Description
In this paper, we seek to contribute to ongoing debates around the value and use of the concept of militarization by focusing on the plurality of militarizations that take place in different social and political contexts in relation to children and childhoods. Children across the world navigate, negotiate, contest, and reconfigure ideas, practices, and processes that work to naturalise the use of organized violence in global politics and in their everyday lives. However, understandings of how different children and childhoods are militarized are profoundly political. In some settings, militarization functions as a technology that both authorises and normalises children’s involvement in violent practices or settings without disrupting wider notions of the sanctity of childhood. In others, militarization is framed as a problematic indicator of state aggression and the disruption of childhood. By centring how different modalities of war shape, and are shaped by, the lives of children in different parts of the world, producing different notions of childhood, we therefore aim to show the ongoing value of examining militarizations in their plurality.
