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Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

Series Editors
Oliver P. Richmond
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Annika Bjö rkdahl

Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Gëzim Visoka
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a

decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing
innovative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International
Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have
contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to
the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace.
Constructive critiques of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday
contributions to peace, the role of civil society and social movements,
international actors and networks, as well as a range of different
dimensions of peace (from peacebuilding, statebuilding, youth
contributions, photography, and many case studies) have been explored
so far. The series raises important political questions about what peace
is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well as where peace takes
place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on
the development of the international peace architecture, peace
processes, UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation,
statebuilding, and localised peace formation in practice and in theory. It
examines their implications for the development of local peace agency
and the connection between emancipatory forms of peace and global
justice, which remain crucial in different conflict-affected regions
around the world. This series’ contributions offer both theoretical and
empirical insights into many of the world's most intractable conflicts,
also investigating increasingly significant evidence about blockages to
peace.
More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​
gp/​series/​14500
Editors
J. Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak

Childhoods in Peace and Conflict

1st ed. 2021
Editors
J. Marshall Beier
Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON,
Canada

Jana Tabak
Department of International Relations, State University of Rio de
Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-74787-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-74788-6
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive

license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks,

service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the
absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the
relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general
use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the
advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate
at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered

company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham,
Switzerland
For the young people navigating peace and conflict
Acknowledgments
A debt of gratitude is owed to the many people without whom this
volume would not have been possible. As with all such projects, it is
founded on the strength of vast and intricate webs of relationships that
exceed the possibility of their being mapped. Not least among these are
the connections (whether literal or figurative) that oftentimes bind us
to those about whom we research and write. They include also the
growing number of colleagues working at the emerging nexus between
Critical Childhood Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies, Critical
Security Studies, and disciplinary International Relations more broadly.
From the outset, we have benefitted from the insights and
encouragement of students and colleagues alike. Like those further
afield in the vibrant and expanding networks of scholarship, activism,
and communities of practice around issues of children and childhoods
in varied contexts of peace and conflict, valued members of our home
departments bear special mention for their interest in and support of
our work on this and other projects. It simply is not possible to
recognize everyone we would like to here, but all have left indelible
impressions with their ideas, perspectives, support, and
encouragement. We continue to learn from our participation in these
networks and hope to contribute to them in return.
In more direct connection with the book itself, we are grateful to the
contributors for answering our initial open call for papers with original
and deeply intriguing proposals, for following through on the
submission of full chapters that delivered on this promise, and for
carrying out revisions to schedule while juggling the many new and
competing demands occasioned by a global pandemic. Challenging
times beget changing expectations around commitments earlier made
and we recognize the extraordinary effort needed in many cases to
follow through in spite of them. It has been our genuine pleasure to
work with and learn from each of you through this process and we look
forward to continuing conversations with hopes of further
collaborations in the future.
We are very pleased to have the volume included in the Rethinking
Peace and Conflict Studies series and thank the series editors, Oliver P.
Richmond, Annika Bjö rkdahl, and Gëzim Visoka, for their support and
for drawing the book into such good company. At Palgrave, Anca Pusca
and Katelyn Zingg ushered our proposal through the process of
approval and acceptance, while two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave
gave excellent and engaged feedback from which we have all gained
much. We are grateful to them all for their enthusiasm, their clear and
supportive editorial guidance, and for input into the framing and scope
of the volume—the final product is much stronger for all of it. Ashwini
Elango provided excellent project coordination, seeing us through the
production process and to publication swiftly and professionally.
And, as always, we are indebted to our families. Their love and
support, their patience as we tend to commitments, and the often-
profound insights they inspire are contributions in their own right, in
this and in all else we do.
January 2021

J. Marshall Beier

Jana Tabak
Contents
1 Other Childhoods:​Finding Children in Peace and Conflict
J. Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak
Part I Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict
2 Children as Soldiers or Civilians:​Norms and Politics in the
United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism on Children
Affected by Armed Conflict
Vanessa Bramwell
3 Voices of Ex-Child Soldiers from the War in Bosnia and
Herzegovina:​Between Public and Private Narratives
Dalibor Savić, Rusmir Piralić and Aleksandar Janković
4 ‘I Have the Right’:​Examining the Role of Children in the
#DimeLaVerdad Campaign
Diana Carolina García Gó mez
Part II Pedagogies of Children in Peace and Conflict
5 Children, Internationalism​, and Armistice Commemoration in
Britain, 1919–1939
Susannah Wright
6 Childhood, Education, and Everyday Militarism in China Before
and After 1949
Haolan Zheng
7 Primary Education and the French Army During the Algerian
War of Independence
Brooke Durham
8 Militarizing Citizenship in Ukraine:​“Strategy for the National-
Patriotic Education of Children and Youth” in Social Context
Vita Yakovlyeva
Part III Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict
9 More Than a Victim: Childhood Resilience in Malik Sajad’s
Munnu
Suniti Madaan and Cijo Joy
10 Children and Childhood on the Borderland of Desired Peace
and Undesired War:​A Case of Ukraine
Urszula Markowska-Manista and Oksana Koshulko
11 Production of ‘Safe’ Spaces for Adivasi Children and the Armed
Conflict of Bastar, India
Rashmi Kumari
12 Raising the Empire’s Children?​Everyday Insecurities and
Parenting the Privileged in the United States
Jennifer Riggan
Index
List of Tables
Table 3.​1 Dominant discourses on ex-child soldiers in BiH

Table 3.​2 Discourses on childhood

Table 3.​3 Typical motives for joining the armed forces and their
characteristics

Table 3.​4 List of interviewees

Notes on Contributors
J. Marshall Beier is a Professor of Political Science at McMaster
University. In his current research, he investigates issues around
children’s political subjecthood, visual and affective economies of
children in abject circumstances, and imagined childhood as a
technology of global governance. His publications include: Discovering
Childhood in International Relations, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020);
Childhood and the Production of Security, ed. (Routledge, 2017); The
Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, ed.
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal
Critical Studies on Security and his work has appeared in journals
including Childhood, Children’s Geographies, Contemporary Security
Policy, Critical Military Studies, Global Governance, Global Responsibility
to Protect, International Political Sociology, International Politics,
International Studies Review, Journal of Human Rights, Security
Dialogue, and Third World Quarterly.

Vanessa Bramwell is a Ph.D. candidate at Massey University, New

Zealand, examining the role of norms in the UN infrastructure on child
protection in armed conflict. Her general research interest is in civilian
protections in conflict through the disciplinary lenses of politics,
International Relations, and Security Studies, and in communicating
across wider disciplinary boundaries in the theorization of conflict-
affected people. She is working on contributions to several publications
due in 2021, while building academic teaching experience. She lives
with her husband and two sons in Wellington.

Brooke Durham is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History at

Stanford University. Her work focuses on the history of the French
Empire and decolonization in North and West Africa in the twentieth
century. She is completing her dissertation on social work, education,
and human development during decolonization in Algeria.
Diana Carolina García Gómez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Childhood
Studies Department at Rutgers University—Camden, New Jersey, USA.
Drawing from the fields of childhood studies, memory studies,
decolonial thought, and international relations, her research focuses on
children’s and youth political participation in peacebuilding, collective
memory, and social movements in post-conflict contexts, particularly in
post-accord Colombia. Her dissertation, Cultivating Hope: Children’s and
Youth’s Participation in Collective Memory Processes in Post-Accord
Colombia, centers children’s and youth participation in transitional
contexts by examining their engagement with collective memory
processes in urban and rural settings. She holds a B.A. in Political
Science from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá , Colombia, and
an M.A. in Cognition and Communication from the University of
Copenhagen, Denmark.

Aleksandar Janković is an Assistant Professor at the University of

Banja Luka, Faculty of Political Sciences, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He
specializes in theoretical sociology. His research interests are in the
areas of social inequalities, sociology of youth, post-socialist
transformation and ethno-nationalism, and social statistics.

Cijo Joy teaches English Literature as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc)

at the University of Delhi. He has an M.Phil. from the University of Delhi
in Adivasi folktales from the state of Jharkhand. In his research, he
traces shifts and changes of the Adivasi identity from precolonial to
contemporary times and situates it in contestation with caste
hierarchies as well as the colonial and postcolonial state. His research
was inspired from his work with cultural groups focusing on archiving
folk songs across India. His activism has focused on issues of civil
liberties and democratic rights. He is currently working on the novel
and textual articulation of temporalities in the city in South Asia. His
research interests also include critical theory and childhood.

Oksana Koshulko is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Global Economy at Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine. She has an
M.A. degree in Economy and Society from Lancaster University and a
Ph.D. in Economic Sciences. Her areas of research are Women’s Studies
and Migration Studies, including Refugees and Asylum Seeking,
inspired by the occupation and war in Ukraine since 2014. In 2019, she
prepared a master’s thesis for Lancaster University, entitled “Exploring
patriotism of women engaged in revolution and war in Ukraine.” She
has published over 140 scientific papers, books, and chapters in books
in various countries, including the USA and the UK. Dr. Koshulko
currently studies women’s and children’s issues and society in general
as impacted by the occupation and war in Ukraine.

