally, enable all branches of the British military to engage the body directly through activities such as ‘fit for life’ cook-offs (Sunderland Air Show, 2010), where Royal Marines demonstrate in real-time the type of culinary skills required to keep the body combat-ready. The prospective and nearly always younger recruit is often encouraged to scale climbing walls and, at Waddington Air Show in 2009, to compete in the Body Composition Assessment (BCA) (Figure 3.1). The BCA allowed young people to compete against each

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other in timed shuttle runs. Flanking the Assessment was a series of posters encouraging competitors (before they were to compete) to locate their bodies on a BMI scale. In suggesting that ‘from 1st Oct 07, all RAF personnel will have a BMI and WC [waist circumference] measurement taken at the beginning of their fitness test’, the RAF here were clear to connect the requisite standards of the military body to the medicalised discourse of the BMI. Indeed, as the posters read, ‘Body Mass Index … measurement offers a simple, but very effective way of determining your body composition and identifying your level of risk’. ‘Risk’, here, is that of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, ‘various cancers’ and Alzheimer’s – all of which are a potential product of obesity. The BCA, then, is but one example where young bodies are willed to perform in lieu of a preference – both of the RAF and wider society – of bodies of particular shapes and sizes. Central to the perception of these bodies is risk, specifically the risk to the self of an unhealthy body, one which would be as unsuited to combat as it is to a civilian life. But equally important here is the youthful body, both as a paragon of the military ideal, and where it is worked upon though various practices of ‘doing’. Recruitment, therefore, provides a vital instance whereby the bodies of military youth learn ‘mastery and awareness of themselves, before [they] can be extended out toward their troop, their squadron, and eventually the nation’ (Adey, 2010: 41). Recruitment at Intersections of the Risky While military recruitment readily scripts children and young people as at risk at a range of geographical scales, it also interpolates them as risky. As Valentine (2009: 24) argues, a Dionysian understanding of children’s bodies ‘constructs children as dangerous, unruly and potentially out of control in adultist public space’. Managing the transition from childhood to adulthood thus becomes about ‘the management and discipline of children’s bodies both to … discipline them in order to ensure they learn to behave in controlled, what are perceived to be adult-like ways’ (Valentine, 2009: 24). Present in many youth-focused recruitment initiatives is this unruly child who, without the remedying influence of the military, is scripted as disadvantaged, lacking in self-discipline, poorly behaved and often dangerous. This ‘risky’ young person has been a staple of RAF recruitment since at least the 1950s. However, a closer look at contemporary youth engagement reveals how unruly tendencies are currently remedied in practice. It also indicates how a range of imagined and real intersections (unruliness, bad-discipline, disadvantage, class and race) are exploited by military recruiters. At the root of the British government’s Military Skills and Ethos programme, outlined above, was a letter sent to the Telegraph newspaper entitled ‘Why the Military should Invade our Schools’ by Shadow Secretaries Stephen Twigg (Education) and Jim Murphy (Defence) (Twigg and Murphy, 2012). In it, they suggest that:

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Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics We are all incredibly proud of the work our Armed Forces do in keeping us safe at home and abroad. They are central to our national character, just as they are to our national security. The ethos and values of the Services can be significant not just on the battlefield but across our society.

What the Shadow Ministers had in mind was for ‘a cadre of Armed Services mentors, mainly veterans and reservists, to work with those in need of guidance and support’ (Twigg and Murphy, 2012: my emphasis) in a range of educational contexts. One of these contexts was to be the new Military Academies (statefunded schools with service specialisms). These military academies have since been trialled as part of the wider Ethos programme, the political support for which was strengthened by a Green Paper produced by the UK think-tank ResPublica (Blond and Kaszynska 2012). As the authors note, the summer riots of August 2011 (violent civil unrest following student and anti-austerity protests in London and other major cities) indicated: the danger of losing many of our most vulnerable children and young adults to criminality or self-destructive behaviour. [They also recognised that] tens of thousands of our young people are becoming hopelessly trapped by lack of opportunity and education and many lack the sufficient skills to access the job market, let alone the discipline to hold down any position they might obtain. (Blond and Kaszynska, 2012: 5)

The cause of the ‘hopelessness and cynicism’ of ‘troubled youths’, Blond and Kaszynska (2012) argue, is the loss ‘from our most disadvantaged areas of the foundational moral institutions which can build the resilience, discipline and confidence that our children need’ (2012: 5). And their suggested fix? ‘A whole chain of Military Academies officially backed by the Armed Services and delivered by the Cadet Associations to be constituted in our most troubled communities’ (2012: 5). As a start, Blond and Kaszynska call for the setting up of Academies in the UK’s youth NEET (not in employment, education or training) ‘blackspots’, where up to 25 per cent of 16–24 year olds are NEET, until, they suggest, there is a military academy in ‘every Local Educational Authority area’ in the UK. To reiterate, the link between Military Academies and recruitment is clear and should not be downplayed: the overarching vision for these Academies is not only to ‘rescue the young’, and to ‘help society’, but also to simultaneously ‘revitalise the reserves’. What is clear in the ResPublica paper and the wider Ethos programme is a consistent scripting of young people as delinquent, potentially dangerous, perpetrators of crime and a risk to an otherwise moral, adult society. But while the scripting of risk in recruitment can be debated, what is indisputable is that recruitment and military education policy target key intersections of ‘risk’ and inequality. Along with focusing the first round of Military Academies in NEET blackspots, the British military’s broader recruiting policy targets ‘schools with

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students from a more disadvantaged demographic’, with the end result that ‘the average reading age of a 16-year-old signing up to the [British] Army is 11’ (ForcesWatch, 2012b). Moreover, a disproportionate number of recruitment visits are made every year to state schools, as opposed to privately-funded schools. For the period 2010–2012, 85 per cent of all state schools in Scotland were visited on an average of four occasions, with one secondary school being visited 22 times (this is compared to a visits to only 50 per cent of private institutions). Similarly, in Wales, 74 per cent of 219 state schools were visited by the Army alone, whereas only 29 per cent of private schools had a visit (see ForcesWatch, 2013). Mirroring a trend in the US, whereby recruitment is targeted indiscriminately at poor and minority communities (Wyant, 2012), the young occupy an intersection on the spectrum of inequality and disadvantage. Thus, overall, what should be of key importance here is a critique of how economic and social disadvantage is compounded by a rhetoric of risk, along with an understanding of how the British military both benefit from, and catalyse, this situation though their recruiting strategies. Engaging in Politics, Resisting Recruitment Beyond the ‘at risk’ and the ‘risky’, a final thematic in the geographies of children and young people useful for populating a notion of geopolitics is political engagement. Young people, as Philo and Smith (2003) note, are often assumed to have little influence over the workings of states, nations and geopolitics, not having the right to vote or otherwise to contribute to political processes (although see O’Toole, 2003; Skelton, 2007, 2010; Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Young people’s exposure to military recruitment and the low age of possible enlistment in the UK is, of course, clear evidence that this is not the case. First, negotiating the solicitations of military recruiters should be considered a (geo)political practice in and of itself. Second, tasked with orchestrating state-legitimised violence means that young people who have enlisted, not least because they will often be still too young to vote, have significant geopolitical agency. But third, young people’s engagement with the political is illustrated through their involvement in and exposure to the burgeoning practice of counter-recruitment – a theme that forms the chapter’s penultimate discussion. Having increased over the past ten years in a climate of ‘heightened militarism … [consequent of the US and UK’s] … involvement in long-term wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’ (Harding and Kershner, 2011: 79), the counter-military recruitment movement has emerged as a ‘way not only to contest but to interfere directly with the execution of war … by disrupting the flow of bodies into the military’ (Brissette, 2013: 1). Confined predominantly to North America (though with some notable exceptions in the UK), the counter-recruitment movement takes a broadly cultural approach whereby the task of counter-recruiters is to ‘alter the common sense around war and militarism’ (Brissette, 2013: 377). Vitally, it engages and involves children and young people directly.

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Counter-recruiters take a trans-scalar approach (Rech, 2014b) and use the immediate spaces of contemporary militarism (most often schools) to mount challenges to the efforts of recruiters that, as discussed above, manifest themselves across various scales from the body to global imaginative spaces. The predominant tactics employed by the movement, therefore, are situated efforts to counter and disrupt the message promoted by recruiters. This might take the form of distributing flyers outside school property, ‘tabling’ on campuses at lunchtimes and at sporting or careers events, or counter-propaganda and the defacement of recruiting materials. The aim of these tactics, as Allison and Solnit (2007: xv–xvi) suggest, is to inform students about ‘what military recruits are used for in the world, understanding war, and creating viable alternatives to … the deadlock of militarism’. It is also about challenging, as Tannock (2005) notes, the assumption that militaries provide a healthy environment in which to live, work and learn, with counter-presences at military careers fairs offering alternative careers advice especially in communities most susceptible to the ‘vocational visions’ offered by recruiters (Harding and Kershner, 2011). Thus, the counter-recruiting narrative is one that targets a range of the key emphases in recruitment – the global reach of militaries, nation and patriotism, and personal achievement. It is also a narrative influenced by the spaces occupied by counter-recruiters: for good or ill (see Friesen, 2014), this kind of activism is intimately connected to educational spaces, indicating that the place of counter-recruitment is one among a ‘terrain of resistance’ (Routledge, 1996). A useful example in the UK is ForcesWatch, an activist and pressure group that has had some success in advocacy on the conditions of military service (ForcesWatch, 2014a). Central to the work of ForcesWatch, however, is the involvement of children and young people in the resisting of recruitment and militarisation. Chief among their initiatives in this area is the recent film Engage: The Military and Young People (see ForcesWatch, 2014b) that was crowd-funded and produced by young people in tandem with a charity working to empower young people through journalism (Headliners.org, 2014). Engage charts military activities in UK schools and explores a range of young people’s exposure to, and opinions of, the military’s youth engagement strategy. Characteristically, the film offers a range of first-hand perspectives and, rather than presenting only a critique of militarising influences, offers an insight into the perceived benefits gained by young people who attend a military cadet organisation, or who welcome military influence in educational spaces. Providing an outlet for opposing views is taken forward as part of a broader strategy for the Engage film, which forms the basis for a workshop for use in schools and youth groups aiming to encourage critical reflection and debate on (rather than merely an outright rejection of) the government’s military engagement strategy. Mirroring a broader effort by a coalition of activist groups under the banner of the Peace Education Network (Peace-education.org, 2014), Engage points to the key importance of educational spaces for envisioning alternatives to militarism. This is especially the case where a wide range of anti-militarist organisations, not just those associated with the

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Peace Education Network, plan a range of interventions throughout the period of the World War I centenary (e.g. the Martin Luther King Peace Committee (2014) teachers’ resource pack). Conclusion What this chapter has done is to outline briefly how a critical geopolitics of children and young people might be applied to the practice of military recruitment. Recruitment reflects and compounds many of the problematic issues in the geographies of children and young people. Inherently, recruitment scripts risk at the scale of global imagined space. But the practice of recruitment also places risk at different and more intimate scales, whereby the youthful body is seen as emblematic yet at the same time ‘at risk’ if it is not of the military size and shape. The ‘risk’, here, is not only that of unhealthiness but of failing to conform to more broadly-held beliefs about young (and gendered) bodies. Military recruitment also scripts (and benefits from the perception of) young people as risky: much of the current policy on youth engagement in the UK is based on the assumption that delinquent and perhaps dangerous young people might well benefit from the remedying and moralising influence of the military. However, military recruitment also points to the crucial fact that young people are fundamentally part of and complicit in (geo)politics. This is clearly the case where, in the UK, people who are officially ‘children’ are able to serve in the military as agents of geopolitics. But it is also the case where children currently negotiate a landscape of geopolitical persuasion (i.e. recruitment), denoting the ‘complex entanglement of young people’s lives with international politics’ (Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014: 444). The practice of counter-recruitment demonstrates, moreover, that children and young people do not passively accept the solicitations of military recruiters, and are often active in the contestation of geopolitics. Following the potential of a young-person-centred counter-recruitment effort, a critical geopolitics of children and young people should involve listening to children and young people (after Pain, 2008). It should also involve thinking seriously about what young people’s engagement with the everyday geopolitics of militarism says about ‘geopolitics’ and the ‘geopolitical’. What an everyday geopolitics of militarism requires is the placing of children and young people (after Hopkins, 2010), and an understanding of how children’s experiences of the geopolitical are ‘materialised … within spaces’ (Colls and Evans, 2009: 1016). Young people’s engagement with military recruiting does not just happen in imagined spaces of globalised fear (though this is a vitally important space). Rather, for recruitment (and counter-recruitment) to work, these practices must be located in place; on the body, in neighbourhoods, and in schools – spaces that might easily be overlooked if we accept a normative definition of ‘geopolitics’. Thus, in line with the scholarship beginning to rethink the epistemology of critical

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military studies, a critical geopolitics of children and young people is an imperative that demands that we ‘populate’ geopolitics. The changed and expanded notion of the ‘geopolitical’ that this argument implies is essential if critical geopolitics is usefully to inform activism, anti-militarism and a vision of peace. References Adey, P. 2010. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Alexander, C. 2008. ‘Growing pains?’: Fear, exclusion and citizenship in a disadvantaged UK neighbourhood. In: R. Pain, S. Smith and J. May (eds), Fear, Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 37–47. Allison, A. and Solnit, D. 2007. Army of None: Strategies to counter military recruitment, end war, and build a better world. London: Seven Stories. Armitage, J. 2003. Militarized bodies: An introduction. Body & Society, 9(4), 1–12. Armstrong, S. 2007. Britain’s Child Army. . Blond, P. and P. Kaszynska. 2012. Military Academies: Tackling disadvantage, improving ethos and changing outcome. ResPublica Green Paper. Bournemouthair.co.uk. 2014. ‘Sponsorship Prospectus’ . Brissette, E. 2013. Waging a war of position on neoliberal terrain: Critical reflections on the counter-recruitment movement. Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, 5(2), 377–98. Burridge, J. and McSorley, K. 2013. Too fat to fight? Obesity, bio-politics and the militarization of children’s bodies. In: K. McSorley (ed.). War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience. London: Routledge, pp. 62–77. COI (1938–9) Raising Air Fighters. RAF Museum, Hendon. FC 95/58. Colls, R. and Evans, B. 2009. Critical geographies of fat/bigness/corpulence. Introduction: Questioning obesity politics. Antipode, 41(5), 1011–20. Dalby, S. 1996. Writing critical geopolitics: Campbell, Ó Tuathail, Reynolds and dissident scepticism. Political Geography, 15(6/7), 655–60. Davies, Q. Clark, B. and Sharp, M. 2009. Report of Inquiry into the National Recognition of Our Armed Forces. . Dittmer, J. and Gray, N. 2010. Popular geopolitics 2.0: Towards new methodologies of the everyday. Geography Compass, 4(11), 1664–77. Dowler, L. 2002. Women on the frontlines: Rethinking war narratives post 9/11. GeoJournal, 58(2–3), 159–65. Dowler, L. 2012. Gender, militarization and sovereignty. Geography Compass, 6/8, 490–99. DUN Project. 2014. Homepage. .

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Evans, B. and Colls, R. 2009. Measuring fatness, governing bodies: The spatialities of the Body Mass Index (BMI) in anti-obesity politics. Antipode, 41(5), 1051– 83. Farnborough.com. 2014. Futures Day. . Farish, M. 2010. The Contours of America’s Cold War. London: University of Minnesota Press. ForcesWatch. 2012a. Expanding the cadets and ‘military ethos’ in UK schools. . ForcesWatch. 2012b. Questioning the presence of armed forces in schools. . ForcesWatch. 2013. Military activity in UK schools. . ForcesWatch. 2014a. Legal obligations and human rights. http://www.forceswatch. net/what_why/whats_the_problem/issues?quicktabs_2=1#legal_obligations. ForcesWatch. 2014b. Engage: The military and young people. . Friesen, M. 2014. Framing symbols and space: Counter-recruitment and resistance to the U.S. Military in Public Education. Sociological Forum, 29(1), 75–97. Gov.uk. 2014a. Countdown to Armed Forces Day 2014. . Gov.uk. 2014b. Creating a military ethos in Academies and Freeschools. www. gov.uk/government/news/creating-a-military-ethos-in-academies-and-freeschools. Gov.uk. 2014c. Giving all children a healthy start in life. www.gov.uk/government/ policies/giving-all-children-a-healthy-start-in-life. Harding, S., and Kershner, S. 2011. ‘Just say no’: Organizing against militarism in public schools. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 38, 79–109. Headliners.org 2014. Homepage. . Heggie-Collins, S. 2014. RAF enlists Echo Managed services. . Hopkins, P. 2010. Young People, Place and Identity. London: Routledge. Hörschelmann, K. 2008. Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003). Political Geography, 27, 587– 609. Hörschelmann, K. and Colls, R. 2009. Introduction: Contested bodies of children and youth. In: K. Hörschelmann and R. Colls (eds), Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–21. Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Transnational citizenship, dissent and the political geographies of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 444–56.

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Hyndman, J. 2007. Feminist geopolitics revisited: Body counts in Iraq. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), 35–46. Kallio, K.P. and Häkli, J. 2011. Tracing children’s politics. Political Geography, 30(2), 99–109. Katz, C. 2007. Banal terrorism: Spatial fetishism and everyday practice. In: D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, pp. 349–61. Lutz, C. and Bartlett, L. 1995. Making Soldiers in the Public Schools: An Analysis of the Army JROTC curriculum. Philadelphia, PA: American Friends Service Committee. MacDonald, F., Hughes, R. and Dodds, K. (eds) 2010. Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: Tauris. Maltby, S. 2010. Military Media Management: Negotiating the ‘font’ line in mediatized war. London: Routledge. Martin Luther King Peace Committee. 2014. Teaching the Christmas truces . McSorley, K. (ed.) 2013. War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience. London: Routledge. Megoran. N. 2011. War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography. Political Geography, 30(4), 178–89. MoD. 2008. Recruiting and retaining Armed Forces personnel. . Nicley, E.P. 2009. Placing blame or blaming place? Embodiment, place and materiality in critical geopolitics. Political Geography, 28, 19–22. O’Toole, T. 2003. Engaging with young people›s conceptions of the political. Children’s Geographies, 1, 71–90. Owen, J. 2014. UK under fire for recruiting an ‘army of children’. . Pain, R. 2008. Whose fear is it anyway? Resisting terror fear and fear for children’. In: R. Pain, S. Smith and J. May (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Ashgate: Farnham, pp. 211–22. Peace-education.org. 2014. Home page. . Philo, C. and Smith, F.M. 2003. Guest editorial: Political geographies of children and young people. Space and Polity, 7(2), 99–115. Pinkerton, A. and Benwell, M. 2014. Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and statecraft. Political Geography, 38, 12–22. Plastow, J. 2011. Youth Engagement Review: Final report. .

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Power, M. 2007. Digitized virtuosity: Video war games post-9/11 cyber-deterrence. Security Dialogue, 38, 2, 271–88. RAF. 2014a. Health Checks. . RAF. 2014b. You can’t join if. . RAF. 2014c. Fitness Challenge. . RAF. 2014d. Progress tracker. . Rech M.F. 2012. A Critical Geopolitics of RAF Recruitment. Unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University. Rech, M.F. 2014a. Be part of the story: A popular geopolitics of war comics aesthetics and Royal Air Force recruitment. Political Geography, 39, 36–47. Rech, M.F. 2014b. Recruitment, counter-recruitment, and critical military studies. Global Discourse, 4(2), 244–62. Routledge, P. 1996. Critical geopolitics and terrains of resistance. Political Geography, 15(6/7), 509–31. Sangster, E. 2013. The military’s influence in UK education. In: O. Everett (ed.), Sowing Seeds: The Militarisation of Youth and How to Counter It. London: War Resisters’ International, pp. 86–94. Sasson-Levy, O. 2003. Feminism and military gender practices: Israeli women soldiers in ‘masculine’ roles. Sociological Inquiry, 73(3), 440–65. Skelton, T. 2007. Children, young people, UNICEF and participation. Children’s Geographies, 5(1–2), 165–81. Skelton, T. 2010. Taking young people as political actors seriously: Opening the borders of political geography. Area, 42(3), 145–51. Solomon, I. and Denov, M. 2009. Militarised bodies: The global militarisation of children’s lives. In: R. Colls and K. Hörschelmann, Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–77. Stanfield, J. and Cremin, H. 2013. Importing control in Initial Teacher Training: Theorizing the construction of specific habitus in recent proposals for induction into teaching. Journal of Education Policy, 28(1), 21–37. Strachan, H., Armour, T., Healy, P. and Smith, M. 2010. Report of the Task Force on the Military Covenant. . Sylvester, C. ed. 2011. Experiencing War. London: Routledge. Tannock, S. 2005. ‘Is ‘opting out’ really an answer? Schools, militarism and the counter-recruitment movement in post-September 11 United States at war.’ Social Justice, 32(3), 163–78.

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Twigg, S. and Murphy, J. 2012. Why the military must invade our schools. . Valentine, G. 2009. Children’s bodies: An absent presence. In: K. Hörschelmann and R. Colls (eds), Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22–37. Ware, V. 2012. Is the Army invading British civil society?’ . Wells, K. 2014. Marching to be somebody: A governmentality analysis of online cadet recruitment. Children’s Geographies, 12(3), 339–53. Wyant, C. 2012. Who’s joining the US military: Poor, women and minorities targeted. http://www.mintpressnews.com/whos-joining-the-us-military-poorwomen-and-minorities-targeted/43418/.

Chapter 4

Ludic – or Playful – Geopolitics Sean Carter, Philip Kirby and Tara Woodyer

Play is often considered inferior to the more ‘serious’ enterprises of work, endeavour and effort; at best, a rehearsal for adult life. In this chapter we want to suggest otherwise; to take play, and those who play, more seriously. We do this with specific reference to toys and build our argument in the following way. First, after a short literature review, we argue that toys need to be situated within specific geopolitical contexts; our focus is upon the history of the ‘action figure’ toy in both Britain and the US. In the second section, we show that, while such discursive approaches are useful in addressing some of the broader aspects of the ludic, they form only part of the picture. In addition, we need to think more closely about how critical accounts of geopolitics might actually engage with children and children’s play. Potential ways that this might be achieved are discussed, with an attendant discussion of the challenges inherent in developing more affective and non-representational accounts of children’s play. The chapter finishes by offering a set of conclusions and suggestions for future research. In short, we contend that the ‘ludic’ is both under-theorised to date and increasingly important in a world where leisure time, and what children do with it, is becoming more and more complex (Livingstone, 2002). Social media and computer games, in conjunction with the continuing popularity of more traditional toys such as action figures, are all part of a global toy industry that is now worth some US$30 billion (Clark, 2007). Playing War: Adult Worlds, Child Worlds There are three dominant theoretical approaches to play that serve as a useful starting point: the utilitarian, the non-instrumental and the ambiguous (Woodyer, 2012). In the first, play is seen as something that children do to prepare for adult life; that is, it has no purpose in and of itself, but derives its meaning from what it will equip a child to do in the future. In the second, play is seen as even less important, being simply the opposite of seriousness and productivity and thus something to be avoided, in many ways. In the third, the approach favoured here, play cannot be reduced to either of these; instead, theories of ambiguity stress that play is a fluid and polymorphous process, without stability of either meaning or content (Woodyer, 2012). This understanding opens up the possibility that play can have its own internal coherence and meaning; neither purposeless, nor brought into relief only by what it might enable one to accomplish in the future.

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We see this multiplicity of meanings in the case of ‘war play’. War games and exercises have been used for centuries to help military commanders play through battlefield scenarios. Chess, for example, originated in the sixth century in India and was based upon the earlier game, chaturanga, also a Sanskrit word for battle formation. Chess was both a form of entertainment and a didactic tool for teaching battle tactics. Many centuries later, Peter the Great took chess sets on his military campaigns for just this purpose (Soltis, 2014). A chessboard consisting of 64 squares is designed as an abstract representation of a battlefield, with the aim being to capture the opponent’s king. Pieces include rooks (castles), knights (cavalry) and pawns (foot soldiers): the features of offensive and defensive armies. Through chess, we see both extremes of war play, both as a training tool for actual military combat and, more simply, a form of pure entertainment. Thus, war play need not necessarily be directly linked to the promotion of militarism, but the connection of war play to actual conflict is often present in some form. An explicit connection between the two is apparent in martial exercises that incorporate elements of competition and gaming, exercises that are not restricted to childhood culture. At the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for example, a series of drills known as Top Officials exercises (TOPOFFs) have been undertaken in recent years to simulate the effect of large-scale terrorist attacks upon the US mainland. In some ways we might see such exercises as examples of play’s utilitarianism, in that they are rehearsals for (potential) real life events. However, such a definition overlooks the effects of the exercises themselves, effects that go beyond simply the better preparation of agencies for future terrorist incidents. For example, TOPOFFs demonstrate to would-be terrorists that the US is prepared for terrorist attacks. It is a form of affective security theatre that also tells the American citizenry that the US is prepared and resilient (Anderson and Adey, 2011; Neocleous, 2013). In this example, then, play contributes to both the securitisation of the nation state and its social construction. TOPOFF exercises implicitly posit an ‘us’ (the US) and a ‘them’ (the terrorist other), reinforcing the imagined community of the nation in the process (see Anderson, 2006; Edensor, 2002). By ‘playing through’ an event of terror they also reinforce the fears of the populace regarding terrorism, justifying additional security measures. The implications of play are perhaps even more insidious when we look at examples that more specifically target children. Rather than suggesting that there is necessarily a link between militarised play and violence – the oft-cited ‘war play’ debate (see Holland, 2003) – we are interested here in the ways that the preponderance of military-themed children’s toys might naturalise or sanitise particular military logics. In other words, the geographical imaginations and practices of childhood play are important in understanding how the world becomes known to this particular group (Hörschelmann, 2008), as well as the intersection between ‘child’ and ‘adult’ worlds. This is not to say that play is the only way that such imaginations and practices are shaped, and there is interesting work within geography on, for example, the importance of intergenerational relations in children’s education (Hopkins and Pain, 2007), as well as the differing ways in

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which urban and rural upbringings can shape a child’s subjectivities (Matthews et al., 2000). We seek to contribute to these literatures through our focus on play, especially in relation to war toys. In addition to providing a more rounded account of the shaping of childhood geographical imaginations, this approach can also help crystallise some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the adult wars fought by, among others, the parents of these same children. Why is it, for example, that we seek to protect our children from even playing at it when war itself is legitimated, under certain circumstances, by international law? In short, it is our contention that it is precisely play’s banal and taken-forgranted nature that enables the widespread domestication and normalisation of military technologies and logics, and allows for their role in popular imaginaries to go frequently unchallenged. Toys, in the examples in this chapter, do not merely respond to geopolitical climates and cultures; they are implicated in their constitution (MacDonald, 2008). While there is not necessarily a linear relationship between playing with such things when children and greater support for military solutions as an adult (Holland, 2003), toys are still entwined with the construction and legitimation of military practices in all kinds of ways. Here, then, we are making two claims: first, that there is a space and need to study further children’s play, less as a foil for ‘serious’, ‘adult’ geopolitical practices and more as a correlate of them; and second, that while the preponderance of war toys can and should be critiqued, such accounts might also ground their analyses by placing toys within their geopolitical context and foregrounding the actual practices of children. The Geopolitics of Childhood, Play and War: From Action Man to Call of Duty In her history of primarily western toys, Antonia Fraser has claimed that ‘nothing is more natural than that a toy should reflect the life of its period, so that one is scarcely surprised to find knights on horseback during the Middle Ages, soldiers at the time of Frederick the Great …’ (1966: 17–18). Referring specifically to GI  Joe, Fraser (1966: 231) suggests that ‘This [action figure] is obviously the natural development of an age when a child’s admired father is dressed up as [a real] GI Joe. As long as men go to war and armies exist children will want to play with soldiers’. ‘At the same time,’ Fraser (1966: 231) continues, ‘it might be argued that as long as the children are given soldiers to play with, they themselves will grow up prepared to be soldiers – but there the argument begins to extend far outside the realm of a history of toys.’ It is exactly this question, however, that we think needs to be considered in the history of toys, play and war. Indeed, children’s war play is a topic of perennial interdisciplinary debate (Carlsson-Paige and Levin, 1990; Doliopoulou, 1998; Wegener-Spohring, 2004). This debate is dominated by a developmental perspective, thus grounded cultural commentaries on war play are still absent. Studies are characterised by

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a narrow focus on toy guns, the immediate effects of war play and classroombased approaches, with inadequate distinction between play fighting and genuine aggression (Holland, 2003). The wider geopolitical climates within which war play is embedded and the ‘child’s voice’ have been unduly neglected. In this way there is a mismatch between the conception of children as competent social actors, as advocated by children’s geographers (Holloway and Valentine, 2000), and perceptions of their passive use of war toys. As such, we argue here that we need to think about war toys not just as ideological texts but as objects that are enjoyed through embodied and playful practices, as well as embedded within wider geopolitical climates and cultures of militarism. A useful way to approach this is through the history of one of the most popular and enduring types of ‘boys’ toys’, the ‘action figure’, yet to receive sustained critical academic attention. In many ways this is remarkable, given the academic attention (particularly gendered critique) directed at the figure’s female equivalent, Barbie (Rand, 1995; Rogers, 1999; Toffoletti, 2007). The study of children’s play with action figures, we contend, has much to offer popular debate about the socialisation of children, contemporary addiction to violence and enchantment with the military (Behnke, 2006; Jenkings et al., 2012). The first mass-produced action figure was introduced in the US in 1964: GI Joe. Two years later, the commercial success of this toy inspired a British equivalent: Action Man. Initially, both ranges were based upon standard World War II soldiers. Frequently described as the ‘good war’, World War II has provided a set of stories of western heroism that have been drawn upon in countless ways since the end of that conflict (Roberts, 2013). In children’s culture, especially, World War II still constitutes an important cultural repository. For example, the recent comic bookbased film releases, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) and its sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), have narratives anchored in World War II, as do the hugely successful computer games, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. Family events such as air shows frequently incorporate re-enactments of key events from World War II using vintage warplanes preserved from that era. As the Action Man line developed and Britain and the US became involved in more theatres of war around the world, other uniforms, vehicles and accessories were introduced. For example, shortly after the successful resolution of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in London by a widely publicised SAS (Special Air Service) operation, the makers of Action Man, Palitoy, introduced an SAS figure to the range. The SAS is an elite military force that had until then lain largely behind the scenes. With its daring exploits at the siege, they entered the public glare and, as a result, the collective national consciousness (Newsinger, 1997). The toy figure was developed and issued within four months of the siege, attempting to capitalise on SAS popularity at this time. What might the preponderance of such toys and their discourses mean with reference to the domestication and sanitisation of military logics? Certainly, we need to be careful to avoid totalising claims based upon discursive analysis without thinking about how children actually engage with such narratives and play

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with the toys that help to constitute them. What we might say, however, is that such popular culture normalises military solutions to conflict at an early age. The kinds of toys and media mentioned above, for example, posit an ‘us’ (Britons and Americans) against a ‘them’ – whether German Nazis or Iranian hostage-takers – creating a binary logic in which self is compared to other and the tension between the two resolved only by military conflict. Play is particularly important in this instance, because it engages the child with these logics in a material and visceral way. Thus, rather than watching antagonism on screen or reading about it in text, children actively play out these wars and conflicts. While these are examples of conflicts and events that have been included in children’s toys, there is also what might be called the ‘geopolitics of omission’ when it comes to play. Bignell (1996: 175) has noted that: there are few toys or games relating to the Vietnam War or to the Falklands War. … It is self-evident that, in Britain at least, these wars have lost cultural visibility because of their political sensitivity in comparison to the apparently more clearcut issues involved in the Gulf War and the Second World War.

