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 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, stifling, in turn, opportunities for children to both claim and express their agency. 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. Conversely, as theory and practice around peacebuilding and the role of international interveners shifts, new opportunities emerge for bottom-up approaches. These changes, in turn, offer the chance to reimagine children’s roles in supporting peace and the place of international interveners in creating spaces for their involvement. Via the case of peacebuilding, this paper contributes to ongoing conceptual discussions of the omission of children in IR, while simultaneously offering an account which traces the multifaceted reasons for this exclusion in a discrete but important area of the field. Making lucid the shifts underway in peacebuilding theory and practice also provides fertile ground not only for reconsidering children’s agency. It also helps to demonstrate the role that actors, structures, contexts, norms, and ideas can play as either constraining or enabling the process of childing IR.