Rashmi Kumari is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Childhood

Studies at Rutgers University. As a scholar trained in Social
Anthropology, she also holds a Women’s and Gender Studies certificate
from Rutgers University. Her research engages with residential schools
for Adivasi (Indigenous) Children in Chhattisgarh, India. She is
currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation entitled, “Shaping
Indigenous Girls as National Subjects: Role of Residential Schools in
Central India.” Her research explores the intersectionality of
indigeneity, age, and gender in the lives of Adivasi children living in
highly militarized contexts. She engages multimodal ethnographic
fieldwork utilizing photography and documentary filmmaking
components. Through multimodal work, Rashmi engages Adivasi youth
in the ethnographic processes while also disseminating filmmaking
techniques. Rashmi’s field engagements can be found at https://​
rashmish.​xyz.
Suniti Madaan teaches English Literature as an Assistant Professor
(Ad-hoc) at the University of Delhi. She has a doctorate from Jawaharlal
Nehru University in the area of Indian comics, looking specifically at the
evolution of popular children’s comic, Tinkle, from the 1980s to
contemporary times. In her doctoral work she reads caste, gender, and
class politics in children’s comics as an expression of middle-class
popular culture in India. She has also translated a short story and some
poems from Hindi to English for the Sahitya Akademi journal, Indian
Literature. She is an active member of the Indian Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has presented
research papers in its international conferences. Her research interests
include children’s literature, childhood, Indian English writing, and
popular culture.

Urszula Markowska-Manista field researcher and contemporary

nomad, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of
Education and Lecture & Program Co-Director of M.A. Childhood
Studies and Children’s Rights, University of Applied Sciences,
Potsdam. She conducts field research on the everyday life and
education of children in culturally diversified environments, among
Indigenous communities (Central Africa), children “out of place” (the
Horn of Africa), national and ethnic minorities (the South Caucasus), as
well as children and youth with migrant and refugee backgrounds. She
researches, publishes, and teaches extensively on topics related to
childhood and youth studies through Indigenous, postcolonial
perspective, nondiscrimination, and participatory approaches to
research, children’s rights, and education in pre-dysfunctional contexts
and culturally diversified environments.

Rusmir Piralić is an ex-child soldier participant of war in BiH. He

holds a bachelor’s degree in criminology from the University of
Sarajevo, Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies,
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Currently, he acts as president of War Veterans
Association—Juvenile Volunteers of the War of Independence and
Liberation ʼ92-ʼ95 Canton Sarajevo. He is a Peace Activist and an
Independent Researcher. He is presently involved in the “Children of
War to Children of Peace, Learning from the War Past” project—a youth
ethnic reconciliation project sponsored and provided by Visegrad Fund
implemented in BiH.

Jennifer Riggan is a Professor of International Studies at Arcadia

University. An educational and political anthropologist, her research
and publications focus on Eritrea and Ethiopia to explore: the
relationships between political identities and the state; teachers and
political instability; and, displacement, containment, and temporality.
She has held fellowships from the Wolf Humanities Center (2020–
2021), the Georg Arnhold Program (2019), Fulbright (Addis Ababa
University 2016–2017 and Asmara University 2004–2005), The
Spencer Foundation/ National Academy of Education (2012–2014),
and the Social Science Research Council (2004–2005). She is the author
of The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization and the
Education of Eritrea (Temple University Press, 2016). She is presently
co-authoring a book entitled, The Hosting State and Its Restless Guests:
Containment, Displacement and Time Among Eritrean Refugees in
Ethiopia.

Dalibor Savić is an Assistant Professor at the University of Banja

Luka, Faculty of Political Sciences, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He
specializes in social science research methods. His research interests
are in the areas of applied sociology, sociology of youth, sociology of
sport, and peace studies. He is currently involved in the “Children of
War to Children of Peace, Learning from the War Past” project—a youth
ethnic reconciliation project sponsored and provided by Visegrad Fund
implemented in BiH. Previously, he was a research team member for
the “Life Projects of Young (Re)emigrants from Bosnia and
Herzegovina” project.
Jana Tabak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is
the author of The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for
Progress (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Her other publications
include: a co-edited special issue of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child
Research; a book entitled Organizações Internacionais: História e
Práticas, 2nd edition, ed. with Monica Herz and Andrea Ribeiro
Hoffmann (Elsevier, 2015); and, Modernity at Risk: Complex
Emergencies, Humanitarianism, Sovereignty, with Carlos Frederico
Pereira da Gama (Lambert Academic, 2012). She is the author of
articles in the journals Contexto Internacional, Cultures et Conflits,
Global Responsibility to Protect, and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy.
She has taught in the areas of international organizations, peace and
conflict studies, and children and war.

Susannah Wright is a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Research

Tutor in the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, UK. She
has researched and published articles and a monograph on themes of
children, moral education, and citizenship in England in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current research
considers themes of young people’s engagement with war and peace,
and with internationalism and pacifism, from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Until the end of 2019 she was co-editor of the journal History of
Education and is now Hon. Secretary of the History of Education Society
(UK).

Vita Yakovlyeva holds a Ph.D. in Social Theory and Cultural Studies

and is currently a Research Associate at the Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research
interests lie at the intersection of critical studies of childhood, its
materiality, and social memory. She has previously studied childhood
memories in relation to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
establishment of independent Ukraine, focusing on the event of the
Chernobyl nuclear explosion as a formative socio-political framework
still resonant in the Ukrainian society.

Haolan Zheng is an Associate Professor of China studies at Keio

University, Japan. She received a B.A. from Fudan University and a Ph.D.
from Keio University. She was visiting scholar at Stanford University in
2019–2020. Her research focuses on grassroots politics in modern and
contemporary China. Her first book, entitled Chinese Rural Society and
Revolution: The Historical Transformation of Jinggangshan’s Villages (in
Japanese), was awarded the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 2010.
Her works have been appeared in many academic journals and books in
Japan. Her co-edited book, Mao’s Campaign and Ordinary People’s Daily
Life, will be published in 2021. She is currently working on everyday
politics in socialist China, from the perspective of children and youth.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
J. M. Beier, J. Tabak (eds.), Childhoods in Peace and Conflict, Rethinking Peace and
Conflict Studies
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_1

1. Other Childhoods: Finding Children

in Peace and Conflict
J. Marshall Beier1 and Jana Tabak2
(1) Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton,
ON, Canada
(2) Department of International Relations, State University of Rio de
Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