This is seen especially in the case of the action figure. While Palitoy was eager to include an SAS figure in their range as soon as possible after the Iranian Embassy siege, the company Chief Designer, Bob Brechin, recalls that other conflicts such as the Falklands were less popular at the company: We never considered producing outfits that were definitely based upon the Falklands conflict. I suppose because it was so recent and soldiers had died, whereas the SAS activity was so hidden and not so exposed on TV, except for the [Iranian Embassy] siege, as the Falklands was. (Personal communication, 17 April 2014)

In other words, the Falklands campaign was deemed politically sensitive (presumably because of notorious events such as the sinking of HMS Sheffield and the Sea King helicopter crash) and, as a result, less commercially viable. At other times, similar sensitivities have developed in the United States. For example, the makers of GI Joe, Hasbro, had to tread the delicate line between toy design and cultural sensitivity in relation to the Vietnam War when, in 1966, a Special Forces Fighter ‘Green Beret’ GI Joe was introduced to represent an average American soldier in this conflict (Bainbridge, 2010). By the 1970s, and with the Vietnam War becoming increasingly unpopular domestically, Hasbro decided to orient GI Joe away from his original military roots. An ‘Adventure Team’ version was introduced that replaced GI Joe’s martial imperatives with new assignments foregrounding rescue missions, adventure and travel, but this new range was not as successful (Brechin, interview, 14 April 2014). In recent years – and with the introduction of action figures with direct links to the British military – the connections between the action figure and the services

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have become explicit. VE (Victory in Europe) Day 2009 saw the launch of the HM (Her Majesty’s) Armed Forces toy range, directly licensed by the British Ministry of Defence and modelled on contemporary serving British troops. In an industry dominated by television and film franchises, HM Armed Forces was notable for being commercially successful without being part of a media franchise. This success has been attributed to the ‘free promotion’ provided by coverage of British military operations in television news bulletins (Dixon, 2013), as well as patriotic displays of British militarism (discussed below). Thus, in much the same way that we may read GI Joe as domesticating the wider geopolitical frame of the Cold War, we may read HM Armed Forces as domesticating support for the British military during the post-9/11 US/UK-led war on terror. This process includes the well-publicised repatriation ceremonies of British soldiers at Wootton Bassett, charities such as Help for Heroes and appearances by military personnel on prime-time television shows such as X Factor and Dancing on Ice (Kelly, 2013). With reference to the first of these, Jenkings et al. (2012: 361) contend that such displays ‘[should] be seen as part of a trend of the rehabilitation of the military in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and the legitimization of the Afghanistan war.’ While toys can and should be situated within their geopolitical contexts, we also want to draw attention to another aspect of particular relevance for thinking through questions of geopolitics and play. Toys and their themes can be understood partly through discursive reading, but it is their immersive quality – how they involve the player within their narratives – that acts as a mechanism for instilling, or otherwise, their geopolitical and military logics. If this has been accepted for computer games – media that have attracted much academic attention (Der Derian, 2009; Shaw, 2010; Stahl, 2010) – it has been perhaps less convincingly stated for more obviously material toys. In the next section we attempt to develop a more grounded approach to toys and games and their geopolitical contexts, and look, too, at how children actually engage with them. This is not to disavow discursive or ideological approaches, but to show other ways that the ludic can and should be explored and developed. War Games and Embodied, Playful Practice Why do children play war games? War is an inescapable part of our world. Children seek to make sense of the world by recreating it using toys and imaginative play … . But these toys don’t just represent war. They are also used as tools of propaganda to communicate deeper political and social messages about war. They can also instil in children a sense of militarism and nationalism. From times of intense patriotism to periods of strong anti-war sentiment, society’s appetite for war toys and play may fluctuate, but it has always endured. (Opening text of War Games exhibition, Museum of Childhood, May, 2013)

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Much of the academic work on toys, to date, has been characterised by what we might call ‘ideologically reading’ toys. A major limitation of this approach is that it often tells us more about the thoughts and predilections of the adult authors than the children who actually play with the toys in question, a criticism made more widely by scholars of children’s geographies (Pimlott-Wilson, 2012). Emblematic of this adultist approach, Machin and van Leeuwen (2009: 51) have examined ‘toys as discourse’ within the context of the war on terror, suggesting that ‘War toys of different eras realise the dominant discourses of war of the time’. In the case of the War on Terror, ‘Early on children are recruited [through toys] not just into the war on terror but also the values of corporate capitalism’ (2009: 51; see Clark, 2007; Langer, 2002). But what of the agency of children to resist the narratives of toymakers, and make up their own games and stories outside of the framework of the War on Terror? In a similar vein, much of the critical geopolitics agenda has focused primarily on ideological readings of geopolitical texts (e.g. films, magazines, cartoons and videogames) at the expense of investigations of audience dispositions and responses, and the embodied and mundane social practices that audiences perform (Carter and McCormack, 2006, 2010; Dodds and Dittmer, 2013; Dittmer and Gray, 2010); and there have been recent attempts within children’s geographies to address this (Skelton, 2013). In a modest attempt to provide space for the child’s voice, we conducted an ethnography of children – principally from toddlers to early primary school in age – and family visitors to the War Games exhibition at the Museum of Childhood (MoC) in Bethnal Green, London. This exhibition provided a good opportunity to begin such a process: first, a formal relationship had already been established with this organisation, providing a clear point of access; second, the exhibition focused upon the topics in question, including how war toys reflect and inflect the geopolitical contexts with which they are contemporaneous; and third, and perhaps most crucially, the MoC is especially tailored towards children, ensuring that the very young form a key part of the MoC’s visitor demographic. For these reasons, then, it was an appropriate location at which to begin to approach children’s reception of war toys. The exhibition consisted of several spaces, media and forms of exhibit. These included, but were not limited to, vintage toys displayed in standard, transparent cabinets; didactic annotations that attempted to teach both children and adults about how war toys have intersected with world politics in various ways; and more interactive features, including a ‘rifle range’ (in which children can pretend to shoot at a large, military landscape) and a diorama (in which two toy armies – humans and aliens – are at war, with children able to activate battle sounds through control panels). In terms of era, the exhibition focused mainly upon the past hundred years, showing how primitive toy guns (sometimes no more than found sticks with a vaguely rifle-like appearance) have given way to increasingly complex and realistic war games, including action figures and computer games. Beyond these, exhibits included board games, soldier costumes, Lego play sets and metallic toy soldiers, almost all produced for western children. British toys

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were the most common, but others, including German Nazi-era games, were also featured. Research was conducted over a total of a week through the months of March and April in 2014. The methods employed were participant observation, semi-structured interviews (principally with parents and guardians, with children in attendance where possible) and a textual analysis of the feedback postcards placed at the exit to the exhibition and completed by children or parents/guardians or both. For ethical reasons it was impractical to interview children individually, especially given that the research was undertaken with members of the public and that there was no prior relationship with parents/guardians. The postcards encouraged respondents to offer their thoughts on both the exhibition itself and the wider prevalence of war games in society. Here, we foreground the postcards in an attempt to begin to understand how children, in particular, engaged with the exhibition and its themes. While not perfect, this method provides an avenue for engaging with children’s thoughts on the exhibition. (The exhibition is now touring; future research is planned using more intensive research methodologies with child visitors, such as linked art activities and discussions with parent and child groups). We were interested in how (and if) children engaged with the geopolitical annotations that accompanied the exhibition’s items, and whether they contributed geopolitical commentaries of their own. In this way, the postcards were used as a method to draw attention to the ‘child’s voice’ within this research context. Through the methods outlined above, especially the postcards, it became clear that children were by no means ‘duped’ by the war narratives of the exhibition’s toys. There are, of course, limitations to making such claims. We do not know whether parents assisted children in writing the postcards (although, from general observation, it appeared not); the children’s exact ages (although, as mentioned above, the broad age range of visitors to the exhibition was clear); or what children who did not fill out the postcards thought about the exhibition. Thus the presentation here should be seen as indicative of children’s thoughts about war play rather than a definitive statement; a starting point in understanding children’s responses rather than an end point. The postcards invited children to finish the following sentence: ‘I think war games are …’ The responses considered both ‘War Games the exhibition’ and war games more generally, and a selection is provided below. Broadly, comments focused upon three themes: how much children enjoyed playing war games; how much children disapproved of war games; and more ambiguous statements that did not clearly fall into either of these categories, but that often demonstrated a clear distinction between fiction and reality (see Table 4.1). Briefly, what we want to tease out here is the diversity of children’s comments on the exhibition and its themes. Certainly, it appears an oversimplification to suggest that children are passive recipients of the geopolitical content of toys, or that discursive readings of toys can be straightforwardly mapped onto children’s responses to them. Many of the comments demonstrate a clear distinction between real and fictional violence; others reject outright the militarism of the toys in

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Table 4.1

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Children’s responses to War Games, Museum of Childhood

Theme

Written response to ‘I think war games …’ (note: responses are presented here as they were originally written)

Enjoyment

I like war because I get to fight bad-guys quite cool! I like playing Indian against cowboys Good and really cool because it is so fantastic and you can feel some of the war games very cool and good because you feel part of it!!! fun because imagine being at war yourself and what it feels like.

Disapproval

Make me uncomfortable and goodies and baddies is misleading. Horrible! I like now days [nowadays] toys like Hormby [Hornby] trains

Ambiguity

really fun but I would never want to go to war! But I still really like war games my favourite are Star Wars! fun but real wars aren’t dangerous because when the child grows up they could be violent but they might forget about it but they are pretty fun though not very nice they might be dangerous some are fun and harmless I think you dont get killed when you are doing it on games but in real life you will get killed play on computer that is better I think there fantastic and brilliant and exciting and if it was real it would be realy scary Good to let a child decide for themselves if war games, and war itself is good or bad.. It’s their decision extremely fun but a bit scary.

the exhibition. Of those that appear to express enjoyment of war play, we might also note the references to the immersive and the tactile: ‘you can feel some of the war games’, ‘you feel part of it’, ‘what it feels like’. Other than showing the importance of multi-sensory perception to children, such comments attest to the need to understand war play affectively, through the visceral pleasure and emotional enjoyment of play, which does not abstract children from the equation in favour of analysis that is solely discursive. Conclusions: Future Directions for Ludic Geopolitics In this chapter we have argued that there is a need to move away from a single focus on the discursive reading of toys. Our attempts to do so have been relatively modest, but the intention to allow more space for the voices of those who actually play with these toys is an important one. In part, this concern stems from recent calls for a more inclusive geopolitical domain that considers children’s social agency (Sharp, 2007). Despite an emerging body of work that re-thinks the status of young people as political agents (Kallio, 2008), children remain unduly

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neglected as geopolitical actors in everyday, mundane domestic settings, as other contributions to this collection attest. Attention has focused principally upon children’s engagement with war in areas of armed conflict (Cook and Wall, 2011), and has addressed children of 12 years or older (Hörschelmann, 2008). Little, if any, attention has been paid to how children make sense of and contribute to geopolitical climates and cultures of militarism beyond the spatialities of actual armed conflict (Woodward, 2004), although there has been some pioneering engagement in this area (Pain, 2008). We contend that greater appreciation of these social practices will enable public institutions and educators to develop more empirically informed policies on war play that take into account how play is embedded in and contributes to wider socio-political practices, and will better facilitate young people’s understanding of conflict and security. Although beyond the scope of this current chapter, we would also argue for a greater focus upon the embodied and affective dimensions of play. Nonrepresentational theories have drawn increasing attention to how geopolitical knowledges are actually enacted ‘on the ground’ (Carter and McCormack, 2006). They are particularly pertinent here for, as geographers have noted, play exceeds representation (Harker, 2005): ‘This is felt in its prioritising of the non-cognitive and more-than-rational, its embodied nature, its heightening of the affective register, its momentary temporality, its intersection between being and becoming, and its intensity’ (Woodyer, 2012: 319). Such aspects will be foregrounded more easily on this project through future research that engages not only in more intensive ways with museum visitors, but also looks at play in domestic contexts, through the use of ‘play ethnographies’ (Woodyer. 2008). At the same time, as Mitchell and Elwood (2012) elucidate and the previous attempt to situate the geopolitics of play attests, we need to guard against depoliticising accounts of children’s play by focusing only upon the affectual. In other words, we think that non-representational approaches promise more nuanced accounts of children’s play, but that there are limits to the insights that can be gained. It has been the contention of this chapter that it is important to ‘ground’ considerations of play. First, we have situated play – in this case, in particular relation to GI Joe and Action Man – within its geopolitical context. This has not been to suggest that geopolitical contexts are uniquely able to make toys interpretable, but to recognise how play links with wider worlds in all kinds of ways. Second, we have tried to understand how children appreciate war through study of their interaction with, and opinions of, war toys and the war play debate. This has focused upon the War Games exhibition at the MoC. The work is at an early stage and further research will be conducted both in museum settings and in domestic spaces. We hope to have indicated, however, that existing accounts of play can be productively enhanced through greater consideration of how toys are actually played with and thought about by children. Play, we conclude, is much more deserving of attention by geopolitical scholars than it is currently afforded, for it is a key mechanism through which children develop geopolitical

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subjectivities, and actively helps to constitute geopolitical climates and cultures of militarism. Acknowledgements Thanks go to Bob Brechin for reflecting upon his experiences as Chief Designer at Palitoy and the Museum of Childhood for their assistance. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of a project on ludic geopolitics (award no. ES/L001926/1). References Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, B. and Adey, P. 2011. Affect and security: Exercising emergency in ‘UK civil contingencies’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(6), 1092–1109. Bainbridge, J. 2010. Fully articulated: The rise of the action figure and the changing face of ‘children’s’ entertainment. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24(6), 829–42. Behnke, A. 2006. The re-enchantment of war in popular culture. Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 34(3), 937–49. Bignell, J. 1996. The meanings of war toys and war-games. In: I. Stewart and S.L. Carruthers (eds), War, Culture and the Media: Representations of the military in 20th century Britain. Trowbridge: Flicks, pp. 165–84. Carlsson-Paige, N. and Levin, D.E. 1990. The War Play Dilemma: Balancing Needs and Values in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Carter, S. and McCormack, D. 2006. Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention. Political Geography, 25(2), 228–45. Carter, S. and McCormack, D. 2010. Affectivity and geopolitical images. In: F. MacDonald, K. Dodds and R. Hughes (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: Tauris, pp. 105–22. Clark, E. 2007. The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain’s Youngest Consumers. London: Black Swan. Cook, D.T. and Wall, J. 2011. Children and Armed Conflict. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Der Derian, J. 2009. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Complex. New York: Routledge. Dittmer, J. and Gray, N. 2010. Popular geopolitics 2.0: Towards new methodologies of the everyday. Geography Compass, 4(11), 1664–77.

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Dixon, H. 2013. Scientists to spend £500,000 examining how toys shape opinions of war. The Telegraph, [online] 18 November. Available at: < http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ 10457425/ Scientists-tospend-500000-examining-how-toys-shape-opinions-of-war.html> [Accessed 8 August 2014]. Dodds, K. and Dittmer, J. 2013. The geopolitical audience: Watching Quantum of Solace (2008) in London. Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 11(1), 76–91. Doliopoulou, E. 1998. Preschool children’s war play: How do Greek teachers and parents cope with it? European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 6(1), 73–86. Edensor, T. 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Fraser, A. 1966. A History of Toys. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Harker, C. 2005. Playing and affective time-spaces. Children’s Geographies, 3(1), 47–62. Holland, P. 2003. We Don’t Play with Guns Here: War, Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Holloway, S.L. and Valentine, G. 2000. Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. London: Routledge. Hopkins, P. and Pain, R. 2007. Geographies of age: Thinking relationally. Area, 39(3), 287–24. Hörschelmann, K. 2008. Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003). Political Geography, 27(5), 587– 609. Jenkings, K., Megoran, N., Woodward, R. and Bos, D. 2012. Wootton Bassett and the political spaces of remembrance and mourning. Area, 44(3), 356–63. Kallio, K.P. 2008. The body as battlefield: Approaching children’s politics. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 90(3), 285–97. Kelly, J. 2013. Popular culture, sport and the ‘hero’-fication of British militarism. Sociology, 47(4), 722–38. Langer, B. 2002. Commodified enchantment: Children and consumer capitalism. Thesis Eleven, 69, 67–81. Livingstone, S. 2002. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage. MacDonald, F. 2008. Space and the atom: On the popular geopolitics of Cold War rocketry. Geopolitics, 13(4), 611–34. Machin, D. and van Leeuwen, T. 2009. Toys as discourse: Children’s war toys and the war on terror. Critical Discourse Studies, 6(1), 51–63. Matthews, H., Taylor, M., Sherwood, K., Tucker, K. and Limb, M. 2000. Growing up in the countryside: Children and the rural idyll. Journal of Rural Studies, 16(2), 141–53.

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Mitchell, K. and Elwood, S. 2012. Mapping children’s politics: The promise of articulation and the limits of nonrepresentational theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(5), 788–804. Neocleous, M. 2013. Resisting resilience. Radical Philosophy, 178, 2–7. Newsinger, J. 1997. Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture. London: Pluto Press. Pain, R. 2008. Whose fear is it anyway? Resisting terror fear and fear for children. In: R. Pain and S.J. Smith (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 211–22. Pimlott-Wilson, H. 2012. Visualising children’s participation in research: Lego Duplo, rainbows and clouds and moodboards. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(2), 135–48. Rand, E. 1995. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roberts, M.L. 2013. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogers, M., 1999. Barbie Culture. London: Sage. Sharp, J. 2007. Geography and gender: Finding feminist political geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 31(3), 381–87. Shaw, I. 2010. Playing war. Social & Cultural Geography, 11(8), 789–803. Skelton, T. 2013. Young people, children, politics and space: A decade of youthful political geography scholarship 2003–13. Space and Polity, 17(1), 123–36. Soltis, A. 2014. Chess. [online] Available at: [Accessed 18 July 2014]. Stahl, R. 2010. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Toffoletti, K. 2007. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. London: Tauris. Wegener-Spohring, G. 2004. War toys in the world of fourth graders: 1985 and 2002. In: J. Goldstein, D. Buckingham and G. Brougére (eds), Toys, Games and Media. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 55–71. Woodward, R. 2004. Military Geographies. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Woodyer, T. 2008. The body as research tool: Embodied practice and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 6(4), 349–62. Woodyer, T. 2012. Ludic geographies: Not merely child’s play. Geography Compass, 6(6), 313–26.

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Chapter 5

Children’s Emotional Geographies and the Geopolitics of Division in Cyprus Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou I saw a dream that Cyprus was … I saw the shape of Cyprus in the form of trees. […] And my mother told me that maybe when I was younger and I was listening about it all the time, I created a picture of it in my mind, so it wasn’t a dream. But I believed that I saw it. I feel very strongly that I saw it. And my mother told me that this place was on the way to Apostolos Andreas. (Nasia, 15 years old, Autumn 2000)

Nasia had never been to Apostolos Andreas (a monastery at the northernmost tip of the island of Cyprus), yet she had a dream about a tree’s formation, in the shape of the island, that was found en route to this place. Her mother – a displaced Greek Cypriot who was forced to leave her village in 1974 after the Turkish invasion resulting in the occupation of the northern part of the island – had narrated the story of visiting Apostolos Andreas so many times that Nasia dreamt about going there. This is an incident of emotional intergenerational transference that characterises so many of the younger Greek Cypriot generation, especially the children of refugees. They have grown up listening to stories about the occupied areas in Cyprus, the pain of refugees and their desire to return to their villages. Since 1974, Greek Cypriots have worked through the collective trauma of the invasion by creating a cultural depository of images and stories about the occupied areas that has permeated all aspects of everyday life, including the educational system (Roudometof and Christou, 2011). In 2003 a unique social experiment took place: the post-1974 generation of Greek Cypriots was unexpectedly able to visit these occupied areas after the Turkish Cypriot leadership in the north opened a checkpoint on the ‘Green Line’, the United Nations buffer zone dividing the island in two. Consequently, the mythical space of their parents’ homes and villages became a tangible, geographical reality, if only for short one-day visits. The historical events leading up to the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and its de facto partition constitute what is invariably referred to as ‘the Cyprus Problem’. A situated understanding of the Cyprus Problem would take us back to the Ottoman conquest of the island (1571–1878) that resulted in the appearance of the Turkish Cypriot minority. The gradual development of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot nationalisms following the transfer of the ownership of the island to the British in 1878 culminated in the so-called EOKA struggle (1955–59), a guerrilla war organised by Greek Cypriots with the explicit aim of overthrowing the British and uniting the island with Greece. Instead, Cyprus was granted independence in 1960,

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and soon afterwards encountered the first inter-communal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and the withdrawal of the latter from the government. This signalled the beginning of the Cyprus Problem. In July 1974 a failed military coup organised by the ruling dictators in Greece to overthrow the Cyprus government resulted in Turkey’s invasion and occupation of 37 per cent of Cyprus’ northern territory. Turkey justified the invasion as a means of protecting the Turkish Cypriot community of the island. Academic debates about ‘the Cyprus Problem’ are numerous and mostly dominated by international relations perspectives of this seemingly intractable political conflict, as a result of the island’s strategic geopolitical position (see Attalides, 1979; Theophanous, 2003). This chapter attempts to provide an antidote to these established ‘realities’ about Cyprus by articulating alternative social and spatial realities that co-exist with high level political debates. Thus, the chapter takes on questions of security and justice from the perspective of the Greek Cypriot children who have accompanied their parents on visits in the northern occupied areas since 2003. We argue that their emotional geographies of the occupied areas (as seen in maps and drawings) are important ways of exploring the conflict in Cyprus, given that children’s inherited collective memories and their selective navigation of the hitherto unknown part of the island constitute a key element in the formation of future political subjectivities. Critical Crossroads Anyone who plans to visit Cyprus cannot escape the tourist-oriented mantra that this eastern Mediterranean island lies at the crossroads of civilisations, a unique blend of European, Middle Eastern and northern African influences. This idea is also promoted by the Ministry of Education in all the history textbooks, notwithstanding a pervasive nationalist rhetoric (Spyrou, 2000, 2001b; 2002; Christou, 2006, 2007; Zembylas, 2010). In fact, Greek Cypriots view geography as both a blessing and a curse, fatalistically resigned to the conviction that the island’s multiple conquerors came as a result of its envious position. Such an interpretation of history fits the traditional analytical frame of geopolitics, where territory is another name for power and world affairs and can be explained in ‘scientific’ terms that describe inescapable realities (Kuus, 2010). In the past two decades, however, advances in the field of critical geopolitics (see Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992; Dodds and Sidaway, 1994) have brought a poststructuralist perspective that aims to challenge the construction of both the ‘political’ and the ‘geographical’ (Dodds, 2001: 471). This means that geography is not a given, naturalised terrain but is itself a product of power discourses. The field of critical geopolitics interrogates geography and power by adopting interpretive approaches that view conflict and negotiation as discursive cultural practices (Kuus, 2010). Within this framework, the politics of geographical knowledge and representation have been the main focus of the field.

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This chapter contributes to these larger debates in critical geopolitics through research about Greek Cypriot children’s understanding of the island’s divided geography and its entrenched political problems. One could point out that these insights are more appropriate to the field of childhood studies than geopolitics, but we argue that there are important intersections to consider. For one, children and youth are the primary focus of national policies, under the assumption that young people represent the nation’s future (Griffin, 2001). The idea that children are blossoming citizens is important to national imaginary that prioritises the cultivation of national identity (Gullestad, 1997; Koester, 1997; Stephens, 1997). Second, even if children do not participate in high level summits with elite ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ (Kuus, 2010; and see Benwell, this volume), their desires and fears are nevertheless part of the social milieu that stages these meetings. Thus, from an epistemological point of view, this chapter utilises a feminist geopolitics perspective, not because it deals directly with gender, but through its effort to ground, embody and locate geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; see also Staeheli and Kofman, 2004). While feminist geopolitics overlaps to a great degree with critical geopolitics in terms of illustrating the importance of tuning into the politics of everyday life that structures visions of space and power, it also presents a departure from it by remaining faithful to the centrality of knowledge production as a grounded act. As Hyndman (2007) argues, critical geopolitics has not escaped the problem of an abstract ‘view from nowhere’ in its attempt to critique conventional geopolitics. Rather, feminist geopolitics ‘aims to rectify disembodied knowledge production and promote epistemologically embodied ways of knowing’ (Hyndman, 2007: 37). This implies locating situated knowledge beyond dominant western views; grounding critique in the mundane rhythm of everyday life; and embodying subjectivities by embracing the connections between bodies, communities and nations (Dowler and Sharp, 2001). Overall, feminist geopolitics ‘offers a lens through which the everyday experiences of the disenfranchised can be made more visible’ (Dowler and Sharp, 2001: 169), meaning that the lack of children’s voices in geopolitics can be a starting point for understanding how marginality is constructed and maintained. In fact, the growing field of children’s geographies has produced important research that documents children’s engagement with space (see Holloway and Valentine, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Jones, 2008; McKendrick, 2000) and raises questions about children’s use of diverse spaces and the impact of these spaces on children’s lives (see for instance, Kraftl, Horton and Tucker, 2012). More recently, the relationship between children and borders – national, material or symbolic – has won the specific attention of scholars aiming to demonstrate how border spaces frame, disrupt or overturn assumptions about young people’s identities and embodied experiences (Aitken and Plows, 2010). As we have argued in our Introduction to Children and Borders, ‘children and childhood are intricately linked with the power struggles that accompany the processes that give rise to, maintain, and transform borders and their role in the world’ (Spyrou and Christou, 2014: 2).

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From this angle, the critical geopolitical crossroads of Cyprus reveal an island that is caught in the midst of contested definitions and declarations. To begin with, the interpretation of the island’s geography is not shared by all inhabitants. Greek Cypriots explain that before its 1960 independence the island was part of many empires: Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and finally the British, which ended in an independent state of Greek Cypriot majority and a Turkish Cypriot minority of 18 per cent. Turkish Cypriots, on the other hand, focus on the establishment of the Muslim population during the Ottoman years and claim that Turkey intervened in 1974 in order to protect the minority’s safety in a largely non-functioning state. Thus, the Turkish invasion and military occupation of the northern part of the island is seen by Turkish Cypriots as a legitimate response to their marginalisation in the years 1960–1974. The ‘Green Line’ that divides the island is a temporary ceasefire line for Greek Cypriots – who desire the island’s reunification – and a permanent border for Turkish Cypriots. One shared reality, however, is the fact that in both communities a generation grew up for 29 years without any contact with the other. In 2003 the Turkish Cypriot leadership partially lifted the ban on movement across the ‘Green Line’ and visits to ‘the other side’ became possible. Children from both sides participated in these journeys, accompanying their parents and grandparents as they crossed the ‘Green Line’ and experienced a new geopolitical reality on the island: division yet separation, including the continually ambiguous status of the line. As researchers of Greek Cypriot children and youth, and having conducted research in the pre2003 context (see Christou, 2006, 2007; Spyrou, 2000, 2001a, 2002), we decided to embark on a new project entitled ‘The Other Side’ that examined both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s understandings and experiences of crossing the dividing line (Christou and Spyrou, 2012; Spyrou and Christou, 2014). These so-called ‘border’ crossings acquire great geopolitical significance in the context of the Cyprus Problem. At one level, the opening of the checkpoint in 2003 put an end to a fixed and, for all practical purposes, impermeable ‘border’ that had lasted for 29 years. Yet at the same time this new reality brought about a renewed and highly politicised public debate about the significance of this change for the geopolitical situation in Cyprus. For some Greek Cypriots it was a move towards a solution of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ and the return of refugees to their homes: perhaps now a political settlement would be easier. For others, to cross over was equivalent to betrayal if it involved accepting demands to show passports or ID to the illegal occupying regime in the north. The dividing line was never and could never be a border in the legal sense, for it does not divide two distinct states but is a temporary ceasefire line resulting from Turkey’s occupation of the north. On the other hand, for many Turkish Cypriots the opening of the checkpoint opened up a new world – akin to the opportunity of visiting another country – that would partly end their economic isolation, given the lack of international recognition of their ‘state’, the so-called ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ or ‘TRNC’. This had been unilaterally declared independent in 1983, but was not recognised as such by the United Nations. But, unlike Greek Cypriots, many viewed this change

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as a move towards consolidating what, in their minds, is a border separating their ‘state’ in the north from the ‘Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus’ – the southern part of the island. Taking into account this geopolitical context and the discourses surrounding ‘border’ crossing, this chapter uses data from in-depth interviews and mapping exercises carried out in 2010 with Greek Cypriot children participating in our study. The study from which the data comes sought to elicit 10–12 year-old Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s views and experiences of crossing the dividing line to visit the other side of the island. In this chapter we focus on a sub-group of 13 Greek Cypriot children, all of whom have crossed to the other side at least once. Most of the children came from working- and middle-class families. Interviews and mapping exercises were carried out in children’s homes during the period from May to July 2010. In all cases, informed consent was given by parents and the assent of all the children to participate in the project was also ensured. Interviews explored in a more open-ended fashion children’s experiences of crossing, while the two mapping exercises focused explicitly on children’s spatial understandings. Thus, in the first mapping exercise children were requested to trace on paper their remembered trips to the other side, while in the second mapping exercise they were asked to fill in a blank map of Cyprus. In this chapter we draw on data from the second exercise. Emotional Journeys Since 1974, the Greek Cypriot educational system has focused on raising a generation of students that ‘remembers’ the occupied areas and understands the refugees’ desire to return to their homes and villages. All Greek Cypriot public schools are decorated with the sign ‘I don’t forget and I struggle’; students write in workbooks that feature the occupied areas on the cover. The curriculum from kindergarten to high school urges teachers to use every opportunity to engage students in discussion about the plight of the 1974 Turkish occupation. As partial as these discussions tend to be (Christou, 2006; Spyrou, 2000), they have been important aspects of fostering a whole generation with an emotional repository of images and stories from the occupied areas that they were not able to visit until 2003. The highly politicised climate of Cyprus where they grew up and the nationalistic curriculum to which they were exposed (see, for instance, Christou, 2006, 2007; Spyrou, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2006; Zembylas, 2010; Zembylas and Bekerman, 2008) provided them with many cultural resources, in the form of collective memories, to draw upon in their actual visits to the occupied areas. Thus, these journeys to ‘the other side’ became opportunities for spatial exploration of an area that had been invested with powerful emotions and images. The idea that space is infused with emotion is not new and it has been especially advanced in the past few years in the field of geography, through the argument that emotions need to become part of spatial exploration (Anderson and Smith, 2001;

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Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2007; Smith et al., 2009). This means approaching people’s engagement with space not only through dry categories of movement but in an effort to capture the spatiality of emotion and the emotionality of space. As Bondi et al. (2007: 3) point out, ‘[a]n emotional geography, then, attempts to understand emotion – experientially and conceptually – in terms of its sociospatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states’ (emphasis in original). Beyond charting space and emotion, however, our goal here is to use these border crossings as an example of critically framing emotional geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Pain and Smith, 2008) by understanding children’s emotional reactions as embodied, situated and contextual sensations. In her call for an emotional geopolitics of fear, Pain (2009) argues that we need to ‘de-scale’ globalised fear and begin to understand how fear happens to real, embodied persons, not abstract subjects. We argue in this chapter that children’s engagement with ‘the other side’ is, above all, an emotional engagement filled with sensual and highly charged emotional experiences. Our interviews with them reflect this kind of engagement, through which their geopolitical understandings and emotional geographies come into being. As they recount their memories of their visits to the other side, starting with their crossing of the checkpoint and subsequently visits to particular places, their words are filled with intense emotions of both desire and fear. For children who come from refugee families, the trips they take to the north with their families are, in a sense, pilgrimages (see Dikomitis, 2013; see also Dikomitis, 2004, 2005) or sacred journeys that bring to life a collective sense of being. Children are not simply visiting a new place to explore and to experience; they are, in many ways, visiting the past – a past raised in their imaginations by their parents’ and grandparents’ stories – where an intimate sense of belonging is recounted, relived and made meaningful in the present. These encounters with place, people and memories help to construct a deeply emotional understanding of geography that transforms the geopolitical situation on the island from a de facto outcome of history to a highly personal matter, central to a sense of identity and belonging. For many children, the opportunity after 2003 to visit their parents’ and grandparents’ villages was filled with excitement and, as many explained to us, they were happy that they were able to do that. As Antonia commented, when she visits the north she feels happiness ‘because I see my parents’ villages’. Yet this general sense of excitement was readily complicated when children elaborated on their visits. When we asked children to reflect on their experiences of crossing over to the other side, many referred to the strong negative emotions they felt at the checkpoint. Perhaps more than anything they were upset by the fact that they had to show their passports or IDs in order to cross. This angered many of the children, who felt that it was unjust to have to show their passports to visit the other half of their own country. As Lakis explained, ‘I wish they did not check on us and that they would get rid of the Green Line so we can freely go to the other side. After all it is our country. It does not belong to the Turks’. Moreover, encountering

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the ‘other’ – the Turkish Cypriot police and other officers who worked at the checkpoint – aroused in many a sense of discomfort and in some cases created a sense of anxiety or fear. What they had learnt at home or school about the ‘other’ (see Christou, 2007; Spyrou, 2000, 2006) readily became relevant and provided an interpretive framework that they used to make sense of what they encountered during their visit. Given this background and the historical realities of Cyprus, for most children this framework was coloured by all kinds of ideological assumptions about the ‘other’ – as ‘enemy’, ‘evil’, ‘barbarian’ and so on – and on deeply-held emotional understandings of their identities as Greek Cypriot children living in a divided country. Many of the children recounted to us how these feelings of discomfort, anxiety or fear extended beyond the checkpoint. Being accompanied by their families gave the children some sense of security but, interestingly, many pointed out that they still felt uncomfortable being in the north. They explained, for instance, that they would hold on to their parent’s or grandparent’s hand during the trip and would avoid any contact with strangers to ensure that they were safe, as far as possible. As Maria put it: ‘I am always careful not to be too far away from my mom and dad. The Turks scare me a lot.’ Indeed, for some children merely being in the north implied a certain degree of unpredictability and uncertainty. What they understand to be an illegal state – a ‘pseudostate’, as Greek Cypriots often refer to the illegal entity set up in the north – cannot be trusted: if something happens while being there (e.g. a road accident), they worry that they might be treated unfairly by the authorities. These fears are not unfounded, given the heavy presence of the Turkish army in the occupied areas. According to a 1994 United Nations report, the northern part of the island is ‘one of the most highly militarised areas in the world in terms of the ratio between numbers of troops and civilian population’ (1994: 7), with indications that numbers of Turkish troops may be increasing. Therefore, one could argue that the fear and anxiety expressed by Greek Cypriot children regarding their visit to the other side is a reflection of this reality. On the other hand, fear is not always a result of perceiving real danger; a critical emotional geography would have to interrogate how children’s fear is constructed, maintained and amplified in spite of reality (Pain and Smith, 2008). Given the fact that these border crossings have not, to any great extent, resulted in incidents of violence, it is important to understand the experience of fear along with feelings of injustice. These were more intense during the children’s initial visits, when they were encountering places they had heard much about and knew as part of their country – ‘it belonged to them’ – yet, unlike the south where they resided, were occupied and controlled by the Turkish military. The presence of the occupation’s symbolism – from the uniformed police at the checkpoint to the flags of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ and the military presence – was abundantly evident to the children and most clearly expressed annoyance at this, as something that they felt reflected the unjust state of affairs. Lana, for instance, explained that she does not like seeing Turkish flags in the north: ‘it is not because I do not like the Turks but I feel that it is something which belongs to us and they

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took it’. Children talked about the anger they felt from experiencing at first-hand this sense of injustice. As Eleonora put it: ‘as soon as I cross over I feel anger, I feel a lot of anger when I know that that thing [i.e. this land] was ours and because the Turks were jealous they came and took it.’ For children from refugee families, visiting the other side and witnessing at first-hand how others are now living in their family’s homes serves to intensify this feeling of injustice. In cases where the children and their families found that the home they left behind was in poor condition or no longer there, their feelings of anger, sadness and injustice combined to create an emotionally powerful feeling that they had never before experienced. Theodora, for example, explained that she was sad during one of the trips when she realised how upset her grandmother was after their visit to the house she left behind in 1974. Similarly, Antonia explained how she and her family felt after they visited her father’s village for the first time and realised that his house had been demolished. For children, the context provided by their family accompanying them on these visits as well as the larger ideological frameworks that were part and parcel of their upbringing provided the interpretive frameworks for making sense of their visits. It is in this sense that children’s understanding of place is made and remade through these experiential encounters of a collective and intimate past, situating them as individuals within a particular historical moment. Yet, despite these children’s intense emotional engagements with the occupied north, some of their encounters with Turkish Cypriots encouraged them to rethink notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. In many cases the Turkish Cypriots welcomed them, befriended them and shared intimate moments, all suggestive of their humanity. Their direct and highly emotional experiences with places and people in the north might, to some extent, have reaffirmed their knowledge, assumptions and worldviews, but they have occasionally also helped them to create more complex and multi-layered understandings of the situation in Cyprus. These complexities in children’s understandings of the geopolitical situation in Cyprus are, as we have argued, reflected in how they ‘map’ their emotional geographies. Mapping Geographies of Emotion For the purposes of this study we had asked children to construct a map of a trip they took to the other side, starting with their departure from their home in the south and ending with their return. We also asked children to fill in an outline map of Cyprus in whatever way they wished. These two types of geographic exercises provided children with an opportunity to map their own understandings of space and place in the light of their visits to the other side. Both sets of maps provided us with interesting insights into children’s place-making and the crafting of their emotional geographies in the context of the island’s territorial division. In this chapter we draw on insights from the second exercise, and the children’s outline maps provided us with a narrative description.

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Figure 5.1

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Antonia’s map of Cyprus

When asked to point out what came to mind when they thought about the occupied north, children mentioned words such as: Turks, Turkey, Turkishoccupied, war, Green Line, barbed wire, anger, sadness and disappointment. All these words point to the political situation in Cyprus and what the children perceive as the pathological state of affairs on the island. In children’s understanding the situation in Cyprus cannot be normal, given Turkey’s invasion and occupation of more than a third of Cyprus’ territory; the thousands of refugees who had to flee their homes; the unilateral establishment of a ‘pseudostate’ in the occupied territories; and Turkey’s unwillingness to negotiate a settlement that would allow for the reunification of the island and the return of refugees to their homes. Turkey’s role in relation to the island’s division, the reality of Cyprus’ territorial split, and the feelings that accompany these understandings, come together to construct children’s emotional geographies of their homeland, north and south. It does so in a way that juxtaposes the two worlds they see as quite different from each other, despite their recognition that Cyprus is one and should be united. A few examples will clarify how children come to construct and imbue space with emotion in a way that creates an ideological separation between worlds, people and places, while providing ways of imagining the future. Antonia had visited the north a few times immediately after the opening of the checkpoint in 2003, but at the time of the interview it had been six years since she last crossed. On her map (see Figure 5.1) Antonia drew the two parts of the island clearly separated, with the occupied north (note that her dividing line does not correspond with the actual geographical ‘Green Line’ that separates

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Figure 5.2

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Andria’s map of Cyprus

north from south) in black and white, and the south in colour. When asked to explain why she drew the occupied north in black and white, she said she did so ‘because almost no one lives there and life does not move forward, while in free Cyprus there are many people who live …’. Antonia’s drawing reflects her own emotional understanding of north and south as corresponding to death and life; this is a theme that is reflected in other children’s drawings. On her map of Cyprus, Eleni reflected this same preoccupation with life, death and suffering by drawing the occupied north in red because, as she explained, much blood and tears were shed on the day of the Turkish invasion in 1974. She also drew dark waves along the occupied shoreline to show how the sea in the occupied north is more like the ‘dead sea’: when people go to the beach in the north, she explained, they are sad while people in the south tend to be much happier. She went on to explain more about the tears she drew: ‘The tears come from almost all people who are thinking that it [i.e. this part] would have been theirs and from the blood of the missing persons, the dead who fell [during the war] … and mainly in my village … because it is a big village … we have five missing persons and we only found three of them and there are still two [to identify].’ The pervasiveness of this symbolic construction of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is clearly depicted in Andria’s map (Figure 5.2): ‘I drew the assumed Green Line dividing the two sides from each other, I drew the sea around, I drew the church of Apostolos Andreas at the edge of Cyprus, [with] houses and trees on one side.’

