Description
The dominant approach to peacebuilding since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been that of the liberal peace model, which contributes to the obfuscation of children in International Relations (IR) in multiple ways. Firstly, those intervening tend to promote a vision of the child, which rests primarily on Eurocentric ideals of childhood as a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity. Secondly, the process of peacebuilding under the liberal model, as top-down and technocratic, curtails the prospects for more bottom-up and local level engagement. Thirdly, liberal interventions pursue a liberal agenda, which tends to institutionalise the child as either risky or at risk and diffuses ideas about childhood in ways that are often decontextualised and culturally insensitive. If children have been overlooked in the context of IR, liberal peace interventions are both a reflection of this omission and a cause for the continued understandings of childhood which keep them hidden. Through the case study of peacebuilding, this paper contributes to ongoing conceptual discussions of the omission of children in IR, while simultaneously offering an account which both traces the multifaceted reasons for this exclusion, while also expanding on new opportunities for childing IR.