J. Marshall Beier
Email: mbeier@mcmaster.ca

Introduction
Childhoods intersect peace and conflict in myriad ways, though
renderings of children in these contexts are all too often reduced to one
of two dominant, if quite distinct, framings: hapless victims or child
soldiers. While critical interventions of recent years have begun to
work toward the recovery of children’s agency and to sketch the
complex heterogeneity of childhoods in both framings, the framings
themselves remain dominant. The contributors to this volume
approach redress of this by way of offering a collection of nuanced
accounts of children and childhoods in varied contexts of peace and
conflict across political time and space, finding other childhoods
constituted in and constituting interstitial sites and practices.
Organized according to three broad and overlapping themes
(ontologies, pedagogies, and contingencies), each chapter explores the
complexities of a particular case study, providing new insights into the
ways children’s lives figure in engagement, ambivalence, contestation,
and resistance in and through the (re)production of political violence
and (anti)militarisms. Venturing beyond the well-worn paths of work
dominated by the iconic figure of the child soldier (in most
conventional renderings, typically prepubescent, male, African) and the
objectified child victim (exemplified in ubiquitous images of acutely
vulnerable children in circumstances of abjection), each urges us to
glimpse other childhoods, in places beyond those that have tended to
draw most attention. They do so from a variety of disciplinary,
experiential, and (inter)relational standpoints. Together, they bring into
comparative perspective children’s experiences of peace and conflict
across a range of less familiar contexts via original inquiries into
specific cases of children and childhoods in peace and conflict
including, among others, classroom curricula on war commemoration
in the United Kingdom, pedagogy in the People’s Republic of China,
resistance movements in Colombia, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and
North American parenting practices. A further important contribution
is in foregrounding childhood agency, treating militarized, conflict-
affected, and peacebuilding subjects as more than ‘passive skin’
inscribed by others and recovering something of the ways in which they
perform, acquiesce in, and resist militarisms in their own everydays (de
Certeau 1984).
Children as victims appear primarily as the ‘emotional scenery’
(Brocklehurst 2015: 32) of conflict and security literatures, critical and
mainstream alike. Images of child soldiers or child victims of war
similarly manifest as potent political resources while also encoding
much in the way of claims about various peoples and contexts. Among
other things, the overwhelming focus—albeit with a few notable
exceptions—on sub-Saharan African contexts does the political work of
reproducing colonial relations of power (Macmillan 2009; Lee-Koo
2011) whilst mystifying myriad intersections of militarisms with the
everyday lives and lifeworlds of children elsewhere. In particular, the
militarized childhoods of the comparatively privileged environs of the
advanced (post)industrial societies of the Global North are due more
attention (see Beier 2011). Of course, as Diana Carolina García Gó mez
reminds us in Chapter 4, “Children and youth are more visible in war
than they are in peace.” War understandably draws our gaze, but
looking only to the exceptional or the spectacular confounds our notice
of what may be equally instructive in contexts more apt to register as
mundane and quotidian (Beier and Tabak 2020). Disturbing the sharp
distinction between war and peace—understanding them as
imbricated and interpenetrated along practices of war, war preparation,
war commemoration, and more—helps us in uncovering a more
complicated picture and understanding a fuller range of militarized
childhoods. At the same time, we should take care to hold these insights
together with those to be gleaned from situations in which children are
more visibly—or perhaps more recognizably—affected by war. As a
collection, the chapters gathered in this volume make visible a range of
different contexts of children and childhoods in war and peace.
Together, they provide a rich case/empirical complement to the
existing literatures seeking to broaden our understanding of childhoods
in zones of conflict (Brocklehurst 2006; Jacob 2014; Huynh et al. 2015;
D’Costa 2016), children as peacebuilders (McEvoy-Levy 2006, 2018;
Pruitt 2013; Berents 2018), the child soldier as (de)constitutive of
global ideational orders (Tabak 2020), and theorizations of children
and childhoods in global political perspective more broadly (Benwell
and Hopkins 2016; Beier 2020).
The organization of the volume along themes of ontologies,
pedagogies, and contingencies should not be taken to mean that each
chapter speaks to only one of these or that any of the three is not
relevant to all chapters. Rather, it reflects our reading of the sum of the
chapters in each part as an illuminating ‘constellation’ of insights that
contribute to complicating dominant knowledges, ‘common senses,’
and habits of thought along lines of each particular theme. In the realm
of ontologies, fundamental questions about the nature of childhood,
central to debates animating Critical Childhood Studies, are crucially at
stake. Here, childhood defined by deficit and understandings of
children as presocial “human becomings” (Uprichard 2008) have come
under sustained critique from a new sociology of childhood (Burman
1994; James et al. 1998) that places the accent on assets and abilities in
its recovery of children’s active and engaged political subjecthood in
ways more consistent with concomitant moves toward apprehending
them as rights-bearing subjects (Mayall 2000; Alanen 2010)
meaningfully engaged in (re)making the social worlds they inhabit.
Still, the children and childhoods ‘called into being’ by the sorts of ideas
and practices of which these currents have been critical are,
nevertheless, among what we might call ‘actually existing childhoods’ in
the sense that they have social and political currency and become the
basis for ways of relating to and with children—inasmuch as they
remain dominant and hardened into ontology in the everyday
governance of social worlds, they retain important relevance even as
we work to reveal their indeterminacies and the unequal relations of
power they sustain.
The second broad theme turns on pedagogies whereby myriad
knowledges, performances, practices, and competencies may
contribute to the militarization of children’s lives, including in but not
limited to societies of the Global North. While this includes purposeful
inculcation and even martial instruction, it emerges too in school
curricula, semi-formal extracurricular programming, and experiential
learning in everyday life. Treating these circulations as pedagogies is
not to suggest that there need necessarily be a conscious
instrumentality giving rise to them. The thrust of some contributions in
this part therefore reveals heterogeneous assemblages, understanding
that actors can be a part of an assemblage without necessarily sharing
the same aims. Here too, we see at the same time children’s agency at
work in remaking and resisting. As Susannah Wright shows In Chapter
5, even in the context of direct and programmatic instruction, children
“in varied ways take on, amplify, modify, or sometimes resist, core…
messages.” Pedagogies here are understood as practices of creative and
complex exchange where the terms of sociopolitical relationships
across both time and space are in a constant state of negotiation.
Such negotiation is very much at issue too in the third and final part,
“Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” which includes
investigations that foreground questions of responsibility to children.
Here, contributors assess, among other things, resilience-building, the
demands of protection, and the material and psychosocial effects of
childhoods lived in the shadow of war. Through all of these, we glimpse
not only the subjecthood of children but also the ambivalence of the
adult world in the navigation of risk and of responsibility to children.
Reading these contributions together, we see too how children’s
subjecthood is simultaneously mediated by, in interaction with, and
engaged in refigurations of resilience, protection, enlistment, and
unequal relations of power. These and other contingencies of lived
childhoods remind us that children and childhoods are, like adults and
adulthoods, constituted together with the particular social worlds of
which they are part. To speak of children and childhoods in peace and
conflict, then, demands that we sustain critical interrogation of the
homogenizing discourses that flatten alterity in deference to hegemonic
tropes of both childhood and child. We are thus called to be attentive
not just to intersections of childhoods with peace and conflict but to the
particular circumstances, idiosyncrasies, and peculiarities of everyday
lives also—a more situated view of children’s agency, in light of
culturally and historically specific mediations particular to post-Soviet
Eastern Europe and Russia (described by Urszula Markowska-Manista
and Oksana Koshulko in Chapter 10), is but one for example. Together,
the varied contributions to this volume, rich in such empirical detail
and insight, sketch for us some exemplars to hold in comparative
perspective so that we might broaden our gaze beyond the
unidimensional framings of child soldiers and child victims in ways that
will perhaps aid in keeping sight of children as meaningful subjects
interacting in, with, through, and beyond peace and conflict.

Other Childhoods and Other Emergencies

Civil emergencies, wars among them, always press demands on
children and, in so doing, they can be tremendously illuminating.
Though it seems somewhat strange to think about it in this way, there is
a perhaps fortuitous aspect to the unforeseen circumstance that this
volume has happened to come together at a time of acute uncertainty
and disruption, layered over the demands and challenges of navigating
peace and conflict. As research for the chapters that follow was
conducted and, later, as they were being drafted, the world had not yet
heard of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. By the time they were
proceeding through the process of review and revision, however, we
were in the grips of the declared COVID-19 pandemic. And, as they
moved together into production toward publication of the book, hope
inspired by the distribution of promising new vaccines came together
with renewed lockdowns and disheartening news of the emergence and
spread of a more transmissible mutated form of the virus. Among its
many lessons, the global health emergency that arose from the early
months of 2020 onward brought complicated webs of interconnection,
interdependence, and inequality into stark relief. In its uneven (and
unevenly experienced) ebbs and flows, the pandemic revealed not only
how circuits of local and global interaction enabled it to spread and to
surge but also how structural inequalities left some groups or
communities (and, within them, some individuals) more vulnerable.
From the local to the global, it exposed material inequality and
disenfranchisement from political power as important predictors of
risk and of what would be demanded of whom. At the same time, it saw
the urgent suspension of norms and routines of everyday life, including
those affecting the regulation and governance of social agency.
As these and other circumstances and implications of the pandemic
and the measures undertaken to address it have unfolded, it has been
impossible not to see parallels in the insights to be drawn from the
chapters herein, all which turn on varied experiences of children and
childhoods shaped by and shaping peace and conflict. For many,
children among them, COVID-19 manifested in ways similar to
emergencies associated with armed conflict. Broadly, exigencies of the
pandemic have frequently been cast as matters of human or national
security whilst response measures are framed in terms that are highly
militarized, often with direct appeal to storied wars of the past as
exemplars of individual duty and sacrifice to collective aims (Beier
2021). The ubiquity of war metaphors in official and vernacular
pandemic discourses (see Isaacs and Priesz 2020; Lohmeyer and Taylor
2020; Semino 2021) is not incidental. Rather, it reflects the important
work war narratives and metaphors do in making exceptional measures
intelligible and setting threat in externalized opposition to an idealized
collective identity in ways that obfuscate inequality even as they
generalize responsibility. War and war preparation, like pandemics,
entail disruption, mobilization, and, of course, casualties.
Still, apart from its temporal coincidence with the later stages of
this project, and whatever the material and discursive parallels, why
pause to comment on COVID-19 at the outset of a book on distinctive
experiences of children in peace and conflict? Here, we would point to a
further important dimension of pandemic responses as particularly
salient: direct appeals by sovereign power to children as indispensable
social agents. In the early days of the declared pandemic, a number of
national leaders called on the children of their countries to assume
responsibility for a range of mitigation measures that included, among
other things, practicing hand hygiene and physical distancing,
supporting public health workers, personal and family emergency
planning, and even reporting violations of public health orders.
Reminiscent of and, in some instances, rhetorically linked to the roles
assumed by children in the World Wars of the twentieth century—from
food conservation campaigns and scrap drives to agricultural labour
and work in munitions plants—the summons to children to contribute
in a new moment of civil emergency places their recognized
subjecthood visibly in tension with their enduring disenfranchisement
from social power (Beier 2021). We are thus urged to sustain
affirmation of their agency together with recognition of their unique
vulnerability, not losing sight of how the latter may bear
disproportionately in their experience of the present emergency (see
Lundy and Stalford 2020). These are sensibilities that likewise promise
more nuanced readings of the cases of children navigating contexts of
organized political violence, whether in zones of conflict, post-conflict,
or relative peace and security.
The pandemic is instructive too for how it has exacerbated
challenges faced by children in existing conditions of abjection the
world over (see, for example, Bö rner et al. 2020). For those already
experiencing war, forced migration, famine, climate disaster, or other
such exigent circumstances, COVID-19 is folded in as a constituent of a
complex emergency, characterized by coeval and intersecting crises
straining the social infrastructure and resources necessary to address
them. Like the pandemic, situations of armed conflict are not social
contexts unto themselves, somehow flattening alterity in the way that
appeals to war metaphors and narratives might suggest. Rather, they
involve myriad intersections of position and prerogative, abjection and
adversity, possibility and promise. They intersect also with
complexities of lifeways and inclinations expressed in agential remit
and, thus, produce unique and diverse expressions and experiences of
peace and conflict alike. And this demands that we think beyond the
iconic figures of the child soldier or the hapless child victim when we
think about children’s experiences both populating contexts of peace
and conflict and as important agential beings, variously making,
remaking, and unmaking those contexts in all their complex exigencies.