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But the houses she drew in the north were devoid of colour, in contrast to those in the south. As she explained, people in the south are good, polite and also happier, while in the north ‘they do not have as much liveliness.’ Children’s mapping of their emotional geographies also reflects their ideological vision for the future, reflecting in this way the politics of reunification, which is the official position of the Republic of Cyprus. Maria, for example, drew a dividing line across the map of Cyprus adorned with barbed wire from which blood is dripping. Next to the map, Maria wrote ‘Why do you divide me in two?’. When asked to elaborate on what she wrote, she explained that Cyprus is sad and ‘wondering why we divided her in two’. The blood dripping from along the ‘Green Line’ is because ‘we hurt her and for the last 35 years blood is running and no one realizes that’. Maria also explained that, although the Turks used barbed wire to divide Cyprus, she feels that Cyprus cannot be divided. The theme of the blood dripping along the dividing line is reflected in other children’s drawings. Children personified Cyprus, assigning to it qualities such as the ability to feel pain and to bleed. This emotionally powerful symbolic expression of Cyprus’ division is not one that children have simply invented; they have read in books, recited in poems, acted out in school plays or heard teachers’ accounts of the 1974 war that led to the island’s division, and about the hopes and dreams of all Greek Cypriots for Cyprus’ reunification and eventual redemption. Similar to Maria above, Zoe drew a divided Cyprus, separating north from south, and with the monastery of Apostle Andreas at the easternmost tip of the island (now in the occupied north) crying because ‘it wants Cyprus to be united, to become one.’ She also wrote on her drawing, ‘I do not forget the missing persons’, in a reference to those missing since the 1974 war, pointing out in this way that the political situation in Cyprus is unresolved. Zoe’s drawing is full of emotion and her understanding of the island’s division highlights its problematic state of affairs. Finally, on her map Lana did not draw a dividing line, but simply coloured in the two mountain ranges, Pentadaktylos and Troodos, and the green, fertile valley of Mesaoria, writing ‘Cypriots United’ at the bottom right-hand corner. When asked to explain what she drew she said: ‘I want to say that Cyprus is united … and that we are all Cypriots’, and later on, ‘Cypriots, both Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots … we can live in a Cyprus without borders or anything.’ Lana’s emotional geography projects her political understanding of the conflict in Cyprus and her vision for a reunified Cyprus, where both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots will live in peace together. Children’s emotional mappings in geographical space, real or imagined, provide a visual expression of their ideological understanding of the geopolitical situation in Cyprus. They are not meant to illustrate an objective understanding of what actually exists in real space, rather to proclaim a political position that reflects their ideological understanding of past, present and future. The intense visual depiction of emotion in children’s maps turns space into place and renders it political. They invest it, in this sense, with the emotional power of their own

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personal experience of visiting the occupied north with their families, as well as the larger cultural experience of growing up in a divided country and learning how to think and feel about its territorial division. Conclusion Our starting point in this chapter was the fact that children’s lives are not independent of the geopolitical dynamics that surround them, a reality abundantly clear in the case of Cyprus. Children’s border crossings in Cyprus provide an alternative insight into questions of geopolitical security through the ways in which they articulate their sense of fear and their perception of justice. At the same time, however, these articulations are laden with contradictions. First is the fact that their fear is maintained, despite largely harmonious experiences in crossing the border to the other side. Although the actual crossings provided some instances of ideological penetration (Willis, 1977), it is obvious that the ideology shaping the emotional experience of crossing and the intensity of emotions is not dismantled by ‘evidence’ from reality. Second, the intense sense of fear when visiting the occupied areas coexists with a deep desire to visit these areas. This conflict between desire and fear exemplifies the root of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ and begs a more critical and self-reflective understanding of how Greek Cypriots talk about the island’s reunification. From a methodological point of view, we would point out that, while the map exercises offered a more visually simplistic and ideologically laden representation of Cyprus, the interviews provided a more nuanced and contradictory discourse. These paradoxical mappings of the island exemplify the importance of both grounding geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp, 2001) and reconceptualising ‘the relationship between emotions and global issues in a way that challenges the hierarchical, procedural scaling of emotions’ (Pain, 2009: 480). Finally, we point out that the main challenge for critical geopolitics researchers is to interrogate the exclusion of children as actors without glorifying children’s subjectivity or exalting ‘local’ knowledge. It is important, therefore, to question the exclusion of certain subjectivities into the making of world politics, while at the same time destabilising romantic views of childhood (James and Prout, 1990). This chapter attempts to contribute to the field of childhood studies that is being increasingly diversified with research from different areas around the world, especially relating to children’s understandings of ethnic difference (Christou and Spyrou, 2012). We have attempted to demonstrate that any debate on children’s agency must engage the multiple and complex ways in which children understand and articulate the state of world affairs. The voices of Greek Cypriot children reflect their understandings and experiences of border crossings in the context of a politically complex geopolitical reality that defies clear, singular and unambiguous positionings. In that sense, it clearly illustrates that, like adults, children play a

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role, however limited, in giving shape and form to geopolitical realities as these manifest themselves on the ground. References Aitken, S.C. and Plows, V. 2010. Overturning assumptions about young people, border spaces and revolutions. Children’s Geographies, 8(4), 327–33. Anderson, K. and Smith, S. 2001. Editorial: Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(1), 7–11. Attalides, M. 1979. Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics. Edinburgh: Q Press. Bondi, L., Davidson, J. and Smith, M. 2007. Introduction: Geography’s ‘emotional turn’. In: J. Davidson, L. Bondi and M. Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–16. Christou, M. 2006. A double imagination: Memory and education in Cyprus. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 24(2): 285–306. Christou, M. 2007. The language of patriotism: Sacred history and dangerous memories. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(6), 709–22. Christou, M. and Spyrou, S. 2012. Border encounters: How children navigate space and otherness in an ethnically divided society. Childhood, 19(3), 302–16. Christou, M. and Spyrou, S. 2014. What is a border? Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s understanding of a contested territorial division. In: S. Spyrou and M. Christou (eds), Children and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dikomitis, L. 2013. Cyprus and its Places of Desire: Cultures of displacement among Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees. London: Tauris. Dikomitis, L. 2004. A moving field: Greek Cypriot refugees returning ‘home’. Durham Anthropology Journal, 12(1), 7–20. Dikomitis, L. 2005. Three readings of a border: Greek Cypriots crossing the Green Line. Anthropology Today, 21(5), 7–12. Dodds, K. 2001. Political geography III: Critical geopolitics after ten years. Progress in Human Geography, 25(3), 469–84. Dodds, K. and Sidaway, J. 1994. Locating critical geopolitics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 515–24. Dowler, L. and Sharp, J. 2001. A feminist geopolitics? Space and Polity, 5(3), 165–76. Griffin, C. 2001. Imagining new narratives of youth: Youth research, the ‘new Europe’ and global youth culture. Childhood, 8(2), 147–66. Gullestad, M. 1997. A passion for boundaries: Reflections on connections between the everyday lives of children and discourses on the nation in contemporary Norway. Childhood, 4(1), 19–42. Holloway S.L. and Valentine G. 2000a. Spatiality and the new social studies of childhood. Sociology, 34(4), 763–83.

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Holloway, S.L. and Valentine, G. 2000b. ‘Corked hats and Coronation Street’: British and New Zealand children’s imaginative geographies of the other. Childhood, 7(3), 335–57. Holloway, S.L. and Valentine, G. 2000c. Spatiality and the new social studies of childhood. Sociology, 34(4), 763–83. Hyndman, J. 2007. Feminist geopolitics revisited: Body counts in Iraq. Professional Geographer, 59(1), 35–46. James, A. and Prout, A. 1990. A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promises and problems. In: A. James and A. Prout (eds),  Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer Press, pp. 7–33. Jones, B. 2008. Geographies of youth/young people. Geography Compass, 2(5), 1659–80. Koester, D. 1997. Childhood in national consciousness and national consciousness in childhood. Childhood, 4(1), 125–42. Kraftl P., Horton, J. and Tucker, F. (eds) 2012. Critical Geographies of Childhood and Youth: Contemporary Policy and Practice. Bristol: Policy Press. Kuus, M. 2010. Critical geopolitics. In: R. Denemark (ed.). International Studies Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 683–701. McKendrick, J.H. 2000. The geography of children: An annotated bibliography. Childhood, 7(3), 359–87. Ó Tuathail, G. and Agnew, J. 1992. Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography, 11, 190–204. Pain, R. 2009. Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography, 33(4), 466–86. Pain, R. and Smith, S.J. 2008. ‘Fear: critical geopolitics and everyday life. In: R. Pain and S. Smith (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate. Roudometof, V. and Christou, M. 2011. 1974 and Greek Cypriot identity: The division of Cyprus as cultural trauma. In: R. Eyerman, J. Alexander and F. Breese (eds), Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Smith, M., Davidson, J., Cameron, L. and Bondi, L. (eds) 2009. Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Spyrou, S. 2000. Education, ideology and the national self: The social practice of identity construction in the classroom. The Cyprus Review, 12(1), 61–81. Spyrou, S. 2001a. Those on the other side: Ethnic identity and imagination in Greek Cypriot children’s lives. In: H. Schwartzman (ed.). Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 167–85. Spyrou, S. 2001b. One and more than one: Greek Cypriot children and ethnic identity in the flow of everyday life. disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 10, 73–94.

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Spyrou, S. 2002. Images of ‘the other’: ‘The Turk’ in Greek Cypriot children’s imaginations. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 5(3), 255–72. Spyrou, S. 2006. Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an enemy: The complexity of stereotypes in children’s everyday worlds. South European Society and Politics, 11(1), 95–110. Spyrou, S. and Christou, M. 2014. Introduction. In: S. Spyrou and M. Christou (eds), Children and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Staeheli, L.A. and E. Kofman. 2004. Mapping gender, making politics: Toward feminist political geographies. In: L.A. Staeheli, E. Kofman and L.J. Peake (eds), Mapping Gender, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. New York: Routledge. Stephens, S. 1997. Editorial: Children and nationalism. Childhood, 4(1), 5–17. Theophanous, A. 2003. The Cyprus problem: Accession to the EU and Broader Implications. Mediterranean Quarterly, 14(1), 42–66. United Nations. 1994. Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, S/1994/680, 7 June 1994. http://www.mfa.gov.cy/ mfa/mfa2006.nsf/All/D2DAA8FC0CC66A22C22571C7001E992F/$file/ Report%20_7%20June%201994_.pdf?OpenElement (retrieved 14 October 2014). Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House. Zembylas, M. 2010. Children’s construction and experience of racism and nationalism in Greek-Cypriot primary schools. Childhood, 17(3), 312–28. Zembylas, M. and Bekerman, Z. 2008. Education and the dangerous memories of historical trauma: Narratives of pain, narratives of hope. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(2), 125–54.

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Chapter 6

Life, Love, and Activism on the Forgotten Margins of the Nation State Sara H. Smith and Mabel Gergan

Across the Indian Himalayan Region, along the jagged edges and neglected margins of the nation state, young people are understood to be on the brink of an uncertain future. In regions such as Sikkim, Ladakh and the Northeast States (see Figure 6.1), youth is reshaping the relationship between home territories and the Indian state through political change and cultural revival. Parents, community leaders and young people talk about geopolitical and ecological futures, and the potential for cultural loss, through narratives about youth. The pace of economic, social, ecological and political change heightens these concerns. In recent events we find young people at the heart of a reorientation between India and its Himalayan margins: activism against state hydropower projects; becoming a locus of intergenerational concern within their communities; and drawing media attention to their position as outsiders. In this chapter we consider three cases in which young people are central to geopolitical questions about the future of territory. In Sikkim, in India’s Northeast, young activists surprise their elders by embracing an indigenous political identity to protest state hydropower projects – claiming territory rooted in the land, through local and transnational solidarity networks. In Ladakh, young Buddhists and Muslims are expected to embody political–religious territorial identities. The worlds of those from regions as distant as the Northeast and Ladakh coalesce in urban centres, where Himalayan students are marginalised as outsiders, and shape self-consciously different political subjectivities. Building on the work of Jeffrey (2010; 2013) and others (Aitken, 2001; Cole and Durham, 2008; Ruddick, 2003; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2008), we approach the lives of young people as a locus of concern in relation to the future. How is this temporality embodied by youth? In the temporal we find a crucial link to the geopolitical. Geopolitical struggles are never only struggles about the past or the present; they are also to determine the future. In the cases here, young people become a focal point as they prepare for a future in which their homeland’s relation to the nation is uncertain. The Himalayan and Northeast regions of India are home to ‘scheduled tribes’ (state-recognised disadvantaged indigenous groups). From the dense tropical forests of Northeast India to the cold desert of Ladakh, this region has a diverse ecosystem and a rugged terrain that has historically served as a geopolitical buffer. These borderland regions have significant differences in politics, cultural practices

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Figure 6.1

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Map of the Himalayan and Northeast regions of India. Created by Timothy Stallmann.

and language, but share commonalities in the racialisation of their residents and in their complex relation to the Indian state. While the Northeast has been the site of separatist claims and slow integration into India, Ladakh has been the site of an identity-based struggle to separate from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In both cases, political struggle has begun from the idea of ‘exclusive homelands for ethnically defined groups’ (Baruah, 2003: 44) that has shaped political activism and subjectivities. The embodied experiences of youth are central to geopolitical struggles to determine relations between the nation and its Himalayan margins. The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) consists of Uttarakhand; Himachal Pradesh; Jammu and Kashmir; Sikkim; the hill districts of West Bengal and Assam; and the other Northeastern states (Nandy et al., 2006). The authors are aware, however, of discrepancies on the ground whereby Northeastern states and subjects may not necessarily identify themselves as Himalayan. The research presented here is based on three projects. The Sikkim case draws on research conducted by Mabel Gergan in 2007, two surveys in 2011 and 2012 and a 10-month period of fieldwork in 2013–14. It includes household surveys, group interviews, an oral history study on intergenerational relations, and personal interviews with young people (16–35 years) and village leaders in Dzongu, North Sikkim. The case of embodied geopolitics in Ladakh draws on research conducted by Sara Smith in 2004 and 2007–8, and in subsequent summers of follow-up work. This includes a family decision-making survey of nearly 200 Ladakhi women aged 18 and over, 65 semi-structured interviews, youth projects with students aged

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18 and over and interviews with local leaders. The final case draws on ongoing joint research, and includes interviews with 35 students and former students from Ladakh and the Northeast, ranging in age from 18–35 years. All names are pseudonyms. In what follows we provide an overview of how the relationship between youth and the future is deployed to geopolitical ends before exploring this idea through three case studies: indigenous activism in Sikkim; the management of intimacy in Ladakh; and, finally, the experiences of Himalayan students in India’s urban centres. We conclude with a discussion of youth as foundational to the relationship between India and its Himalayan margins. Youth and the Future of Geopolitics Young people are caught up in rapid political and ecological changes brought on by globalisation (Katz, 2004; Aitken, 2001; Ruddick, 2003; Jeffrey, 2013). Concern over their behaviour is a proxy for hopes and fears over the future (Cole and Durham, 2008). Young lives, and the ways in which they are imagined, thus provide us with insight into how the future is understood, imagined and feared (Jeffrey, 2010; Langevang, 2008; Johnson-Hanks, 2002; Jeffrey, 2013). Adults make political use of youth through the celebration, idealisation, and legal institutionalisation of children as apolitical and vulnerable, ‘innocent and prepolitical’ (Kleinfeld, 2009: 875, citing Berlant, 1997; and Edelman, 1998; Martin, 2011; Ruddick, 2007; Laliberté, 2013; Katz, 2004; Hyndman, 2010). In opposition to this, the idea of youth can be used to imply threat and disorder (Young et al., 2014; Jeffrey, 2013; Rodenbeck, 2011). These framings create a heightened sense of moral imperative and urgency. Whether described as innocent victims or as immanent threats, the figure of youth transforms political conversations: creating spaces of temporary peace (Kleinfeld, 2009); becoming part of a discourse of disorder used to justify military intervention (Bayat, 2009); or drawing public attention to the violence of war, as did the deaths of children playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014. Despite the attention directed at young people, Skelton (2010), Philo and Smith (2003), and Benwell and Dodds (2011) have noted that youth agency in politics remains somewhat understudied. Research has demonstrated crucial ties between geopolitical struggles and young lives (Hopkins, 2007; Hörschelmann, 2008; Pain et al., 2010; Hopkins and Alexander, 2010). In the most recent accounts of young people’s politics, young people are understood to be active political agents (Jeffrey, 2013; Nayak, 2010; Hopkins, 2007; Pain et al., 2010). We follow this work to ask how young people’s agency extends beyond the formal political sphere to the politics of everyday life. When and how do young lives come to signify and affect geopolitical questions about the future? In the Himalayan context, young people are implicated in political questions brought on by the rapidly shifting patterns of industry and urbanisation. The region’s ecological vulnerability is at odds with the Indian state’s need to develop

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the ‘frontier’ (Tsing, 2005; Aggarwal and Bhan, 2009). Paternalistic state discourses suggest that the region’s ‘peculiarities’ and ‘fragile nature’ are responsible for its lack of development (Government of India Planning Commission, 2010). This representation of the physical geography as ‘difficult and unruly’ extends to its subjects who, Subba and Malla (1998: 80) argue, are ‘the Orientals of the Orient,’ viewed as primitive, irrational, lazy and feminine (Said, 1979). In recent years the Northeastern states have witnessed a spike in drug usage, HIV/AIDS and suicide rates among young people (Eicher et al., 2000; Ningshen, 2011), with escalating fears regarding young people as idle and a site of ‘moral panic’ (Smith, 2012; Neyzi, 2001; Jeffrey, 2008). Ecological precarity bears directly on young people’s lives and labour, which are intimately tied to the natural environment (Katz, 2004; Dyson, 2008; 2014). Himalayan youths find themselves responding to this layering of tropes that paints them as both ‘apathetic youth’ and the ‘lazy native’. Young people’s bodies and futures are the template on which territorial, ecological and moral anxieties play out (Smith, 2013). The Shifting Terrain of Indigeneity in Sikkim Sikkim is a tiny Eastern Himalayan state that was a Buddhist monarchy until its assimilation into India in 1975. Bordering China, Nepal and Bhutan, like the other Northeastern states it is connected to the rest of India by a 23-kilometrewide corridor. Its proximity to China and a complex history of assimilation make it a site of intense geopolitical anxiety. Developmental activities such as constructing roads and dams are a way of securing the border territories. Ironically, questions of security that necessitate these development activities also result in deforestation and displacement of native inhabitants, destabilising both ecology and civil society. The Lepcha and Bhutia tribes are recognised as indigenous, but the state has a majority Nepali population due to colonial and historical immigration. With a population of 5,000, Dzongu in the Upper Teesta Valley is a protected reserve for the Lepcha tribe. Just as the Northeast exists at the geographic and cognitive peripheries of the Indian state, this town exists at the periphery of the Sikkimese state, connected by three bridges. Lack of education and employment opportunities have pushed reserve youth to urban centres such as Mangan (the district capital) and Gangtok (the state capital). Reserve elders and community leaders have expressed fears about the cultural and moral dissolution brought on by this mobility. In 2007, 29 dams were commissioned in Sikkim, seven of which would cut across the reserve. To the surprise of reserve members, two young men based in Gangtok and educated outside the reserve initiated a hunger strike against these dams. The strikes sparked discussions among youth around the moral responsibility to protect the tribe and larger concerns around their historical marginalisation.

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Lepcha youth activism demonstrates how young people’s practices reconfigure ideas of territory and the future. The discourse of indigeneity is central to these visions, signalling an identity that is both territorially rooted and a product of translocal solidarity (Castree, 2004). Young people received little support from within the reserve since, to their disappointment, many welcomed the projects. While their activism alienated them from the state and community, it helped them to forge ties with national and transnational organisations, for instance International Rivers, and independent scholars and activists from Australia, Europe and the US. These networks were made possible because of Sikkim’s interest for researchers into Himalayan ecosystems and Buddhist culture. Several international scholars who came to Sikkim for altogether different reasons found themselves drawn to Dzongu and the story of the Lepcha protests. Lepcha activists were successful in cancelling four dams, but their activism left them unemployed and uncertain of their future prospects in a state where the government is the single largest employer. An emergent political identity, coupled with the harsh reality of unemployment, pushed the activists back to the reserve where they began reimagining visions of home, family and territory. Adapting to village life after years outside took some ingenuity. There was a nascent ecotourism industry, but not altogether successful due to Dzongu’s ‘backward’ image. However, when the activists set up eco-tourism ventures the word spread quickly through their national and transnational networks. Nearly four years after the protests, all the popular eco-tourism homestays in Dzongu are run by activists. One of these homestays even boasts of having hosted the Crown Prince of Norway. A website for one of the successful homestays promotes this vision: Nestled amongst the trees is Mayal Lyang, a beautiful house for a homestay. Mayal Lyang means the ‘Hidden Land’ or ‘Land blessed by God’ in the Lepcha language. Untouched by the tourist hustle bustle, this place has hidden treasures behind every other tree. Relax and enjoy the pure mountain air, eat the food we grow here, and understand our way of life.

Through these narratives, young activists are actively developing an ecological rendering of territory and the future that weaves together the Lepchas’ ancient ties to the land with a critique of state-led development. Despite their tenuous relationships at home, the activism of Lepcha youth has rendered the tribe more visible to both the state and the global indigenous community. Lepchas are acknowledged as the ‘first insiders’ and ‘original’ inhabitants of Sikkim, implying ties to the land predating those of Bhutia and Nepali communities (Little, 2008; Arora, 2007). Dzongu is slowly becoming a favoured tourist destination and, with the emergence of a new opposition party, an important political constituency. Lepcha activists are challenging representations of Dzongu as backward and its members as naïve simpletons:

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Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics When I was in college on my way back to Gangtok from Dzongu, two people got on from Singtam. The driver he put some English songs and they said, ‘Are people in Dzongu listen to English songs?’ I got so mad I turned around and said, ‘Have you ever been to Dzongu?’ They hadn’t and I said how can you say that about Dzongu if you haven’t even been there? They apologised and said we didn’t mean it. I told them they shouldn’t just believe what people say about Dzongu. And after a while they said, ‘Hm, actually this song is quite good.’

This emergent indigenous identity that valorises the indigenous subject while positing the state as an antagonistic force is familiar. However in Sikkim, where the state government has been lauded for its ‘pro-tribal’ policies (Shneiderman and Turin, 2006; Turin, 2014), this discourse of indigeneity marks a shift from the more prevalent institutional discourse that appeals to the state for recognition and benefits. This shift is a product of the Dzongu protests and, more specifically, young indigenous people’s experience of exclusionary state practices and their engagements with transnational solidarity networks. Lepcha activists imagine a future in which educated youth will have a say in development. In interviews in 2013, young activists, mostly college-educated, spoke of their alienation from the state government and panchayat (elected village leaders). Sonam: There aren’t many educated people in the panchayats. I don’t think they (panchayats) have even passed class 10th and they’re handling the affairs of an entire GPU (Gram Panchayat Unit), like I can’t imagine how they are doing it. And they’re the kind of leaders who victimise others, if they don’t like someone like a teacher they’ll get them transferred to a very remote location.

These young, articulate, politically and environmentally-conscious Lepcha activists indicate the shifting terrain of indigeneity. Young people’s activism is bringing the territorial margins into the political and geographic imaginary of the state. But it is important to acknowledge here that ‘youth’ is a heterogeneous category and, more often than not, only privileged voices filter through. Many of the Lepcha activists represent the more upper-class, educated voices within the reserve, leaving out young people without such privileges. While transnational networks of support have helped them have influence beyond the borders of Dzongu, it has sharpened a territorial understanding that can perpetuate an exclusionary politics for non-indigenous groups who cannot make similar claims to the land. The emergent Lepcha political identity is informed by a complex relationship between personal agency and structural constraints, leaving little room for alliances with other marginalised groups. Contradictions and frictions will emerge as more groups such as the Lepchas make themselves visible in response to growing discontentment with State apathy in the Himalayan region. Through these contestations, young people such as the Lepcha activists are increasingly identifying themselves as important political subjects with stakes in the geopolitical and ecological futures of these regions.

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Love and Geopolitics in Ladakh In the Ladakh region of the conflicted Jammu and Kashmir State (J&K), relations between Buddhist and Muslim residents deteriorated through the twentieth century due to its complicated geopolitical context. Since the country’s inclusion into independent India the residents of Leh, Buddhists in particular, have been seeking greater autonomy from the state of J&K. The region was split in 1979 into two districts, Leh and Kargil, named for their respective main towns; Leh has a Buddhist majority and Kargil has a Shia Muslim majority. In 1989 Buddhist activists in Leh District (the site of this research) worked to force the autonomy issue by calling for a social boycott of Ladakhi Muslims. During the two-year boycott, Buddhists were not to have contact with Muslims – not to attend weddings, buy their bread or otherwise interact. In 1993 Leh was awarded a semi-autonomous government, but relations remain tense. Before the 1990s intermarriage was common – in the area around Leh town most people had relatives through marriage across religious lines. There remains an informal ban on intermarriage, as well as a campaign encouraging Buddhist women to have more children in order to maintain an electoral and cultural majority (Smith, 2012). The bodily practices of marriage and reproduction are tied to geopolitical strategy through discourses of territory, cultural loss and vulnerability in the context of the contested sovereignty of J&K State, as the religious demography of the region is assumed to shape its political future. The intermarriage ban reflects the tight and tense relationship between bodies and territory at work in South Asia, especially during and following the colonial era, as censuses were mapped onto territory and thus determined national boundaries (e.g. Das, 1995, 2004; Bacchetta, 2000; Stoler, 2002). One of the results of this logic has been increasing concern over the management of youth: their supervision, religious upbringing and romantic relations are all discussed in relation to inter-religious conflict. Youth is understood to be the material rendering of Ladakh’s future: a potential source of conflict – as those who would orchestrate riots – and a potential site of religious and cultural dissolution. Buddhist political activists talk about a future in which Buddhists are ‘finished off’ and in which the 14 per cent Muslim population takes control of local government through mobilising blocs of (as yet unborn) voters. What does this geopolitics of territory, love and babies mean for those young people who find their bodies its crux? The spectre of a dangerous young future comes in the form of two territorial narratives. In one, not enough Buddhist children are born, and in the other, unruly young lives lead to cultural loss or inter-religious conflict. Youth is thus a site of particular intensities of care and anxiety. Parents described young people as impulsive and reckless in love, ‘sneaking and writing letters. All those things: talking to each other, going places in cars. We didn’t have anything like that’, said Amira, a Shia woman in her early forties, of her own youth. These behaviours are understood to threaten a fragile peace. When asked about conflict, people often turned to questions of youth romance, as was the case with Salima, a Sunni woman in her twenties:

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Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics That is when brides runaway with someone. Isn’t it? What else causes demonstrations? … Today’s young people don’t have good hearts. If something small happens, they will say all kinds of things.

Love and geopolitics flow together in other ways as well, as young women are discussed as a type of territory that may be ceded to the other side. The words of Karima, in her thirties, and Jameela, in her fifties, echo this theme and the dangerous future: Karima: They say that Buddhist girls are going to run out. And the Muslim girls … . If the Buddhists convert to Islam and the Muslims convert to Buddhism, then, that being the case, then that will be the end. Sara: Is it better to prevent or allow [religious intermarriage]? Jameela: It’s better to prevent, because rather than let there be a demonstration … . Then our own community will last, if we don’t bring from outside. Then there’s the danger of what will happen to our women.

Given these concerns about the destructive power of unmoderated desire, youth becomes a focal point. This often means unwanted or frustrating attention and policing (Smith, 2013; Aengst, 2014). In a youth oral history project the young men and women described their elders as being unnecessarily suspicious, with one young Sunni Muslim woman saying, ‘If a boy and a girl go somewhere, bas, they think something is going on. They don’t think of friendship. In Leh, they think friendship is not possible between boys and girls’. Ironically, while the older generations portray young people as the source of conflict, young people enthusiastically describe friendship across religion. They draw on discourses of modernity both to shore up claims of conflict (suggesting that education fuels competition and selfishness) and to dispel them (suggesting that modern values will overcome religious prejudice). In the policing of their love lives, and in their own discussions of change and politics in Ladakh, young people and their parents place the embodied actions and changing hearts of youth at the centre of the geopolitical future. Education, Difference, and Belonging On 30 January 2014, 19-year-old Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal Pradesh, died after being beaten by shopkeepers who ‘mocked him for his longish, stylised, dyed hair, effeminate clothing and East Asian physical features (reportedly calling him ‘chinki’)’ (Ghosh, 2014). These characteristics marked him as someone from India’s Northeast, thus not properly belonging to the nation state. Nido Tania’s death sparked protests among students. His life, cut short, was a tragic

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reminder of the exclusion felt by Himalayan students. This incident marks the complicated relationship between India’s centre and the margins, and the central role that youth plays in this relationship. As ever-increasing numbers of young people flood to the urban centres, they become the conduit through which India is known in their homeland. The sense of difference is notable in the language used to describe studying in the major urban centres – often referred to as ‘going outside.’ What embodied understandings of the nation do they bring home with them? In geopolitical terms, how will these understandings affect the political and territorial stability of the nation? Students describe the first year as a difficult process of adjustment in which they reshape their sensibilities in order to ‘make it’ outside their hometown. They change their food preference, dress, even manner of speaking. Some described never feeling completely at home, and one student said that she now thinks of herself as an Indian first and a Ladakhi second, but that it took 10 years. Students use the English word, ‘adjust’, to describe their first year or two in mainland India, saying, for example: ‘I was a person who couldn’t adjust’ to heat, to weather, to teasing, to different standards of behaviour, to speaking up in class, to food – and to loneliness. Students from the mountain periphery of India share the experience of being rendered voiceless – they are asked what country they are from and have racial slurs such as chinki directed at them in the street – and are thus placed in a complicated position regarding the nation state. Over time, this comes to shape their understanding of their place within India. The moment that sparked this research was a conversation with a young woman in Ladakh. She showed me pictures of her college friends on her phone, offhandedly remarking, laughing, ‘They are all “chinki ” like me’. The comment, both simple and shocking, indicated both the degree to which this offensive term had become commonplace to her, and her casual observation that nearly all of her friends were from India’s geographic and ethnic margins. Students reported facing discrimination from city residents, classmates and others. Some students made friends and mentioned particularly kind teachers or classmates, however, nearly all mentioned incidents of racialised discrimination. Roshan Pegu, a graduate student from the Northeast studying at the Delhi School of Economics, reiterated a common thread in interviews, stating: If you are outside [in Delhi], you get a lot of questions like, ‘you are an outsider, where are you from?’ Like you have different features, like that I mean as much as you don’t want to believe in it but then you know it affects you? Starting from the auto rickshaw wallahs and even in college and stuff.

Jigmet, now a teacher in Ladakh and a mother in her thirties, has an album full of university photos that suggest a carefree youth and a diverse circle of girlfriends, but the stories that she tells about university life provide a more complex picture. She described her friends from ‘down’ [the plains of India] as being happy to

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socialise and create superficial friendships, but stressed that her close friends and study companions were all Ladakhi: The students weren’t that good to us, they didn’t help us that much. They thought we’re from a ‘remote area,’ they had this thing, and they’ll say ST [scheduled tribe], they’ll say remote area. You know, they’ll say, all of these are ST, they won’t know anything. That’s what the students’ thinking was like … . In a hundred, there might be five, or there might be maybe two, the rest won’t be helpful.

Like those interviewed by Hopkins (2011), these students gave views of university life that are complex and contradictory as they describe both moments of feeling welcome and excluded, and implicate themselves in these narratives as well. Parallel to exclusion, we have found a subaltern cosmopolitanism (Jeffrey and McFarlane, 2008), a conscious celebration of transnational ties and intentional stylistic choices meant to lay claim to an East Asian aesthetic. Himalayan students embrace East Asian pop culture and forge their own aesthetic based in part on their understandings of racialised difference through divergent practices such as haircuts, Facebook postings and consumption. In 2013 and 2014 interviews, Ladakhi students reported receiving fashion compliments with pride, even as they are discriminated against in other aspects of life. What does racialised difference, as well as difference cultivated and affirmed through choices of style and food, mean for geopolitics? Mundane choices made by students indicate in subtle and overt ways a lack of connection to the nation. The underlying sense of disconnection felt by students surfaced in March 2014: Ladakhi students studying in Delhi protested against the rising cost of airfares to fly home. With faces painted in green and blue, the students called themselves ‘aliens,’ and asked, ‘Does India care about Ladakh?’ For these students, their experience of studying in a sometimes hostile city and asking for help from a sometimes indifferent state will be a formative one, shaping their political leanings and sense of citizenship. The ‘Aliens’ Rally’ and protests at Nido Tania’s death illustrate the political strategies, the consequences of exclusion and the importance of attending to students’ place within the nation state. As these young people wait for their hometown to change, moulding their bodies, subjectivities and comportment to be appropriate to both places – sometimes with ease, sometimes with irritation and frustration – they are shaping the future. Conclusion In considering these cases we find that a key to the critical geopolitics of youth is an understanding of the ways that youth figures (Cole and Durham, 2008) and consciously tries to shape geopolitical futures, which here centre on the relation between the centre and its margins. While youth in Sikkim grapples with the

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meaning of indigeneity and creates new ways to lay claim to their ancestors’ territory, youth in Ladakh struggles with expectations that they secure the future of their religious identity, and students in the Himalaya struggle as outsiders, with ramifications for the nation state’s integrity. As these young people and their elders make sense of the geopolitical future, are their concerns heard at the national level? Recent media events suggest that this exclusion is gaining visibility, right at the moment when students are making a case for inclusion. A discussion of racism in India has been broached in the media, often making reference to Nido Tania’s death (e.g. George, 2014; Mander, 2014). Surprisingly, the 2014 national television advertisement campaign for the popular show, Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?) centred on a young woman whose features tell us she is from the Northeast (Pacheco, 2014). Asked whether Kohima (capital of India’s Northeastern state of Nagaland) is in Bhutan, China, Nepal or India, she polls the members of the audience while we watch their reactions. She is told by Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood star hosting the show, that she has wasted her ‘lifeline’, because ‘everyone knows’ that Kohima is part of India. In return the young woman replies, ‘Yes, but who believes it?’ while sentimental music changes the audience’s expressions and causes two mainland Indian men to apologise to their (now smiling) Northeastern-looking friend. While such moments in the media are fleeting and may not lead to lasting change, it is possible that these media events, and use of the term ‘racism’, signal a new openness to considering the question of race and exclusion. Considered together, these three cases demonstrate the importance of attending to the role of youth in geopolitics. One way to take on this relationship is by examining the ways that youth is figured as critical to the formation of geopolitical futures and minority relations, and how its actions and movements are understood to reconfigure territory itself. In Sikkim indigenous youth activism is critical in defending territory from the incursions of the state while simultaneously building transnational allies. In Ladakh parents exert pressure on young people to shore up religious boundaries tied to territorial imaginings. Finally, in the experiences of the Himalayan students, embodied experiences shape understandings of the nation state, resulting in conflicting loyalties. The embodied experiences of youth are central to geopolitical struggles to determine relations between the nation and its Himalayan margins. We suggest that thinking through the ways that youth can and do impact on the future of territorial claims and geopolitical relationships between centre and margin can provide new insights into the critical geopolitics of youth and, in particular, to the active role that young people play in making geopolitical futures. References Aengst, J. 2014. Movements of adolescents: Secret dating, elopements-on-therun, and youth policing in Ladakh, India. Ethnos, 79(5), 630–49.

