This chapter introduces micro-sociological methodologies and analytical strategies, including the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of micro-sociology. The chapter proposes three micro-sociological strategies: studying key events, interaction ritual chains, and patterned phenomena. The chapter shows how micro-sociological analysis can be conducted with various methods but focuses mainly on video data analysis (VDA), because this method is particularly well-suited for capturing micro-dynamics of rhythm, emotions, and bodily interaction. The chapter shows how to gather, code, and analyze video material and illustrates how VDA can be triangulated with other methods. Likewise, the chapter presents positivist and post-positivist epistemologies of VDA. The chapter further discusses dilemmas of VDA related to (1) access and availability, (2) validity and veracity, (3) data presentation, and (4) ethics. Finally, the chapter presents the data sources, methods, and methodological considerations that make up the empirical basis of the book.

This chapter explores the second main source of uncertainty in crisis bargaining: power. At first, the results appear to be superficially similar to how uncertainty over costs works. However, upon deeper inspection, uncertainty over power is harder to mitigate. Even a clever mediator might struggle to solve the problem. Further, states have an incentive to strategically create such uncertainty for their opponents because free riding by not constructing weapons is a tempting choice.

This chapter presents a micro-sociological re-theorization of nonviolent resistance as shaped by dynamics of rhythms, destabilization of domination, energizing and de-energizing repression, and emotional feedback loops. The chapter shows how an occupying power can be understood as a tightly organized musical ensemble with dominating interactions and rhythmic coordination, and how nonviolent resistance can disrupt the rhythmic coordination and domination by a regime; hence, de-stabilizing and potentially challenging the power relation. The chapter discusses how concrete nonviolent actions can defy domination and the degree to which they can be useful for challenging violent repression. In conflicts of nonviolent resistance, the battle is determined by whether the protesters or the regime are able to dominate the situation and challenge the tight, rhythmic coordination and unity of the opponent. If neither party is able to dominate, the situation will escalate. Finally, the chapter discusses how nonviolent resistance can foster long-term change.

Introduction

Recent decades have demonstrated an unprecedented institutionalization and mainstreaming of children and youth participation in international decision-making processes (Holzscheiter et al, 2019; Kwon, 2019; Knappe and Smith, 2021). In the UN system, children and youth have been identified as one of the ‘major groups’ (United Nations, 1992) whose participation is critical for effective and just global governance of sustainable development. As a result, we have witnessed a significant growth in the organization of youth constituencies, working groups for children and youth, child rights strategies, and youth forums in a wide range of areas such as climate, peace and security, health, and migration (UNICEF, 2014; United Nations, 2018; Holzscheiter and Pantzerhielm, 2023). The development follows a broader shift in international politics, from nation-state-centred negotiations to the opening up of global institutions to include actors such as NGOs, philanthropies, cities, businesses, and experts to tackle some of the most pressing global issues of our time (Tallberg et al, 2013). This is also the case in the global governance of migration (Schierup et al, 2018). In a time when global migration is reaching unprecedented heights and states of the Global North are trending towards restrictive border regimes, international organizations like the UN and the International Organization for Migration are seeking to find durable solutions to ‘safe, orderly and regular’ migration through the inclusion of new stakeholders.

However, while the inclusion of children and youth as political actors in international politics has certainly enabled new inclusionary forms of global political representation, the institutionalization of young people’s participation remains contested. Scholars have critically noted that the mainstreaming and implementation of children’s rights and their participation do not necessarily mean that the life situation of children and youth is becoming better or that young people’s experiences of injustices are being recognized (Reynaert et al, 2012; Josefsson and Wall, 2020). It has been pointed to how the institutionalization of young people’s rights and voices in decision-making processes has also become an instrument to govern, regulate, and control children and youth (Prout, 2003; James, 2007; Holzscheiter et al, 2019; Kwon, 2019). Further, the massive mobilizations of children and youth against global injustices of racism, climate change, labour, oppressive policing, and restrictive migration policy seriously contest the ways in which they are politically represented at local, national, and global levels (Cummings, 2020; Josefsson and Wall, 2020; Bessant, 2021; Josefsson et al, 2023).