Structure of the Volume

Through their various points of entry into children’s experiences of
peace and conflict, the contributors to this volume challenge fixed and
bounded understandings of childhood. Taking a range of different
empirical and conceptual starting points, the borders of what children
are and how they relate to their own lifeworlds are problematized in
the chapters that follow—individually and in reading them together—
so their complexities can be explored. Of particular interest, children
are analyzed as political subjects, and possible discontinuities between
‘places for children’ (designated as safe spaces by parents, state
authorities, and international organizations) and ‘children’s places’ (as
negotiated or constructed by children and adults) are brought to the
fore. Across varied empirical cases and contexts spanning sociopolitical
time and space, the child–adult relationship, despite its power
imbalance, is discussed in terms of “interdependencies” (Punch 2001).
Even in armed conflict zones, children negotiate and resist the
constraints of an inside/outside coding of spaces and hierarchies and
reaffirm their relative autonomy within the boundaries that limit their
choices, creating their own meaningful worlds and participating in the
construction of the lives of those around them and of the societies in
which they live.
While engaging with debates in critical approaches to International
Relations, Childhood Studies, Anthropology, and other fields and
disciplines, this book does not purport to overcome the dichotomies
between children as vulnerable versus competent or dependent versus
autonomous, but seeks to explore how these sorts of ideas about and
practices around children and childhood have social and political
currency and become determinant of possibilities (and the limits on
possibilities) of specific kinds of subjectivities, life experiences, and
objects. At the same time, the chapters herein expose how challenging
and uncomfortable might be the call to contest the ontologies of
childhood and the practices of protection based on this particular
category. One of the aims of this volume is precisely to confront such
narratives about children and childhood and to investigate their
tensions, malleability, and contingencies. In doing so, room is opened to
engage in a further dialogue about the nature and boundaries of the
agentive, competent, knowing child who makes meaning with regard to
her/his own lifeworld (Spyrou et al. 2019).
Furthermore, both ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ operate here as
“analytic prisms” (Jenks 2005: 420) through which contributors
explore their constitutive capacity and the power relations that
permeate and authorize the ontologized ideas not only of the child and
the modern political subject, but also about peace, conflict, and the
nation-state. In this sense, besides investigating the ontologized ideas
and concepts that produce a universalizing—but not universal—
concept of children and childhood, this volume invests in
problematizing what is produced and reproduced in the social order
when pedagogies of children—or, ordering mechanisms—are put into
practice and contingencies of children overflow the limits of the ideal
child whose borders enable, respectively, support and security opposed
to uncertainty and danger.
The first part, “Ontologies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” aims at
challenging dominant ontologies that prefigure childhood in particular
ways. The three chapters in this opening part—taking up, respectively,
who counts as a child worthy of protection in armed conflict situations,
questions of voice and participation in the war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and the diminution of agency in the peacebuilding
process in Colombia—equip the reader to engage with the complexity
of lived childhoods and to take children as bona fide political subjects
even in cases where they might be profoundly disempowered, under
threat, and consummately objectified.
In Chapter 2 “Children as Soldiers or Civilians: Norms and Politics in
the United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism on Children
Affected by Armed Conflict,” Vanessa Bramwell invites us to reflect
upon what violations against children in armed conflict situations are
grave enough to trigger strong demands for international intervention.
In her analysis of the practices of protection developed within the
United Nations’ thematic architecture of Children and Armed Conflict
(CAAC), including the six grave violations against children during
armed conflicts which have been specified in several Security Council
resolutions, the child soldier—or, the child with a gun—emerges in the
Western imagination as the hapless victim worthy of protection while
the demands and needs of other conflict-affected children are not
addressed in an appropriate and relevant way. Focusing on the gaps of
the UN’s protection mechanisms towards children in armed conflict
situations rather than on the international response to the child soldier
problem, Bramwell draws our attention to which images of children
suffering generate public discomfort and elicit global action whilst
other violations against children are silenced. Here lies a puzzle at the
center of the international interventions as they are continuously at
play: what are the limits of protection? Which children’s experiences
are risky enough to trigger international attention? What deviations
from the ontologies of childhood need to be addressed as things to be
treated/resisted/protected? Either maintaining its over-focus on child
soldiers in the CAAC mandate or expanding the list of violations against
children in armed conflict situations, the United Nations keeps framing
the borders of childhood in a particular bounded way, despite its many
exceptions and silences.
In a similar vein, Chapter 3, “Voices of Ex-Child Soldiers from the
War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Between Public and Private
Narratives,” also focuses on the ‘child soldier phenomenon.’ However,
instead of exploring the international interventions towards children,
Dalibor Savić, Rusmir Piralić, and Aleksandar Janković address the
experiences of children’s participation in war based on their own voices
and perspectives. In this regard, it is worth noting that one of the
authors, Rusmir Piralić, is himself a former child-soldier in the War in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and today is a peace activist. If, on the
one hand, Bramwell investigates the limits of international
interventions aimed at protecting children in wars, Savić, Piralić, and
Janković address children’s experiences in armed conflict beyond what
has been articulated by the humanitarian and the local ethno-
nationalist discourses. The ontologies of the ‘child soldier phenomenon’
are not only destabilized through children’s own stories, but also by
bringing to the fore children’s participation in a war that took place in
the 1990s in Europe. Within the particular construction of the child-
soldier as a vulnerable and exploited victim that needs to be saved,
little mention is made of the lived realities of children’s participation in
wars outside the African continent. As such, Savić, Riralić, and
Janković’s contribution opens space to acknowledge the participation
of children in wars beyond the usual focus on the Global South or, more
specifically, the characterization of child-soldiers as an essentially
‘African problem.’
In order to problematize the idea of child soldiers as passive
participants in war and post-war events, this contribution explores the
similarities and differences between the auto/biographical narratives
of former child soldiers and the hegemonic narratives about them in
BiH society. While there is much that is revealing in these testimonies,
something that is especially interesting is that, although many of them
self-identify as victims of the war, this does not mean their varied
experiences as soldiers—which tell different stories of oppression,
participation, and resistance—may be erased or forgotten. Differently
from the humanitarian discourse that articulates the child-soldier
either as the hapless victim or the dangerous monster, Savić, Piralić,
and Janković draw our attention to the messy, ambiguous, and
sometimes paradoxical experiences of child-soldiers in wars.
Furthermore, by making their own voices audible, the chapter points
out the limits of the static identity of the child soldier, which is
rendered possible by its relationship to the category of the child. As
such, exploring hegemonic ideas about child soldiers and their
childhoods means not only challenging the idea that child-soldiers are,
by definition, an exception to the ontologies of childhood, but also
seeing the conception of child as uncertain.
In Chapter 4, “‘I Have the Right’: Examining the Role of Children in
the #DimeLaVerdad Campaign,” Diana Carolina García Gó mez turns the
focus to the post-conflict situation and children’s engagement in the
Colombian peacebuilding process. Exploring the ways in which the
post-accord institutions in the country are conceptualizing children’s
participation in the process of building a “New Colombia” after over
half of a century of armed conflict, Gó mez analyzes the limits of
children’s roles and whether the #DimeLaVerdad campaign subverts or
upholds the hierarchical adult–child relation. What is more, she argues
that recognizing that children are not only victims of the conflict, but
also perpetrators and peacebuilders, opens space for children to share
their stories and to be recognized as citizens of the Colombian society.
Regardless of what they did while engaged in conflict, children’s acts
were presented in terms of their own experiences, allowing them to
escape from the bounded and fixed narrative of child victimhood
caused by war and be recognized by adults as social and political actors.
Through analysis of the campaign, Gó mez unpacks the ontology of
children as defenseless objects in need of protection and explores the
limits and potentialities of children’s political subjecthood and their
role in negotiating peace in transitional contexts.
Together, the chapters gathered together in the first part of the book
simultaneously challenge and offer unique analysis on the limits and
silences of the ontologies of childhood, which articulate the borders of
the concept of child as the innocent, vulnerable being who must be
properly prepared to become a rational, productive, educated adult and
citizen of the future. The ideas of both the child and childhood, as they
emerge and are investigated through these three chapters, speak to the
ways in which relations of power are bound up with and are mutually
constituted by dominant ontological renderings of childhood. At the
same time, presenting cases that address these issues in ways and
under circumstances not anticipated by prevailing common senses,
they are revealing of the varied ways in which children’s political
subjecthood is at work in the making, remaking, and unmaking of these
same commitments and, with them, of the social worlds of their
everyday lives.
The contributions to the second part of the book, “Pedagogies of
Children in Peace and Conflict,” reveal heterogeneous assemblages—
authorized by hegemonic ideas of peace, conflict, and the nation-state
—that operate as ordering mechanisms by attributing distinctive rights
and duties to both children and adults, determining the objects and
agents of protection, identifying violations of such protections, and
setting the scope for education programs. In Chapter 5, “Children,
Internationalism, and Armistice Commemoration in Britain, 1919–
1939,” Susannah Wright addresses internationalism and armistice
commemoration in the interwar years in Britain by focusing on both
how the internationalists of the League of Nations Union (LNU)
engaged with children and childhood as part of their armistice-related