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Chapter 7

Young Falkland Islanders and Diplomacy in the South Atlantic Matthew C. Benwell

This chapter charts some recent developments in diplomatic activity and the enactment of geopolitics in the south Atlantic, with specific reference to the Falklands–Malvinas sovereignty dispute. I acknowledge the geopolitical sensitivities of naming the Islands the Falklands or Malvinas, given their disputed status, and use the most contextually appropriate term. When referring to the Islands from an Argentine or British perspective the terms Malvinas and Falklands are used, respectively, while references to their disputed status appear as Falklands–Malvinas. The chapter builds on recent work highlighting the increasingly variegated and creative diplomacies being enacted by state and non-state actors (e.g. Constantinou, 2013; McConnell et al., 2012; Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014) by thinking specifically about the involvement of young people from the Falkland Islands in diplomatic activities. While their participation in politics is not necessarily new in this context (e.g. Governor Moody, the first governor of the Falkland Islands became Lieutenant-Governor at the age of 28 in 1841), more recent events have seen a marked change in the visibility and role of young Islanders (this term is used henceforth as shorthand for people from the Falkland Islands) in diplomacy. Notwithstanding Marshall’s (1949) early call for a ‘citizen diplomacy’ and more recent interest in the role of citizens as part of diplomatic and cultural exchanges in relation to US foreign policy (see Bellamy and Weinberg, 2008), diplomatic activities and statecraft have widely been considered the preserve of ‘privileged practitioners’ (Shimazu, 2012: 335). These are regarded as functioning typically within and between the institutions or foreign ministries of nation states (Henrikson, 2005). The limitations of such understandings have been acknowledged by various scholars (e.g. Bellamy and Weinberg, 2008; Constantinou, 2013) although political geographers, in particular, have been rather slow to recognise citizens as potential diplomatic players in geopolitical affairs. Subsequent work by geographers has underlined how diplomacy is increasingly undertaken both by governments and citizens in ways that appear to blur traditional distinctions between the ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ (Kuus, 2008) and ‘everyday citizenry’ (Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014: 13). An enhanced sensitivity to the diverse spaces, actors and ways of doing diplomacy presents an opportune

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moment to think through how young citizens, a group rarely associated with such geopolitical machinations, might also be implicated. In recent years young Islanders have become more visibly involved in diplomacy relating to the ongoing sovereignty dispute with Argentina over territories in the south Atlantic. This is not to suggest that their interest and participation in diplomatic events is a new development per se, but that they are now more likely to be identified as actors of diplomacy than simply passive recipients or geopolitical pawns (see Jones, 1985). This has seen young Islanders take part in official diplomatic visits arranged by the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) to the United Nations in New York, as well as increase their engagement with online social networks to promote or counter certain geopolitical points. This diplomacy enacted by young Islanders, which constitutes the main focus of this chapter, can be understood in part as a response to the diplomatic manoeuvres of Argentina that have been instrumental in ‘heating-up’ this territorial dispute (Benwell and Dodds, 2011; Dodds and Benwell, 2010). In the second half of the twentieth century successive governments in Argentina have made ‘reclaiming’ sovereignty of the Malvinas the principal objective of the nation’s foreign policy. Recent years have seen Argentina intensify its diplomatic activity on national, regional and international stages, as it looks to garner support for its claim over this UK-designated Overseas Territory (OT). In a formal governmental sense this culminated in the creation of a Malvinas Secretariat in early 2014, headed by the former senator Daniel Filmus, further illustrating Argentina’s commitment to the ‘Malvinas cause’. The ‘discovery’ of oil in waters surrounding the Falkland Islands (at the time of writing there is still uncertainty about the commercial potential and the projected exploitation date of 2019), as well as repeated Argentine (and wider Latin American) claims of British militarisation in the region ratcheted up the tension still further. The presence of sophisticated Typhoon aircraft at RAF Mount Pleasant and ‘routine’ deployments of Royal Naval destroyers (Type 42 and 45) in the South Atlantic have done little to quell Argentine concerns. The bitter legacies of the 1982 Falklands–Malvinas war are still evident in both Argentina and the Falkland Islands (although arguably less so in the UK). This war saw Britain retake control of the territories and resulted in the deaths of 255 British and 649 Argentine servicemen, as well as three people from the Falkland Islands. By drawing attention to examples of young Islanders’ participation in diplomacy, this chapter makes a call for scholars of diplomacy studies and critical geopolitics to explore more comprehensively young people’s potential to act in these kinds of geopolitical encounters. Work has already shown how children and young people can be implicated – more often than not in passive ways – in diplomacy relating to geopolitical events during the Cold War; see Jones (1985). In making this call, the chapter outlines the embodied and performative aspects of young Islanders’ involvement in different practices and spaces of diplomacy, ranging from encounters in the conference halls and corridors of the UN to those that take place online and using social networking websites.

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Statecraft, Diplomacy and Young People Curiously, practices of diplomacy have received relatively little attention from political geographers (McConnell et al., 2012), although the term has not altogether vanished off the disciplinary radar. Halford Mackinder (1890) made reference to diplomacy and the work of ‘diplomatists’ as early as the late nineteenth century, and more recent work in Bosnia has shown how international diplomacy and its cartography has been instrumental in reinforcing nationalist conceptions of political community (Campbell, 1999). The limited work that has been undertaken has tended to focus on elites and ‘high politics’ associated with the institutional spaces of national and international governance (Shimazu, 2012). Koopman (2011) critiques this focus, seeing it as characteristic of (popular) geopolitical research more generally. Several authors have consequently seen the need to bring ‘the people’ back into research on geopolitics and diplomacy (Shimazu, 2012: 336) in order to understand how non-state actors such as citizens and pressure groups can actively (re)produce and interpret geopolitical discourse (Bellamy and Weinberg, 2008; Dittmer and Dodds, 2008; Marshall, 1949; McConnell et al., 2012). This is not a dualistic argument calling for the abandonment of research with ‘professionals of geopolitics’ (Dodds, 1993; Kuus, 2008), but one that accounts for the rich diversity of actors and spaces implicated in geopolitical issues in the twenty-first century. In response to these contemporary developments, McConnell et al. (2012: 805) point out that geographical literature has placed ‘an increasing focus on different modes of diplomacy drawing on ideas of soft power and … a broadening of the type of actor engaged in diplomatic practices to include non-state polities’. Studies on diplomacy have, then, started to challenge the emphasis on state-centric practice by suggesting that ‘anyone from the globalised demos can now become a citizen–diplomat or an activist–diplomat without much difficulty in view of radical changes in communication and travelling’ (Constantinou, 2013: 158). For instance, McConnell et al. (2012: 804–5) look ‘beyond the stereotypical accoutrements of state formality’ to consider how nonstate or unofficial diplomacies are enacted in ways which ‘simultaneously draw on, mimic and intervene in the realm of formal political action’. Similarly, in the context of the Falklands–Malvinas dispute, Pinkerton and Benwell (2014) have shown how so-called ‘citizen statecraft’ can be creatively deployed alongside the formal diplomacy of the state. In turn, this formal state diplomacy has been shown to ape broader cultural and creative practice in ways that blur traditional distinctions between the actors, practices and spaces of diplomacy. They call for ‘a more inclusive examination of [diplomatic] creativity by interrogating its manifestations beyond the elite spaces and actors most often associated with diplomatic activities’ (Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014: 15). Young citizens have seldom been considered to have potential as diplomatic actors, partly because of how these activities have been traditionally framed. However, the growing recognition that diplomacy can be performed by a range

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of actors (both state and non-state) and across diverse geographies presents an opportunity to explore the ways in which young people might be engaging in such geopolitical exchanges. The wider literature on the political geographies of children and young people is increasingly demonstrating how the lives of young citizens are intimately bound up with geopolitical events (e.g. Hopkins, 2007, 2010; Hörschelmann, 2008; Pain, 2008; Pain et al., 2010). This growing body of work has shown that young people are not simply passive subjects or victims of geopolitical processes, but instead ‘respond openly and creatively by resisting, contesting and challenging global issues and events’ (Hopkins, 2010: 167). For example, research in Argentina has shown the various ways in which young people there receive and interpret dominant national and geopolitical discourses on territorial nationalism over the Malvinas (Benwell and Dodds, 2011). There is a clear sense from this work that young people can and do actively contribute to debates about global political issues, and yet little has been written about how they might act diplomatically in geopolitical affairs between nation states. Although it has not been applied to geopolitics and diplomacy per se, there is an extensive literature that critically considers and distinguishes between children/ young people’s role as political actors in formal and everyday settings (e.g. Kallio and Häkli, 2011; O’Toole, 2003; Skelton 2010). Philo and Smith (2003: 106) contend that it is ‘easy to distinguish between inquiries into the political geographies of children and youth that concentrate on Politics or macro-politics and those that concentrate on politics or micro-politics’ (original emphasis). They go on to suggest that research into the former remains necessarily adultcentred because it is predominantly concerned with institutions and actions that are dominated by adults, while research into the latter is typically child-centred, focusing on ‘the stuff of everyday life, linked to the development of political identities’ (Skelton, 2010: 147). This work, then, is sensitive to the ways in which young people and adults differ as political actors (Kallio and Häkli, 2010), and how political action can be enabled or constrained across space (usually by adults). Skelton (2010: 147) seeks to challenge this P/political binary by showing how young people ‘have the capacity to blend and meld both types of politics simultaneously when in particular spaces and times of multiplicity and coevalness’. Thus, political geographers have been encouraged to interrogate the connections between these different domains of politics to develop richer understandings of how children and young people can act politically (Smith and Philo, 2003: 110; also see Wood, 2012a). The different examples discussed in this chapter look to make some of these connections in relation to young people as geopolitical actors by considering the varied sites and practices of diplomacy with which they are associated. So, for example, I ask what role young Islanders adopted during diplomatic visits to the UN and other nation states – institutional settings typically dominated by (adult) diplomats and politicians – alongside their often creative diplomatic interventions online (Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014).

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This chapter draws on research from a larger project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on how young people from Argentina, the Falkland Islands and the UK learn about and interpret the geopolitical dispute in the South Atlantic. Specifically, it presents extracts from interviews undertaken during 2011–13 with 15 young Islanders (all of whom were white and aged 16–28; 10 respondents were female and 5 male), all born after the 1982 Falklands war. Additional interviews cited here are from those conducted in the Falkland Islands with officials of the FIG, secondary schoolteachers and politicians. Being Diplomatic: Young Islanders and Formal Diplomacy The recent formalised involvement of young people in the FIG’s diplomatic activities began in earnest in 2012 when six young Islanders attended the UN’s Special Committee of Decolonisation alongside senior Members of the Legislative Assembly of the Falkland Islands (MLAs). This is not to downplay the fact that young Islanders have historically participated in both more, and less, formal diplomatic encounters. For instance, prior to 1982 two young men in their twenties became MLAs, and photographs show that children and young people were present at protests during the controversial visit of Lord Chalfont to the Falkland Islands in 1968 (see Dodds, 2002). Young Islanders have subsequently travelled with MLAs to nation states throughout Latin America that have been supportive of Argentina’s sovereignty claim. These Latin American trips came on the back of a referendum held in the territories in March 2013 in which Islanders voted overwhelmingly to retain their current status as an OT (Dodds and Pinkerton, 2013). In addition, young people are regularly selected to represent the Falkland Islands at international events, most notably sporting competitions such as the Commonwealth and Island Games. Although not overtly diplomatic in nature, these are the kinds of sporting performances that are significant in giving international exposure to the Falkland Islands and young Islanders. MLA Gavin Short described the significance of having the young Islanders present at the UN in a contribution to The Guardian (Short, 2012) newspaper: For the first time, our delegation will consist of more than just our democratically elected Legislative Assembly Members. Six young Falkland Islanders, who can trace their heritage back seven generations in the Islands, will be attending. This is the face of the Falkland Islands that the world needs to see … . All we ask of Argentina is that our rights be respected, that we be left in peace to choose our own future and to develop our home for our children and generations to come.

So what difference does the presence of young delegates from the Falkland Islands make and what geopolitical ‘work’ do these young bodies do in the context of multilateral meetings organised to discuss such sovereignty disputes? Taking

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inspiration from Weber (1998) and Edensor (2002), the young people might be understood to ‘perform’ the sovereign nation state in several ways. ‘Perform’ is a fitting term for diplomatic meetings of this nature, where nation states and their delegations typically deliver prepared presentations (see Shimazu, 2011). As indicated in the quote from MLA Short, these young citizens are constructed as embodying the longevity of Islanders’ presence in the territories. They are the embodiment of six or seven generations of families that have lived in the Falkland Islands, some from the mid-1800s. As a result they represent a rather narrow sample of young people chosen, in this case, to exemplify rootedness and a particular historical attachment to place. This choice overlooks the presence of other young people in the Falkland Islands with different placebased biographies, for instance young people from Chile or St Helena. Wood (2012b, 196) emphasises the dynamism of ‘national identity’, seeing it as ‘always in the process of production’ as opposed to something natural and pre-given. The performance and production of national identity is highly significant in this geopolitical context, which has seen Argentina regularly frame the population of the Falkland Islands as, at best, implanted and temporary. At worst, it has framed the people as non-existent in the sense that the dispute is fundamentally about a disputed territory where the presence of a population is deemed irrelevant, as suggested by Hectór Timerman, the Argentine Minister of Foreign Relations. The necessity to (re)produce a particular Islander identity is brought sharply into view when one considers that Argentina receives consistent support for its sovereignty claim from its Latin American neighbours and nation states further afield at, for example, meetings of the G77 and China and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) (see Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship, Argentine Republic, 2014). At the same time, the young Islanders embody a futurity that hints at a dynamic and forward-looking society with a hopeful future (despite diplomatic pressure applied by Argentina that has involved, for instance, restrictions on shipping between the Falkland Islands and ports in South America). The young Islanders’ presence enables alternative imaginations of the Falkland Islands, moving on from typical associations with the 1982 war, especially since they were born after the conflict. These young people, selected by the FIG for their eloquence and in some cases previous media experience, are also seen as the potential future leaders and politicians of the Falkland Islands. The FIG has recently placed great importance on introducing young Islanders to the political realities of this relatively small OT and specifically the strained relations with their nearest neighbour and continent. Interestingly, the most recent elections in the Falkland Islands saw the first person born after 1982 elected as a MLA, representative of a new post-war generation entering into politics in the territories. These discourses of futurity (Evans, 2010; Horton and Kraftl, 2006) were accompanied by those linked to generational longevity stretching back over a century and a half. The social studies of childhood literature has been slower to think through how constructions of children and young people might

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be representative of, and embody, past eras (although see Burman, 1992). The young Islanders, then, embodied both a past and future that was fundamental to bolstering arguments put forward by the FIG, while also seeking to undermine the sovereignty claims expounded by Argentina. These diplomatic performances can be interrogated further by thinking through the ways in which the young Islanders were able to participate and how they subsequently reflected on these experiences. Amy (aged 28. All names are pseudonyms) spoke about her experiences of the UN visit: We were shadowing Mike and Roger, the two MLAs, for the most part and I was just seeing what they did. I think the message we were sending and the message that we made sure we got out whenever we were speaking to people is … this is the next generation of Falkland Islanders and that was the point of us. We would say, ‘Hi, I’m so-and-so, my family’s been here since 1842, that kind of thing’. We were there to demonstrate that the Falklands has a future and what it looks like. (Interview with Amy, 10 February 2013)

In this instance the young Islanders were not able to speak at the official session of the Committee of Decolonisation; rather, their physical presence in the hall and their shadowing of current MLAs was considered to be more influential by the delegation. There are, then, critical questions that might be posed here relating to the young people’s agency and the extent to which they were able to contribute autonomously to such carefully stage-managed diplomatic performances (Shimazu, 2011). That said, they were actively involved in talking to the media and delegates from other nations and, interestingly, trying to deliver a letter to Argentina’s President from the FIG to reaffirm the Islanders’ right to self-determination. The President refused to accept this upon realising that the young delegates were from the Falkland Islands: And then in the conference itself when [Cristina Fernández de] Kirchner left, and this is something that had been planned that was kept secret from everybody until the morning it happened I think, that we each had copies of the letter – you must have heard about that in the news – that we were all going to prove a point, in a way, just to try and hand a letter – is that such a big deal to her? One of the other guys, he managed to shake her hand … but as soon as she realised who we were she just wouldn’t even look at us. I got a bit carried away and ran along with the pack for a little while … it was bloody exciting. (Interview with Amy, 10 February 2013)

So, the young people were involved in the doing of diplomacy in creative and unconventional ways within various diplomatic spaces of the UN, actions, which attracted global media attention, especially from the press in Argentina (for example, the influential Argentine newspaper La Nación 2012 reported on how young Islanders were intent on meeting the Argentine President).

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Geographers have called for more attention to be given to the spatialities of diplomacy (Henrikson, 2005; Shimazu, 2012) and these are worth considering here briefly. The young Islanders were involved in enacting diplomatic encounters within the corridors of the Headquarters of the UN, as opposed to their more passive role during the formal session. The presence of young people at the UN is not necessarily novel, given that they have periodically attended and addressed sessions. For instance, in July 2013 a Pakistani schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, delivered a speech about compulsory education for every child. However, some scholars have been critical of the extent to which such practices might represent tokenism (Ansell, 2005). It is interesting to speculate whether senior politicians from the FIG would have engaged in similar diplomatic ‘pursuits’ in these interstitial spaces or if this was a role reserved for younger members of the delegation. It is difficult to say definitively, although ‘everyday citizenry’ are perhaps able to evade and challenge some of the usual diplomatic protocol and professionalism expected in such environments – although, as the interviewee suggests, even these actions were carefully planned. That said, a week later President Fernández de Kirchner appeared to ignore any such protocol by attempting to deliver an envelope to British Prime Minister David Cameron at a G20 meeting, and was similarly rebuffed. (Un)diplomatic Encounters Online The increased involvement of young Islanders in diplomatic efforts of the FIG has been matched by their online engagement (see Auer, 2011). Kallio has shed light on the oft-neglected informal expressions of political agency that young people develop in their everyday lives within ‘the lived communities of the home, the school, the neighbourhood, hobbies, social media and the like’ (Kallio, 2012: 291, my emphasis). She goes on to contend that: It is in these socially constructed worlds – spatially situated along the lines of transnational [crucial for a geographically remote place like the Falkland Islands and the global circulation of information related to the community], local or otherwise relational citizenship – that children and young people acquire unquestionable positions, roles, identities and interests through, by and for which to act and develop as political agents.

In similar ways, then, it is necessary to explore the ways in which young people are involved in various activities and spaces of diplomacy. What motivations do they have for engaging (or disengaging) with online media in geopolitical ways? What audiences are they hoping to reach and so on? Young Islanders are directly involved in the running of the @falklands_utd Twitter account (with nearly 30,000 followers as of August 2014) that promotes the Falkland Island’s right to self-determination through its links with high profile

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journalists and politicians throughout the world. They regularly engage with other social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo. For example, during the run-up to the March 2013 Falkland Islands referendum some young Islanders posted videos of them talking about what the poll meant to them. These were widely shared on social networking sites (the FIG has also produced videos that tell the stories of young Islanders; see, for example, http://www.falklands.gov.fk/ our-people/). The internet has become a critically important communicational tool for Islanders (preceded by radio; see Pinkerton, 2008) in the twenty-first century: The Falklands is the most networked place in the world in terms of proportion of the community using [online] media … . I think one thing that Falkland Islanders are is incredibly well world-wise, they’re very aware of global politics, they’re very aware of their place in the world. And I think you get an awful lot of Islanders debating with Argentines on Twitter or on Facebook … . And, yes, I think that does have quite a big impact for the younger generation. (Interview with the Public Relations Manager of the Falkland Islands, 15 February 2013)

These online devices have a range of geographies, giving the Islanders an opportunity to engage with a global audience including the UK, Argentina and others living in the Falkland Islands. Callum (aged 16) spoke about his experiences of having online exchanges with people from Argentina: Interviewee: And like the news and that from Argentina, still it’s just so abusive. It’s ridiculous! Interviewer: Do you follow a lot of that? Interviewee: I do on Twitter I suppose. I use that. I’ve had some dodgy tweets from ‘Argie-tines’ [sic.] I just ignore them … . Because I’ve got our Falkland flag as my background. It doesn’t bother me. It really doesn’t. I don’t really mind a lot what they think. I’m like quite patriotic I suppose. (Interview with Callum, 10 February 2013)

The young people reacted variously to comments or provocations they received via Twitter or Facebook. Some chose to ignore them, avoiding public geopolitical discussions that could be widely read, while others entered into lively and sometimes abusive debates. Young Islanders were not alone in having to negotiate these heated online encounters, as British MP Andrew Rosindell (Chairman of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on OTs) made clear: When I put status updates on Facebook about the Falklands I get attacked. There’s a concerted effort by Argentines that [sic] go on my Facebook page and put loads of abusive messages, so you have to watch out for that as well. (Interview with Andrew Rosindell MP, 13 February 2013)

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Despite the contested nature of the territories in which they live, not all young people (or politicians/diplomats) wanted to participate in these geopoliticallycharged discussions and had decided to disengage from them altogether. Indeed, intense media and academic attention placed on the Islands in recent years, a consequence of commemorative and contemporary (geo)political events, has seen some young people become reluctant to speak about the sovereignty dispute (a challenge encountered in the recruitment of respondents for this research). There has been a certain ‘sovereignty fatigue’ expressed by some young people from this relatively small island community, who, understandably, do not wish to be defined solely by geopolitical tensions with their nearest neighbour. A teacher at the sole secondary school in the Falkland Islands hinted at another reason why young Islanders might avoid these online encounters: I’ve read some of our youngsters’ replies and in some cases I’ve thought, you know, wind your neck in because that’s a bit rude. Yes, it’s the global world that we live in these days and Argentina has been using it very effectively and I’m pleased to see that some of our kids use it as well. Some of them give very reasoned views. As I say, but some of our youngsters are a little bit heated. (Interview with a school teacher at the Falkland Islands Community School, 14 February 2013)

In a community the size of the Falkland Islands it is possible to follow what fellow Islanders are saying in both formal FIG settings and via social media websites (see Pinkerton, 2008 for work on intra-community surveillance in the Falkland Islands in relation to radio). The FIG and the community in general place considerable emphasis on presenting a unified and consistent message to counteract the promotion of Argentina’s sovereignty claim, both off and online. Young people were deeply conscious of this implicit intra-community scrutiny and some chose to circumvent geopolitically-related topics and arguments as a result. Although these spaces of diplomacy might appear to enable different actors, voices and opinions, it is critical to remain aware of the implicit and explicit pressures and constraints that might be placed on such expressions (Auer, 2011; Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014). To what extent can the interventions of young Islanders be understood as part of a performance that is ‘monitored’, ‘rehearsed’ and ‘scripted’ in similar ways to diplomatic presentations at the UN? While there are clearly no overt restrictions on what citizens can do online in the case of the Falkland Islands, nevertheless there is a certain expectation that they will reproduce the dominant discourse propagated by the FIG and wider adult community. Those who deviate from the expected geopolitical line, such as the three citizens who voted ‘No’ (to retaining their political status as a British OT) in the 2013 referendum, are distinguished from the vast majority who are supportive of the Islanders’ cause (The Guardian, 2013). Young Islanders were acutely aware of audience(s) and who they saw as important to inform about life in the Falkland Islands. Many young people from

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the territories study in the UK after the age of 16 as there is no further or higher educational provision in the Islands. Online technologies enable them to stay in touch with events at home when they are away and to feed back to family and friends in the Falkland Islands how the British public is responding to news from the South Atlantic. In particular, young Islanders who had studied in the UK expressed concerns about how little British people knew about the territories, including their location: When I was at university a few years ago, people my age and younger, a lot of them didn’t even know where it was. It’s very important … . People need to know more than that. Otherwise you’re going to have a generation of people who don’t understand the issues who maybe don’t have much memory of the war footage or anything like that and maybe consider in the future, and if I think for my children and my children’s children, you want to have that continuity that people understand the issues and wouldn’t decide down the line, oh well, this isn’t worth arguing over anymore, which I think is a fear that everyone has a little bit. (Interview with Amy, 10 February 2014)

Some of the young people saw their use of online social media as a critical tool in educating British friends and the wider populace about their situation, securing support now and in the future. The Islanders were conscious of the need to remind British people of their plight, as the UK’s armed forces provide the defence capability in the Falkland Islands (which many Islanders consider as a crucial deterrent to a future Argentine invasion). The ending of regular programmes focusing on the Falkland Islands and broadcast in the UK via ‘conventional’ media, like BBC Radio 4’s Calling the Falklands (broadcast until 2006) only served to underline the educational importance of these online networks. Online diplomatic activity, therefore, was targeted on the education of certain audiences and enabled an unprecedented form of exposure and interconnection for the citizens of this geographically isolated territory. Conclusion The spaces and ways in which diplomacy is being enacted in relation to the geopolitics of the south Atlantic have changed markedly in recent years. Young people from the Falkland Islands have become more visibly involved (even if this youthful diplomatic engagement might not be necessarily new) through their participation in government delegations and engagement with online media. Work from both the political geographies of childhood and youth and critical geopolitics is yet to explore adequately the various ways in which young people can act diplomatically in geopolitical disputes or as part of peace-making efforts. Such activities should be of especial interest to scholars of critical geopolitics because they are intimately concerned with how world politics is represented,

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mobilised and performed by politicians, diplomats and citizens alike (Dodds, 2007). Understandings of these activities need to be suitably broad, encompassing state and non-state diplomacies; and, as O’Toole (2003) suggests, led by youthspecific explanations. The latter point is significant in order to avoid categorising everything (e.g. young people’s online activities) as necessarily diplomatic. Kallio and Häkli’s thoughts on confronting the related challenge of conceptualising children’s politics are useful here: If ‘the political’ in childhood is vaguely conceptualised, children’s politics cannot be distinguished from personal behaviour or general social agency. Politics [or diplomacy] then becomes an empty notion. To enliven the concept of children’s politics we propose that it be reserved specifically to those situations where children as intentional social beings relate to subject positions offered by parental, (peer) cultural or institutional forces of socialisation. (Kallio and Häkli, 2010: 357–58, original emphasis)

In the case of defining young people’s diplomacy I would contend that this issue of intentionality is vital to distinguishing what are, and what are not, deliberate diplomatic interventions. As this chapter has shown, some young Islanders intentionally engaged with online media actively to reach and inform diverse audiences about the place in which they grow up, while others disengaged. The chapter lays the foundation for more focused research with young people to explore how they frame their engagements with geopolitical issues. It has considered the blurred nature of the diplomatic performances of young Islanders and politicians across diverse settings (Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014). For example, the reproduction of rehearsed geopolitical discourse might more commonly be associated with official government visits and presentations, yet the examples here show how the online activities of young Islanders can also be implicitly ‘monitored’. Furthermore, politicians and young people spoke about how they negotiated geopolitical confrontations online in similar ways. Future work should continue to consider critically the ways in which young people’s diplomatic performances and the spaces in which they take place are juxtaposed alongside, as well as enabled or disabled by, the state’s diplomats, politicians and fellow (adult) citizens. Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the empirical research presented in this chapter through their Early Career Fellowship scheme. I am grateful to all the respondents who generously gave me their time. Thanks go to Klaus Dodds and Peter Hopkins for providing incisive feedback on early drafts of the chapter and to Tansy Newman (Jane Cameron National Archives, Falkland Islands) for offering useful historical insight.

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Horton, J. and Kraftl, P. 2006. What else? Some more ways of thinking and doing ‘children’s geographies’. Children’s Geographies, 4, 69–95. Jones, H. 1985. The diplomacy of restraint: The United States’ efforts to repatriate Greek children evacuated during the Civil War of 1946–49. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 3, 65–85. Kallio, K.P. 2012. Political presence and the politics of noise. Space and Polity, 16, 287–302. Kallio, K.P. and Häkli, J. 2010. Guest editorial: Political geography in childhood. Political Geography, 29, 357–58. Kallio, K.P. and Häkli, J. 2011. Are there politics in childhood? Space and Polity, 15, 21–34. Koopman, S. 2011. Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening. Geoforum, 42, 274–84. Kuus, M. 2008. Professionals of geopolitics: Agency in international politics. Geography Compass, 2, 2062–79. La Nación. 2012. Jóvenes kelpers quieren reunirse con Cristina en la ONU [online] 12 June. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2014]. Mackinder, H.J. 1890. The physical basis of political geography. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 6, 78–84. Marshall, J. 1949. International affairs: citizen diplomacy. The American Political Science Review, 43, 83–90. McConnell, F., Moreau, T. and Dittmer, J. 2012. Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimising strategies of unofficial diplomacies. Geoforum, 43, 804–14. Ministry and Foreign Affairs and Worship, Argentine Republic. 2014. The international community and the Malvinas question, [online] 14 June. Available at: [Accessed 6 June 2014]. O’Toole, T. 2003. Engaging with young people’s conceptions of the political. Children’s Geographies, 1, 71–90. Pain, R. 2008. Whose fear is it anyway? Resisting terror fear and fear for children, in R. Pain and S.J. Smith (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 211–22. Pain, R., Panelli, R., Kindon, S. and Little, J. 2010. Moments in everyday/distant geopolitics: Young people’s fears and hopes. Geoforum, 41, 972–82. Philo, C. and Smith, F.M. 2003. Guest editorial: Political geographies of children and young people. Space and Polity, 7, 99–115. Pinkerton, A. 2008. ‘Strangers in the night’: The Falklands conflict as a radio war. Twentieth Century British History, 19, 344–75. Pinkerton, A. and Benwell, M. 2014. Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft. Political Geography, 38, 12–22.

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Shimazu, N. 2011. ‘Diplomacy as theatre’: Recasting the Bandung Conference of 1955 as cultural history. Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, 164 (October). Shimazu, N. 2012. Guest editorial: Places in diplomacy. Political Geography, 31, 335–36. Short, G. 2012. As Falkland Islanders, we have the right to decide our own fate. The Guardian, [online] 13 June. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2014]. Skelton, T. 2010. Taking young people as political actors seriously: Opening the borders of political geography. Area, 42, 145–51. The Guardian. 2013. Who were the three Islanders who voted no? [online] no date. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2014]. Weber, C. 1998. Performative states. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27, 77–95. Wood, B.E. 2012a. Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people’s everyday politics. Political Geography, 31, 337–46. Wood, N. 2012b. Playing with ‘Scottishness’: Musical performance, nonrepresentational thinking and the ‘doings’ of national identity. Cultural Geographies, 19, 195–215.

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Chapter 8

‘Dear Prime Minister …’ Mapping Island Children’s Political Views on Climate Change Elaine Stratford

In considering climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Anthropocene, Dalby (2013: 38) notes that the term ‘geopolitics’ summons matters related to the world and ‘the geographical arrangements that shape the contests for power over that world’. To effect change, Dalby argues, new ways of ‘thinking and a new politics are … needed to challenge the competitive assumptions of state negotiations’ (2013: 45). This argument is made on the basis that ‘these logics may … ameliorate … symptoms of climate change’, but fail to address it as ‘a production problem’. In turn, Koopman (2011: 275) calls for new conversations to understand the interweaving macro- and micro-scales of what I will spell out as ‘geo-P/politics’ – a geopolitics that applies equally to the global reach of ‘drones and the day to day’. In doing so, she usefully underscores the urgent need to deeply reflect and act for ‘peace(s) across places, including the place of the body’ (ibid.). In such light, a ‘focus on becomings – on children’s doings – is important because it allows us to highlight the political impact of children’s activities … see how children … create conditions for political and social change … [and know that as activists] children are often purveyors of possibility and difference’ (Bosco, 2010: 386). Responding to the imperative to think, act, and narrate anew, this chapter is concerned with a particular assemblage: climate change, islands, geopolitics and children’s geographies. Noting that climate change means drawing on cultural and political resources, Strauss (2012: 372) argues that it is an ‘intensifier, which overlays but does not transcend the rest of the tests we face’. She suggests that people are helped to respond to climate change challenges and opportunities by means of storytelling – including narrative or visual forms such as letters and art, as featured in this chapter. Islands are also intensifiers: their populations face pressing problems related to sea level rise, salinisation, land use, development, pollution, and threats to public health. Sheffield and Landrigan (2011) attribute to climate change some 150,000 deaths worldwide in 2000 alone. Of these, 88 per cent were among children; their ‘underdeveloped immune systems [putting] them at far greater risk of contracting … diseases and succumbing to their complications’ (Lawler et al., 2011: v). Given that ‘children’s bodies also appear to be “intensifiers”, not least in relation to the risks inherent in climate change, including on islands, one wonders if significantly more attention directed to their care and flourishing might reap astonishing results’ (Stratford, 2015: 139).

