Description
What should we make of a warplane as a playground feature or war museums hosting children’s birthday parties? Children’s encounters with war narrative and the easy, often light-hearted coexistence of childhood and militarism across innumerable settings of everyday life are reminders that simultaneous with the militarization of childhood is the childing of militarism. Deeply invested with social meaning, imagined childhood brings content and implications to encounters with militarism that go beyond inculcation of children, affecting how militarized practices are decoded more generally. Children’s presence in militarized spaces, war remembrance, and more is, for other subjects as much as for children themselves, a constituent in making meaning of militarism as a benevolent force. We might therefore reframe the question of how militarized toys, spaces, and performatives have come to be seen as appropriate for children to one that asks whether, in a world dominated by martial politics, it could be otherwise. This paper develops conceptual insights urging that investigations into the ways militarism interpenetrates children’s lifeworlds must at the same time sustain affirmation of imagined childhood as an always-important social technology of governance that plays an indispensable part in the everyday (re)production of martial politics and the political viability of war.