activity, and how children engaged with them as well. Children were
understood as important audiences of the main message articulated
through the commemorations—that is, to remember and to honor the
lives lost during the First World War in order to avoid the same
happening again and, in doing so, to promote international
understanding and peace. Exploring LNU texts, Wright reveals how
children were depicted as the “internationalists of the future” and, as
such, frequently neglected as political subjects in their present time.
Performing a pleasing visual spectacle in front of the audiences,
children were prepared to act as capable and productive adults of the
future who would preserve internationalist and peaceful communities
—or, as Wright puts it, “They were to be the keepers of an
internationalist inheritance.”
Children’s high profile in modern society as the hope—and
instrument—for a progressive and peaceful future cannot be denied.
Wright’s chapter reminds of Erica Burman’s (2008: 11) observation
that, “[…] childhood becomes a site of multiple emotional as well as
political investments: a repository of hope yet a site of
instrumentalisation for the future, but with an equal and opposite
nostalgia for the past.” Burman’s argument turns visible the ambivalent
meaning of the child: at the same time that the child is (re)produced as
a symbol of the promise of a progressive future, s/he also serves to
display to adult society its own state of once untutored and
undeveloped difference, which needs to be monitored and subject to
different forms of regulation and training (Tabak 2020). Considering
this process of regulation and training of the child—among the
pedagogies of interest to us—children are placed in designated spaces,
schools being one of them where children can be developed so a
peaceful and secure future can be guaranteed.
Similarly, in Chapter 6, “Childhood, Education, and Everyday
Militarism in China Before and After 1949,” Haolan Zheng focuses on
elementary educational policy in China in order to show the similarities
between the Chinese Nationalist Party and Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) understandings of the ideal child, and how this particular
understanding articulates children’s daily lives. Furthermore, Zheng
explores the intersections between schooling and militarization by
addressing how children in China were not only objects of education,
but also widely mobilized to assimilate and practice militarism in their
daily lives, such as participating in political campaigns to support war
under the highly top-down mobilization system of the CCP during the
Korean War. Of particular interest, Zheng draws our attention to the
process through which the ideal child is constructed in the course of
Chinese nation-building. In other words, the model of the child—or, the
future Chinese citizen—whose life is fully militarized is simultaneously
associated with and authorizes a very specific type of nation-state,
whose limits are carefully articulated by and through the particular
ideas of sovereignty, order, peace, and conflict.
In Chapter 7, “Primary Education and The French Army During the
Algerian War of Independence,” Brooke Durham extends the
investigation of the investment in schooling, with a focus on the
primary education of rural Algerian children in Grande Kabylie
provided by the French military during the Algerian War of
Independence. As argued throughout the chapter, not only did investing
in Algerian children’s education allow the French military to present a
responsible and humanitarian face of its military operations, but
primary schools also operated as strategic spaces for controlling the
risks related to children, who were not just students but potential
supporters of the nationalist militants alongside their parents.
Effectively, by disciplining the child through school education, risks of
instability in the former colony might be kept at bay. From Chapters 6
and 7, it seems that schooling occupies a central role in pedagogies of
children once the process of educational learning prepares the child by
imparting knowledge so they can become productive, and ‘properly’
socialized (in accordance with particular political aims) citizens in the
future. Within these terms, these contributions are in close dialogue
with Nikolas Rose’s (1999: 124) argument that education is recognized
not only as an individual right for the child, but also operates as a social
and collective right, since it implies the “duty of each individual to
improve and civilize themselves for the benefit of the social health of
the community.”
By its turn, Chapter 8, “Militarizing Citizenship in Ukraine: ‘Strategy
for the National-Patriotic Education of Children and Youth’ in Social
Context,” also seeks to analyze the role of education policies, here in
framing the relationships between Ukraine and its youngest citizens.
Specifically, Vita Yakovlyeva explores the efforts of the 2016–2020
Strategy for the Ukrainian National-Patriotic Education of Children and
Youth in developing a unified system of national military-patriotic
education based primarily on ideas of militarization and territorial
defence in a country impacted by an armed conflict. As spaces for
preparing children to become (a particular kind of) adult citizen, this
network of state and non-government educational institutions,
governed by social and educational policy, operates as an important
mechanism for promoting military training and encouragement of
children and youth to take on an active role in defence of Ukraine’s
sovereignty and territorial unity based on particular—although
hegemonic—ideas of nationality, ethnicity, and militarism. Together
with the other chapters in this part, this contribution draws our
attention to the pedagogies of children as ordering mechanisms that
carefully articulate and authorize the limits not only of the bounded
ontologies of childhood, but also of dominant understandings of
sovereignty, nation-state, peace, and conflict.
However, what happens when the limits of pedagogies are
destabilized by experiences and images of children that overflow what
is prescribed by their ontologies? The third and last part of book,
“Contingencies of Children in Peace and Conflict,” explores questions
that emerge when the encounter between children’s actual life
experiences and their idealized childhood is more effacing than
engaging. While focusing on different contexts, all four chapters of this
part investigate questions of responsibility to children when the
processes of pedagogies are simply not enough. That is, the limits of
these myriad knowledges, performances, and practices lie wherever
there are children engaged in experiences that do not fit into the
ontologies of childhood and of the child. In this regard, one of the main
questions that puts these contributions into conversation is: when may
protection mechanisms be better read as processes of risk
management? Or, as Rashmi Kumari invites us to question in Chapter
11: whose safety is under threat when contingencies of children make
ontologies of childhood unrecognizable?
In Chapter 9, “More Than a Victim: Childhood Resilience in Malik
Sajad’s Munnu,” Suniti Madaan and Cijo Joy question the narrative about
Kashmiri children framed by the limits of the victim stereotype.
Through a critical reading of the graphic autobiography, Munnu: A Boy
from Kashmir, by Malik Sajad, this contribution goes beyond the focus
on children’s victimhood and explores representations of children in
armed conflict situations when many facets of growing up in vulnerable
contexts are brought to the fore. Thinking in terms of
“interdependencies” (Punch 2001) helps us navigate through questions
related to children’s participation in socio-political life and their
resilience as a way of dealing with and resisting stress and disturbance.
Without excluding Kashmiri children’s right to protection, Madaan and
Joy contribute to the debates on children’s rights in situations of armed
conflict by complicating our views about childhood and pointing
towards a multiplicity of experiences beyond being the object of adult
protection.
Also with a focus on the experiences of children in armed conflict
situations, in Chapter 10, “Children and Childhood on the Borderland of
Desired Peace and Undesired War: A Case of Ukraine,” Urszula
Markowska-Manista and Oksana Koshulko draw from interviews with
children and adults in order to explore and interpret other forms of
childhood within contexts of extreme vulnerability. Rather than erasing
the experience of war, the authors discuss how these children—even
when they are under threat—have managed to resist and be active in
the construction of their own lifeworlds. Sharing empirical context with
Chapter 8, this contribution also discusses the impacts of the national-
patriotic education curricula in framing the limits of bounded children
and their childhood. However, the authors highlight the dangers of
reproducing the victimhood stereotype once it silences the
multidimensionality of childhood, showing how diverse are the ways
children react and participate in the territories affected by the war and
occupation in Ukraine. As they put it, every childhood is a “perpetual
negotiation” of their time and spaces.
If the first two chapters of this part problematize the over-focus on
the idea of the child as a hapless victim in need of adult protection, the
last two explore the contingencies of children by questioning
who/what is being protected—or whose safety is at issue—when
ontologies of childhood are under threat. In Chapter 11, “Production of
‘Safe’ Spaces for Adivasi Children and the Armed Conflict of Bastar,
India,” Rashmi Kumari problematizes state investment in education for
Adivasi children in rural Bastar by complicating the role of schools as
ordering mechanisms in a society amidst conflict. Engaging in the limits
of the construction of childhoods “in crisis” and “in need of saving,”
Kumari questions the official discourse of education and poses the
question of what children’s safety (or lack of safety) entails and
authorizes in terms of state practices towards children in order to
maintain stability and security. At the end of the day, by addressing the
ambivalent meaning of children’s innocence that made them
simultaneously victims of violence and potential threats to state
security, this chapter invites us to critically reflect on whose best
interest is being addressed when children are depicted as being “at
risk.”
Finally, in a very different context, but addressing similar issues
regarding the anxiety around children’s education when they are
constructed primarily as innocent beings (or, becomings), Chapter 12,
“Raising the Empire’s Children? Everyday Insecurities and Parenting
the Privileged in the United States,” is a personal interrogation of
practices around education and parenting when contingencies of
childhood and children destabilize the idea of childhood as a “once-
upon-a-time story with happy and predictable ending” (James and
Jenks 1996: 315). Outwardly distinct from many of the contributions to
this volume, Jennifer Riggan focuses on the processes of discipline of
children and the rituals adopted by caregivers intended to keep them
safe and entertained within a context that may appear less ‘exceptional’
and perhaps less ‘spectacular’ than zones of conflict as they are
commonly imagined. Riggan discusses how the construction of
privilege juxtaposed with daily insecurities that are felt present, but
which we cannot really see or fully understand, produce the limits of
the “children of empire.” Unpacking and complicating parenting
practices and parental anxieties around protecting one’s children
against a world with its multiplication and proliferation of threats, this
closing chapter reflects upon and challenges the limits of the main
categories that constitute the book itself, which are (re)produced as
authorized and universal truths and presumed stable and self-evident
categories, such as children, peace, and conflict.