This appendix provides a brief overview of how to calculate and manipulate infinite streams of payoffs.

What would global political life look like without children and childhoods? If the question seems an odd one, it is perhaps because it presumes something quite outside the ambit of what global politics is usually understood to enclose, and well beyond the realm of possibilities normally imagined about childhood. Certainly, for students and scholars of disciplinary International Relations (IR), the association is not an intuitive one, but neither has it figured significantly in the wider interdisciplinary spaces concerned with critically interrogating the politics of the global. And yet, the provocation is important because, despite a dearth of attention to children and childhoods, they are indivisible from and indispensable to discourses and practices of global politics. Though the dominant understanding of childhood is premised on developmentalist-inspired assumptions of children’s incapacity and the consequent deferment of their meaningful participation in the social worlds we share, this belies not only their competence as everyday social actors but also the ways in which they are relied upon as such. And while imagined childhood is sentimentalized as a time of innocence, understood to demand a unique claim on protection from the harsh realities of the world, the fact is that children the world over contend daily with ‘adult’ life through, among other things, participation in labour markets, shouldering domestic responsibilities on which households and communities depend, enduring structural deprivations, navigating complex emergencies, and experiencing armed conflict. What is more, the everyday functioning of global systems of material production and the maintenance of status quo power relations depends on millions of children performing essential functions and fulfilling important roles across these and other contexts.

While recognizing and taking seriously this indispensability of children to socio-political life is a critical first move towards finding them in global politics, coming to a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of childhood(s) themselves is no less crucial. On first gloss, the meaning of childhood may seem self-evident as a temporally delineated formative stage of the human life course. This aligns well not only with vernacular usage and but also with culturally and historically specific common senses that hold childhood – and, by extension, children – sequestered behind some nominally fixed age threshold. For juridical purposes, this lends straightforward criteria for the governance of children through agecontingent deferment of rights, participation, bodily autonomy, and more.

This chapter introduces the logics, assumptions, and theoretical underpinnings of micro-sociology in the context of Peace and Conflict Research. In the chapter, I present and discuss how macro-phenomena comprise and yet are more than the sum of micro-interactions. I then proceed to introduce key concepts and elements of the micro-sociological framework developed in this book, including interaction rituals, emotional energy, social bonds, micro-sociality, and socioemotional credit and discredit. Moreover, the chapter conceptualizes four forms of interaction that shape peace, and conflict: friendly interaction, conflictual interaction, dominant interaction, and low-intensity interaction. These modes of interaction can be analyzed to understand concrete situations and grasp larger patterns of peace and conflict. The chapter discusses how modes of interaction can be changed and challenged, how interactions are also shaped by practices and material circumstances, and how intergroup conflicts and peace may imply different forms of interaction.

Introduction

Peace support operations of various kinds implemented by the United Nations or other national, regional, and international actors are key forms of intervention and order making in global politics: they are some of the largest foreign deployments of military forces, are mandated to address a complex range of political problems, and are reasonably effective at reducing violence, ending civil wars, and preventing conflict recurrence (Walter et al, 2021). Since the end of the 1990s, protection has become a central focus of many peacekeeping missions, with an emphasis on the protection of civilians, the protection of children from grave violations of their rights, and the protection of women from sexual violence (Kullenberg, 2020). Children make up a substantial portion of the population of states hosting peacekeeping missions, and violations of children’s rights, particularly their recruitment and use as soldiers, are considered to be particularly grave. Consequently, peace support operations provide a fruitful site for investigating how a universalized conception of childhood helps to sustain certain forms of global politics and is reproduced in doing so. International discourses on child protection primarily construct children as universally innocent, vulnerable, and dependent on adults and the state, in need of protection so that they can mature into responsible adult citizens. Deviations from this form of childhood, such as child soldiering, threaten this progression and necessitate intervention (Tabak, 2020). However, this construction of childhood does not align with children’s own experiences of the specificity of their circumstances and their exercise of agency (Denov, 2012; Drumbl, 2012). Children play a range of active, political roles during armed conflict which should be considered in research on peacekeeping (Jacob, 2015).