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Other analyses anticipate the productive terrain traversed by those cited above. More than a decade ago, for example, Philo and Smith (2003) considered how geopolitical entanglements across temporal and spatial scales produce liminal spaces for intra- and intergenerational political action. Responding to their call for more work on these matters, Wood (2012: 344) argues the need to develop and deepen a ‘more explicit spatial conception of liminality’ on the grounds that it ‘exposes how young people’s everyday politics [takes] place in … blurred spaces betwixt and between adults’ and young people’s worlds’. Wood contends that in such spaces are ‘the beginning of fresh political possibility’ (ibid.). Her position echoes work on youth citizenship by Hörschelmann (2008), and on young people’s experiences of migration, mobility and asylum by Hopkins and Alexander (2010). Wood’s contention about geopolitical possibilities for young people also aligns with a call by Kallio and Häkli (2010) for scholars to ground our thinking in the (mundane) world, and to be alert and bear witness to young people’s intention. Kallio and Häkli (2011) propose that alertness may be focused by noting young people’s formal political agency (for example in youth councils); by acknowledging their everyday engagement in geopolitics (by dint of being in or moving through places where struggles exist); and by apprehending that they practise politics in everyday environments ‘by exercising a degree of autonomy in their mundane practices, whichever they may be’ (2011: 105). Bartos (2012) emphasises this need to consider the banal in understanding the interstices between geopolitics and children’s geographies, drawing on feminist care theories and principles in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). Among those precepts are those framing how young people’s identities and capacities to act are co-constituted in and with the political contexts in which they are situated or through which they move. In partnership with young people, I think there is compelling sense in seeking to ensure that those contexts are caring – of and for self, other and Earth. Indeed, by learning more about children’s daily political practices through their acts of care, we can learn more about how children understand their responsibilities in a globalised world, the value they place on personal and familial relationships, how they resolve conflicts, and how they develop relationships of trust, mutuality, respect and love, adding an important dimension to a political geography of children (Bartos, 2012: 159). Mindful of these aforementioned debates and literatures in geopolitics and children’s geographies, which increasingly and usefully ‘speak’ to one another, this chapter is based on two premises. One is that children’s lives are already fully human lives and not merely lives-in-waiting for adulthood. The other is that those lives are always already politically located; that is, enmeshed in particular locations, affected by the scalar dynamics between locations and influenced by diverse forms of identification such as gender, ethnicity or status. My specific objective is to work out from those foundational assumptions and contribute to debates about how island children citizens engage caringly with the geopolitics and processes of political socialisation in relation to climate change to co-constitute a society they deserve (Horton and Kraftl, 2006). To such ends,

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I report and reflect on a collaboration across geography and the arts to enable such engagement and to understand better how children’s geopolitical views about climate change might be elicited, valued and mobilised. Formally entitled ‘Fresh! A Map of a Dream of the Future’, this programme ran between 2008–10, gained support from the UNESCO Australia Commission, and resulted in several spin-off projects during 2011–12. Known by collaborators and participants as AMDF, the programme involved academics, artists and educators working with school students in Tasmania, the island-state of Australia, and I elaborate upon its structure, processes, and outcomes later in the chapter. AMDF is explicitly positioned in the geohumanities, which takes the conventional remit of the humanities, ‘know thyself’, and the concerns of geography with space and place to focus ‘on ‘imaginative geographies’ [which] allows us to ‘map’ the self into the [real] world’ (Cosgrove, 2011: xxiii). It was encouraged by thinking among artists and geohumanists committed to a crossdisciplinary praxis to map, reflect, represent and perform the world (Daniels et al., 2011; Hawkins, 2011; Randerson, 2007). In the terms provided by Dalby, Koopman and others cited above, such work is geopolitical. Thus, in discussing AMDF’s development and achievements in this chapter, I hope to provide insights of wider relevance to scholars of children’s geographies, geopolitics, and island and climate studies, among others. To discern these wider empirical and theoretical lessons, the chapter illustrates a cycle of ‘“multiple loops” of reasoning [through which] … the researcher tentatively develops concepts (induction) and then compares them to the details of the social world that comprise the case (deduction)’ (Baxter, 2010: 90). The method thus moves between ‘everyday concepts and meanings, lay accounts, and social science explanations’ (Mason, 2004: 180). It reflects my understanding of the co-constitutive relationships shared by adults and children, and my desire to avoid reproducing false dichotomies between people at different stages of the life course. It also seeks to model the dynamics of a geo-P/politics that bridges macro- and micro-scale concerns (Philo and Smith, 2003). The chapter both reflects and asserts a strong commitment to the transformative power of participatory programmes involving the arts and geography. Evidence suggests that the collaborative techniques used in such programmes give effect to new modes of thinking about geopolitics and engender resilience, whether applied to climate change (Kirkby et al., 2014), health (Carter and Ford, 2013), migration (Torres and Carte, 2014), or more generally (Robinson and Gillies, 2012). Adding weight to this evidence, I focus on how Grade 5 and 6 students – aged 10–12 years – engaged with AMDF. It is germane that those students live on the main island of the archipelago that is Tasmania. Located at 40°S–42°S and 147°E, it has an area of 64,519 square kilometres (24,911 square miles) and a population of c.512,000. On that island, key population centres and many small settlements are located along parts of a 5,400 km coastline, up to 84 per cent of which may be subject to inundation (Sharples, 2006). This scenario is not uncommon: worldwide, over half a billion islanders are at the ‘frontline’ of climate change and sea level rise, embroiled in multiscalar geopolitical responses to challenges such as coastal

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inundation; risks to water, food and land supply; or risks to sovereignty and the international dynamics of migration (Baldacchino, 2006; Barnett and Campbell, 2010a; Barnett and Campbell, 2010b; Burkett, 2011; McAdam and Saul, 2010; Stratford et al., 2013). Of added import is the point that most of those who will be affected most severely by climate change are under 30 years of age (House, 2013). A Map of a Dream of the Future Since 2001, Tasmania has hosted an international biennial arts event, ‘Ten Days on the Island’. In 2003 I was invited by the festival director to help develop an event for the 2005 programme. Working with personnel from the Tasmanian Government Department of Education we created an international programme, ‘Webbing the Islands’, curated by young artist, Sarah Howell, and then I took on the programme after the festival. Among other things, the programme provided opportunities for children and teachers to collaborate online and consider distinctive features of island communities around the world using videos, pictures, critical inquiries and creative writing; 64 such groups were ultimately involved. It was of great interest to me that children living away from the coastline appeared to have limited appreciation of Tasmania’s island status; those living at the coast were profoundly aware of edge and boundary, and alert to sea level rise as part of climate change. In 2008 funds were secured from the Tasmanian Government and Regional Arts Tasmania to create AMDF and deepen the research, fostering authentic, respectful engagement with children and inviting them to explore possibilities for resilience in the face of a future whose climate has changed. The programme also sought to understand children’s orientation to more or less authoritarian or libertarian, more or less ecocentric or technocentric, and more or less optimistic or pessimistic political views. These findings are expanded upon in Stratford and Low’s work (2013). Such inquiries on our part were partly indebted to Political Compass (2010), a UK site that maps political proclivities. AMDF employed writer and new media artist Nic Low; filmmaker Heidi Douglas; graphic artist Nadine Kessler and arts curators Kate MacDonald and Josie Hurst. We were supported by a reference group with expertise in festivals, education and community engagement. Particular expertise was provided by a teacher and community champion, Anna Pafitis, and festivals director, Neil Cameron. The programme started in 2008 with a public forum on climate change, education and the arts when young people, artists, climate scientists and teachers helped us shape the rest of the offering. In 2009 we developed and distributed a 50-page education kit to regional art galleries and all Tasmanian schools – over 300 in total. The kit was based around a story set in the year 2090 about a group of school students – Ruby, Kené, and ‘you’ – and their lives in a climate-changed world (Low et al., 2010). In 2010 the programme culminated in a major exhibition conceived by Low and held at the national regional arts conference that year, and has been augmented via conference and refereed papers and chapters.

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The education kit is a key focus here. It contained numerous creative exercises involving letter writing, storytelling, drawing, performing and model-making, all designed to engage children in thinking about climate change challenges and opportunities as applied to food and water, shelter, transport and migration. Among several school communities engaging with AMDF was Youngtown Primary School in Launceston, on Tasmania’s north coast. It is to this engagement that I now turn on the grounds that it was among the first and most vibrant of our collaborations, featuring teachers especially dedicated to engaging with the project, returning student work to us and providing details about their experiences of the programme. Engaging Youngtown Primary School Young people appear to be sensitised to their political impulses when supported by creative and participatory activities (Horton et al., 2008; Matthews and Limb, 1999); plainly, in such work it is imperative to engage them on their terms (Strazdins and Skeat, 2011). Child-initiated participation is rare, nevertheless ‘children [should] have the opportunity to participate in society in truly authentic ways as ‘active citizens’ (Malone and Hartung, 2010: 24). In this light, it is important to clarify that AMDF, like ‘Webbing the Islands’ before it, was generated by adults seeking to provide opportunities for students to contemplate their capacities as citizens and for us to learn from them respectfully. This clarification is advanced mindful of Swyngedouw’s closing comments at a special session on children’s geographies at the Association of American Geographers’ conference in 2001, in which he: saw both policy and academic circles as complicit with a neo-liberal will to shift the onus for ‘making changes’ away from adult-directed interventions designed to improve children’s lot and on to the newly discovered ‘agency of the child’ as the privileged locus of solutions. Significantly, therefore, Swyngedouw’s contribution clarifies why bringing together children’s and political geography has critical merit, but it also sounds a warning about exactly the kinds of studies that might result – especially if an obviously ‘political’ edge is lost in the process and the larger (and more conventionally defined) ‘political’ contexts for the expression of child agency then neglected. (Reported in Philo and Smith, 2003: 105)

We were also mindful that schools are key sites of political socialisation and comprise large public groups whose values may differ from those in familial settings. Such settings represent a diversity that is important for learning both democratic rights and responsibilities (Toots et al., 2013; Wood, 2012), hence the AMDF team’s desire to work with school communities in which students are leading agents in learning processes.

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In June 2010 Mario Bergamin, Assistant Principal at Youngtown Primary School, sent me a package containing work produced for AMDF by a combined Grade 5/6 class. Earlier in the year Mario had kindly agreed to our engaging with the students as part of their work in environmental education and sustainable practices, and for six consecutive weeks he had given 90 minutes a week to the programme, then provided comprehensive written feedback on the programme. (I acknowledge that I am not able, now, to access feedback from the children then involved in the project, for they have dispersed and moved on to high schools.) In mid-May 2014 I spoke with Mario again and asked him to reflect anew on how students had approached AMDF and understood their roles as citizens, and their capacity to act and to influence. He recalled that in 2010 the Rudd Labor Government’s ‘Education Revolution’ was in full swing. A part of that policy was to ensure that all school students had access to computers; another was to implement a semi-standardised Australian curriculum across all the states and territories. Following the global financial crisis, elements of the policy were redesigned around another, namely ‘Building the Education Revolution’. This measure was part of the Government’s expansionary fiscal strategy to avoid the national economy’s plunge into recession. It was allocated AU$16.2b (£8.8b), enabling ‘the construction of school libraries, multipurpose halls, science laboratories, and language learning centers … [so that by May 2012 it] had funded about 24,000 infrastructure projects for approximately 9,500 schools across Australia’ (Lewis et al., 2014: 299). Mario explained that the influx of funds meant several sustainability projects at Youngtown became feasible, including the installation of a 92,000 litre water tank and new water-smart toilets. He reminded me that student participation in AMDF was integrated into a suite of units of inquiry on sustainability, during which they had been learning how to write letters, so some processual work in the genre had been undertaken prior to our collaboration. Building on that work, and drawing on AMDF’s education kit and creative exercises, Youngtown teachers invited students to prepare drafts of letters to Prime Minister Rudd about mitigating the water shortages arising from climate change. That focus allowed them to augment the experience of watching the newly-funded water-smart infrastructure come into the school. I consider these letters to the Prime Minister shortly. Fortuitously, AMDF was aligned with Youngtown’s focus on environmental and global education. Mario noted that because the third main character in our story was ‘you’, students could empathise with Ruby’s and Kené’s circumstances. They came to understand more clearly that Tasmania is an island, that Australia is an island-continent, and that these are places linked in many ways to other [island] places around the world and to other kinds of places also experiencing the effects of climate change. Such shifts in understandings may have been prompted by the way each chapter in the AMDF story ‘sets up a challenging situation, and is followed by arts-based activities requiring students to make decisions, and propose and consider the implications of solutions’ (Stratford and Low, 2013: 7). Either way, transformations in children’s thinking add empirical weight to the types of considerations mapped out in the literature discussed at the start of this chapter.

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Reflecting on the changes noticed among the children, Mario remarked that, in his experience, generally students who had not travelled beyond Launceston, the north of Tasmania or the island found it challenging to think in global terms. Yet, he observed, AMDF had the capacity to ‘place’ them in the ‘here’ that is the island, and simultaneously showed how ‘here’ has links to ‘there’ elsewhere. This insight, I think, is profound: being asked about their views on future options for climate change adaptation and mitigation, the students came to see themselves as agents with capacity to influence at multiple scales. For example, in relation to the microscale, on 2 June 2010 arts curator Josie Hurst emailed the AMDF team following her session with the Youngtown students, noting that the ‘kids really grasped the concepts easily … [and] left laughing and inspired, desperately grabbing their mums and dads to show them their artwork when they came in’. In overheard conversations children also engaged in what Bartos (2012) or Wood (2012) might describe as political lobbying – in this instance for changes in home-based practices relating to food procurement, water management, walking to school as transport and rethinking what it means to be islanders. These kinds of place-based political concerns were echoed time and again in different settings with different groups involved in AMDF, and their expression underscores the idea that schools are critically important hybrid spaces for intergenerational engagement and what I see as multi-directional opportunities for geopolitical learnings. Further observations on the ways in which the children engaged in both micro-political and macro-political strategies and tactics are made later in relation to letters they wrote to the Prime Minister. It is noteworthy that students working on AMDF were leaders in the school community – nominated to such positions using a peer-led, teacher-supported process. Acceptance of leadership required a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and rights, and the allied task of co-constructing the civic dynamics of the school day and experience. There is much of merit written about children’s rights to political voice (see Freeman and Veerman, 1992), and to priority consideration in relation to climate change (see Gardiner et al., 2010). According to findings reported in Alderson’s (2000: 131) survey in Great Britain and Northern Ireland of 2,272 young people aged 7–17 years of age, gauging their evaluations of school life and school councils, such understandings of leadership are possible much earlier than is generally appreciated. For example, ‘eight-year-olds listen carefully to one another, take minutes, brainstorm, provide creative solutions to problems, and peacefully resolve disagreements’ and ‘young children show sophisticated skills when adults expect and encourage these’. Alderson suggests that much work on children’s citizenship and rights presents these as cognitive competencies, referring to the influential Crick Report (UK Citizenship Advisory Group, 1998: para. 3.8, para. 3.22), which emphasises teaching democracy as a series of abstract ideas and an antidote to political disaffection and alienation. But, as Alderson asserts, democracy and citizenship involve: strong feelings about how to share actions, resources and power fairly (or unfairly), through bodies and relationships: by playing and labouring together,

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Moreover, where children are denied access to participatory and democratic processes, their disaffection is erroneously attributed to immaturity and the tacit or unwitting disrespect shown to them goes unchallenged. Mario’s observations about student leadership at Youngtown led to another conversation about children’s capacities to act and influence. He suggested all adults need to provide safe, extended and enabling opportunities for children, and that teachers have particular responsibility to activate learning, not merely guard or transmit knowledge (Alfieri et al., 2011; Bruner, 1961). He described the school’s use of what is known as a ‘twenty-first century fluencies’ framework (Crockett et al., 2011; Jukes et al., 2010), emphasising solutions, information, creativity, media, collaboration and global digital citizenship. The use of these fluencies is formatively assessed at Youngtown, and Mario thought they accelerate students’ broad appreciation of their agency and the ways in which it comprises rights and responsibilities. Such fluencies and enhanced appreciation of agency resonate with studies on political socialisation based in, but not limited to, the United States and Australia. Useful work with 800 children aged 7–11 reveals that, despite ‘the fact that so much in politics is problematic in the sense of being permanently contestable, the basic principles for solving problems or clarifying issues apply at least as much to politics as any other area of discourse’ (Stevens, 1982: 9). These principles influence comprehension, logic-making, conclusions, inferences and reasoning. They require insight: thinking that is both relevant and directed; that moves to hypothesising; and that involves internal critical faculties to evaluate and – if necessary – to discard a thought or idea. According to Stevens (1982: 12), a child exercising such abilities and interests can understand ‘politics as an area of human behaviour  … . And, as with politics, so with other concepts such as freedom, democracy, having rights, governing, having political parties and competing policies, treating people equally’. Such insights are mirrored in earlier works on political socialisation in the US and Australia, such as those by Hess and Torney-Purta (1967), Connell (1971) and Moore et al. (1985). ‘Dear Prime Minister’ It is useful now to recall two points. The first relates to the ways in which Youngtown students bore witness to the installation of water-smart toilets and a 92,000 litre water tank funded by the Australian Government, and engaged in environmental education, leadership and AMDF. The second relates to Mario Bergamin’s observation about teachers activating learning opportunities and Alderson’s comment on young people’s disaffection with politics. With these

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points in mind, I now turn to reflect on the dynamics of an exercise from AMDF in which the students drafted letters about water management and its relationship to climate change to Kevin Rudd, then Prime Minister. Political Socialisation and National Leaders Two generalised considerations are important to set the context for discussion. First, in early political socialisation literature there is an understanding that children and younger adolescents tend to view prime ministers and presidents and their office in a positive light (Ball, 2003; Greenstein et al., 1974; Hess and Easton, 1960). Recent reviews do not suggest otherwise (Toots et al., 2013). In seeking to explain such views of national leaders, Connell (1971: 25) draws on the idea of the ‘task pool’ in work with 119 people aged 5–16 in Sydney, Australia. The task pool is a: set of conceptions of political actions which a child [or anyone] … creates by pooling details from a number of different sources. [A child,] Therese gives an excellent illustration of this. Her Queen, Prime Minister and President are part legislator, part schoolmaster, part mayor.

In turn, Hess and Torney-Purta (1967: 42) have influenced the debate by referring to the ways in which children’s attachments to the President of the United States appear to be predicated on an understanding that he ‘would be concerned with their welfare: they reciprocate by extending loyalty and affection … protection reciprocated by love’. Such fealty was seen to extend to a love of the nation state. Moore et al. (1985: 86), later examined this and found that primary students ‘demonstrate steady growth in their ability to identify geopolitical units such as their city, state, and nation, even though some children do not evidence consistency from year-to-year’. Hess and Torney-Purta also discerned that those able to remember more than one presidency seemed better able to separate the office from the incumbent and any of his misdeeds. Connell (1971: 55) had also established that some Australian children would colourfully propose ‘arresting, imprisoning, or murdering him’, although the majority deemed it more appropriate to remove him from office – sometimes referring to the next election. Second, the political socialisation process has particular resonance with the form adopted; that is, correspondence to national leaders. A study by Ball (2003) of letters from children and young people to President Lyndon Johnson illuminates the point that more attention needs to be paid to letter writing as a form of political communication – and I would underscore that such analysis always needs to be mindful of place, scale and spatial relations. In her work Ball refers to the ancient lineage of letter writing as an essential and honoured part of training in rhetoric and political engagement. Ball notes that, when the paper was written, she could find only two research outputs on children’s letters to the

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US President, one in 1964 and one to the first President Bush; my own searches for a recent literature are likewise limited (but see Adler and Adler, 2009, on letters to President Obama). From the collection of youthful letters in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, Ball examined 258 written by boys and girls aged 7–14 from across the US. She found that young people writing to President Johnson appeared to internalise and deeply feel the assassination of President Kennedy, absorbing that collective national trauma, often inquiring of Johnson his views on his predecessor and his own ascent to power. They recited key metaphors in political discourse, particularly those pertaining to the Domino Theory and communism as a disease, prevalent during the Cold War. Letters to Johnson were candid and lacked guile, exhibiting how political discourse circulates in chains through social institutions such as the family and education. By reference to symbolic convergence, Ball (2003: 7) explains how ‘certain communities [thus] come to share values, attitudes, and beliefs’. A number of young people also sought to influence Johnson directly by asking him why he had chosen to continue bombing Hanoi after its leadership had apparently asked him to stop. One letter on the Vietnam War started: ‘If I could make a speech …’, which Ball (2003: 8) interprets as ‘implying a lack of voice for which [the young person’s] letter intercedes’. Nevertheless, many letters positioned the presidency as possessing ‘god-like qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence’ (9) and thus constituted the incumbent in parallel terms. An attendant and assumed benevolence is crucial to younger children’s sense of being safe and protected. This sense is an act of faith as they emerge into the polity and place it within their own cognitive and affective frameworks. To: Mr K Rudd (PM), Canberra In light of the foregoing, it is interesting to consider the letters that Youngtown students wrote to Prime Minister Rudd, dated 28 April 2090 and written on or about 28 April 2010. Often visiting classrooms around the nation, Rudd was widely known as someone (briefly) positioned at the helm of the education revolution, and was also seen as a champion of global, national, and local climate change action. Eleven Youngtown students, constituted as civic and sustainability leaders living on an island, wrote to the Prime Minister as part of their participation in AMDF, most penning two or three paragraphs (an average of 106 words, with a range of 67–166 words). I can discern no particular relationship between the sophistication of the message and the number of words. Five letters were signed by girls, five by boys, and one incomplete letter was unsigned. All letters conformed to certain premises: in 2090, climate change is affecting water supply; water shortages are serious and warrant great concern; these problems exist at multiple scales, from the home to the globe, and affect people’s health, well-being, capacity to produce food and ability to function normally; and

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solutions are at hand. Students appreciated that remedies may come from distant political leadership, and localised stewardship and agency. At no time was mention made of the corporate sector or of the role of non-government organisations, and only one letter mentioned the government as a key force for change. This is not surprising, given both the age group and their brief. According to Toots et al. (2013: 62), at around ages 9–11 years young people understand basic social mechanisms such as exchange, different interests and roles, although their grasp of political system and governmental structures and processes is vague, and their thinking about community needs is concrete and based largely on emotions. Whether and to what extent these features change into adulthood is, I think, a moot point. All of the letters proffered solutions generated by the correspondents. Nine used a persuasive – and sometimes authoritarian – tone in calling for the Prime Minister to introduce laws. These assumed his position to be all-powerful, mirroring Ball’s findings from letters to President Johnson. Students wanted the Prime Minister to require people to install timers or other technological fixes to constrain the length of time spent showering, with one recommending heavy fines for failure to comply: If people waste water they will be punished depending on how much water is being wasted. If it’s a small amont [sic] of water is wasted it will gust [sic] be a two hundred dollar find [sic].

In reality, subsidies for water fixtures have been available for some time throughout much of Australia, and it is reasonable to posit that a growing number of children live in homes with these fixtures. Both ‘suggesting and demanding’ the Prime Minister to urge this range of actions, students expected he would also mandate the installation of rainwater tanks. He was petitioned to require the construction of domes with trees beneath to foster shade and water harvesting. He was advised that, in winter, skylights in dark rooms would save electricity (Tasmania lies at 40°S–42°S and depends on hydroelectricity). Nine students wrote about the importance of technological innovation. One suggested the invention of a water pill that would ‘quench your therst [sic]’, noting that ‘I need some funding to test and diliver [sic] it. The hole [sic] point of the funding is to find a way of making water in a safe and healthy way and not to waste more water’. One student wanted ‘money to make filters that contain water, underground pipes, eco-toilets … underground tanks … rain catching pipes/tanks, wall water storage, [and] recided [recycled] shower water’. He finished his letter thus: ‘I hope the climate change commity [community] can support me on this. I also was hoping to hear from you’. Again, that such appeals should be heard and responded to echoes observations made by Ball and other scholars about the intimacy that young people assume in relation to presidency and prime ministership. Two other students wrote: ‘Water waste is a very big problem in our states so pleas [sic] think about this idea’, and ‘Kevin Rudd I really hope to hear back from you, I hope my plan will go ahead’. These appeals

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underscore both the faith that is placed in leadership, and the impulse to care and caring, offering ‘the greatest possibility for transforming social and political thinking’ (Tronto, 1993: 124). Conclusions Responding to the wider agenda of this book, to explore the connections between children and young people’s lives and critical geopolitics, at the beginning of this chapter I argued that in the face of climate change, and especially among island people, there is need to think, act and narrate the world in new ways. I advanced the view that the geohumanities has much to offer in terms of furnishing creative mechanisms for such thinking, acting and narrating, and speculated that children and young people have key roles here. I drew on insights from literature dedicated to understanding the multiscalar and multigenerational complexities of climate change, geopolitics and children’s geographies, emphasising the power of an overarching ethic of care. I also sought to ground these theoretical debates with reference to a particular case, the AMDF participatory programme using the arts and geography, and collaboration with a specific group of staff and students at Youngtown Primary School. Arguably, AMDF was able to support teachers and young people in conscious collective efforts to become sensitised and open to the latter’s political agency and the values that underpin their views, many of which are based on a caring ethos. AMDF also illustrates the utility of resilience as a resource for children to draw upon when responding to the prospect of a climate-changed future. By thinking about the challenges of climate change for islands in terms of their own capacity to act at different temporal and spatial scales, in and through different locations, children develop their sense of shared yet differentiated responsibility. In more general terms, the findings seem to support the utility of participatory arts–geography programmes in fostering geopolitical engagement on ‘matters that matter’. The insights derived from AMDF also seem to add weight to several arguments cited above. One is that an effective children’s geopolitics will (a) account for multiscalar and multigenerational complexity and liminality; (b) make better use of culture as a political resource; and (c) be alert to young people’s caring intentions and capacities to engage as active citizens in and across diverse sites – formal and informal, large and small scale, here and now, there and later, public and private. These findings are important because, as Bartos (2012: 158) has properly claimed, ‘children are not only inheriting the future given by their elders, they are indeed important social actors in the present now’. Better understanding their values, aspirations, capacities, and circumstances must surely be vital in extending care to them as equal fellow citizens.

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References Adler, B. and Adler Jr. B. 2009. Kids’ Letters to President Obama. New York: Ballantine. Alderson, P. 2000. School students’ views on school councils and daily life at school, Children & Society, 14(2), 121–34. Alfieri, L., Brooks, P.J., Aldrich, N.J. and Tenenbaum, H.R. 2011. Does discoverybased instruction enhance learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(1), 1–18. Baldacchino, G. 2006. Islands, Island Studies, Island Studies Journal. Island Studies Journal, 1(1), 3–18. Ball, M. 2003. Through children’s eyes: Political socialization, images of the President, and rhetorical strategies in children’s letters to Lyndon B. Johnson, Intercultural Communication Studies, 12(2), 1–18. Barnett, J. and Campbell, J. (eds), 2010a. Climate Change and Small Island States: Power, Knowledge and the South Pacific. London: Earthscan. Barnett, J. and Campbell, J. 2010b. Discourses of danger, in J. Barnett and J. Campbell (eds), Climate Change and Small Island States: Power, Knowledge and the South Pacific. London: Earthscan, pp. 154–74. Bartos, A.E. 2012. Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood. Political Geography, 31(3), 157–66. Baxter, J. 2010. Case studies in qualitative research, in: Hay, I. (ed.), Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–98. Bosco, F.J. 2010. Play, work or activism? Broadening the connections between political and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 8(4), 381–90. Bruner, J.S., 1961. The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31(1), 21–32. Burkett, M. 2011. The nation ex-situ: On climate change, deterritorialized nationhood and the post-climate era. Climate Law, 2(3), 345–74. Carter, B. and Ford, K. 2013. Researching children’s health experiences: The place for participatory, child-centered, arts-based approaches. Research in Nursing & Health, 36(1), 95–107. Connell, R.W. 1971. The Child’s Construction of Politics. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Cosgrove, D. 2011. Prologue: Geography within the humanities, in S. Daniels, D. DeLyser, J.N. Entrikin and D. Richardson (eds), Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities. London: Routledge, pp. xxii– xxv. Crockett, L., Jukes, I. and Churches, A., 2011. Literacy Is ‘Not’ Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age. The 21st Century Fluency Series. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

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Lawler, J. with M. Urbano et al., 2011. Children’s Vulnerability to Climate Change and Disaster Impacts in East Asia and the Pacific. Bangkok: UNICEF. Lewis, C., Dollery, B. and Kortt, M.A. 2014. Building the education revolution: Another case of Australian Government failure? International Journal of Public Administration, 37(5), 299–307. Low, N., Douglas, H., Kessler, N., Hurst, J. and Stratford, E. 2010. Fresh! A Map of a Dream of the Future. Exploring Island Life, Climate Change, Resilience. Hobart: School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania. Malone, K. and Hartung, C. 2010. Challenges of participatory practice with children, in B. Percy-Smith and N. Thomas (eds), A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives from Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 24–38. Mason, J. 2004. Qualitative Researching, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Matthews, H. and Limb, M. 1999. Defining an agenda for the geography of children: Review and prospect. Progress in Human Geography, 23(1), 61–90. McAdam, J. and Saul, B. 2010. An insecure climate for human security? Climateinduced displacement and international law. University of New South Wales Faculty of Law Research Series. Working Paper 59, Sydney: University of New South Wales Faculty of Law. Moore, S.W., Lare, J. and Wagner, K.A. 1985. The Child’s Political World: A Longitudinal Perspective. New York: Praeger. Philo, C. and Smith, F.M. 2003. Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people. Space and Polity, 7(2), 99–115. Political Compass. 2010. (accessed October 2012, May 2014). Randerson, J. 2007. Between reason and sensation: Antipodean artists and climate change. Leonardo, 40(5), 442–48. Robinson, Y. and Gillies, V. 2012. Introduction: Developing creative methods with children and young people. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(2), 87–89. Sharples, C. 2006. Indicative Mapping of Tasmanian Coastal Vulnerability to Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise. Hobart: Consultant Report to Department of Primary Industries and Water Tasmania. Sheffield, P.E. and Landrigan, P.J. 2011. Global climate change and children’s health: Threats and strategies for prevention. Environmental Health Perspectives, 119(3), 291–98. Stevens, O. 1982. Children Talking Politics: Political Learning in Childhood. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Stratford, E. 2015. Geographies, Mobilities, and Rhythms over the Life-course: Adventures in the Interval. London: Routledge, Chapter 3. Stratford, E., Farbotko, C. and Lazrus, H. 2013. Tuvalu, sovereignty and climate change: Considering fenua, the archipelago and emigration. Island Studies Journal, 8(1), 67–83.

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Stratford, E. and Low, N. 2013. Young islanders, the meteorological imagination, and the art of geopolitical engagement. Children’s Geographies, DOI 10.1080/14733285.2013.828454. Strauss, S. 2012. Are cultures endangered by climate change? Yes, but … Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 3(4), 371–77. Strazdins, L. and Skeat, H. 2011. Weathering the Future: Climate Change, Children and Young People, and Decision Making. Canberra: Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Toots, A., Worley, N. and Skosireva, A. 2013. Children as political actors. In: G.B. Melton, A. Ben-Arieh, J. Cashmore, G.S. Goodman and N.K. Worley (eds), The Sage Handbook of Child Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 54–80. Torres, R.M. and Carte, L. 2014. Community participatory appraisal in migration research: Connecting neoliberalism, rural restructuring and mobility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(1), 140–14. Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. UK Citizenship Advisory Group. 1998. Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools. London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. United Nations. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. , accessed 16 July 2013. Wood, B.E. 2012. Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people’s everyday politics. Political Geography, 31(6), 337–46.

Chapter 9

Critical Geopolitics of Child and Youth Migration in (Post)socialist Laos Roy Huijsmans

Stories of societal transformations are often narrated through a nationalist frame, and seldom through the lives of young people. This is partly because the geopolitics that shapes nationalist narratives, including its critiques, fits poorly with accounts of the everyday that constitute the analytical core in much childhood and youth studies literature (Ansell, 2009). Feminist contributions to geopolitics have struggled with a similar dilemma and gone some way to overcome this (e.g. Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2004). The work of Pain and Smith (2008) on critical geopolitics and everyday life is informed by such debates and is instructive here. In their efforts to bridge geopolitics and the everyday analytically, they first highlight the importance of embodying geopolitics, focusing on how ‘particular bodies are used and represented, in evaluating discourses and in highlighting particular experiences’ (Pain and Smith, 2008: 6). Second, drawing on Dowler and Sharp (2001), they stress the importance of locating geopolitical analyses by privileging voices that ‘challenge authoritative/ expert accounts’. Third, they recall the importance of grounding geopolitics by considering ‘how international representations and processes work out in everyday life’ (Pain and Smith, 2008: 6). Feminist contributions to critical geopolitics can inform engagements with children and youth, yet some important differences must be identified that affect the geo-graphing of young people’s lives. Feminist scholars have challenged the masculinism of geographical knowledge production, yet there is no parallel in the geographies of children and youth where, despite widespread use of participatory methods, adults have remained central to knowledge production. Further, whereas the widely used concept of gender demands relational analyses of women’s lives (and men’s), conceptual tools for thinking in relational terms about children and youth remain under-utilised in existing research (Huijsmans et al., 2014). In addition, children are assumed to be in the private sphere and thus not participating in the political process. Those children and young people not acting out this script are typically framed as deviant and beyond these societal expectations (Hyndman, 2010). Studying migration illuminates the various ways in which the world is mapped and constitutes an obvious space where young people experience geopolitics (Hopkins and Alexander, 2010). In addition, I would suggest that migration is a space where young lives become geopolitically charged at the level of

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Figure 9.1

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Map of Laos. Modified version of Laos location map by NordNordWest, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

representation and as embodied agents, in both their present capacity as young people and as future adults. This can be illustrated with vignettes from a historical and contemporary wave of young people migrating independently from their parents and/or adult care-givers in Laos, a relatively small and fairly sparsely populated landlocked country in the Southeast Asian peninsula. There is first the historical case:

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Our parents were of course very excited, Khamphone recalled. Can you imagine? Three months at school, nothing to pay, and we’d become teachers! I wanted to go. My father was also happy to let me go. But my mother was more reluctant. She asked me twice if I really wanted to go, and I replied each time “yes”. That really showed that she didn’t want me to leave … Three months at school and then becoming a teacher it was a lie … But it was a lie with an honourable purpose since it was meant to give us an education. (Pholsena, 2006: 109)

As I argue in this chapter the two instances of widespread child migration discussed are inextricably tied to shifts in wider geopolitical power constellations at the level of practice and representation Khampone’s historical account refers to the little known phenomenon of child migration to northern Laos and Vietnam as part of the revolutionary struggle that led to the proclamation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic of 1975; a course of events tightly interwoven with the Second Indochina War. The embodied experience of Khamphone in the above quote, illustrates how geopolitics is manifested in his everyday life. This is most dramatically illustrated by his migration experience at the age of 12 from his village in Houaphan province, northern Laos, to North Vietnam (see Figure 9.1). Lao communist soldiers had come to his village to recruit children with the promise of free education in Vietnam. After three months they would return to their villages as trained teachers. Khamphone acknowledges that this turned out to be a lie; he only returned as an adult. Yet his early migration transformed Khamphone from his earlier experiences of rural ethnic minority village childhood into a conscious Lao citizen, as is evident from his response to the question whether he had ever thought of staying in Vietnam: ‘No … I wanted to go back to my homeland, Laos. The Vietnamese and Lao are too different. For example, the Vietnamese eat bread by dunking it in the soup, and we, Lao, eat rice’ (Pholsena, 2006: 111). Furthermore, it was through his migration that he became fully involved in the revolutionary struggle, shaping his political subjectivity and leading him to reflect critically on hegemonic representations of the Lao past in his later life as a Lao scholar of ethnic minority origin (Pholsena, 2006). Young people in Pakxaeng district of Luang Prabang province feel their right to move has been restricted by local authorities … “If we move out of our village, the village authorities will fine our families”, a group of young girls told media last week. But local authorities claim the district’s rule limiting the girls’ relocation was aimed at preventing young people from becoming victims of human trafficking. (Vientiane Times, Pongkhao, 2008)

The Vientiane Times quote above refers to the contemporary phenomenon of young Lao villagers migrating for work to urban Laos or across the border into Thailand. It expresses the unease of Lao authorities over the widespread involvement of minors in internal and cross-border migration, and how a global discourse – human trafficking – is appropriated to serve distinctly national concerns of place-making

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(Huijsmans, 2011). The human trafficking narrative in this quote is presented as an authoritative account employed to keep young people who desire to move firmly in their place (High, 2014). Yet the quote also suggests how the voices of young girls have the capacity to challenge such official accounts. In contemporary Laos, widespread migration must be understood in relation to the political and economic reorientation of the Lao state; away from a closed economy and political ties with the socialist block, towards a gradual political and economic integration into the wider southeast Asian region. Such a shift was partly inevitable, given the global collapse of state communism, but was also heavily stimulated by regional factors such as the Asian Development Bank’s funding, geared towards realising ‘a Greater Mekong Sub-Region’ in which Laos is viewed as an important crossroads for the economic power houses of the region (Oehlers, 2006). In addition, migration is a key element in the ASEAN project of creating a single southeast Asian borderless market. Work on children and young people that adopts a critical geopolitics perspective has so far mostly taken the form of soliciting young people’s opinions on geopolitical matters and investigating how international representations and processes affect their everyday lives (Hörschelmann, 2008; Skelton, 2010). This work typically focuses on the present. In this chapter, I contribute an historical perspective by turning to life histories presented in the work of Vatthana Pholsena (2006; 2008; 2012a; 2012b) about the ethnic minority people who migrated at a young age in the context of the Lao revolutionary struggle. I bring this material into dialogue with research on contemporary child and youth migration and geopolitics. The methodological approach increases the temporal scope for analysing how geopolitical and everyday accounts may be mapped on to each other, something that is often a challenge in researching the present (Pain and Smith, 2008). The historical dimension often makes clearer how geopolitics has unfolded, yet complicates our understanding of everyday accounts of childhood and youth because such accounts of young people’s everyday lives are often memories of childhood and youth, narrated by those who are no longer young (Toren, 1999). Situating Laos: Geopolitics, History and Knowledge Situated in the shadow of powerful empires, Laos has for a long time received relatively little mention in the academic literature. This led Rigg (2009: 703) to describe Laos as ‘a blank page and a black box – the invisible country of the southeast Asian region’. It was only in moments when its in-between location became relevant to the geopolitics of the time that Laos received specific scholarly attention. One such moment was the internal conflict that divided the country from the late 1940s until well after the proclamation of the Lao PDR in 1975. This conflict was part of the Second Indochina War that ravaged much of the southeast

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Asian region. The Lao stage of this conflict, like the wider battle, was no internal matter as the Royal Lao Government depended heavily on the US, and the ultimate victor, the communist Pathet Lao, depended on the North Vietnamese communists. A sudden academic interest in Laos at that time by the US must be understood in this geopolitical context. Illustrative here are a number of studies now known as the Laos Project Papers conducted by the US anthropologist Joel M. Halpern, predominantly in the 1960s (Elliott, 2010: 545–46). The research was funded by the RAND Corporation, a body that grew out of Project RAND: ‘a [US] organization formed immediately after World War II to connect military planning with research and development decisions’ (RAND Corporation, 2014). After the proclamation of the Lao PDR in 1975, knowledge production on Laos remained at a low level, in part because many of the Lao intelligentsia fled the country, and foreign researchers (apart from those of socialist countries) found it virtually impossible to enter the country to research social science. The situation has changed considerably over the past decade. Now, a range of both Lao and international scholars write within the emerging field of Lao studies and the country increasingly features as a case study in wider debates (e.g. Rigg, 2006; Goudineau and Lorrillard, 2008). Contemporary research about Laos, while diverse in focus, has some general characteristics. First, it is mostly conducted in the context of international development, at times funded by agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. This is unsurprising, given Laos’ inclusion in the United Nations’ list of ‘Least Developed Countries’ in an otherwise quickly developing region. Yet, it means that much knowledge production in and about Laos is generated within the frame of international development cooperation. Second, the historical dimension to research on Laos is often scarce or altogether absent. This is partly due to the future-oriented focus of research carried out within a development planning frame, but is also a consequence of limited reliable historical sources. Third, the literature on Laos is largely adult-centric, despite its overwhelmingly youthful population: over 40 per cent of the Lao population is below 18 years of age. This effectively renders invisible how a large segment of the population – the young – is positioned in, and contributes to, development and change. Organised Child Migration During the Socialist Revolution For a period of 15 years from the second half of the 1950s, thousands of children and adolescents aged 10–15 years living in areas controlled by the Pathet Lao were enrolled in the ranks of the revolutionary movement. A number were sent to northern Laos (Viengxay district, Houaphan province) and others to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the main political and military ally of the Pathet Lao, for study. Many stayed away for several years; some returned only as adults (Pholsena, 2012a: 45, author’s translation from French).