***
In their various explorations of empirical cases both within and beyond
zones of conflict, the contributors to this volume reveal something of
how children and childhoods are always bound up in the making,
remaking, and unmaking of conflict, experienced as war, war
preparation, war commemoration, and more. Likewise, they are
indispensable and engaged subjects in the building and maintenance of
peace as well as in imagining and specifying its requisites. Without
discounting the importance of continuing work around issues of child
soldiers and war-affected children in settings that, having dominated
popular iconography and global public imaginaries, have tended to
garner most attention, these original contributions alert us to the vast
multiplicity of childhoods shaped by and shaping the navigation of
peace and conflict in unique and often sui generis ways. ‘Finding’
children in contexts in which they have been less often sought, and
perhaps even more seldom seen and heard, the chapters that follow
nuance our understanding of political subjecthood and of its varied and
complex forms. In so doing, they better equip us to critically engage the
paradox of children’s simultaneous indispensability to and
marginalization in global security practices. And populating peace and
conflict with a fuller range of political subjects, they contribute as well
to a deeper understanding of recourse to organized political violence
and of efforts to manage, mitigate, and ameliorate its imprint upon
social worlds and everyday lives.

Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight Grant from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant
number 435-2019-0009).

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Part I
Ontologies of Children in Peace and
Conflict
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
J. M. Beier, J. Tabak (eds.), Childhoods in Peace and Conflict, Rethinking Peace and
Conflict Studies
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_2

2. Children as Soldiers or Civilians:

Norms and Politics in the United
Nations Monitoring and Reporting
Mechanism on Children Affected by
Armed Conflict
Vanessa Bramwell1
(1) Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Introduction
2019 marked 30 years since the signing of the Convention on the Rights
of the Child. This convention comprises the protection of children’s
rights in a range of situations, one of which is the protection of children
in armed conflict. This mandate to protect children in armed conflict
has developed a complex infrastructure over the last three decades—an
infrastructure made up of non-governmental organizations as well as
United Nations working groups. The reporting relationships and
mechanisms are somewhat opaque, however UN documents claim
success in a particular pillar of child protection in armed conflict: the
release and repatriation of child soldiers. Although many contemporary
violations in armed conflict happen primarily to civilian children
(where these can be clearly separated from ‘child soldiers’), such as the
denial of humanitarian access and attacks on schools, the child soldier
discourse remains highly prominent in the Children affected by Armed
Conflict (CaAC) workstream. Publicity campaigns and reports by the
relevant UN bodies have reflected an image of the child soldier which
has evolved over time, yet consistently speaks to the role of the conflict-
affected child as a site of local and global—indeed, moral—tragedy; a
corrupted victim, whose rightful function as cultural capital for the
future must be restored; a “global child” (Linde 2016) or “world-child”
(Tabak 2020).
This chapter examines the development of the norm of the “child
soldier” in the Western imagination, and the way it has evolved along
with the CaAC infrastructure to become the dominant way of
conceptualizing conflict-affected children in this mandate. There is
already excellent scholarship in the area of ontologies of the child
soldier in UN intervention, and this chapter draws on a base of
scholarly work in critical feminist International Relations and Security
Studies, Anthropology and Childhood Studies. It also utilizes the
author’s own analysis of resolutions and reports of some relevant UN
bodies, including the Security Council and the Special Representative of
the Secretary-General for Children Affected by Armed Conflict. These
sources together inform a discussion of the role of norms and political
motives, as well as the mechanisms of the infrastructure itself, in the
dominance of the child soldier mandate. Finally, ways to move away
from an over-reliance on norms concerning child soldiers are
suggested, with the aim of both discouraging such over-simplistic
norms in other areas of the mandate, and giving these overlooked areas
greater attention.

Children in Armed Conflict

Children’s suffering is talked about today in ways that are
fundamentally different to those of the early/mid twentieth century.
The World Wars were famously brutal to children. Many were killed in
air raids and other military operations, as well as dying due to
starvation and suffering exposure or other forms of victimization in the
aftermath of the wars. The popular conception of children in the public
mind usually identified them as complete victims, always civilian. In
this regard, children shared an ‘identity’ with women, who may have
been engaged in war work at home, but very rarely were active
combatants (at least in the Western collective conscious). David M.
Rosen (2005) has examined the ways in which children exercised their
agency in some twentieth century conflicts, including an analysis of the
‘ghetto-fighters’ of Warsaw in the Second World War, and demonstrates
that children were in fact pivotal actors in these events—in the case of
Warsaw, not even as individual children contributing to adult
resistance, but as a political organization very much orchestrated, and
motivated, by youth; yet, our cultural and national narratives about the
war do not generally recognize this role.
There are some similarities between the way we imagine children in
general in armed conflict today, and how we did so during and after the
World Wars. The suffering of children, as well as women, was the
original mandate for the charity operations of UNICEF (which keeps its
original acronym for United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund). Jennifer M. Morris (2015: 3) discusses the origins of
UNICEF’s strict and homogenizing focus on women and children as
victims of global conflict, arguing that this characterization was a
political discourse attached as a condition of funding by the United
States, which considered the strength of the traditional family to be a
key pillar in the defence against communist ideology. While UNICEF’s
portrayal of women and children as total victims became increasingly
impactful on the Western imagination as its fundraising and publicity
efforts grew, the suffering of children was also frequently used as a
propaganda tool to further political motives or drum up support for
war as the twentieth century went on. The hyper-politicization of the
suffering of children in war has also occurred far more recently, notably
with regard to the War on Terror and the supposed need to liberate
women and children from various entities in the Middle East, including
the Taliban. As a recent example, Cathy Russell, the US Ambassador-at-
Large for Global Women’s Issues, stated in a 2014 op-ed about the fight
against ISIL:

Girls as young as 12 or 13 have been forced to marry extremists

or sold to the highest bidder — like cattle at an auction. These
are young girls, mothers, and sisters facing imminent rape,
trafficking, and forced marriage. These are women and girls who
pleaded to be killed in airstrikes rather than be brutalized by ISIL.
(Russell 2014; emphasis added)
 This description is graphic and emotive, making use of popular
norms relating to the subjugation of the vulnerable (women and
children) under brutal and barbaric foreign powers. There is no agency
allowed in this discourse, and the contrast to Rosen’s analysis of the
empowered child ghetto fighters is stark. The imagery recalls rhetoric
from the George W. Bush administration at the time of the War in
Afghanistan, which itself took on an imperialistic, hyper-altruistic tone:

Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small

displays of joy are outlawed. Children aren’t allowed to fly kites.
Their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. (Bush 2001)

Such emotive Western characterizations of children’s suffering, but

particularly of soldiering, were popular years earlier, during the Iraq-
Iran War. Shaherzad R. Ahmadi’s (2018) feminist analysis of the
intersection of social class and gendered spaces in boys’ enlistment in
the war discusses the Western account of these young fighters, and its
reliance on an explanation of state-encouraged religious fanaticism.
Again, agency is not afforded at all. Although children have probably
always fought in warfare, and certainly did in modern history—
including in the American Civil War, for example (Rosen 2005: 5)—“…
the child soldier as an abused and exploited victim of war is a radically
new concept” (Rosen 2005: 6). The oft-cited ‘Straight-18’ position on
childhood, whereby any person under the age of 18 is by definition a
child, is a concept born out of the Western Industrial Revolution and
consequent periods of state consolidation and influence over the
private sphere (Linde 2016).
Political motives for the propagation of norms such as that
described above will be examined further on in this chapter. But first, it
is important to touch on the theory of norms and symbolic
technologies, a theory which is being usefully applied to research on
CaAC by critical feminist scholars.

Norms and Children in Armed Conflict

The theory of norms came to critical feminist International Relations
theory by way of social constructivism. A popular model for the
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JANUARY 1917.
 UNCONQUERED: AN EPISODE OF
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by maud diver.
Copyright, 1917, by Mrs. Diver, in the United States of America.

‘The stars are threshed and the souls are threshed from their
husks.’

Blake.

CHAPTER I.

‘Whom does love concern save the lover and the beloved?
Yet its impact deluges a thousand shores.’
E. M. Forster.

