Description
The paper argues that examining the ‘adult-child’ binary as a distinct political hierarchy offers a valuable, but currently understudied, lens to international politics. Recent scholarly literature has already challenged the naturalisation of ‘adult’ and ‘child’ categories and highlighted their political nature and construction. The binary has also been effectively translated to the international, with multiple instances of this hierarchy mobilised to strategically label political entities as ‘childlike’. ‘Childlike’ entities are presumed to lack agency and expertise, therefore requiring guidance from those deemed more ‘mature’. I demonstrate the evocation of this binary in Russia's framing of its relationship with Ukraine and the "collective West". Infantilising discourses result in justification of domination and military intervention, which relies on the normalised ‘common-sense’ division between adults and children. Challenging the binary offers a framework to unpack established themes in IR, such as modernity, paternalism, and imperial power in workings of the international order.