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Despite the existence of historical scholarship on child migration (Van Hear, 1982; Coldrey, 1999; Bagnell, 2001), such work rarely enters contemporary debates. The Lao case is no exception and the movement of children organised by the Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese communist allies, although considerable in scale, is never currently mentioned in discussions of this issue. Moreover, it is also muted in the official representations of the Lao revolutionary struggle, where the place of children is typically restricted to that of victims of what is referred to as the ‘(neo)colonial aggressors’. This observation speaks to a larger point: despite the widespread involvement of children and young people in revolutionary struggles worldwide (e.g. West, 2000), the literature on the theme has remained adult-centric. When children do enter the story it is typically in an idiosyncratic way. For example, Brown and Zasloff’s (1986) otherwise insightful work on the Communist movement in Laos suggests that children’s role in the struggle was incidental and unorganised: ‘school children inserting bamboo stakes or booby traps in the ground’ (Brown and Zasloff, 1986: 232). In a series of publications Pholsena goes some way to fill this void (Pholsena, 2006: 112, 2012a, 2012b). She draws on life histories with ethnic minority peoples originating from the rural upland areas on the Lao side of the Lao– Vietnamese border in Southern Laos (see black circle in Figure 9.1). Her material shows that the participation of children and youth in the revolutionary struggle often took structural forms; it was organised child migration for revolutionary education and training in North Vietnam and Pathet Lao controlled areas. Pholsena’s work shows that, from an early age, children often contributed to the revolution as part of their everyday lives. This included, for example, carrying food prepared by villagers to the North Vietnamese communist militants (Pholsena, 2012a, 2012b) who were highly instrumental in the Lao revolutionary struggle. It was typically through these initial encounters that young villagers were recruited into the revolutionary struggle on a more structured basis, as the first quote of this section illustrates. The recollections of Khamphone, who left his ethnic minority village and family at the age of 12, shed further light on how this wave of child migration was organised and experienced: We started early in the morning after eating a bit of rice that we took with us. We walked all day. At every village we stopped the Lao Issara soldiers recruited new children. Then, after three or four days of walking, we reached the Vietnamese border … . The following day, the children were put onto trucks. There were enough of them to load three vehicles, which were completely covered in order to keep their passengers out of sight of the local population. It was a secret operation to prevent the Vietnamese villagers from suspecting that there were Lao soldiers and children in their country … [at the military camp in Vietnam] we were all together! We learnt the Lao alphabet at the primary school, and then the teaching was conducted in Vietnamese at the secondary and high school levels. The teachers were Vietnamese soldiers who had fought in Laos. (Pholsena, 2006: 110)

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Pholsena’s work unsettles the generational frame through which stories about the Lao revolution are commonly told. Children were not just victims, and adults were not the only active agents. Children’s contribution to the struggle mostly took the form of tasks and activities that were not far removed from children’s everyday village life. However, for some children and youth, the involvement went a considerable step further: they left their villages behind for further revolutionary training in North Vietnam or in Pathet Lao controlled areas. Pholsena’s work (2006; 2008; 2012a, 2012b) illuminates the hardships the young people encountered in migration, the deception some experienced and the gendered costs of dedicating one’s youthful years to the revolution; for many young women it meant sacrificing marriage and motherhood (Pholsena, 2008). The other perspective is that, through their migrations, these young people contributed to an important social transformation: the eventual proclamation of the Lao PDR. These youthful, revolutionary migrations were important formative experiences at a personal level, and the political subjectivities they shaped served to legitimate the emerging Lao state: living in sites of socialization such as boarding schools or the army (for the older ones), these boys and girls, to varying degrees, internalized the communist regime’s values … . The transformation of those children into subject citizens was very much part and parcel of the process of legitimating communist rule. (Pholsena, 2012b: 179)

Contemporary Youth Migration and the Questions Seldom Asked Contemporary Lao child and youth migration is shaped by distinctly different geopolitical relations from the revolutionary migration described above. In addition, it is by no means an under-researched phenomenon; on the contrary, an area of research where Lao children and youth feature prominently is in reports and scholarly publications on human trafficking and migration. This is in part a response to an empirical reality in which young people comprise a considerable share of the Lao internal (rural–urban) and cross-border (predominantly to Thailand) migrant population (MoLSW, Committee for Planning and Cooperation National Statistical Center and ILO-IPEC/TICW, 2003). It has received attention because cross-border migration by people under 18 years of age is commonly separated from other migrations and approached through the emotive lens of human trafficking (Huijsmans, 2012; Howard, 2014). Following a period of high socialism (1975–1985) in which any cross-border movement between communist Lao PDR and capitalist Thailand was heavily policed, the past decade has seen Lao authorities reluctantly come to accept labour migration by Lao nationals to Thailand as an inevitable consequence of its politics of regional political and economic integration. In recent years it has even started to embrace cross-border migration for its developmental potential

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(Huijsmans, 2014b). However, the Lao migration regime that has emerged corresponds poorly with the empirical features of the Lao migration landscape. For example, while most Lao migrants leave their villages in the youth stage of the life course (Huijsmans, 2014a), Lao migration policies hinge crudely on the 18 years threshold. In effect, migration for those over 18 years of age is increasingly appreciated and facilitated by the opening of channels for legal migration, while at the same time migration by minors remains predominantly defined as an issue of human trafficking (Huijsmans, 2014b). As the Vientiane Times quote in the introduction of this chapter indicated, those younger than 18 years of age are targeted by policies that discourage them from migrating and instead aim to keep them in their villages. As I have discussed elsewhere (Huijsmans, 2011), the Lao migration regime is shaped by extra-local forces. This includes sanctions that the US Government may impose on developing countries considered to be making too little progress in their anti-trafficking efforts, yet also the ASEAN project of moving towards a single labour market. However, it would be wrong to see Lao national policies as a mere function of extra-local forces. Policy attempts to exclude minors from migration are no doubt motivated by genuine concerns about young people’s safety in migration. Yet its effect, keeping young Lao citizens on Lao soil, is also attractive for other reasons. For example, for the relatively young, multi-ethnic, Lao nation state, the objective of keeping its young citizens within state spaces has arguably only increased in importance since the opening of borders. This is in order to ensure the generational reproduction of the imagined community of the Lao nation. Illuminating the geopolitics underpinning the dominant representation of Lao minors in (cross-border) migration as victims of trafficking is an important initial step in coming to a critical geopolitical perspective of the phenomenon. Yet, the exercise cannot stop here (Hörschelmann, 2008; Pain et al., 2010). It must also ask what other geographies are marginalised by such dominant perspectives and, importantly, how this matters geopolitically. Casting the phenomenon in terms of migration is a necessary first step (Huijsmans and Baker, 2012), yet it is important to steer clear of the categorising perspective characterising much work on child and youth migration (Huijsmans, 2012). It is for this reason that I employ a relational perspective to young people’s migration, by which I mean situating mobile children and youth in relation to households and communities, and viewing them as social actors implicated in, yet also contributing to, processes of social change (van Blerk and Ansell, 2006). Most Lao citizens live in rural areas and are involved in agriculture. For many years this was primarily smallholder agriculture producing the household’s subsistence, complemented with harvesting forest produce and some trade. Writing nearly a decade ago, Rigg (2005) noted some important signals of change that have since only become more pronounced, namely a ‘progressive extraction of rural peoples from farming-focused and land-based livelihoods’ (Rigg, 2005: 171).

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Importantly, it is predominantly youth who, through their migrations, dramatically rework the social relations shaping rural societies. The process of rural transformation is fundamental, not restricted to shifting livelihoods. Young people’s migrant earnings alter the very generational structure of gerontocratic rural societies, as Koning’s (1997) work in rural Java suggests that, ‘bolstered by their cash, children gain a position in their relationship towards their parents that is new and more powerful than at any other time in history’ (Koning, 1997: 222). In addition, through their migrations young villagers become ‘citizens of a much wider community than their own settlements’, and their connections with the world beyond the village may well become of greater importance than those with neighbours (Elson, 1997: 226, in Evans, 2008: 525). The experience of staying in different places often challenges young people’s conceptions of belonging. For example, through a stay in urban areas young people often become crudely aware of their rural background and its social inferiority in the Lao context (Huijsmans, 2014a). Similarly, through cross-border migration young Lao realise that their vulnerability is not simply one of being a foreigner but is a result of the intersection of their migrant status, age and class, as Lao authorities too often ignore poor young migrants even when they reach out for support (Huijsmans, 2014b). Yet current scholarship on Lao youth migration and rural change has barely addressed the impact of widespread migration by young Lao nationals on the socio-cultural, spatial and generational orientation of everyday life, and how this matters in terms of politics (an exception is High, 2014). As explained in this section, this appears to be less because of the significance of these questions and instead a reflection of the geopolitics shaping research on rural Laos and migration. Critical Geopolitics and Thinking about Child Migration across Historical Time Critical geopolitics is about placing ‘the existing structures of power and knowledge in question’ (Ó Tuathail, 1999: 107). This includes, Hörschelmann (2008: 589) notes, scrutinising ‘the discourses and policies of elite actors and institutions’. However, she makes the important additional point that such an approach easily translates into ‘lack of engagement with the multiplicity of subjects who make sense of political discourses and practices, bear their consequences and/or contest them [which] risks reinforcing the privileged position of the state and of powerful media institutions’ and thus ultimately ‘impoverishing the critique’ (ibid.). The role of children and young people in the two historical moments I have discussed in this chapter is typically reduced to that of victims. My concern with this victimhood perspective is an analytical one, going beyond the fact that children, and adults too, have suffered. My critique takes issue with the categorising perspective underpinning victimhood representations because it obfuscates how young people’s lives are typically lived in a relational fashion, and thus bound up with that of adults and older people (Huijsmans et al., 2014). This is especially true

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for young people in the rural Global South, where the length and extent to which young lives are spatially and socially separated from the adult world are typically shorter and less marked than in the Global North. Pholsena’s work privileges the voices of former child migrants. Their narratives about their initial encounters with the revolution are relational accounts about peasant childhoods lived in a time of violent geopolitical conflict. Since the Lao revolutionary force was relatively small in number and greatly overstretched, it was heavily reliant on the peasant population for its supply logistics of food, weapons and ammunition. Peasant households were thus drawn into the conflict, either voluntarily or forcefully, and within this context children contributed their share. One of Pholsena’s respondents recalled, for example, that in his early teens he ‘often brought food prepared by villagers to Vietnamese communist militants, who camped during the day in the forest’ (Pholsena, 2012b: 179). Running errands for those senior in age is part of Lao peasant childhood, both now and then (Huijsmans, 2014a). Yet, situating this activity in the Lao revolutionary struggle and the wider Indochina War makes it more than a mere expression of being a child. It also becomes geopolitically charged, both in relation to the social transformation to which it contributed and for the sort of political subjectivity it triggered. Pholsena’s life histories suggest that a solidification of young people’s political subjectivity typically involved more than village level participation. This is illustrated by ambivalence at the political and ideological motivations for becoming involved in organised child migration. For example, Pa Phaivanh, a well-known revolutionary figure in Savannakhet Province who was in her sixties when interviewed, recalls the course of events as follows: Before getting involved, my motivations were as follows: first, I was an orphan, both my parents had died. I was living with my uncles and aunts. I wasn’t angry; I didn’t hold any sentiments of hatred. No, I didn’t. But on that day … at the age of 14, in 1957, on my way back from the hay [upland rice field] I met my uncle. He was already working for the Revolution. He was hiding. He asked me: ‘Do you want to get involved? Do you want to study?’ I then replied: ‘Yes, I want to study!’. He took me to another agent and told him: ‘Write her down and take her to study politics, solidarity [sic], and all that!’ My uncle also warned me: ‘If you meet strangers, people that you don’t know, don’t tell them that visitors came around.’ And that was how it really began! (Pholsena, 2008: 461–62)

The case of Sisouk provides another example. He left his village in Savannakhet Province in 1959 to join the revolutionary struggle at the age of 13 years. Here also the initial motivations were neither politically motivated nor ideological, even though his father was the head of the village and working clandestinely for the Lao revolutionary movement. In fact, his father had planned for his only child to leave the village to study in a Buddhist monastery in order to ‘protect him from “those dangerous activities”’ (Pholsena, 2006: 111). Sisouk was not keen on this idea and instead left his village through a group of Vietnamese soldiers whom he

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had come to know while providing them with food. Their promise of an education in Vietnam led him to leave and it was only later, when a Viet Minh instructor asked him for his motivation, that he came to express these in revolutionary terms by declaring that ‘his father was the chief of the village and the French treated him badly … [and] his uncle was brutalized by a Lao soldier under the order of a French commander for failing to feed the troops properly’ (Pholsena, 2008: 462). The way in which Sisouk sums up his motivations 40 years later shows that the everyday childhood dimension that apparently played an important role in becoming involved in the struggle has been erased from the narrative, now ambivalently revolutionary and narrated from his adult vantage point: I was full of hatred, so I joined the Revolution to take my revenge! But I didn’t know anything about the Liberation War or the Revolution. Only after studying in Vietnam and in Russia, I found out what I had fought for. (Ibid: 462)

Placing the historical case of child migration during the Lao revolutionary struggle alongside contemporary practices helps to rethink the role of children and young people in important societal transformations. It also raises questions about the geopolitics of childhood. For example, if children’s role in the Lao revolutionary struggle cannot be reduced to that of victims, why does this discourse prevail even though the change these young people contributed to is generally considered positive by the ruling Lao authorities? This question is particularly pertinent since many of the young people that were involved in organised child migration are now considered heroes of the revolution or hold positions of power in the post-1975 Lao bureaucracy, or both. Moreover, Pholsena’s work shows that these older ethnic minority people positively value their childhood migration on the whole, despite the hardships experienced. Why, then, is this important formative experience that contributed to legitimising communist rule marginalised in official recollections of the revolutionary struggle and the making of revolutionary heroes? Part of this muting might be geopolitically motivated, yet it is also shaped by a geopolitics of childhood. Based on the Geneva Accord of 1962, Laos was supposed to be neutral, hence any intervention or support from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) for the Lao revolutionary cause was prohibited, and is thus likely to be silenced. A second reason revolves around the geopolitics of childhood. It is often forgotten that socialist revolutions were also childhood revolutions (Stearns, 2011). Consequentially, a main friction in socialist revolutions in agricultural societies such as Laos came to revolve around the gap between the socialist construct of childhood and the reality of young rural lives. In agricultural societies children are valued for their economic contribution to the family farm and often work alongside adults; in socialist ideology and practice, on the other hand, children’s ‘work’ was primarily mobilised to aid the state (and not the economy and the family), often in institutional spaces such as schools and mass-organisations, and separate from the adult world (Avis, 1987; Stearns, 2011).

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Figure 9.2

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Cover of National Human Development Report for Laos

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Formal reconstructions of the past are narrated from the vantage point of what came after. Actual practice, on the other hand, is shaped by the immediate context. Young people’s involvement in the revolution was multiple; some ended up as victims, some as heroes, yet most simply made the best of what were highly constraining circumstances. Young people’s active participation in the struggle is in line with what is expected of children in agricultural societies. However, such an historical reality became ultimately incompatible with the radically different position attributed to the young in the post-1975 socialist era. In contemporary times a similar disconnection between representation and practice can be observed. The Lao authorities have reluctantly embraced migration for its developmental potential. This is evidenced by the images featuring on the cover page of Laos’ 2006 national Human Development Report (see Figure 9.2). Yet, the order comprising this developmental vision is challenged by the mobile teenagers (referred to in the Vientiane Times quote in the introduction to this chapter) who resist being categorised as children. The cover presents migration as regulated movement: people queue for border checkpoints (picture top left) and cross the border through formal channels (picture top right: the first ‘friendship bridge’ between Laos and Thailand). This order reflects a generational categorisation: it is adults who move and children who stay put. The latter’s contribution to developing Lao society is imagined as limited to the realm of schooling (bottom picture: Lao primary school students). The representation of young mobile bodies as ‘children’ at risk of human trafficking can be read as a discursive reflex to maintain this spatial and generational order of the official development imaginary. Conclusion The two waves of child migration discussed in this chapter differ in a number of important ways. First, they are obviously situated in quite different geopolitical contexts. Second, organised child migration is a marginalised element in formal reconstructions of the Lao revolutionary struggle. The opposite holds for the presence of minors in the contemporary Lao migrant population that, indeed, has received much attention. It is precisely these differences that make the historical juxtaposition presented in this chapter fertile analytical ground, not least because, to date, most work on critical geopolitics, childhood and youth has focused on the present. The temporal dimension generated by historical time increases the scope for thinking how geopolitical and everyday accounts may be mapped onto one another. This includes teasing out why major frictions between such accounts have come about and how they play out in dominant representations, as well as in people’s self-narrated biographies. Indeed, the analysis presented suggests that a politics of childhood does not only shape formal representations of young lives; the historical case illustrates that it also affects how individual accounts of

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everyday, lived childhoods are narrated as part of older people’s recollections of the past. While there is a geography to the politics of childhood that is tied into overarching geopolitical power relations, such forces ultimately work through generational dynamics that never fully erase the significance of the relational dimension of lived childhoods. By placing attention on such situated and relational knowledges, I suggest that alternative accounts about children’s position in social transformations may be told. References Ansell, N. 2009. Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children’s geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209. Avis, G. (ed.) 1987. The Making of the Soviet Citizen: Character Formation and Civic Training in Soviet Education. London: Croom Helm. Bagnell, K. 2001. The Little Immigrants: The Orphans who came to Canada. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Brown, M. and Zasloff, J.J. 1986. Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930–1985. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University. CIA. 2012. Laos. Retrieved 29 October 2014, from . Coldrey, B.M. 1999. ‘… a place to which idle vagrants may be sent.’ The first phase of child migration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Children & Society, 13(1), 32–47. Dowler, L. and J. Sharp 2001. A feminist geopolitics?’ Space and Polity, 5(3), 165–76. Elliott, D.V.M. 2010. RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Evans, G. 2008. Lao peasant studies today. In: Y. Goudineau and M. Lorrillard (eds), New Research on Laos/Recherches Nouvelles sur Le Laos. Paris, Vientiane, Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, pp. 507–31. Goudineau, Y. and Lorrillard, M. (eds), 2008. Recherches Nouvelles sur Le Laos/ New Research on Laos. Etudes Thematiques no 18. Paris, Vientiane, Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient. High, H. 2014. Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos. Singapore, NUS Press. Hopkins, P. and C. Alexander 2010. Politics, mobility and nationhood: Upscaling young people’s geographies: Introduction to Special Section. Area, 42(2), 142–44. Hörschelmann, K. 2008. Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003). Political Geography, 27(5), 587– 609.

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Howard, N. 2014. Teenage labor migration and antitrafficking policy in West Africa. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 653, 124–40. Huijsmans, R. 2011. The theatre of human trafficking: A global discourse on Lao stages. International Journal of Social Quality, 1(2), 66–84. Huijsmans, R. 2012. Beyond compartmentalization: A relational approach towards agency and vulnerability of young migrants. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 136, 29–45. Huijsmans, R. 2014a. Becoming a young migrant or stayer seen through the lens of ‘householding’: Households ‘in flux’ and the intersection of relations of gender and seniority. Geoforum, 51, 294–304. Huijsmans, R. 2014b. Gender, masculinity, and safety in the changing Lao–Thai migration landscape. In: T.-D. Truong, D. Gasper, J. Handmaker and S.I. Bergh (eds), Migration, Gender and Social Justice: Perspectives on human security. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 333–49. Huijsmans, R. and Baker, S. 2012. Child trafficking: ‘Worst form’ of child labour, or worst approach to young migrants? Development and Change, 43(4), 919– 46. Huijsmans, R., George, S., Gigengack, R. and Evers, S.J.T.M. 2014. Introduction. Theorising age and generation in development: A relational approach. European Journal of Development Research, 26(2), 163–74. Hyndman, J. 2004. Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics. Political Geography, 23(3), 307–22. Hyndman, J. 2010. The question of ‘the Political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’. Political Geography, 29(5), 247–55. Koning, J. 1997. Generations of change: A Javanese village in the 1990s. Faculteit der Politieke en Sociaal-Culturele Wetenschappen. PhD thesis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. MoLSW. 2003. Labour Migration Survey in Khammuane, Savannakhet and Champasack 2003. Vientiane, Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, Department of Labour (Lao PDR), Committee for Planning and Co-operation of the National Statistical Center, International Labour Organisation–IPEC/ TICW. Ó Tuathail, G. 1999. Understanding critical geopolitics: Geopolitics and risk society. Journal of Strategic Studies, 22(2–3), 107–24. Oehlers, A. 2006. A critique of ADB policies towards the Greater Mekong SubRegion. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 36(4), 464–78. Pain, R., Panelli, R., Kindon, S. and Little, J. 2010. Moments in everyday/distant geopolitics: Young people’s fears and hopes. Geoforum, 41(6), 972–82. Pain, R. and Smith, S.J. 2008. Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life. In: R. Pain and S.J. Smith (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–19. Pholsena, V. 2006. Post-war Laos: The Politics of Culture, History and Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Pholsena, V. 2008. Highlanders on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Critical Asian Studies, 40(3), 445–74. Pholsena, V. 2012a. La production d’hommes et de femmes socialistes nouveaux: Expériences de l’éducation communiste au Laos révolutionnaire. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds), Laos: Sociétés et pouvoirs. Paris, IRASEC/Les Indes Savantes, pp. 45–67. Pholsena, V. 2012b. The (transformative) impacts of the Vietnam War and the Communist Revolution in a border region in southeastern Laos. War & Society, 31(2), 163–83. Pongkhao, S. 2008. Youth upset over limits on movement. Vientiane Times, 191, 3. RAND Corporation. 2014. History and Mission: Our mission and values. Retrieved 2 June 2014, from . Rigg, J. 2005. Living with Transition in Laos: Market Integration in Southeast Asia. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Rigg, J. 2006. Land, farming, livelihoods, and poverty: Rethinking the links in the rural south. World Development, 34(1), 180–202. Rigg, J. 2009. A particular place? Laos and its incorporation into the development mainstream. Environment and Planning A, 41(3), 703–21. Sisouphanthong, B. and Myers, C.N. 2006. International trade and human development: Lao PDR 2006 – The third Lao PDR national human development report.’ Vientiane, Committee for Planning and Investment, National Statistics Centre, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Skelton, T. 2010. Taking young people as political actors seriously: Opening the borders of political geography. Area, 42(2), 145–51. Stearns, P.N. 2011. Childhood in World History. Abingdon: Routledge. Toren, C. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian ethnography. London: Routledge. Van Blerk, L. and Ansell, N. 2006. Imagining migration: Placing children’s understanding of ‘moving house’ in Malawi and Lesotho. Geoforum, 37(2), 256–72. Van Hear, N. 1982. Child labour and the development of capitalist agriculture in Ghana. Development & Change, 13(4), 499–514. West, H.G. 2000. Girls with guns: Narrating the experience of war of Frelimo’s ‘female detachment’. Anthropological Quarterly, 73(4), 180–94.

Chapter 10

Young People’s Engagement with the Geopolitics of Anti-Apartheid Solidarity in 1980s’ London Gavin Brown and Helen Yaffe

In the late 1980s, children, teenagers and young adults were central to sustaining the anti-apartheid Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London. The Picket was organised by the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (City Group, for short), with its central demand being the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela. It started on 19 April 1986 and continued outside South Africa House 24 hours a day, until Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 (Brown and Yaffe, 2013; 2014). This chapter considers youth involvement in British antiapartheid activism as a means of exploring how children and young people engage in geopolitics. We argue that youthful concerns about global geopolitics are always entangled with the everyday politics of growing up. Historical studies are still uncommon within the field of children and young people’s geographies (Mills, 2013); this is even more the case in relation to studies of young people and geopolitics. This chapter, therefore, extends the scope of critical geopolitics by suggesting how retrospective, historical methodologies might expand geographers’ understandings of how young people engage with geopolitics and produce geopolitical knowledge. Between 2011 and 2014 we interviewed 90 former participants in the NonStop Picket. They span a fifty-year age range: the youngest are now in their midthirties and the oldest is a man in his mid-eighties. Some were already middleaged adults when they supported the Non-Stop Picket in the 1980s; others were the children of adult activists who first attended in the company of their parents, but returned of their own accord as they entered their teens towards the end of the protest. The majority of those we interviewed are now in their forties or early fifties, and were either teenagers or young adults in their early twenties at the time of the Non-Stop Picket. We initially recruited interviewees through those people, often with distinctive names, who could be traced through social media. We were able to snowball from the social networks of these initial contacts. As our project gained publicity, we were contacted by more former picketers who offered to share their stories with us. In addition to these interviews we have analysed a significant archive of documents, correspondence and ephemera produced by and about the Non-Stop Picket. Although it was not transferred to a public archive,

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the entire contents of City Group’s office were stored privately from 1994 and we were able to work with these papers. This chapter is structured as five sections. We introduce some of the young people who participated in the Non-Stop Picket, their motivations for doing so, and give some indication of how they fitted their (geo)political commitments around the rest of their lives. Next, we examine some of the ways in which City Group highlighted the historical role of ‘the youth’ in South African resistance to apartheid as a means of mobilising young people in Britain to participate actively in anti-apartheid activism. We examine how these young activists made the NonStop Picket a site of geopolitical contestation through their attempts to disrupt the work of the South African Embassy. We explore not only the geopolitical approach that informed their actions, but also the Cold War rhetoric mobilised against them. Finally, we examine how young picketers contributed to the subaltern ‘diplomacy’ of the (smaller) South African liberation movements; attending their conferences, supporting them at the United Nations and helping to disseminate their subaltern geopolitical perspectives (Sharp, 2013). First, however, we start with a review of debate on young people’s political agency and involvement with geopolitics. Young People and (Geo)politics Young people tend to be viewed either as apolitical, disengaged from (formal) politics or excessively political and prone to radicalism (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007). Despite these concerns, children and young people do engage with issues of (inter)national politics, but this is ‘contrary to common understandings about young people’s lives, which see them as distant and remote from politics and nation’ (Hopkins, 2010: 136). Their lives are affected by political decisions made by adults over which they seldom have any formal influence. Young people may have little direct influence over key ‘“political” phenomena and structures’ (Philo and Smith, 2003: 103), such as the composition of parliaments, the drawing of national borders or the emergence of geopolitical blocs, but this does not stop some of them seeking to influence these matters in other ways. They are able, therefore, to wield political power and even use their relatively disempowered position to political advantage (Bosco, 2010). Skelton (2013) has called for a deeper examination of how children and young people practise politics and how their lives are political. Debates about children and young people’s political practice frequently conclude that they ‘do politics in complex, innovative, melded and liminal ways and in a variety of spaces’ (Skelton, 2013: R4). For Kallio and Hakli (2011), young people carve out a political space for themselves at the meeting point between children’s and adults’ social worlds. This location is not just liminal, as Wood (2012) suggests, but serves as a transitional space that holds together their childish political experiences with anticipated future engagements in the politics of adult life (Brown et al., 2012). To date, too little work has explored the relationship between young people and geopolitics.

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While there is an increasing recognition that children and young people’s lives are impacted by geopolitical processes in different ways from adults (Dodds, 2014), there is still only a relatively small literature examining how young people understand the world geopolitically and attempt to become geopolitical actors themselves. In their recent paper, Hörschelmann and El Refaie (2014) demonstrate that the lives of British teenagers are entangled with the geopolitical practices and imaginaries of the ‘War on Terror’ in complex ways. Drawing on the work of Maira (2004), they suggest that those youths who actively challenge the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are making a dissenting claim to (British) citizenship – they are not excluding themselves from British politics, but making a passionate challenge to the policies pursued internationally by the British state (Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014). We explore related themes in this chapter. The young people of the NonStop Picket were seeking to engage with the ‘adult’ geopolitical concerns of decolonisation, anti-imperialism and late Cold War proxy conflicts. In the 1980s the South African Government and their international supporters understood their interests within the binary geopolitics of the Cold War. They believed the apartheid state was a bastion against communist-inspired decolonisation that had swept through southern Africa in a ‘domino effect’ (De Blij, 1981; O’Sullivan, 1982). While many of the young activists on the Non-Stop Picket may initially have felt compelled to take action against apartheid, fuelled by broadly humanitarian concerns, many came to be influenced by the anti-imperialist analysis of apartheid offered by members of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) – with their newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! – who were active within City Group. Several interviewees celebrated the intervention of Cuban troops in Angola in the late 1980s as making a decisive difference in the balance of forces within southern Africa at the time. Others understood their support for the anti-apartheid cause more within a Pan-Africanist geopolitical imagination (Sharp, 2013). Whatever their political inclinations, through their (sometimes immature, sometimes precociously earnest) engagements with these ‘big issues’, these young activists created spaces of mutual support to deal with the everyday politics of growing up. This chapter sits within a longer tradition of critical geopolitics scholarship that examines the conduct of a ‘geopolitics from below’ (Routledge, 1998), which is resistant to the geopolitics of those in power. At the same time, it owes allegiance to feminist geopolitics’ questioning of whose agency counts in the study of geopolitics (Sharp, 2000). We take this approach further to examine how young people incorporated an engagement with ‘geopolitics from below’ into their everyday lives, making it commonplace rather than extraordinary. By considering how global events are experienced locally (Cahill and Katz, 2008), it is possible to appreciate how young people respond to geopolitical events. As Hopkins (2007, 2010) has highlighted in his work on young Muslim men, youth are knowledgeable about global political issues and respond politically to global events, demonstrating an active and critical engagement with geopolitics. By linking their own experiences of fear and exclusion, some young people

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can develop an identification with and feelings of solidarity for distant others (Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014). Young people (and particularly university students) had been the core membership of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) since the early 1960s (Fieldhouse, 2005). In 1980 the AAM focused on the Free Mandela campaign. Although it continued to campaign around many other issues, this simpler framing of their cause helped to raise awareness of apartheid in South Africa. Between 1984 and 1989 the national membership of the AAM increased nearly 500 per cent (Fieldhouse, 2005). If nothing else, the 1984 hit music record by the Special AKA, Free Nelson Mandela, brought the struggle against apartheid to the attention of a wider, youthful audience. Regular news coverage of the revolts by black youth in South Africa’s townships and their violent repression by the police and military (Bozzoli, 2004; van Kessel, 2000) also had a profound impact on the perspective of many young people in Britain and elsewhere. Following the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) as a mass antiapartheid coalition in South Africa in 1983, many of its publications proclaimed a vanguard role in the struggle against apartheid for a ‘student–worker alliance’ (van Kessel, 2000: 67). The leadership of youth organisations tended to be formed of school and university students as well as (relatively) well-educated young workers. As van Kessel (2000: 68) acknowledges, ‘they were the successes rather than the failures of the school system’. But, as violent confrontations with the police and army became more commonplace, a less well-educated leadership emerged on the streets. Most of the young people who joined the anti-apartheid Non-Stop Picket in London were more like the reasonably well-educated ‘youth’ who were the key organisers of South African youth organisations. Nevertheless, they felt an affinity with the street fighting ‘young comrades’ who were attempting to make the townships of South Africa ungovernable, as part of the ANC’s strategy for a ‘people’s war’. In aligning themselves with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa they were continuing a long tradition of radical internationalism (Featherstone, 2012), as well as a more contested tendency among sections of the British Left to locate the ‘real’ impetus for revolutionary change in the ‘Third World’ during periods of conservatism and reaction in Britain (Birchall, 2014). Young People and Anti-Apartheid Solidarity People of all ages participated in the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London, but young people were central to keeping it ‘non-stop’ for nearly four years. They came from diverse social backgrounds and many nationalities. While students and unemployed youth participated day and night, at weekends and during school holidays younger teenagers and children played a prominent role. Many of the young people who participated in the Non-Stop Picket were highly educated and from relatively privileged backgrounds, but not all. While a significant proportion came from professional middle-class families, many

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grew up in more ‘intermediate’, aspirational working-class families (the sons and daughters of skilled manual workers, technicians and self-employed tradespeople). But there were also working-class black youths from inner city London; young migrant workers from across the globe; and those who found themselves living rough on the streets of central London for various reasons. The 1980s were a mixed time for young people in Britain. By 1983, unemployment nationally topped three million (but was probably higher). Even in relatively prosperous London, unemployment disproportionately affected young people (and particularly black youth). Although the experience of unemployment could be disheartening, it did create relative autonomy for those who chose to commit to activist (or artistic) pursuits (Turner, 2010). But, most of all, the 1980s were a decade of rapid social, economic and political change. Although Thatcher’s supporters frequently pursued socially conservative policies, social attitudes as well as the economy were liberalised during the 1980s. The young people who joined the Non-Stop Picket may have understood themselves as being in opposition to Thatcherism, but they could not escape the influence of the social changes occurring around them. Georgina had grown-up in suburban south-east London. She joined the NonStop Picket soon after it started with her best friend, Sharon. They were 16 and had both just left school. Georgina described herself at the time, in the following words: I was on the Picket because I was already politically aware. I had a lot of halfformed ideas. I read an awful lot. I was aware of racism through the years … I was definitely looking for something in that kind of direction. Both Sharon and myself were talking about it, we were very aware of it, we were looking, we had these discussions, people we knew were politically minded already and we wanted to do something and I think that that’s part and parcel of the sheer joy of being young and looking around and thinking you’ve got this time as well.