Sir Mark Forsyth pushed back his chair, left the dinner-table, and
strolled over to the bay window. He drew out his cigarette-case, but
apparently forgot to open it. He stood there, looking out across the
garden, that merged into rocky spaces of heather and bracken, and
culminated in an abrupt descent to the loch. Low above the
darkening hills the sunset splendour flamed along the horizon, and
all the waters beneath were alight with the transient glory. But the
man’s face wore the abstracted air of one who dwells upon an inner
vision. Though the subdued flow of talk behind him entered his ears,
it did not seem to reach his brain. ‘Bobs,’ his devoted Irish terrier,
crept out from under the table and, joining his master, made sundry
infallible bids for attention, without success.
 Presently alluring whiffs of cigarette smoke, intruding on his
dreams, reminded Sir Mark of the unopened case in his hand.
‘I vote for coffee on the terrace, Mother,’ he said, turning his eyes
from the glory without to the dimness of the unlighted dining room.
‘Then we’ll have the boats out. There’s going to be an afterglow and
a half presently.’
‘I told Grant about the coffee two minutes ago, dear,’ Lady Forsyth
answered, smiling; but her eyes dwelt a little anxiously on the
silhouetted view of her son’s profile, as he set a match to his
cigarette. The straight, outstanding nose and square chin vividly
recalled his dead father. But the imaginative brow was of her
bestowing, and a splash of light on his hair showed the reddish
chestnut tint of her own people: the tint she loved.
‘Come along, children,’ she added, including in that category four
out of her five guests—two girls, unrelated to herself, Ralph Melrose,
a Gurkha subaltern, and Maurice Lenox, an artist friend of Mark’s.
Keith Macnair, professor of philosophy—his rugged face lined with
thought, his dark hair lightly frosted at the temples—was the only
genuine grown-up of her small house-party. A connection of her own,
and devoted to both mother and son, he was so evenly placed
between them in the matter of age that he could play elder brother to
Mark or younger brother to Lady Forsyth as occasion required. And,
whenever professional claims permitted, occasion usually did require
his presence, in some capacity, either at Wynchcombe Friars or
Inveraig. Between times, he lived and lectured and wrote
philosophical books in Edinburgh, having been a Fellow of the
University since his graduate days: and never, if he could help it, did
he fail to spend most of the long vacation at Inveraig.
When the party rose from the table he joined Mark in the window:
and as the two girls stood back to let Lady Forsyth pass out, she
slipped an arm round each. Her love of youth and young things
seemed to deepen with her own advancing years. But she had her
preferences; and it was the arm round Sheila Melrose that tightened
as they passed through the long drawing-room to the terrace, where
coffee was set upon a low stone table in full view of the illumined
lake and sky.
‘It’s splendid to have you safe back again, child,’ she said,
releasing Monica Videlle and drawing Sheila down to the seat beside
her. ‘India’s monopolised you quite long enough. There’s some
mysterious magnetism about that country. People seem to catch it
like a disease. And I was getting alarmed lest you might succumb to
the infection.’
Miss Melrose smiled thoughtfully at the sunset. ‘I’m not sure that I
haven’t succumbed already!’ she said in her low, clear-cut voice. ‘I
have vague tempting dreams of going back with Ralph when his
furlough is up; or with Mona, to help doctor her Indian women. But
probably they’ll never materialise⸺’
‘More than probably, if I have any say in the matter!’
Lady Forsyth spoke lightly, but under the lightness lurked a note of
decision. She had her own private dreams concerning this girl with
the softly shining eyes under level brows, and the softly resolute lips
that never seemed quite to leave off smiling even in repose.
At mention of India Miss Videlle’s thoughtful face came suddenly
to life. ‘It would be just lovely for me,’ she said. ‘Too good to be true!’
‘Never mind, Miss Videlle,’ Maurice consoled her almost tenderly.
‘This ripping evening’s not too good to be true. And I can put you up
to some tips for squaring Lady Forsyth—in strict confidence of
course!’
He bent towards her with a slightly theatrical offer of his arm, and
they moved off to a seat near the ivy-covered wall, looking towards
the distant rapids.
Lady Forsyth glanced after them with a passing twinge of concern.
The girl—a fairly recent acquisition of Sheila’s—was shy and
clever, with a streak of dark blood in her veins. She had done
brilliantly at Oxford, and was now qualified to take up the medical
work in India on which she had set her heart. Sheila had acquired
her while going through a course of massage and magnetic healing,
for which she showed so distinct a gift that she had serious thoughts
of taking it up in earnest. A vague idea of going out with Monica had
been simmering in her brain for the past week; but she had not
spoken of it till to-night.
‘Wonder what’s come to old Mark,’ mused Ralph pensively, stirring
his coffee. ‘Thought this picnic arrangement was all for his benefit
⸺’
‘Rather so!’ Mark’s voice answered him, as he and Macnair
strolled round the corner of the house. ‘Hurry up with the coffee,
Mums. I love dabbling my oars in the sunset. Lenox, old chap, you
two might go on ahead and give the word.’
They went on readily enough; and the rest soon followed them
through the wilder spaces of the garden, down rocky steps to the
bay, where sand and rough grass shelved gently to the water’s edge.
Here they found two boats already afloat, with Maurice and Monica
—she was commonly called Mona—established in one of them.
Lady Forsyth, nothing if not prompt, privately consigned Ralph to
that boat, Mark and Keith to her own. It was a heavenly evening, and
she thanked goodness they were going to have it to themselves:
quite a rare event since Maurice Lenox had discovered that
superfluous Miss Alison.
‘Coming to row stroke for us?’ she asked as Mark handed her in.
He shook his head, smiling down at her.
‘That’s to be Keith’s privilege! I’m for the other boat.’ But neither
his smile nor the light pressure of her arm could atone for the refusal.
‘Pointed and purposeless,’ she denounced it mentally; but within a
very few moments his purpose was revealed.
‘Down stream a bit first, Keith,’ he called out, as he pushed off his
own boat and sprang lightly in. ‘I want to run up to the village. Miss
Alison and her friend might like to join us.’
So they rowed down stream at his command: and for Lady Forsyth
the pleasure of the outing was gone; the peace and beauty of the
evening spoilt by fierce resentment against these intrusive strangers
who had no authorised position in the scheme of things. And her
natural vexation was intensified by concern for Sheila: though
whether the girl took Mark’s sudden and strange defection seriously
it was impossible to tell. She wore that smiling, friendly graciousness
of hers like a bright veil, that seemed to baffle attempts at intimacy,
while it enhanced her charm. Even with Lady Forsyth, who loved her
as a daughter, she had her reserves, notably on matters nearest her
heart.
‘After all, she knows the real Mark almost as well as I do,’ Mark’s
mother reflected by way of consolation. ‘And she’s wiser than I am,
in many ways, though she is nearly thirty years younger. I’m
probably racing on miles too fast. He’s barely known the girl a
fortnight. He couldn’t be so crazy⸺All the same, he’s no business
to—it’s distracting!’ she concluded, her irritation flaming up again at
sight of the two figures that were now approaching the shore,
escorted by Mark.
Miss Alison, the taller one, had unquestionably height and grace to
recommend her. Mark, who stood six feet in his socks, could barely
give her a couple of inches; and the languid deliberation of her
movements had, on Lady Forsyth, the same maddening effect as a
drawl in speech. Her own brain and body were too quick, in the
original sense of the word, not to make her a trifle intolerant towards
the ‘half-alive’; and, rightly or wrongly, Miss Alison was apt to
produce that impression even on her admirers, though no doubt they
expressed it differently.
Personal prejudice apart, Lady Forsyth preferred the girl’s
companion, Miss O’Neill, in spite of her wrong-headed zeal for the
Suffrage and Home Rule. Had Bel Alison been out in search of a foil,
she could have discovered none better than this big-hearted,
fanatical woman of five-and-thirty, shortish and squarely built, with an
upward nose, an ugly, humorous mouth, and a quantity of rough
brown hair in a chronic state of untidiness. Lady Forsyth gathered
that she was an active philanthropist, and that the incongruous pair
shared a flat somewhere in Earl’s Court. To outward seeming they
had certainly nothing beyond the same address in common.
 If Bel’s movements were over-deliberate, Miss O’Neill’s were apt
to be sudden; and she strode into the boat with the decision of one
given to putting her foot down to some purpose.
‘Steady on! You evidently don’t do things by halves!’ Sir Mark
remonstrated, laughing, and consigning her to a cushion in the bows.
Bel had already usurped Maurice’s seat astern, and Mark rowed
stroke—this time without need of invitation. Then they turned about
and moved slowly up the loch, dabbling their oars in the sunset fires
and shivering the purple shadows of the hills.
And if for Helen Forsyth the pleasure of the evening was over, for
Mark it had but just begun. And she knew it. Therein lay the sting.
Though ‘the boy’ was now very much a man, she could honestly
have said, two weeks ago, that nothing beyond minor differences
and mutual flashes of temper had marred the deep essential unity of
their relation—a unity the more inestimably precious since he was
now all she had left of her nearest and dearest on earth. Husband,
daughter and younger son had all passed on before her into the
Silence, and of her own people one brother alone remained. At the
moment he was Governor of New Zealand, and seemed disposed to
stay on there indefinitely when his term of office expired. The
Empire, he wrote, was a saner, sweeter, more spacious place of
abode than twentieth-century England, which seemed temporarily
given over to the cheap-jack, the specialist, and the party politician.
And she—while loving every foot of her husband’s country and her
own—understood too well the frequent disappointment of those who
came, on rare and hardly earned leave, from the ends of the earth
and failed to find, in picture-palaces and music-halls, in the jargon of
Futurists and demagogues, the England of their dreams.
For this cause, her sole remaining brother had become little more
than a memory and a monthly letter. Yet could she never account
herself a lonely woman, while she had Keith for friend and mentor,
Mark for son, and Sheila for—more than possible—daughter. What
business had this unknown girl to step into their charmed circle and
unsettle the very foundation of things? Never, till to-night, had it
seemed possible to Mark’s mother that she could arrive at dreading
the fulfilment of his heart’s desire. Yet that was what it amounted to.
Dread lurked behind her surface irritation. The touch of second sight
in her composition made her vaguely conscious of danger in the air.
Small wonder if she anathematised Maurice Lenox for his knack of
picking up promiscuous strangers, and, in this case, aggravating his
offence by failing to appropriate his own discovery.

CHAPTER II.

Quand on vous voit, on vous aime; quand on vous aime, où

vous voit-on?