Consequently, in this chapter, I focus on the practices of peacekeepers involved in child protection to examine both how this universal conception of childhood influences and is contradicted by peacekeeping practice, and how children actively navigate the social environment of war in ways that peacekeepers have to account for. I do so through analysing practice-oriented documents from the UN, such as training materials and manuals, and interviews with military, police, and civilian peacekeepers with experience in a range of child protection functions in several UN missions. This analysis both demonstrates one site where children play an active role in the global political world and illustrates how universalizing discourses like those on children are disrupted and contested in practice. Despite the dominance of discourses of children’s lack of agency during war, child soldiering and the UN’s response to it shows one way in which powerful global actors understand and implicitly acknowledge children as political actors.

Introduction

The lived experiences of children and young people and the actualization of their political agency – whether individually or collectively – remain largely under-recognized within wider policy frameworks, especially those that attempt to systemically address the ongoing climate crisis. In terms of current global priorities, the climate crisis is placing children and young people at the centre of both policy and advocacy, and there are now multiple examples of political spaces within a context in which they can be seen to be an important part of ‘doing the work’ (see, for example, Byrne et al, 2019). This chapter examines this centrality within the context of education, specifically arguing that children and young people are increasingly advocating for a ‘critical climate justice praxis’, as coined by Sultana (2022: 119), that ‘demands systemic changes to address structural inequities and destabilize power systems that produce various climate injustices’. This is becoming more visible as a result of the political space that liberal institutions are allocating children and young people as moral authorities in addressing the climate crisis (Leggett, 2019) because they, and future generations, will be the ones witnessing its long-term impacts.

However, the demand for a climate justice praxis, and this moral positioning, clash with current educational frameworks for climate action in that, despite the widespread recognition by key stakeholders that critical climate justice education should involve radical critique, examination, and solutions, what currently exists is a framing that is neoliberal and colonial in nature. This chapter argues that alongside the very clear central role that children and young people play in climate action, what is required is a recognition that current frameworks of climate education are not, in fact, fit for the radical change that the climate crisis requires. Many of the education policies currently being promoted strip questions of justice, politics, and power from discussions of climate change and, in the end, deny children and young people the political space required to fully explore the causes and spectrum of responses to climate change. This is to say that the current policy environment sends a dual message that while children and young people are authorities in climate politics, they should not be given education that is critical of historical and enduring colonial and neoliberal structures, which remain the cause of the climate crisis.

Introduction

In recent years, unaccompanied children on the move have featured prominently in global politics, with significant implications for the children themselves, but also for the potential host countries. The number of firsttime child asylum applicants (both unaccompanied and with their families) in the EU rose from 64,330 in 2011 to 386,415 in 2016 (Eurostat, 2021). The number of unaccompanied child asylum applications in the EU also increased, from 11,690 in 2011 to 63,250 in 2016, with a 2015 peak of 95,205 unaccompanied children applying for asylum in the EU, including 3,255 in the UK (Eurostat, 2021b). In Europe in 2016, around one third (390,770) of asylum applications lodged were for children, with the UK receiving a relatively small number (9,200) of those applications compared to Germany, where two thirds (261,300) of the children applied (UNHCR et al, 2017). However, while in other European countries the 2015 peak has not been superseded, the UK saw higher numbers in 2019, when it received 3,755 asylum applications for unaccompanied children, suggesting that action to address these children’s needs remains significant there. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, numbers of unaccompanied child refugees once again began to rise in the UK, even more so in Poland and Germany.

Although the presence of independently migrating children is not an entirely new phenomenon, their increased presence has challenged accepted ideas about children and childhood held by policy makers. Moreover, the growing visibility of unaccompanied children and awareness of their specific needs pose significant questions for policy makers and wider host societies alike. This has been particularly notable in the UK, where questions of migration were politically leveraged throughout the Brexit decision process with significant implications for policy making and people’s everyday lives in the UK, Europe, and beyond.

During the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–2016, public concerns relating to children on the move increased concurrently with major related political debates in Europe, including the Brexit vote in mid-2016 – a particularly prominent example of a broader political decision widely linked to ideas about immigration. Drawing on data gathered through a wider study considering political representations of young people on the move, in this chapter we consider the particular salience of representations of unaccompanied children, who are often highlighted as the children seen as most at risk or causing most concern.

