Children, childhoods, and security studies: an introduction

Children and childhoods have not garnered much attention from either mainstream or critical currents of scholarship in International Relations and Security Studies, notwithstanding the significant ways in which they may be inseparable from the fields’ subject matters, core concepts, and ideas. Addressing this omission is not a matter of simply ‘bringing children in,’ however. Rather, it necessitates first coming to terms with how children are already present both as global political actors and as expressed through deeply held ideational commitments that enable and sustain our understandings of and engagements with security. At the same time, this is a presence that has only ever been partial inasmuch as the children and youth of the field’s imagining are not imbued with full and unqualified political subjecthood. Recovering robust subjecthood and a more nuanced understanding of lived childhoods promises, among other things, important theoretical correctives and more sophisticated conceptualization of emergent concepts like resilience.