Children Young People And Critical Geopolitics

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

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

This book examines how and why, in the context of International Relations, children’s subjecthood has all too often been relegated to marginal terrains and children themselves automatically associated with the need for protection in vulnerable situations: as child soldiers, refugees, and conflated with women, all typically with the accent on the Global South. Challenging us to think critically about childhood as a technology of global governance, the authors explore alternative ways of finding children and their agency in a more central position in IR, in terms of various forms of children’s activism, children and climate change, children and security, children and resilience, and in their inevitable role in governing the future. Focusing on the problems, pitfalls, promises, and prospects of addressing children and childhoods in International Relations, this book places children more squarely in the purview of political subjecthood and hence more centrally in IR.

The conventional wisdom according to which children’s lives should be safe from adult concerns tends to situate them categorically outside the political. Thus understood, children become political agents when they reach maturity and eligibility to formal participation. Alternatively, political skills and competences may be seen to develop gradually through political socialization. Both views are challenged in recent scholarship on youthful politics beyond the formal, adult-centered political world. This book considers politics as it appears and unfolds in children and young people’s everyday lives. The collection problematizes several key concepts in the research field and introduces a relational reading of youthful political agency based on social, spatial and political theorization. The chapters engage with youthful realities in Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, New Zealand, the US and the UK, revealing a variety of ways in which children and youth are important political actors in their own right. The book also includes an extensive literary review on the study of children and young people’s politics in the past decade. This book was originally published as a special issue of Space and Polity.

'Fear' in the twenty-first century has greater currency in western societies than ever before. Through scares ranging from cot death, juvenile crime, internet porn, asylum seekers, dirty bombs and avian flu, we are bombarded with messages about emerging risks. This book takes stock of a range of issues of 'fear' and presents new theoretical arguments and research findings that cover topics as diverse as the war on terror, the immigration crisis, stranger danger, global disease epidemics and sectarian violence. This book charts the association of fear discourses with particular spaces, times, social identities and sets of geopolitical relations. It examines the ways in which fear may be manufactured and manipulated for political purposes, sometimes becoming a tool of repression, and relates fear to political, economic and social marginalization at different scales. Furthermore, it highlights the importance and sometimes unpredictability of everyday lived experiences of fear - the many ways in which people recognize, make sense of and manage fear; the extent of resistance to fear; the relation of fear and hope in everyday life; and the role of emotions in galvanizing political and social action and change.

The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately connected to contemporary norms, practices and spaces of care, caring and care-giving. The provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people’s development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. However, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. An overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared for has effectively marginalised their agency and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care. Bringing together a significant array of multidisciplinary work on children, young people and families, this collection draws together new research on the diverse lives and experiences of children and young people as carers, as cared for, and in relation to spaces and institutions of care. It is the first collection specifically devoted to the subject of care in relation to childhood and youth. As such, the book will be a key resource for academics, practitioners and students seeking leading-edge empirical and conceptual material on this topic.

This book explores the ways in which the study of the domestic and the international, far from being separate spheres, are in fact woven together in multiple ways. The chapters in this volume seek to question this traditional domestic/international binary and approach their entanglement through a range of different empirical settings and methodological approaches. Inspired by a recent turn towards recognising the importance of the home, the intimate, and the everyday in the construction of geopolitical worlds, this book captures a broad range of agents, practices, objects, performativities and discourses that contribute to how geopolitics is rendered familiar, sanitised, embodied and enacted, and the ways in which ‘the home’ and the ‘traditional’ terrain of the geopolitical (the international sphere) are in fact folded into each other in multiple ways. Domesticating Geopolitics will be of great use to students and researchers interested in geography and politics including popular geopolitics and human geography. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This volume examines children's and young people's emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and to provoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emotions in policy and practice, relevant to readers' own context.