Introduction

The Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 stunned the world with its brutal, targeted violence against civilians. Systematic war crimes by the Russian military have not spared children, who featured prominently as objects of violence in global media coverage (Falk, 2022). As children have been killed, trafficked, wounded, and maimed, this vulnerable group also comprises significant portions of the worst refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) crisis in Europe since World War II (Vierlinger, 2022). While many analysts trace how Russia’s war against Ukraine is fundamentally changing the global geopolitical order, we note that this war is likewise profoundly shaping the youngest generation of Europe’s largest country in ways that are still unfolding.

However, as we explore in this chapter, children’s intersections and interactions with this war and its resultant militarism began nearly a decade ago. Although the current escalation has intensified the themes we explore in this chapter, we have elected to restrict our focus to 2014–2022 to explore how these latent realities shaped Ukrainian children and young adults today – including Ukraine’s youngest soldiers who were in elementary school when this war began. The current war began when the Russian Federation annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked armed conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Under the pretext of a separatist conflict, the Russian government funnelled military, financial, and political support to proxy forces, leading to protracted conflict that received muted global attention (Dunn and Bobick, 2014; Galeotti, 2016; Government of the Netherlands, 2018; Marten, 2019; Hook, 2020; Troianovski, 2021).

Even before February 2022, the United Nations estimated that at least 14,000 lives had been lost, 1.6 million IDPs driven from their homes, and approximately 30,000 people wounded (International Crisis Group [ICG], 2022). In 2020, the United Nations Children’s Agency, UNICEF, estimated that the war had ‘deeply affected’ 580,000 children near the eastern frontlines and in areas controlled by Russia’s proxy forces, with 200,000 children requiring urgent psychosocial support, another 200,000 driven from their homes, and a fifth of conflict zone schools damaged by kinetic violence like shelling, causing widespread disruption of education (UNICEF, 2020).

Introduction

Under what is known as the girling of development (Hayhurst, 2011), girls have received unprecedented attention as global activists and empowered figures uniquely capable of addressing our world’s most urgent crises. Early iterations of these programmes in the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Nike’s Girl Effect and the World Bank’s Adolescent Girl Initiative, focused on girls’ unique capacity to end global poverty. Increasingly, however, girls are being called upon to save our planet from climate change. Girl Rising (GR), a US-based ‘girl’s education non-profit’, has launched the Future Rising (FR) programme, described as ‘a virtual fellowship for young activists working on environmental justice storytelling with a focus on women and girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.c). FR fellows are to create a ‘body of knowledge about how the drivers and impacts of climate change intersect with girls’ education and gender equity’ (Girl Rising, nd.b). Although many of the inaugural fellows’ projects address the intersectional and global inequities of climate change, the FR programme itself – especially its promotional material and crafted lesson plans available to interested Global North teachers – remains committed to GR’s broader liberal emphasis on individual educational investment to not only improve the life trajectories of Global South girls but also to address a broad array of grave social crises. As GR boldly claims, the ‘future of our planet depends on investing in quality education for girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.b).

FR is an example of girl power environmentalism: an individualistic, colonial, and capitalist version of (Southern) girls’ personal responsibility for global planetary problems. Here, girls – because they are girls – possess a unique girl power waiting to be tapped into by Global North educational intervention and green employment initiatives. Under this thinking, girl power is all we need to address the climate crisis. Using what I refer to as decolonial feminism – a theoretical framework that encompasses Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-imperial feminist theorizing (Lugones, 2010; de Finney, 2014; Datta, 2015) – this chapter illuminates how FR constructs a limited, colonial, and capitalist version of girlhood informed by girl power environmentalism, one that works to conceal the variegated ways in which girls always already exist as political subjects in the world.

The problem with cheap talk communication is that it is free to lie in an effort to obtain a better outcome. What if signals were costly instead? This chapter investigates that question from the perspective of military mobilizations. We see that such mobilizations can credibly communicate a state’s resolve because less resolved types pay differential costs to mobilize. Unfortunately, this means that mobilizations are not as useful for revealing private information about the costs of war or a state’s martial effectiveness.