Childing peacebuilding: imaginaries of childhood and the government of peace

Recent scholarship has shifted attention from children themselves to childhood as a social technology of governance through which wider political practices become intelligible. While this analytical move has been applied to international politics, war and security, it has yet to be systematically extended to peacebuilding. In response, this article develops the concept of childing peacebuilding. It argues that competing imaginaries of childhood provide a distinctive lens and vocabulary through which to examine how different approaches to peacebuilding imagine political subjecthood and, in doing so, legitimate distinct modalities of governance. The framework is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of liberal and adaptive peacebuilding. Rather than evaluating which paradigm is preferable, the article develops childing peacebuilding as a diagnostic framework for revealing how competing approaches to peacebuilding construct political communities and how those constructions both authorize and obscure different forms of governance.