For a while the two boats kept in touch, so that talk passed easily
between them. Miss Alison spoke little. Silence rather became the
fair pensive quality of her charm—and probably she knew it. The
uncharitable supposition was Lady Forsyth’s: and she was fain to
confess that pensiveness and silence harmonised well with the fine,
straight nose, the mass of dull gold hair, and eyes of that transparent
blue which lacks warmth and depth, yet has a limpid beauty of its
own, especially where the pupils are large and the lashes noticeably
long.
Mark, too, had fallen silent: the worst possible sign. But Miss
O’Neill atoned for all deficiencies by discoursing vigorously to
Maurice’s swaying shoulders, upon the latest developments of the
suffrage campaign. Maurice, equal to any emergency, had no
difficulty in airing his own views on the subject—as it were, through
the back of his head—to one who had hammered shop windows with
her own hand, though she graciously drew the line at firing churches
and wrecking trains. Yet she was a woman of generous and, at
times, noble impulses. The greater part of her small annuity was
lavished on a very personal form of rescue work—and on Bel.
‘It’s rank injustice, say what you please,’ she declared in her
strong, vibrant tones, ‘to imprison and torture poor misguided girls
who have the courage of the faith that’s in them. The real blame lies
on the heads of those who’ve driven us to extremes.’
 ‘That sounds very fine, Miss O’Neill, but I’m afraid it won’t hold
water,’ Macnair put in quietly from the other boat. ‘It has been the
standing excuse of fanatics and—dare I add?—criminals all down
the ages. Your latest forms of argument will simply harden and justify
opposition to a cause that is not without certain elements of justice
and right.’
His pleasant voice had the clear, leisured enunciation of the
scholar, a quality peculiarly exasperating to the red-hot enthusiast
whose thoughts are, in the main, emotions intellectually expressed.
‘Justice and right indeed!’ Miss O’Neill fairly hurled the words at him.
‘That’s all we’re asking, isn’t it? And precisely what we’ll never be
getting under a man-made Government and man-made laws.’
Macnair smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He had no mind to let
argument and recrimination desecrate the peace and glowing beauty
of a Highland summer evening; and with practised ease he slid into
the calmer waters of generalisation, as much in the hope of weaning
Lady Forsyth from troubled thoughts as for the pleasure of
expressing his own.
‘The truth is,’ he said, resting on his oars, while the boats drifted
into a luminous bay, ‘every age, like every country, has its moral
microbe; and the microbe of this one is “Down with everything”;
“Can’t; won’t; shan’t; don’t; Pass it along the line,” that’s about the
tune of it, in all ranks. Kipling may or may not be a classic poet, but
his “Commissariat Camels” put the present-day spirit into a nutshell.
For nearly a hundred years the world has been fed on a steady diet
of revolt; and now we have the climax, distaste for duties and
clamour for rights. The fine, brave old wisdom of acceptance is
altogether out of court⸺’
Mark, withdrawing his gaze from Miss Alison’s profile, treated him
to a smile of amused approval. ‘Why this sudden access of
eloquence, old man?’ he asked; and Keith deliberately winked over
his shoulder.
‘Miss O’Neill there’s to blame; and the modern world does seem
rather egregiously modern when one’s been living for months in a
backwater with Pindar for company.’
 ‘Oh Keith, have you really found time for your promised translation
of the “Odes”?’ Lady Forsyth—herself a translator of some distinction
—leaned eagerly forward.
‘I’ve been making time for a few of them,’ he answered, pleased
with the success of his diversion, ‘by neglecting my Bergson book.’
‘Have you got them here?’
‘Yes. They’re in type, awaiting your consideration!’
‘Good. You’ll publish them, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘Not even to please you! I’ve simply been
enjoying myself, exploring a little deeper into the heart of an old
friend; one who could look life in the face without feeling convinced
that he personally could have made a better job of it. One suspects
even our poets, these days, of being propagandists in disguise.
Pindar is as sublime and as useless as a snow-peak; and one can
no more convey the essence of him in English than one could
convey the scent of a rose in Parliamentary language! Yet one is fool
enough to try.’
Sheila, who had been listening with her quiet intentness, remarked
softly, ‘Why don’t we all learn Greek?’
‘Because the humanities are out of court in an age of scientific
materialism. Wasn’t there a promise, once, that I should teach you?’
The girl flushed with pleasure. ‘I thought you’d forgotten.’
‘And I thought Miss Videlle had persuaded you to give up
everything for this massage you’re so keen about.’
Their talk took a more personal tone, and Lady Forsyth’s attention
strayed again towards the other boat. It had drifted a little farther off,
and a change of seats was in progress between Mark and Miss
Videlle. One moment his tall figure loomed against the dying
splendour; the next, he sank cautiously down beside Miss Alison,
who vouchsafed him a side-long glance of welcome.
‘We’re moving on a bit, Mother,’ he sang out, seeing her face
turned in their direction.
 They moved on accordingly: and it did not occur to Lady Forsyth
that Miss O’Neill, sitting alone in the bows, obscured from vision of
the disturbing pair, was in much the same mood as herself. Lonely,
passionate, and emotional, her thwarted womanhood had found in
Bel Alison an object on which she could lavish at once the protective
tenderness of a mother and the devoted service of a man.
Unhappily, this last included a consuming jealousy of those who had
a better natural right to the girl than herself. Diligently and skilfully,
therefore, she had scattered seeds of prejudice against the unjust
half of creation—which, by the way, she very much appreciated in
units, while denouncing it in the mass. By way of a more positive
deterrent, her slender means were taxed to the utmost that Bel might
have cushions and flowers and curtains to suit her fastidious taste.
No one, least of all Miss Alison, suspected the extent of her secret
shifts and sacrifices. And, intermittently, she had her reward. But no
skill in self-deception could blind her to the fact that her lavish
devotion was as dust in the balance against the passing attentions of
a baronet, lord of two estates, and a fine-looking fellow to boot. To-
night the conviction rankled with peculiar keenness by reason of her
suppressed irritation with Macnair.
‘Shirking the issue. Just like a man!’ she soliloquised wrathfully.
‘And dragging in his own trumpery translations by the heels. The
conceit of the creatures! And the folly of them. Wasting good abilities
over the vapourings of a musty old Greek poet. Blind as a bat, or
simply not caring a snap that the world’s crammed with evils crying
out to be reformed. Let them cry, so long as he can scribble in
peace....’
At this point her somewhat chaotic thoughts were interrupted by
music from the other end of the boat. Mark was singing Wallace’s
lullaby, ‘Son of Mine’; half crooning it, at first, for the benefit of Miss
Alison, who did not know it. But as the strong swing of the melody
took hold of him, he let out his voice to the full—a true, clear
baritone; music in its every cadence; and something more than
music, for those who had ears to hear.
Harry, raging inwardly, heard, and understood very well that the
days of her own dominion were numbered. Lady Forsyth understood
equally well; but she had passed beyond the raging mood. The song
was an old favourite; every note of it laden with associations; and in
spite of herself tears started to her eyes.
As for Mark, others might understand or not as they pleased. He
was singing to an audience of one; to the girl who sat beside him,
her uncovered head lifted and half turned away toward the dark
sweeping curves of the hills.
When the murmur of applause died down she turned to him with
the slow lift of her lashes that, conscious or no, thrilled him afresh at
each repetition. ‘I didn’t know you could sing like that,’ she said
softly.
‘I can’t always,’ he answered, flushing under her implied praise.
‘Sometimes—it just takes hold of me. Don’t you sing yourself? I’m
sure you’ve got music in you.’
She suppressed a small sigh. ‘Oh yes. It’s one of my poor little
half-fledged talents; useless for want of proper development. My
elder sister’s the clever one, and she got all the chances. She found
me convenient sometimes for duets.’
‘Duets? Good. I know plenty. Let’s have a try. What was her line?’
‘Classical. Mostly German.’
Mark was silent a moment, raking his memory. Then he had an
inspiration. ‘Mendelssohn’s “I would that the love”...? Wasn’t that the
sort of thing?’
‘Yes. Very much so.’
‘Right! We’ll give them a treat. You take the air.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re going much too fast. I never said I’d
sing; and—I’ve rather forgotten the words.’
‘You won’t slip out of it that way!’ he told her; and leaning close he
crooned under his breath: ‘“I would that the love I bear thee, My lips
in one word could say; That soft word⸺”’
‘Oh yes, I remember now,’ she cut him short rather abruptly; but a
faint colour showed in her cheeks and this time she did not lift her
lashes. ‘Very pretty, but drenched with sentiment. That’s the worst of
German songs.’
‘Well, you can’t beat the music of ’em,’ he persisted, rebuffed a
little by her tone, and hoping it was assumed for the benefit of Miss
Videlle, who was most vexatiously in the way. ‘I’m set on it anyhow.
Are you ready?’
Taking her smile for consent he moved one hand, beating time in
the air; then, without preliminary, their united voices took up the
song. Bel’s, though sweet and true within its range, proved too slight
an organ to stand the open-air test, and Mark had need to moderate
his full-toned alto accordingly, thereby giving an added effect of
tenderness to words and music already sufficiently expressive.
And again Lady Forsyth—a most unwilling listener—understood
everything far too well. Deliberately she hardened herself against the
appeal of the music. For this time she was simply angry—angry as
she had never yet been with her son; though, needless to say, she
attributed his egregious behaviour entirely to Miss Alison.
‘How can he? How dare he!’ was the cry of her pained heart. ‘So
unlike him. An insult to Sheila. Flinging his folly in her face.’
But Sheila was drawing her finger-tips lightly through the water,
watching the effect with that shadowy smile of hers, and to all
appearances simply enjoying the song. Almost Lady Forsyth found
herself hoping that it was so. In any case, she was thankful when the
‘exhibition’ ended, and Maurice’s cheerful voice was heard calling
out: ‘Your turn, Miss Videlle! Can’t you give us a music-hall
masterpiece by way of diversion?’
But Miss Videlle disowned all knowledge of masterpieces, music-
hall or otherwise, and Maurice himself came nobly to the rescue.
‘I’m not up to Mark’s style; but I’m top-hole at genuine Harry
Lauders,’ he volunteered with becoming modesty. ‘And as you’re all
so pressing, it would be ungracious to hide my light under a bushel.’
‘Good egg!’ sang out Ralph from the second boat. ‘Give us
“Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.”’
 And Maurice, with a deliberate wink at Mark over Miss Videlle’s
shoulder, proceeded to give it for all he was worth, in the broadest of
broad Scotch. But Mark was in no mood to see the joke of a
performance that sounded far too like a travesty of his own chosen
love-song.
‘“I kissed her-r twice and I asked her-r once if she would be my br-
ride,”’ sang Maurice with insolent gusto, burring his r’s like a
policeman’s rattle; and Mark simply wanted to kick him into the loch.
Lady Forsyth, on the other hand, was privately blessing the boy’s
foolery, that seemed to clear the air and sent the boats skimming
homeward to the swing of chorus on chorus; only her son’s voice
being conspicuous by its absence. Keith’s boat was leading now;
and without turning round deliberately she could see nothing of the
two who haunted her mind.
This was perhaps fortunate; for Mark’s arm lay along the back of
the seat, his shoulder was within three inches of Bel’s; and under
cover of the music they had picked up the dropped thread of their
talk in lowered tones that imparted a tender significance to the
simplest remark.
‘I don’t call your singing a half-fledged talent,’ he said with a faint
stress on the pronoun. ‘You’ve the gift, anyway. Why not make more
of it—study, practise?’
She smiled and lifted her shoulders. ‘I’ve tried, but I couldn’t keep
it up. Laziness, perhaps; I don’t know. Vanity, perhaps, a little. I either
want to do things splendidly or else—I can’t be bothered. I need
someone to spur me, to encourage me.’
‘Well, I should have thought Miss O’Neill⸺’
‘Harry? Oh yes, she’d lie down and let me walk over her if I
wanted to. But she’s swamped in “the Cause” and philanthropic
work. As for my talents, when I wanted the helping hand it wasn’t
there; and now—it’s too late. I’ve dabbled first in one thing and then
in another, and frittered away what little ambition I ever had.’
The emotionless quiet of her tone suggested a noble resignation
to the general obstructiveness of life; a resignation that, to the man’s