Although Georgina claims that she and Sharon were politically aware and looking for a cause to become involved in, their encounter with the Non-Stop Picket on the day it was launched was down to chance – they had become lost in central London looking for another demonstration (against the US bombing of Libya) when they found the anti-apartheid protest. Time and again, young picketers recalled that they first encountered the South African Embassy protest by accident. Like Sharon and Georgina, Andre was 16 when he joined the Picket in the summer of 1986. He is Dutch and was visiting relatives in London at the time. We used to go out clubbing and stuff in Leicester Square, and then one night waiting for the bus, we saw some people standing there so we kind of went over, and this was in July 1986, and that was it. There were some nice people there, there were some young people and we just kind of had a friendly chat and basically they recruited me, you could say, for the rest of the holiday. (Andre)

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What is clear from the narratives of Georgina, Andre and others is the way in which these young people integrated an engagement with geopolitical campaigning into the more everyday aspects of their lives. As such, they ensured that their antiapartheid solidarity was not exceptional or extraordinary in their youth. From an adult perspective, it is tempting to imagine that geopolitical engagement is carefully considered on the basis of thorough research and evaluation, and pre-planned. In contrast, our respondents remember chance encounters with an enthusiastic individual, or stumbling across the Picket while bored or lost in the West End, or making a spontaneous commitment to get involved. While this decision was seldom entirely uninformed by prior political awareness, in most cases a detailed analysis of the geopolitical consequences of (anti-)apartheid came later. The Non-Stop Picket was enticing for these young people, and gave them the opportunity to become politically engaged on their own terms. There is a danger of presenting these young people as ‘extra-ordinary’ and, in some ways, of course, through their actions and commitments, they became so. But most were fairly ordinary children and teenagers who were juggling their political activity with all the pressures and concerns of the transition to adulthood. As Nicole, who joined as a 16-year-old school student, said: ‘I was never able to commit as much time as I would have liked. I was doing my A levels initially, and being a tad boring, prioritised that I guess.’ The Picket was organised on a rota basis, with individuals and groups pledging regular three- and six- hour shifts. Those young people who were university students or unemployed worked across the day and week, while school students and those in regular employment fitted shifts around their other commitments. In these ways the young picketers made their geopolitical campaigning mundane, no longer spontaneous – it became part of their daily and weekly routine, scheduled alongside all the other demands on teenage or young adult life. Because there was guaranteed to be someone there, many picketers also turned up whenever they were bored or at a loose end, relishing having somewhere to hangout, with a purpose, with likeminded peers. In this way the everyday politics of youthfulness and growing up were entangled with the young picketers’ commitment to challenging apartheid in South Africa and Britain’s economic and political support for the apartheid regime. Youth in Action Beyond its primary demand for the release of Nelson Mandela, the Non-Stop Picket called for the closure of the South African Embassy. The Picket’s very existence was an attempt to disrupt the diplomatic operations of apartheid’s representatives in Britain. City Group harnessed the youthful exuberance of core participants to maximise the impact of its protests. Young people were encouraged to participate actively in all aspects of the group’s campaigning: they took responsibility for the day-to-day running of the Picket; volunteered in the group’s office; served on its committee, and travelled widely to promote their cause.

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The Group included elected Youth and Student Organisers, responsible for building support for the Non-Stop Picket among young people. They convened a loose sub-group of other young activists to support their work. This sub-group played an important political function, but it was never a silo – young people were fully integrated into the work (and leadership) of City Group. In addition to building links with British youth and student organisations, the sub-group established links with the youth wings of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and black consciousness organisations in southern Africa. On 6 May 1987 three young members of the City Group, including its Youth and Student Organiser at the time, Adam, carried out direct action against the Embassy. The idea to protest against the white-only general election in South Africa by throwing red paint over the Embassy came from Irene, at 16 years the youngest of the trio. She shared the idea for the protest with her older sister and fellow picketer, Liz, who then recruited Adam (who was in his mid-twenties) to the action. Adam appreciated the potentially serious charges that the trio could face as a result of their actions, but agreed to take part because ‘it was a significant day, so I did feel that it warranted a fairly dramatic response’. The trio discussed their plans in very general terms with a leading member of the City Group. Irene was clear that she felt empowered to lead this action and was not seeking permission from her elders. With no explicit attempt having been made to dissuade them, they made concrete plans. On the day of the election they covered the entire public entrance in red paint and effectively closed the Embassy to the public for the day. Adam, Liz and Irene were charged with criminal damage to the Embassy doors, a policeman’s uniform and his long-johns. They used their subsequent trial as a platform to expose the complicity of the South African Embassy in statesanctioned violence against its opponents and to gain greater publicity for their cause. This trial was fought politically. They did not deny that they had thrown paint over the Embassy entrance, yet pleaded not guilty, arguing that they had taken the action to prevent the (greater) crimes of the apartheid regime’s agents operating out of the Embassy. A number of expert witnesses were asked to speak in their defence at the trial. David Leigh of The Observer gave evidence about the illegal activities of the Embassy and its staff, including their involvement in the bombing of the London offices of the ANC in 1982 (when explosives and detonators were smuggled into the UK in diplomatic bags) (Bell with Ntsebeza, 2003). Zolile Keke, the Chief Representative of the PAC in London, gave evidence about his experience of torture in South Africa. These and other testimonies were enough to convince the jury. Their defence developed a geopolitical vision of South Africa as an authoritarian state exporting terror around the world. On 30 September 1987 the jury at Southwark Crown Court refused to convict them, despite an instruction to do so by the presiding judge. The case went to a retrial and this time the young picketers lost. On 23 March 1988, Adam Bowles was sentenced to 14 days in Brixton Prison for his part in the damage to South Africa House. At this second trial Adam and his co-defendants

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had once again claimed that they had committed the ‘criminal damage’ to the Embassy in order to prevent the commission of a greater crime – apartheid. They had used the United Nation’s 1966 declaration of apartheid as a crime against humanity in their defence. In taking their action against the Embassy, these three young activists sought to disrupt its functioning. This was an attempt to question the validity of Britain’s political and economic links with apartheid South Africa and to promote an alternative geopolitical perspective that saw a common interest between antiapartheid forces in southern Africa and anti-racists in Britain. Youthful Engagements in Subaltern Geopolitics From the beginning of the Non-Stop Picket there was frequent tension between the police and the protestors about where they could stand, how much space they could take up and how they could interact with the public. Noise was a key point of contention. The Picket was noisy: picketers used megaphones to sing, chant and make speeches. This noise not only drew attention to the protest but was a constant irritation to the work of the Embassy. Less than a fortnight after the Picket began the Embassy complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) about the noise: — (South African Embassy official) said that the demonstration was an impairment of the dignity of the Mission; the noise from the loud hailer prevented the Embassy staff from properly conducting their business. — (FCO official) stressed the Secretary of State’s personal interest in the matter and our determination to enforce arrangements which, while protecting the demonstrators’ freedom of speech and assembly, met our obligations under the Vienna Convention. (Excerpt of a minute from — (FCO official) to Private Secretary dated 28 April 1986, released under the Freedom of Information Act)

In this and other communications with the FCO, Embassy officials frequently asserted that by allowing the Non-Stop Picket to continue the British Government was failing in its duty to protect the ‘peace and dignity’ of a foreign diplomatic mission under the Vienna Convention (1961). By their noisy presence outside the Embassy, young anti-apartheid protestors were imposing themselves on the routine diplomatic relations between Britain and South Africa. For them, the South African diplomats represented apartheid; they did not believe the Embassy deserved any ‘peace and dignity’. In this way the presence of the Non-Stop Picket made the South African Embassy a site through which different geopolitical understandings of the apartheid state in South Africa were contested. At Prime Minister’s Question Time on 25 May 1988 John Carlisle, the Conservative MP for Luton North, described the Non-Stop Picket as ‘a continual nuisance … to those working in the Embassy’.

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He demanded that the Metropolitan Police be given more powers to remove the anti-apartheid protest. His speech came a year after City Group had successfully fought against an attempt to ban it from protesting outside the Embassy after the red paint attack. It gives an indication of quite how much the Picket’s continuous presence had riled the representatives of the apartheid state inside. He continued, I believe that the House should hear about the terrible scourge of that picket, or demonstration, on Trafalgar Square … They are especially violent and spiteful in the demonstration that they are mounting against the South African Government outside the Embassy … and the fact that this violent element exists in our capital is a disgrace to us all.

The Non-Stop Picket was raucous, loud and, at times, angry and unruly in its opposition to British ‘collaboration’ with apartheid, but it was a non-violent protest. Mr Carlisle’s description of the protest as ‘violent’ is itself instructive: to support the right of the South African people to struggle against apartheid (whether violently or not) was presented as an act of violence, even when those offering such solidarity were themselves acting non-violently. In hindsight, the MP’s description of the picketers as ‘a bunch of left-wing political extremists’, ‘renta-mob’ and a ‘motley crew’ is perhaps not so wide of the mark. Indeed, as often happened when they were attacked in such ways, the picketers took these insults, turned them on their head and made them a badge of honour. The phrase ‘We are a motley crew …’ was adapted into some of the Picket’s regular chants in the weeks that followed Carlisle’s attack. In some ways it was the very thrown-togetherness of this motley crew that made the Non-Stop Picket such a lively place, where the exchange of ideas between people from very different backgrounds and political perspectives fostered new forms of solidarity. Carlisle appears to have become carried away, as his speech went on to describe the Non-Stop Picket as part of a ‘world conspiracy’ against apartheid, ‘receiving funds from eastern European countries’ and including the dangerous combination of communists, the World Council of Churches, London’s Camden Council and the Labour Lesbian Group! It is true that the ANC received funding from Soviet bloc countries, that communists were involved in anti-apartheid work around the world and that the World Council of Churches was strongly opposed to apartheid. Yet the way in which Carlisle assembled these points into a single global conspiracy is telling. It reveals something of the way in which the South African state presented global opposition to apartheid to its supporters at home and abroad. It also shows how Carlisle adapted this narrative to play to the prejudices and fears of Conservatives in Britain at the time: take one communist conspiracy, add lesbians and a left-wing London council, and stir well. Despite being laughable, Carlisle’s speech was trying to achieve a serious outcome in the interests of the apartheid regime. He complained that, notwithstanding assurances given to the South African Embassy by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in April 1986

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when the Non-Stop Picket started, ‘the problem’ had still not been alleviated. Without mentioning the several hundred arrests of picketers in the previous two years, he accused the Metropolitan Police of being ‘unwilling’ to deal effectively with the nuisance caused to the Embassy. While members of the Non-Stop Picket contested the legitimacy of apartheid South Africa’s diplomatic mission, they developed relationships of solidarity with members of the South African and Namibian liberation movements. Like the United Nations, City Group did not accept the ANC as ‘the sole legitimate representative’ of the South African people (Brown and Yaffe, 2014; Thomas, 1996), but offered support to all anti-apartheid tendencies. Exiled representatives of South African liberation movements regularly spoke at rallies on (and off) the Non-Stop Picket, and leading members of the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement (of Azania) passing through London would frequently make time to give briefings for City Group’s membership (Kondlo, 2009; Maaba, 2001). As a result of the mutual trust established through the group’s solidarity activism, a small number of young picketers (more often young adults than teenagers, but not exclusively so) had the opportunity to represent City Group at conferences and meetings of these liberation movements and to contribute to its creation of subaltern geopolitical imaginaries (Sharp, 2013). In 1988 two young activists from City Group, Charine and James (both in their early twenties at the time) represented the group at a conference organised by the PAC’s Women’s Section in Dar es Salaam. They presented an official message of solidarity from the Non-Stop Picket and engaged in extended discussions around the conference. Andre was another young activist who travelled internationally to represent City Group at ‘diplomatic’ meetings. I once went to Geneva, there was some United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid (I think they were called) and the Pan-Africanist Congress had special status with the UN … And, as such, they were able to invite a solidarity organisation to come to this UN meeting. I was lucky to be chosen to go – alone. I think I was only 19, I was young … I had to make a speech and address this meeting; and that was a real scary thing. (Andre)

If Andre was slightly intimidated to be in this setting at such a young age, his participation in another delegation soon put this in perspective. Following the unbanning of anti-apartheid organisations in February 1990, City Group was invited to attend the first legal congresses of the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. Andre was selected as part of the City Group delegation. In addition to the conferences, their days were packed with meetings with a wide variety of anti-apartheid organisations: Every morning, every afternoon and every evening we had set ourselves up a whole range of meetings, meetings, meetings. It was absolutely amazing and one thing that struck me was you set up this meeting with some organisation,

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you expect to go there and meet, I don’t know, what maybe we would think of as ‘experienced’ people, but they were really young. I was meeting people my age being General Secretary of this, or that, some committee, and that was pretty amazing. (Andre)

In London, critics of the Non-Stop Picket frequently dismissed it as being maintained by an unruly crop of naive youngsters who, although well-meaning, were unwitting dupes of an international communist conspiracy against South Africa. Although the youthful ranks of the Non-Stop Picket did include many communists, there were equally many young campaigners who understood their activism as being in solidarity with a Pan-Africanist vision of a decolonised African continent. When they travelled to southern Africa these young protestors often found themselves in dialogue with their direct peers who were trying to secure an alternative future for themselves without the inequalities, indignities and violence of apartheid. Conclusions Only a minority of young picketers had the opportunity to represent City Group at international anti-apartheid meetings. The Non-Stop Picket did, however, create an atmosphere where young people’s political opinions and motivations were taken seriously. The protest was open, welcoming and inclusive – it encouraged active participation by all age groups. The Picket’s location on a wide, busy pavement in central London meant that many young people literally stumbled across it. Keeping the Picket going as a continuous protest provided many opportunities for young people (including those barely into their teens) to become involved and take on various responsibilities. Those young people who became regular picketers had to develop a means of fitting their political activity into their weekly routine (around their studies, their work, and their family obligations). For young people, being on the Picket was both serious and fun. They were taking action for a political cause that they believed was important. In the process they were taken seriously by adults and given opportunities to develop new skills and confidence. Their youth gave them energy, certainty and determination to maintain a non-stop protest over a four-year period. That youthful lack of doubt was sometimes expressed with an earnestness at which some of our interviewees cringe as they reflect on it from the vantage point of early middle age. Back then, the young picketers identified with the militant ‘young comrades’ who were resisting apartheid and attempting to decolonise South African society. As a result, they challenged the geopolitical perspectives of many in the British Government at the time who still saw white South Africa as a bastion against the strategic interests of the Soviet Union and its allies in southern Africa. In London the picketers understood their protests as a means of disrupting the smooth operation of the South African Embassy and, by extension, the economic and

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political links between the British and South African governments. Through their contact and interactions with members of the South African liberation movements, particularly those influenced by Pan-African and black consciousness ideologies, young picketers contributed to the development and dissemination of subaltern geopolitical knowledges that imagined a different role and new alignments for a post-apartheid South Africa. Former picketers also remember the fun that came from taking collective action about something that mattered (to them and to the world) with similar young people. The act of standing together regularly outside the Embassy over an extended period, often for hours at a time, fostered great solidarity among the group. The Picket provided a space in the centre of London where young people could sing, shout, test the limits of the law with the police and debate the shape of the world in which they wanted to grow up. Acknowledgements This work was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-072), Non-Stop against Apartheid: The spaces of transnational solidarity activism. We also benefited from the support of the University of Leicester Human Geography Research Fund. References Bell, T. with Ntsebeza, D.B. 2003. Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth. London: Verso. Birchall, I. 2014. ‘Vicarious pleasure?’ The British far left and the third world, 1956–79. In: E. Smith and M. Worley (eds), Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 190–208. Bosco, F.J. 2010. Play, work or activism? Broadening the connections between the political and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 8(4), 381–90. Bozzoli, B. 2004. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Brown, G., Kraftl, P., Pickerill, J. and Upton, C. 2012. Holding the future together: Towards a theorisation of the diverse spaces and times of transition. Environment & Planning A, 44, 1607–22. Brown, G. and Yaffe, H. 2013. Non-stop against apartheid: Practicing solidarity outside the South African Embassy. Social Movement Studies, 12(2), 227–34. Brown, G. and Yaffe, H. 2014. Practices of solidarity: Opposing apartheid in the centre of London. Antipode, 46(1), 34–52. Cahill, C. and Katz, C. 2008. Young Americans: Geographies at the crossroads. Environment and Planning A, 40, 2809–13.

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De Blij, H. 1981. Geography: Regions and Concepts. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Dodds, K. 2014. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Featherstone, D. 2012. Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. London: Zed Books. Fieldhouse, R. 2005. Anti-apartheid. A History of a Movement in Britain. A Study in Pressure Group Politics. London: Merlin. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. n.d. City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (CLAAG) – Activities/ Non-Stop Picket of South African Embassy, London 1985–1991. Response to FOI Data Access Request. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. 2007. Young People and Social Change, 2nd edn. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Hopkins, P. 2007. Global events, national politics, local lives: Young Muslim men in Scotland. Environment and Planning A, 39(5), 1119–33. Hopkins, P. 2010. Young People, Place and Identity. London: Routledge. Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Transnational Citizenship, dissent and the political geographies of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 444–56. Kallio, K.P. and Häkli, J. 2011. Tracing children’s politics. Political Geography, 30, 99–109. Kondlo, K. 2009. In the Twilight of the Revolutions. The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa) 1959–1994. Basel: Basler Africka Bibliographien. Maaba, B.B. 2001. The Archives of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness-Orientated Movements. History in Africa, 28, 417–38. Maira, S. 2004. Youth culture, citizenship and globalization: South Asian Muslims in the United States after September 11th. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24, 219–31. Mills, S. 2013. An instruction in good citizenship: Scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 120–34. O’Sullivan, P. 1982. Antidomino. Political Geography Quarterly, 1(1), 57–64. Philo, C. and Smith, F. 2003. Guest editorial: Political geographies of children and young people. Space and Polity, 7(2), 99–115. Routledge, P. 1998. Anti-geopolitics: Introduction, in: G.Ó. Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge. Sharp, J. 2000. Remasculinising geo(-)politics? Comments on Gearoid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. Political Geography, 19(3), 361–64. Sharp, J. 2013. Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics. Political Geography, 37, 20–29. Skelton, T. 2013. Children, young people and politics: transformative possibilities for a discipline. Geoforum, 49, R4-R6. Thomas, S. 1996. The Diplomacy of Liberation: The Foreign Relations of the ANC since 1960. London: Tauris.

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Turner, A.W. 2010. Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s. London: Aurum. van Kessel, I. 2000. Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa. Charlottesville, VI: University Press of Virginia. Wood, B.E. 2012. Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people’s everyday politics. Political Geography, 31, 337–46.

Chapter 11

Becoming Geopolitical in the Everyday World Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

Introduction Children’s political agency has received increasing attention within academia in the past couple of decades, including from geographical research (for an overview, see Kallio and Häkli, 2013, 2015; Kallio and Mills, 2016; Philo and Smith, 2003; Skelton, 2013). This emerging body of work is now extending to geopolitical inquiry, as the introduction to this volume illustrates. Thus far, the primary focus of this research interest has been in youthful agency as unfolding in the present with immediate effects and implications. However, how people come to engage in geopolitics in their early years and the potential future implications of their political development has gained less attention. This chapter focuses on these latter aspects. At first sight, children’s political development may seem to follow expected and predictable paths, reproducing the ideologies, imaginations and views of their families, local communities, national societies and the broader cultural realm. But when examined more closely, surprising and unexpected directions can be identified (Habashi and Worley, 2009; Kallio, 2014a; Laketa, 2016; Marshall, 2016). As the recent research strongly argues (e.g. Matthews, 2007; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Uprichard, 2008), since children are active participants in the meaning making processes that allow them to understand new things, they also form personal understandings about political life based on their experiential and cognitive knowledge (Bartos, 2012; Elwood and Mitchell, 2012; Kallio et al., 2015; Mitchell and Elwood, 2013). These include perspectives about broadly politicised issues of international relevance and/or geopolitics. Even if strongly conditioned by their contexts of living, children’s geopolitical experiences, understandings and agencies are hence subjectively generated. Arendt (1953: 321) has noticed this creativity springing from subjective engagements as a central condition of politics: ‘With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being.’ In Arendt’s thought ‘beginnings’ refer to the potential of change; by beginning something new people establish themselves in the ‘space of appearance’, which is the realm of politics where practice and thought interweave (Arendt, 1958: 176, 199). While the notion that each child is a beginning with unquestionable political

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potential implies a hopeful horizon, it should be borne in mind that children’s emerging political subjectivities are not innocent or neutral but may take many directions. As is the case in the worlds of adults, children’s political worlds and their interpretations of them are diverse and subject to change. For example, being a girl means different things depending on the context and life situation, as gender is contextually politicised, but this does not mean that all people would feel similarly about their gendered identities in similar circumstances. Gender, like all identity markers, is politicised subjectively because people have particular experiential understandings about their girlhood. Understanding political development in any given case therefore requires empirical exploration with children. The contextual establishment of political subjectivities and the transformations that come about in changing life situations are imperative for making sense of the roles and positions people are prone and willing to take in different geopolitical relations and events. How children become members of political communities, which communities are pertinent to them, where these communities are situated, and what is important within them are key questions in understanding how children develop as political beings. Any attempts at answering these questions need to recognise that this development is enmeshed with broader political changes (Philo and Smith, 2003). Instead of politically significant activities, these questions draw attention to children’s situated, experienced and lived relations. These dynamic relations, that are perhaps better described as ‘geosocial’ than geopolitical (see Mitchell, 2016; Mitchell and Kallio, forthcoming), are constitutive of their political subjectivities that form the condition of possibility of political agency (Häkli and Kallio, 2014). Children familiarise with different forms of spatial-political knowledge in explicit (e.g. school, the news, parental discussions) and implicit (e.g. peer group discussions, popular cultural media) learning situations. These meaning making processes are geopolitically significant as ‘the very production and distribution of geographical knowledge and the mobilization of that knowledge’ lie at the heart of geopolitics (Mamadouh, 2010: 321). This chapter continues the feminist geopolitical project that examines ‘the ways in which the nation and the international are reproduced in the mundane practices that we take for granted’ (Dowler and Sharp, 2001: 171), and thus challenges ‘the nation-state as the sole or primary subject of geopolitical thinking’ (Massaro and Williams, 2013: 570, also Secor, 2001; Väyrynen, 2014). In this view, the ‘geopolitical world’ does not appear only as a territorial field of power struggles that is commanded by the States and other established regional actors, but as a multidimensional and variably scaled sphere of ‘multiple geographies of affiliation linkage and flow’ (Amin, 2004: 38). The first section presents conceptual starting points for considering the development of geopolitical subjectivities in terms of spatial socialisation. These processes where ‘political becoming’ takes place are part of every child’s life, be they situated in a peaceful or conflict society, in a democratic or authoritarian State or in the East, West, North or South, or falling in-between these due to migration, exile or work-related travelling. The second section introduces some methodological

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starting points for approaching children as developing geopolitical subjects. This approach is employed in the following empirical analysis that draws on an ethnographic study with some early youth in southern Finland. The lived worlds of these ‘ordinary children’ form a ‘seemingly “a-political” and “a-geopolitical” realm […] at which discursive and material relations of geopolitical power are continually reproduced and challenged’ (Massaro and Williams, 2013: 574), and which thus provide an apt context for critical geopolitical inquiry. The chapter closes with a brief conclusion that summarises its key arguments and proposes the potential of critical geopolitical research with children in understanding how political worlds are reproduced, re-imagined and re-established in everyday lives. Spatial Socialisation: A Situated and Dynamic Process of ‘political becoming’ Before turning to spatial socialisation, it is necessary to review briefly the history of ‘socialisation’ in social scientific research. Until the turn of the 1980s, the concept was commonly used in sociology, developmental child studies and political science in reference to processes where children internalise the values, ideologies, understandings and so on of and from adult-led communities. This conception started to face broad critique some 30 years ago, especially from the scholarship presently known as ‘the new social studies of childhood’. In her seminal article Rethinking Childhood, Leena Alanen – one of the founding scholars in this field – summarised the prevailing attitude to studying childhood in the 1980s with a critical tone. She states that the international research field is dominated by: … assumptions concerning the nature of an essentially non-social childhood, the family as an appropriate context for this kind of childhood, and socialization (the more academic term for what childhood processes are about). This configuration presents the (Western) child not as (yet) part of her society, but condemned into a curiously non-social existence […] a period of lack of responsibility, with rights to protection and training, but not to autonomy, a configuration that is irrelevant both culturally and structurally to the majority of the world’s children (Alanen, 1988: 52, emphases in original).

Reasons for the forceful emergence of this critique that led to a paradigmatic turn in the social studies of childhood and youth have been given by the few critical scholars who were involved in political socialisation research in the 1950–70s. Raewyn Connell, in summing up the foremost problems in that research tradition, points out that: Had the researchers spent a lot more time talking to the children, thinking about the changing frameworks of their political judgements, and tracking down the sources of their information and the ways they use and transform it, I do not think the image of the child (or adult) as a passive recipient of ‘socialization’

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In the last 25 years, the wide-ranging critique of socialisation has meant that in research, as well as legislation, policy making and societal practices, children are now broadly acknowledged as players rather than pawns in their lived worlds, with social competence and particular skills to make their ways in their communities (for an overview, see Bartos, 2016; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Matthews, 2007). This important development has taken place across different geographies as well. Home, school, welfare institutions, urban space and other children’s everyday environments have been brought up as important topics of child-centred inquiry for geographers from the early 1990s (e.g. Aitken, 1994; James, 1990; Ploszajska, 1994; Sibley, 1991; Valentine, 1996; Winchester and Costello, 1995). In political geographical research, initial moves to take children into account as actors were made most importantly by Cindi Katz (1986: 1991) with studies on children’s positions, roles and agencies in the world of economic restructuring in rural Sudan and urban New York (for latest developments, see Kallio and Mills, 2016). However welcome, this progress in childhood and youth studies also had side effects. It effectively ended the social scientific exploration of children’s development as members of their political communities and societies. ‘Socialisation’ became the symbol of old fashioned, adultist, behavioural, developmentalist and future-oriented research, and the ‘child as becoming’ was depicted as an antithesis to the knowing, acting and skilful ‘child as being’ (Matthews, 2007; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Uprichard, 2008). A particularly heavy burden was laid on the concept of political socialisation. Scientific publications are still remarkably consistent in their disengagement with political socialisation and early political development. The leading sub-disciplinary journals of childhood research have had practically no engagement with these topics since the 1980s, and alternative conceptions of children’s development as members of their political communities have rarely been explored (see, for example, Children and Society, Childhood, Childhoods Today, Global Studies of Childhood, Children’s Geographies and so on; excluding Habashi’s and Worley’s work). Yet, concurrently with these developments, socialisation remained on the agenda in some other scholarly contexts. In geography, Anssi Paasi, together with his colleagues, acted as the leading scholar who introduced the concept of spatial socialisation as pertinent to understanding nationalisation and spatially embedded identity building (e.g. Häkli and Paasi, 2003; Newman and Paasi, 1998; Paasi, 1996, 1999; also Herb, 1999; Kemp, 1998; MacLeod, 1998). This research arose from politically and geographically oriented border and regional studies that had no connection to childhood and youth research whatsoever. Consequently, the debate does not line up or even engage with research stressing children’s agency.

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Thus far, spatial socialisation has been appreciated mainly as a top-down process, through which political belonging and identity construction happen, and by which territorially grounded political communities and societies continue to exist (Paasi, 2009; Lois, 2013; Murphy, 2013; see also Silova et al., 2014). Paying little attention to children’s active involvement in socialisation processes, this tradition is in line with the political scientific treatment of the term where active youthful agency has started to draw interest only very recently (McDevitt and Chaffee, 2002; Sapiro, 2004; van Deth et al., 2011; Neundorf and Niemi, 2014). Bringing an up-to-date understanding of children’s agency to the spatial socialisation research paves the way for an enlivened conception of political development. Appreciating socialisation as a situated mundane process through which children become members of political communities, and including active youthful agency as an inseparable element of this development, leads to fruitful starting points for understanding political becoming. This conception stresses that socialisation does not take place in a vacuum, but that it is strongly conditioned by the worlds where people lead their lives; worlds where children are not empty vessels to be filled with context during their early years, but where they are unique human beings who build their relationships with the world subjectively. Spatial socialisation, hence, comes to denote a dynamic process where both ‘the political’ and ‘the spatial’ are relational. Instead of fixed dimensions, they are continuously reworked in everyday social practices where children, young people and adults alike make sense of their lived worlds and also transform these worlds to create enjoyable and agreeable conditions for living. Geo-socialisation In a short commentary for an editorial by Jones and Sage (2010) entitled, ‘New directions in critical geopolitics’, Mamadouh (2010: 320) states: ‘For geographers, the term [geopolitics] is now institutionalised as the apt label of an ever-growing body of research aimed at deconstructing geopolitical discourses and disclosing the hidden power relations behind them.’ As one breakaway from this tradition, or an attempt to move on within the sub-discipline, she then portrays the diversification of the field (ibid: 321): ‘away from the hegemon (the US) and the greater powers to examine other states, away from formal and practical geopolitics to explore popular geopolitics, away from the state-centric approaches to study non-state actors such as social movements and transnational organizations and diverse forms of collective action.’ While agreeing that this expansion of scope and shift in topical issues is justified, Mamadouh notes that it does not come without challenges. Such broadening may easily lead to a loss in focus as everything to do with power and space becomes potentially geopolitical – the dilemma familiar to political theorising more generally (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Acknowledging this challenge, I wish to join those who are eager to take the list even further: away from adult-centric approaches to study minor members

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of political communities, away from conflicts and violence to examine peaceful communities and non-violent uses of power and away from collective movements to explore how geopolitics is conceived, perceived, performed and transformed in the mundane practice of everyday life (e.g. Brickell, 2012; Katz, 1991; Secor, 2001). This refocusing is informed by an understanding that, like economic relations, social relations are inseparable from politics as Mitchell (2016) drawing from Ho (2009: 789) suggests: ‘A more systematic analysis of the emotions with respect to their impact on other types of behavior – such as political acts related to the nation-state […] allows an examination of “the substance of social relations and structures” rather than merely holding them up as something fixed and given. This in turn enables an articulation of individual feelings in relation to larger forces and fields.’ In response to Mamadouh’s concern, I draw on feminist approaches presented by Massaro and Williams (2013: 570) which, slightly paraphrased, propose the following: In children’s lived worlds, geopolitics can be understood as the presence of broader-scale politicised processes that impact on their everyday experiences and understandings (often framed as ‘childish’). These issues and events are given meanings by children, which stem from their situated conceptions of the world (often framed as ‘incomplete’). However ‘childish’ and ‘incomplete’ they might be considered to be, these meanings affect how they understand and engage with geopolitical relations, and thus mobilise broadly politicised matters in particular ways. Further, as children are recognised along these lines by other people in their lived worlds, the manifold processes of spatial socialisation become embodied and socially established: ‘Bodies transformed by political processes not only represent those processes, they experience them […] realize cultural code and social dynamics in everyday practices. The memorialized experience merges subjectivity and social world’ (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1994: 216–17, italics in the original, see also Väyrynen, 2014). Thus, new geopolitical subjectivities start to emerge and, following Arendt’s thought, new geopolitical worlds are potentially coming into being (see Introduction). Building on this approach, I posit ‘geo-socialisation’ as a dynamic process where children, by subsuming broadly politicised issues in their experiential worlds, grow into situated subjects with particular spatial-political mindsets. This ‘political becoming’ does not lead to fixed identities but builds grounds for future developments and transformations, which take place throughout the life course as part of ‘geo-social’ living. The ‘wilful stances’ they take in their political realities – to borrow Gambetti’s (2005: 434) formulation – mobilise in the form of attitudes, expressions and activities, during childhood, youth, adulthood and later life. The empirical exploration of spatial socialisation as it unfolds in the everyday is challenging. In my ongoing study, I focus on particular conceptions of spatialpolitical relations that children have told me about. In the analysis, I trace how these fit into their contexts of living, including different spatial dimensions and formal as well as mundane communities, to shed light on their contextual political positioning and the ‘wilful stances’ they occupy. The next section portrays one example from this research. In the selected case, the child’s geopolitical attitude

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differs notably from those of his coevals, yet captures precisely the kinds of processes through which children become geopolitical. With this piece of analysis I seek to portray how geopolitical understanding is generated by children in their everyday lives where different forms of knowledge enmesh. The analysis draws from an ethnographic study that investigated the political realities of 129 early youths (11–16) from Finnish middle-class neighbourhoods. The field work was carried out in 2012 by myself and Elina Stenvall and used an anthropologically oriented research approach that involved a mapping exercise, in-depth interviews, biographical essays and art work (see also Kallio, 2014a, 2014b; Kallio et al., 2015). The study followed a child-centred methodology where the participants could choose which locales of their lived worlds were explored and what topics related to them were discussed. The analysed case was selected from among many others due to its particularity and while the account may at first appear shocking, it hopefully becomes understandable with the subsequent contextualisation. What I seek to make visible by engaging with Rasmus’ (pseudonym) case is, first, that children are active participants in the processes of geopolitical meaning making, and second, that their contextually conditioned spatial-political understandings can be very complex and multifaceted and bring together elements from many sources that result in unforeseen outcomes. Locating Geopolitics in Everyday Life: ‘home’ and ‘amiable relations’ in Rasmus’ Lived World The following analysis draws on two map-based informal interviews with Rasmus, a 12-year-old boy who lives in a middle-class area in Tampere, one of the bigger cities in Finland. He is not too fond of school but likes to hang out there with his friends and, in his own words, does just enough to get by with regards to school work. On the whole, he seems more or less content with his everyday life, the details of which he was happy to share with us in the interviews. We researchers, on the other hand, felt a little uncomfortable in the first interview with him. In the mapping exercise preceding the interviews we had noticed Rasmus’ provocative way of expressing his political thoughts, which made us anxious about working with him. Figure 11.1 portrays his Map of Europe on which he has made three markings. Finland is coloured green (green denotes positive things) and specified as ‘the best country J’, as is the case on many children’s maps (73 green markings out of 122 markings altogether). Russia is coloured red (red denotes negative things) and accompanied with a double label of ‘I hate’. This attitude was not unexceptional on our participants’ maps (37 red markings on Russia and hardly any with other colours). Yet Rasmus’ annotations on Germany are one of a kind. The country is coloured green with the explanation: ‘helped in the war against Russia’. The text is accompanied by an established image that is titled ‘Hitler’ and there are two swastikas on the German map.

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Figure 11.1 Rasmus’ map of Europe Prior to the interview, we expected that Rasmus wanted to annoy us by presenting things he knew were inappropriate so as to test our tolerance and to resign from the study (which happened with some other participants). Yet it occurred that he was very happy to participate in the study and to talk about his world and perspectives. We subsequently went on to discuss his Map of Europe: Interviewer: You have a green mark on Germany, what do you think about it? Rasmus: Well I think it is a fine country and then it is good in the sense that it helped Finland in the wars, and so on. Interviewer: What do you think war is about? Why must wars be fought? Rasmus: Well of course they shouldn’t be fought but, well, countries help each other if someone is at war, for instance in an unfair … . Like if the other country is way bigger than the other; just like Russia against Finland, when Germany came to help.

