Description
Considering, on one hand, liberal militarism as a concept that shapes how liberal states are organized and produced through force, and on the other hand, the modern binaries of child/adult, civil/military, and peace/war as constitutive of the liberal social order, this article argues that children recruited by the (liberal) state’s Armed Forces are framed as “children who soldier” rather than as the ‘pathological’ child-soldier. Drawing from the case of the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), our analysis emphasizes that, through liberal militarism, the (child) subject links their identity, awareness, and behavior with the goals of an Armed Force – that is, soldiering. In this context, military recruitment is depicted as a peaceful, non-threatening path to becoming a productive, civilized (adult) soldier. Ultimately, unlike the ‘deviant’ child-soldier discourse, the category of children who soldier permits a political interpretation of ‘normalcy’ rooted in the liberal myth of the child/adult, civil/military, and peace/war binaries, which form the basis of modern narratives about the liberal state and childhood. In conclusion, the article highlights how the power dynamics at the core of the liberal state shape the militarization of children and how these narratives reinforce existing views on childhood and the modern international landscape, while marginalizing alternative perspectives of militarized children as deviance in distant lands.
