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.

This chapter explains why international researchers prioritize war as a topic of research and summarizes the prevailing theoretical methods used to study conflict. It further narrows the topics that the remainder of the book explores.

Introduction

From 1980 to 2000, Peru experienced an internal armed conflict between the Peruvian state, the Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path (PCP-SL), the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), and others. After the resignation of Alberto Fujimori in 2000 as president of Peru due to corruption charges, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) was created by the transitional government of interim President Valentin Paniagua in 2001, with the mandate to research the causes of the conflict and the human rights violations. The PTRC was seen as part of an exemplary transitional justice case to reach a successful transition to democracy (Boesten, 2014). From 2001 to 2003, the PTRC gathered 16,986 testimonies to produce the Final Report. The PTRC relied heavily on the testimonies gathered as the emphasis was placed on victims’ narrated experiences about the conflict, and the work done for the chapter on sexual violence against women was no exception. The PTRC Final Report acknowledged that the state forces were the foremost perpetrators of sexual violence, and in doing so, it recognized that several children born of violence were born after assaults. These children were mentioned in the Final Report, public hearings, and the data gathered and produced by the PTRC as ‘abandoned children’, ‘children without a father’, ‘soldiers’ children’, or the ‘product of rape’.

Stories about children born of violence have emerged in post-conflict Peru. These stories provide alternative accounts of children born of violence that counter the promoted version of the PTRC conflict memory. The counter-narratives can be found within the realm of the PTRC in interviews, testimonies, birth certificates, and all the material gathered and produced by the PTRC that is kept in the archive and the realm of popular culture. The counter-narratives about children born of violence challenge the promoted narratives on sexual violence against women by the PTRC, in which children born of violence were portrayed as evidence to demonstrate their mother’s rape. The counter-narratives situate several narratives, but in general terms, they display that children’s identities are continuously constructed and contested in Peru nowadays.

In this chapter, the analysis of the stories about children born of violence as counter-narratives reminds us of the existence of children born of violence as more than just channels to reflect on the trauma of war, as has been suggested in the literature on children born of war (Carpenter, 2007, 2010; Seto, 2013).

Introduction

On 23 November 2015, Wajih Awad, a 14-year-old from the Qalandiya refugee camp and her 16-year-old cousin Norhin Awad, entered West Jerusalem Mahane Yehuda market armed with scissors, with the intent to stab Israeli civilians. Wajih lightly wounded an elderly man and attempted to stab another civilian before the girls were both shot by an Israeli security officer. Wajih Awad was killed after being knocked on the ground by a passerby and then shot at point blank range by a security officer. Her cousin recovered from two bullet wounds in her stomach and is serving a 13-year prison sentence in Israel. Wajih, the 14-year-old ‘terrorist’, was apparently seeking revenge for the death of her brother, who was killed by Israeli soldiers after being shot at close range with a rubber bullet to the neck while protesting at a checkpoint. Her 16-year-old cousin claimed that she was accompanying her and did not intend to hurt anyone. Armed with scissors, these girls did not pose a serious threat; only the one man was slightly injured. However, within Israel, the shooting of the girls was considered fully justifiable. The attack by the teens was not an isolated case but was rather one of hundreds of incidents involving Palestinian youth seeking revenge against Israeli civilians subsequent to the 2014 Gaza war and ongoing realities of life under the military occupation. Because so many of the incidents were perpetuated by Palestinian youth lightly armed with scissors, screwdrivers, or knives, the wave of violence during 2015–2016 has often been referred to as the ‘knife’ or the ‘children’s intifada’.

Within an internal violent conflict where civilians are not far removed from combatants, children may engage as activists or perpetrators of violent acts, and they can volunteer or be coerced into conducting suicide missions. Although there is much literature on children’s vulnerability regarding the effects of war and exploitation (Slone and Mann, 2016; Wessells, 2019), there is far less research into children as perpetrators of violence. Most of the research on children as violent perpetrators has focused on child soldiers abducted and trained by armed groups. Recent research has noted that modern armed conflict has increased the use of child soldiers (Nyamutata, 2020). Violent groups have practical reasons for targeting children for terrorist activities, which include attaining cheap soldiers and increasing the longevity of the groups.