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This excerpt reveals that Rasmus had taken the exercise very seriously; following the instructions, he portrayed the world as it appears to him. He wanted to tell us that Finland is where his heart resides, with Russia as its enemy and Germany as its friend. However, there was nothing fanatical about his way of conveying this. As we discussed further his interest in guns, war games, the army and hobbies involving war-type features, it became ever more evident that he was not intrigued by violence and did not idealise fascist or other politically oriented movements. The amiable relations with family and friends, instead, took centre stage in our discussions. It would be easy to render Rasmus’ understanding about the relations between Finland, Russia and Germany as childish and incomplete (cf. Massaro and Williams, 2013), and thus define it as ‘disqualified knowledge’ using Foucauldian terminology (Kallio, 2012: 6–7). Such a reading includes the assumption that, with time, he will develop more sophisticated interpretations of these international relations, i.e. learn what the history between these nation-states really is like and how much this violent history should affect the way we think about their relations today. Whilst this may be a fair assumption, it is not very fruitful in understanding his political subjectivity in the present. Another possibility is to approach his ideas through the world where he lives, i.e. the multi-faceted context of his political development. Rasmus has lived all his life in Finland; a neighbouring country of Russia and a member state of the European Union. Whereas Finland’s relations with Russia are varied and fluctuating, in the European Union the country nearly always aligns with Germany. The national media emphasises this nature of the relations systematically by portraying things related to Russia as problematic and celebrating Finland’s allegiances with Germany. It has, for instance, often been stressed that Finland and Germany share the AAA status in credit rating (until the very recent shifts), and news from summits typically includes photos of high-ranking Finnish and German politicians enjoying each other’s company. These amiable relations could also be seen during a debate over the ‘Euro crisis’, held at the University of Tampere two months prior to our fieldwork, with the Prime Minister and the Finnish and German Ministers of Finance. News concerning Russia usually has a different tone: practical difficulties related to customs practices, land ownership, congested lorry traffic and criminal control are often raised, and suspicious political moves like those concerning child welfare issues and airspace/waters violation are frequently cited from a critical perspective. Also, when violent conflicts are discussed, Russia is typically portrayed in a negative light; for example, like at the time of our fieldwork when the frozen Russia–Georgia conflict and the tense relations with Chechens occupied the agenda. In Rasmus’ lived world, these explicitly expressed public attitudes towards Germany and Russia are supported by subtler ones. For instance, the ways in which the two nationalities are talked about and noticed in everyday practices differ notably. During World War II and right after, Germans were referred to as ‘Nazis’ and Russians as ‘Russkies’ in a disparaging manner in Finland, as in many

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other countries. Today, the word ‘Nazi’ has been thoroughly disconnected from the present day understanding of Germans. It is considered extremely rude if used in everyday language, even in the context of organised groups that manifest fascist ideologies (‘neo-Nazi groups’). On the contrary, the word ‘Russkie’ is still clearly associated with Russians and is used quite frequently, even if people know its political incorrectness. One practical example is that whereas German children are not bullied as Nazis, children with a Russian background are commonly labelled as Russkies (Silvennoinen, 2011: 22). In Rasmus’ class one boy suffers from such name-calling. From the broad analysis we learned that everyone in the class is aware of this – including teachers – but it seems that nothing can be done about the situation. This demonstrates clearly how commonplace and silently accepted the ethnic disregard of Russianism still is in Finland. Noticing these explicit and subtle contextual features, Rasmus’ interpretation of Russia as the ‘enemy’ and Germany as the ‘friend’ does not seem so farfetched. Both public representations and people’s mundane associations highlight the biased nature of these interpretations of international relations. The views he presented could even be assumed commonplace among Finnish youth, and yet, our analysis does not suggest this. Quite the contrary, it points to the exceptionality of Rasmus’ views, as none of our other participants gave similar accounts. More contextualisation is hence needed to follow the grounds of his geopolitical understanding. Another view on the development of Rasmus’ political subjectivity can be built by looking into his everyday intimate relationships. Distinct from most children in our study, he does not have a hobby to fill his free time. This does not appear to be a problem, as he enjoys leisure time at home and in the neighbourhood. As a place of dwelling, he particularly appreciates the relaxed atmosphere of his family home. He enjoys playing computer games with his father, his elder brother and his friends, but not in on-line communities with strangers like many other participants in our study. The close community with its parks, ponds, stores and kiosks also apparently serves him well. Walking the dog and grabbing a snack from the hamburger stand are comfortable things he can do on his own or with someone he likes to be with. He accentuates that when people in his family do not need to work or go to school they enjoy being at home, which we discussed extensively in qualitative terms. Hence, Rasmus’ life is firmly attached to the family house and places located physically close to it. He hardly ever strays beyond them; he has not visited many places outside of his neighbourhood, goes to town only for specific reasons, does not make regular visits to places in Finland and has never travelled abroad. This is in striking contrast with the other life stories we engaged within our study. Most of the early youth we worked with told us about frequent travels in Finland and abroad with their families, including plenty of encounters with familiar and new places, cultures, people and issues (Kallio et al., 2015, cf. Brickell, 2012). Virtual environments also extend their sphere of life. Instead of a family house connected to the local community, many portrayed their familial lives as transnational networks including places and people near and far (Kallio, forthcoming). Thus, in contrast to Rasmus, their ‘homes’ and connections with ‘the outside world’ are not

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tightly concentrated in Finland. This is one important aspect that distinguishes his spatial belonging from that of many other children in Finland. Another characteristic in Rasmus’ everyday life that stands out as particularly interesting concerns his social relations. Unlike many other boys who share their lives with circles of friends that have varying compositions and which they commonly talk about as ‘guys’ or ‘mates’, he singles out all of his friends and talks about them as particular individuals. One of them is his classmate with a Russian name and family, who is bullied by most other boys in the class. Also, the other friends he has from that school do not belong to the group but are ‘outsiders’. Rasmus has positioned himself between them and the ‘boys of the class’. Many of our interviewees profess about his in-between position that is tilted more towards the outsiders than the insiders: ‘He’s sort of different from others, I don’t think he would even like to be with them’, one of the outsiders explains. By taking this ‘wilful stance’, Rasmus has chosen a side in the political geographies of the school where power relations are unevenly distributed and constantly negotiated in the everyday peer cultural practices (cf. Gallacher, 2005; Thomas, 2009). It hence seems that also in his mundane communities, he acknowledges that when one quarter ‘is way bigger than the other’, the weaker ones need to be helped by those who can help (cf. the interview excerpt). There is inevitably a politics of care at play here, which he finds also in state relations, even if his maps portraying disturbing geopolitical attitudes do not first give this impression. This mundane analytical frame shows that Rasmus’ everyday life constitutes a handful of intimate relations that are all connected to his ‘home base’; that is, the family house where and around which basically everything significant to him appears to happen. His friends all live very close by and they are tightly knit to his familial life. In peer communities, he does not align with those in leading positions but rather shelters the individuals in weaker positions. His friendships are specific and long-lasting, and he gives them great value. Also in social media or other virtual environments he connects with people he knows, and is not actively seeking new connections with strangers. This is the mundane geosocial world where his political subjectivity develops. It is embedded in the broader societal frame where Finland as a State consorts with Germany, the so-called engine of Europe, and where Russia appears as the unpredictable Eastern empire, probably up to no good in her activities. His life is also framed by the ordinary state of affairs in his everyday environments where some children uncomfortably lead the life of a ‘Russkie’ and carry the stigma still silently reproduced by many Finns. Germans, instead, have a privileged position in this reality where they are met with largely positive and amiable attitudes. Geo-socialisation: A Subjective and Conditioned Process of ‘geopolitical becoming’ To explore geopolitics in the processes of spatial socialisation, the above analysis has sought to make visible how broadly politicised issues and mundane realities

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interweave in children’s understandings and agencies and lead to certain kinds of positions, attitudes, moralities, desires, competencies and activities. Through their social engagements, children participate in the meaning making processes where both the ‘geo’ and the ‘political’ are constantly negotiated and redefined from their own starting points. They use many sources and bring together different kinds of knowledge elements to make sense of the world where they find themselves situated. Hence, ‘geo-socialisation’ is not detached from other processes of subject formation but unfolds in people’s geosocial lives as one trajectory among others. The two elements of social life Rasmus emphasised in our discussions with him – his home and relations with friends and family – are among the most common themes in our study. The young participants who could choose which parts of their lived worlds were taken up in the individual interviews all wanted to tell us about their familial lives and close relationships. In this sense, the analysis of Rasmus’ case aligns well with the other results from our broader study. These suggest that the home as a mundane living environment and the amiable relations that children actively establish and maintain in their everyday lives are significant in the socialisation processes where their political subjectivities develop (Kallio forthcoming; Kallio et al., 2015). Yet, as Rasmus’ case demonstrates, what home and amiable relations mean, where they take place, whom they include and how they are practiced are specific to each child’s life. The family house may be the heart of familial life where people spend time together and organise their daily routines. On the other hand, it can also serve as a ‘hub’ of daily life where family members come and go according to their individual trajectories that take them around the city, the country and beyond; and familial life is led in multiple places, like summer houses, leisure resorts, the homes of other family members, bringing children into contact with various people. Between these two extremes, our study includes 129 different kinds of homes as contexts of socialisation where our young participants develop their political subjectivities. Similarly, their ways of interacting with others vary notably. Depending on their lifestyles, opportunities and interests to connect with other youth, and to associate with different people, distinct knowledge elements and discourses become part of their everyday. A variety of issues stand out as substantial in our participants’ close relations, with implicit moralities and explicit ethical codes. Respectively, becoming political with friends seems to lead to diverse directions, with an emphasis on a legion of different things that emerge contextually. Hence, in our study the contexts of youthful geosocial life appeared on one hand similar, including homes and relations with friends and family, but on the other hand particular as these are distinct for each child. Therefore, the geopolitical understandings that our participants were developing during their young lives were built on different grounds, even though they went to the same kindergartens and schools, lived in the same neighbourhoods and cities, and were Finnish citizens and EU nationals. In distinction from what they knew about the world, their expressed attitudes and opinions on relations and issues that can be seen as

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geopolitically oriented were emotively charged. ‘I just feel this way’, ‘It’s just something I’ve come to think of’ and ‘I just marked this place with this colour, I don’t know why’ were standard explanations for markings that singled out certain countries and regions on their maps, or pointed to broadly politicised issues. The fact that our participants typically could not pinpoint the origins of these views and voiced unease to talk about them any further emphasises their deep embeddedness in their personal lives – the social nature of geopolitics. It is not feasible to identify direct causalities between the mundane lived worlds that our participants shared with us and the attitudes related to broadly politicised matters that they expressed. In exploring their processes of political socialisation, only assumptions, or perhaps educated guesses, can be made from the ways in which they portray their worlds and place themselves and others in them. The contextual analysis of spatial-political situatedness that I have undertaken is, however, illuminative of the basics of political becoming. As a process of geopolitical becoming, ‘geo-socialisation’ is conditioned by the multifaceted worlds where children lead their lives, and it is subjectively mobilised by the children who seek to make sense of these worlds in their geosocial lives. Conclusions This chapter has discussed spatial socialisation as a situated mundane process through which children become members of political communities and develop as political subjects. In accord with prevailing social scientific understandings of children and childhood, and as a critique on the conventional top-down ideals of socialisation, youthful agency is identified as an imperative element in the processes of spatial socialisation where children make sense of broadly politicised processes that enter their lives from subjective perspectives. This aspect of political development I have termed ‘geo-socialisation’. The understandings thus generated become embodied and socially established, merging subjectivity and social world (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1994: 716), yet not leading to fixed knowledge or identities but “wilful stances” (Gambetti, 2005: 434). They provide a basis for political subjectivities and attitudes that are constantly evolving though mundane geosocial encounters. The employed methodological approach continues the feminist project that seeks to unravel connections between broad political processes, human agencies and intimate embodied experiences, to radically replace the locus of spatialised power relations. Secor (2001) proposes this change of perspective as ‘counter-geopolitics’ that challenges scholars to continuously reconsider what geopolitics is about and where it takes place. To elucidate how ‘geo-socialisation’ unfolds in children’s lived worlds, I have introduced a case where a child living in a seemingly ‘a-geopolitical’ community and situation expresses geopolitical attitudes that appear shocking. The analysis of this twelve-year-old boy’s mundane ways of knowing and relating with specific nation-states and the people in his close communities portrays both explicit and

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implicit forms of knowledge, which provide access to his geosocial world that is constitutive of his political subjectivity. Following Arendt’s approach, it displays that new geopolitical subjects and worlds get established as children mobilise broadly politicised issues in their lived worlds in particular ways; regardless of how ‘childish’ and ‘incomplete’ these might be labelled. In Massaro and Williams’ (2013: 574) words, these lived worlds which involve children as active agents can be identified as contexts where ‘discursive and material relations of geopolitical power are reproduced and challenged’. These subjectivities develop little by little throughout childhood and youth, as well as later in life, and they form a basis from which people may practise individual and collective politics. In conclusion, I wish to propose that if critical geopolitics is about recognising ‘the geopolitical and the everyday as entangled and mutually constitutive spheres [where] geopolitical relations are produced in the home as much as the battlefield and by a whole suite of actors outside the formal political realm’ (Massaro and Williams, 2013: 569), then children’s everyday encounters form an ideal context for the ‘reworking of the types of conceptual frameworks, methodologies and empirical examples that have previously delimited critical interrogations of geopolitics’ (Jones and Sage 2010: 316). These, as I have suggested in this chapter, will continue to open up new directions in critical geopolitics. Looking into individual children’s developing political subjectivities directs ‘the attention to everyday practices and the inscription of geopolitics onto particular bodies [which] turns our attention to new sites and issues to be studied in a geopolitical frame’ (Massaro and Williams, 2013: 572). Exploring critical geopolitics with children may therefore be one of the most fruitful arenas for making significant findings about politics as it unfolds in the world. Acknowledgements I wish to thank the Academy of Finland for financially supporting this work (grants SA 134949, SA258341) and the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG–RELATE) at the University of Tampere for an inspiring research environment. Special thanks to Elina Stenvall for the fieldwork. References Aitken, S. 1994. Putting Children in their Place. Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC: Edwards Bros. Alanen, L. 1988. Rethinking childhood. Acta Sociologica, 31(1), 53–67. Amin, A. 2004. Regions unbound: Towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 33–44. Arendt, H. 1953. Ideology and terror: A novel form of government. Review of Politics, 15(3), 303–27.

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Chapter 12

Conclusion Matthew C. Benwell and Peter Hopkins

The contributions to this edited collection have charted some of the ways in which geopolitics plays out in the lives of children and young people, as well as how issues of relevance to children’s and young people’s lives are tied up with debates concerning critical geopolitics. Our hope is that this collection helps to consolidate the field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. A number of important themes are evident across the chapters and we see these as some of the principal agendas for future scholarship in the field. These encompass everyday militarism, recruitment and play; territories, borders and migration; diplomacy and global geopolitical issues, and finally activism, protest and everyday politics. As Hyndman (2001: 213) reminds us, ‘critical geopolitics is about questioning assumptions in a taken-for-granted world and examining the institutional modes of producing such a world vis-à-vis writing about the world, its geography and politics’. In seeking to continue to develop the field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics – and mindful of what Hyndman notes above – we use this Conclusion to suggest potential avenues for continuing to take the field forward. Some of these suggestions build upon themes explored in this collection, and others upon issues we have not included here; however, all of them share a focus on being sensitive to the role, scope and influence of geopolitics as well as to the practices, identities and spatialities of children’s and young people’s lives. First, there is a need to continue to reflect critically on the connections between the global and the intimate, the transnational and the everyday – in a wide variety of contexts and with a more diverse set of agents (most especially with children and young people in the Global South and, furthermore, those parts of the world which are notably under-represented in Anglo-American literatures such as North Africa and Latin America). In a special issue in Area, Pain and Staeheli (2014) discuss ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ and note that this seeks to redress the primary focus often given to geopolitics, with the hyphen representing the apparent divide between intimacy and geopolitics, as well as the ways in which they are simultaneously inseparable from each other. More specifically, Pain and Staeheli (2014: 346) discuss intimacy-geopolitics as spatial relation, as modes of interaction and as sets of practices; they point to the ‘entanglement and indivisibility of proximate and distant spaces’, ‘the inseparability of politics from emotional geographies’ and the ways in which ‘certain bodily and social intimate practices traverse sites and scales’. Such ways of conceptualising the relations between geopolitics and

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intimacy (and between global politics and everyday lives) could be particularly fruitful in extending children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. Second, a number of the chapters in this collection have explored the everyday practices of children and how these are bound up in, and interrelated with, critical geopolitics. This has included discussions about children’s toys and play, as well as their drawings and letters. Notwithstanding these valuable contributions, the majority of work on geopolitics and younger people’s lives has been conducted with young people rather than children, so we would contend that there is certainly scope for methodological and theoretical advancement here. Other chapters in the collection have focused specifically upon young people, exploring issues related to education, activism, mobility and politics. Nayak and Kehily (2008: 9) note that ‘many studies of children and young people use the term play to refer to children’s activities, while young people are viewed as engaging in leisure and youth subcultures rather than play.’ We suggest that young people’s engagements in leisure and youth subcultures could provide an additional fruitful avenue of inquiry into their encounters with geopolitics. Third, children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics could benefit from greater dialogue with debates about relational geographies of age (Hopkins and Pain, 2007), intergenerational relations and spaces (Vanderbeck and Worth, 2015), and debates about life course transitions (Hörschelmann, 2011). As the chapters by Hörschelmann and Rech in this collection have shown, children and young people can often encounter geopolitics alongside adults and other members of their family. The ensuing activities and discussions provide fertile ground for understanding how children, young people and adults learn about and interpret geopolitics together. Similarly, research could be more attentive to how the geopolitical imaginations of children and young people might change along the life course. The chapter by Smith and Gergan shows the ways in which geopolitics can permeate key moments in young people’s life course, such as leaving home to go to university or decisions about intimate relationships and marriage. Fourth, the predominant focus of work on children, young people and critical geopolitics has, perhaps understandably, been on the geopolitical present; on how young people, typically, directly experience and perceive the contemporary world of international relations. This has drawn attention to the perspectives of young people (usually from northern Europe) on military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the insecurities, fear and prejudice they may experience as a result of growing up in an increasingly securitised and militarised world (Pain et al., 2010). Incidentally, the emphasis on how (in)security is practised, performed, experienced and interpreted, most especially by those who are marginalised in dominant security discourses, will surely be a central research focus for a critical geopolitics of children and young people (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007; Philo, 2012). Far less common, however, are considerations of how children and young people come to learn about, and engage with, geopolitical events in the past. Developments in the vibrant field of memory studies might offer ways to think through how this could be done (Edkins, 2003; Mitchell and Elwood, 2013; Till, 2006).

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Equally, retrospective accounts of adults reflecting back on their engagements with geopolitics during their childhood and youth are rare, and the chapter by Brown and Yaffe is suggestive of how such historical forays might be undertaken to yield extremely rich and insightful results. Finally, here, research might follow Huijsmans’ lead (this collection) and think further about how children and young people are implicated in geopolitically-driven processes over time by reflecting on historical and contemporary eras. Fifth, and in relation to spatial context, the growing significance of the internet and social networking provides an important virtual space in which children and young people – who are often the most savvy when it comes to the use of such forms of technology – may engage with geopolitics. The chapter by Benwell hints at the ways in which some young Falkland Islanders use these online technologies creatively to make, share, alter or counter geopolitical points circulated about the sovereignty dispute with Argentina. Critical geopolitics scholarship might attempt to understand how young people interact with different people, organisations, groups and audiences online. Of course, and important to observe here, is the fact that not all children and young people (or for that matter adults) might wish to engage with geopolitics online or across other geographies, so future work should be sensitive to relative absences of geopolitics in the lives of children and young people, ensuring that assumptions are not made about any decisions they might make to disengage. Ultimately, we restate the importance of working with and alongside children and young people in our research to understand more fully their perspectives on, and interpretations of, geopolitics. This leads us to our final point, which relates to methodology and critical geopolitics. The innovative and exciting developments in methodology that have characterised childhood and youth research in the past 25 years provide a substantial foundation for the application of creative research methodologies to critical geopolitics. This work might offer ways forward when thinking through the methodological possibilities and ethical challenges of doing the kind of research outlined here about, for instance, intergenerationality (working with children and their peers or families), historical geopolitics or young people’s use of the internet. Critical geopolitics has in recent years embraced ‘new’ methodological approaches inspired by feminist scholars and looked to collaborate with stakeholders beyond academia such as artists, which evokes a spirit of openness to experimentation (e.g. Ingram, 2011, 2012). This vibrancy, linked to the expertise of those with considerable experience of working with children and young people, establishes a reassuring and invigorating base for future scholarship within critical geopolitics. References Bialasiewicz, L., Campbell, D., Elden, S., Graham, S., Jeffrey, A. and Williams, A.J. 2007. Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy. Political Geography, 26, 405–22.

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Edkins, J. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, P. and Pain, R. 2007. Geographies of age: Thinking relationally. Area, 39, 287–94. Hörschelmann, K. 2011. Theorising life transitions: Geographical perspectives. Area, 43, 378–83. Hyndman, J. 2001. Towards a feminist geopolitics. The Canadian Geographer, 45: 210–22. Ingram, A. 2011. Making geopolitics otherwise: Artistic interventions in global political space. Geographical Journal, 177, 218–22. Ingram, A. 2012. Experimental geopolitics: Wafaa Bilal’s domestic tension. Geographical Journal, 178, 123–33. Mitchell, K. and Elwood, S. 2013. Intergenerational mapping and the cultural politics of memory. Space and Polity, 17, 33–52. Nayak, A. and Kehily, M.J. 2008. Gender, Youth and Culture: New Masculinities and Femininities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pain, R., Panelli, R., Kindon, S. and Little, J. 2010. Moments in everyday/distant geopolitics: Young people’s fears and hopes. Geoforum, 41, 972–82. Pain, R. and Staeheli, L. 2014. Introduction: Intimacy-geopolitics and violence. Area, 46, 344–60. Philo, C. 2012. Security of geography/geography of security. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 1–7. Till, K. 2006. Memory studies. History Workshop Journal, 62, 325–41. Vanderbeck, R.M. and Worth, N. (eds), 2015. Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge.

Index

Activism 18, 19, 54, 91, 94, 95, 96, 155, 187 young people’s activism 17, 157, 164, Actors 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 64, 70, 86, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 134, 146, 147, 157, 170, 172, 173, 182 Affect 12, 62, 69, 132 Agency 7, 9, 11, 12, 53, 69, 96, 114, 144, 169, 173 Alter-geopolitics 31, 40–41 Anger 82 Ansell, N. 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 17, 27, 30, 41, 114, 119, 139, 146, 151, 154 Anxiety, see fear Arab Spring 7 Armed Forces Community Covenant 45 Artefacts 31 Asylum 6, 124 Attitudes 180 Austin, Texas 132 Australia 15, 18, 95, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133 Babies, see children and young people Banal, see everyday Beier, J.M. 14, 20, 29, 30, 31, 41, 42, 43 Belonging 80, 179, 181 Benwell, Matthew C. 1–20, 9, 14, 18, 26, 50, 58, 77, 93, 102, 187–9, 107–18, 107, 109, 110, 115, 118, 119, 121, 189, Bhutan 94, 101 Bhutia 94, 95 Blerk, Lorraine van 6, 14, 17, 146 Body 8, 9, 16, 47–9, 51, 55, 94, 97, 100, 111, 123, 149, 187 Body size 48–9, 50–51 Body Composition Assessment 50–51 Body Mass Index 51 health and fitness 49–50

Borders 1, 16, 17, 77, 78, 91, 149, 187 border territories 94 and checkpoints 78, 149 and crossing 16, 78–9, 80, 96 transgression of 17, 34, 38 Borderlands, see borders Boundaries 8, 33 Brickell, Katherine 9, 12, 21, 174, 178, 183 Brown, Gavin 8, 19, 155, 155–66, 156, 164, 166, 189 Buddhism 91, 94, 95, 97 Carter, Sean 8, 12, 13, 16, 21, 61, 61–71, 67, 70, 71, Chechnya 177 Childhood 3, 4, 29–30, 31, 38, 62, 64, 77, 155 Childhood studies 5, 12, 14, 17, 77, 86, 139 Social studies of childhood 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 112, 171 Sociology of childhood, see social studies of childhood Children and young people 1, 3, 7, 9, 15, 19, 34, 40, 64, 77, 79, 93, 97, 114, 115, 117, 144, 145, 187 and apathy 94 and politics 110, 124, 146 Children’s geographies 123, 124, 125, 134 Children’s rights 29, 40 Chile 112 China 94, 101, 112 Christou, Miranda 9, 17, 21, 75, 75–87, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89 Citizenship 2, 9, 32, 49, 62, 124, 129, 134 Citizens 9, 127 Climate change 18, 19, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134

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mitigation of 123, 129 Coastline 125 Coastal inundation 125, 126 Cold War 66, 132, 156, 157 Collective action 166, 173 Collective memory, see memory Commemoration 2, 29, 66 Conflict 62, 69, 76, 97, 124, 142, 177 Cowen, D. 16, 18 Critical emotional geography 81 Critical geopolitics 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 45–6, 47, 55, 56, 67, 76–7, 86, 100, 101, 108, 117, 134, 139, 141, 146, 147, 151, 155, 157, 171, 173, 182, 187, 188, 189 Critical Military Studies 55–6 Crossroads 76, 78 Culture 16, 30, 75 Cultural practices 76 Cyprus 15, 17, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86 Cyprus Problem, 75–6, 86 ‘Green Line’ 78, 80, 83, 84, 85 Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus 79 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus 78, 81 1974 Turkish invasion of 75, 79, 83, 85 Dam 94, 95 Diplomacy 18, 107, 109, 110, 113, 117, 118, 162 and performativity 108, 111–12, 118 and youth 108 Displacement 94 Dittmer, Jason 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 21, 22, 25, 50, 56, 67, 71, 72, 109, 119, 120 Deforestation 94 Development 94, 96, 142, 143, 149, 169, 170 Dodds, Klaus 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 22, 27, 58, 67, 71, 72, 76, 87, 93, 102, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 119, 157, 167 Dowler, L. 3, 8, 9, 12, 18, 22, 46, 49, 56, 77, 86, 87, 139, 152, 170, 183

Education 94, 126 Ellwood, S. 70, 73, 169, 183, 185, 188, 190 El Refaie, L. 10, 23, 30, 42, 55, 57, 157, 158, 167 Embodiment 2, 8, 9, 12, 16, 69, 77, 91, 92, 99, 101, 108, 112, 139, 140, 174, 181 and practice 31, 64, 66 Emotions 12, 17, 29, 79, 81–2, 85, 148, 181 Emotional geography 17, 76, 80, 82, 83, 85 Engagement 53, 147, 169 EOKA 75 Ethical considerations 68 Ethnicity 19, 99, 124, 141, 142, 145 Ethos (program) 52 European Union 177 ‘Euro crisis’ 177 ‘The everyday’ 139, 142, 148, 180, 182 Everyday life 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 31, 35, 124, 146, 175, 178–9 Everyday practices 124, 177, 178, 179 Exclusion 29, 86, 96, 99, 100–101, 157 Facebook, see social media Falklands 1, 2, 65, 107, 108, 111, 115, 117 Falklands War 65, 111 Family 12, 34, 80, 82, 95 Fear 16, 47, 62, 81, 86, 93, 94, 97, 157 Feminism 5, 124, 139, 174, 189 Feminist geopolitics 8, 12, 77, 157 Feminist youth research/‘girl studies’ see feminism Finland 175–7 Food 126, 127, 129, 133, 144 Foucault, M. 177 Fun 164, 166 Future 93, 94 Gender 9, 19, 48, 50, 54, 64, 77, 97, 124, 139, 144, 170 Geopolitics 1, 7, 8, 46, 50, 54, 61, 76, 143, 146, 147, 149, 155, 181 Geopolitical subjectivity 2, 19, 46, 69 Gergan, Mabel 17, 91, 91–101, 92, 188 Germany 175–7

Index Globalisation 93 Gulf War 65 Guns 177 Hakli, J. 3, 6, 10, 24, 53, 58, 110, 118, 120, 124, 136, 156, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 183, 184 Himalayas 17, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101 Holloway, Sarah 4, 22, 33, 42, 64, 72, 77, 87, 88, 172, 183 Home 95, 114, 179–80 Hopkins, Peter 1–20, 3, 9, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 22, 23, 30, 42, 47, 55, 57, 62, 72, 93, 100, 103, 110, 118, 119, 124, 136, 139, 152, 156, 157, 167, 187, 188, 189, 190 Hörschelmann, Kathrin 3, 6 , 7, 9, 10, 12, 16, 19, 23, 29, 29–41, 30, 42, 43, 47, 48, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 70, 72, 93, 103, 110, 119, 124, 136, 142, 146, 147, 152, 157, 158, 167, 188, 190 Huijsmans, Roy 8, 139, 139–51, 141, 145, 146, 147, 153, 189 Hyndman, Jennifer 2, 8, 15, 17, 23, 46, 58, 77, 88, 93, 103, 139, 153, 187 Identity 81, 95, 101, 112, 114, 124, 173 Images 75, 79 Imagination 112 and geopolitics 17, 63, 125 India 15, 17, 62, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101 Indigenity 91, 93, 94, 95, 101 Intergenerational 63, 75 Intermarriage 97, 98 Internet 18, 118, 189 Intimacy 8, 9, 12, 17, 18, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 47, 50, 54, 55, 80, 82, 93, 94, 110, 117, 178, 179, 181, 187, 188 Iranian Embassy Siege (1980) 64, 65 Iraq/Afghanistan War 53, 66 Islands 123, 125, 128, 134 James, A. 4, 13, 23, 33, 42, 86, 88

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Justice 76, 86 Kalliio, Kirsi Paulina 3, 6, 10, 19, 24, 53, 58, 70, 72, 110, 114, 118, 120, 124, 136, 156, 167, 169, 169–82, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185 Kirby, Philip 16, 61, 61–71 Knowledge 139, 147, 151, 177 Koopman, S. 9, 12, 13, 24, 31, 33, 40, 41, 42, 109, 120, 123, 125, 136 Kuus, Merje 7, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 76, 77, 88, 107, 109, 120 Land use 123 Laos 139, 140, 141 Lepcha 94, 95 Leverhulme Trust 110, 118 Love 97, 98, 124, 131 Ludic geography 13 Malaysia 4 MacDonald, F. 13, 24, 46, 58, 63, 71, 72 McConnell, F. 1, 12, 18, 25, 27, 31, 44, 107, 109, 120, 184 McCormack, D.P. 8, 12, 21, 67, 70, 71 Marginality 77 Marriage 97, 144 Massaro, V. 6, 8, 9, 27, 170, 171, 174, 177, 182, 184 Media 2, 16, 30, 35, 37, 91, 101, 113, 116, 117, 177 Megoran, Nick 1, 12, 13, 24, 25, 31, 42, 43, 46, 58, 72 Memory 76, 79 Methodology 13, 14 Artistic research methods 18, 68 Auto-ethnographic observations 30 Ethnography 16, 67, 69 Interviews 17, 19, 68, 79, 83, 92, 96, 99–100, 111, 113, 115, 117, 148, 155, 159, 164, 175, 176 Focus groups 9 Life histories 142, 147 Mapping exercises 17, 79, 84, 85 Participant observation 68 Participatory research exercises 18

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Personal experience 33, 36 Migration 6, 16, 17, 94, 124, 126, 127, 139, 140, 141, 143–4, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 experiences of 17 Military 13, 48, 55 and gender 49 practices 63, 65 and school 52 and youth 46, 50–51, 54 Militarism 12, 13, 15, 29, 30, 32, 33, 53, 62, 66, 69 187, 188 civic 45 contesting 35, 53–4 everyday 15, 46, 53–4 and gender 36 normalisation of 31, 32, 33, 38, 41 rejection of 68–9 Mills, S. 3, 6, 8, 25, 32, 43, 70, 73, 155, 167, 169, 172, 183, 184 Mitchell, K. 70, 73, 169, 183, 185, 188, 190, Mobility 17, 124 Movement 80 Museum of Childhood 16, 66 War Games Exhibition 66, 67, 69 Muslim 2, 78, 91, 97, 98, 157

Passivity 10 Patriotism, see nationalism Performance 9 Philo, C. 6, 26, 53, 58, 93, 104, 110, 120, 124, 125, 127, 137, 156, 167, 169, 170, 185, 188, 190 Physical geography 94 Pilgrimages 80 Pinkerton, A. 9, 18, 26, 50, 58, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121 Play 13, 16, 31, 32, 38, 61, 62, 86, 187, 188 Playgrounds 10 Ploszajska, T. 3, 26, 172, 185 Political geography, 2, 6, 124, 179 Political instability 12 Political subjectivity 76, 91, 141, 144, 147, 169, 170, 178, 182 Poverty 12 Power 14, 76, 77, 141, 179 Precarity 94 Protest 7, 18, 19, 99, 159, 187 Prout, A. 4, 14, 21, 23, 86, 88 Public space 35 Punch, S. 4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 27, 169, 172, 185

Nation/state 40, 46, 49, 91, 92, 94, 100, 112 Nationalism 66, 76, 110 Nazi/Nazism, 177–8 Neighbourhood 55, 114 Nepal 94, 101 Non-state actors 107, 109

Rech, Matthew F. 12, 16, 26, 45, 45–56, 46, 47, 54, 59, 188, Recognition 96 Recruitment (military) 15, 16, 29, 37–8, 39, 40, 46, 47, 50–51, 54 Refugee 80, 82 Representation 2, 18, 62, 76, 95, 139, 141, 149, 151 Resilience 11, 52, 62, 125 Resistance 54 Respect 124 Riots 52 Risk 16, 30, 47, 50, 51 and youth/ ‘troubled youth’ 51, 52, 54 Ruddick, S, 10, 26, 91, 93, 104 Russia 175–7 Russian-Georgian conflict 177 ‘Russkie’ 177–8

Objects, see artefacts Other 81 O’Toole, T. 6, 7, 25, 53, 58, 110, 118, 120 O’Tuathail, Gerard 7, 25, 56, 76, 88, 147, 153, 167 Pain, Rachel 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 47, 55, 56, 58, 62, 70, 72, 73, 80, 81, 86, 88, 93, 104, 110, 120, 139, 142, 146, 153, 187, 188, 190 Parks 10

Salinisation 123

Index

195

action figures 61, 63 Action Man 64 Adventure Team 65 Captain America 64 games 62, 67 GI Joe 64, 65 Transgression 33, 37 Trust 124 Twitter, see social media

Scale 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 30, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55, 123, 124, 125, 129, 131, 132, 134, 143, 170, 174 School 16, 37, 45, 46, 54, 55, 79, 114, 116, 149 Sea level rise 123, 125 Security 13, 29, 46, 69, 76, 94, 188 Securitisation 8, 62, 188 Self-determination 113, 114 Sharp, Jo 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 69, 73, 77, 86, 87, 139, 156, 157, 164, 167, 170, 183, 184 Sikh 2, 91, 92 Sikkim 92, 94, 95, 101 Skelton, T. 6, 26, 53, 59, 67, 73, 93, 104, 110, 121, 142, 154, 156, 167, 169, 183, 184, 185 Smith, F. 6, 26, 53, 58, 93, 104, 110, 120, 124, 125, 127, 137, 156, 167, 169, 170, 185 Smith, Sara H. 3, 9, 17, 26, 56, 58, 91, 92, 188 Spyrou, Spyros 9, 17, 21, 75, 75–87, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89 Social media 49, 61, 100, 114, 115, 117, 189 Sovereignty 107, 108, 111, 126 Space 46, 75 and emotion 80 Stratford, Elaine 9, 18, 123–34, 126, 128, 136, 137, 138 Storytelling 123 Street 16 Students 99, 100, 127, 131, 133 Subaltern 100 Sustainability 128

Valentine, Gill 4, 22, 33, 43, 51, 60, 64, 72, 77, 87, 88, 172, 183 Vanderbeck, R.M. 5, 10, 11, 14, 27, 183, 188, 190 Vietnam 141 Vietnam War 65, 132 Vimeo, see social media Violence 2, 46, 53, 76, 93, 163, 177 normalisation of violence 31, 32 Visibility 65 Voting 53 Vulnerability 11–12, 47, 93

Tasmania 18, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133 Technology 18, 29 Territory 16, 17, 91, 95, 97, 101 Terrorism 1, 2, 62 Terrorist, see Terrorism Thailand 145 Threat 93 Tisdall, K.M. 4, 10, 11, 26, 27, 169, 172, 185 Toys 13, 16, 34–5, 61, 63–4, 66, 67, 188

War 3, 12, 30, 35, 68, 83, 93, 176–7 and childhood 30, 41 normalisation of war 30, 32 problematisation of war 30 War on Terror 45, 66, 67, 157 War games, see war play War play 34, 35–6, 61, 62, 64, 66 177 Water 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133 Williams, J. 6, 8, 9, 27, 170, 171, 174, 177, 182, 184

United Kingdom 1, 6, 15, 19, 33, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 108, 110, 115, 116, 117, 126, 129, 161 United Nations 78, 80, 11, 108, 113, 114, 143, 156, 164 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 4, 124 United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid 164 United States 65, 130 University of Tampere 177 U.S. Department of Homeland Security 62 Urban 91, 93, 94

196

Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics

Woodward, R. 12, 15, 24, 27, 31, 43, 44, 70, 72, 73 Woodyer, Tara 13, 16, 27, 61, 61–71, 70, 73 Wootton Bassett 66 World War II 29, 64, 143, 177

Yaffe, Helen 8, 19, 155, 155–66, 164, 166, 189 Youth 3, 4, 48, 93, 98, 100 YouTube, see social media Zoo 16, 34