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Discovering Childhood
in International
Relations
Edited by
J. Marshall Beier
Discovering Childhood in International Relations
 J.  Marshall Beier
Editor

Discovering
Childhood
in International
Relations
Editor
J. Marshall Beier
Department of Political Science
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-46062-4 ISBN 978-3-030-46063-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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, express or implied,
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
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For the young people actively remaking our world
 Acknowledgments

My deepest and sincerest gratitude is owed to each of the contributors

to this volume. Not only have they been wonderful to work with at all
stages of the project but they have taught me much and have given me
pause to reflect anew on matters of shared interest in ways exemplary of
the best of all we hope for in collegial relationships and from collabora-
tive work. The contribution they collectively make herein offers excep-
tional insight, deeper and more engaging than I could have imagined at
the outset of our work together, into what thinking about children and
childhoods means for and about disciplinary International Relations. I
look forward to continuing the conversations they open here and to all
that we still have to learn from them.
In this and other work, I continue to gain much in the way of encour-
agement from members of the Department of Political Science at
McMaster University. In particular, I would like to thank the superbly
engaged undergraduate students who have made my fourth-year semi-
nar, “Child/Youth Rights and Security in Global Political Perspective,”
among the most stimulating and thought-provoking (and, happily,
ongoing) experiences of my professional life. They and the many excel-
lent graduate students with whom it is also my privilege to work are ever
pushing my thinking in new ways and inspiring deeper contemplation on
issues central to this volume. Likewise, my colleagues in the International
Relations field, Peter Nyers, Robert O’Brien, Tony Porter, Alina Sajed,
and Lana Wylie are fonts of intellectual energy and constant sources of
inspiration. Together with others in our Department, we all depend as

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

well on the administrative support provided by Manuela Dozzi, Rebekah

Flynn, and Wendy Ryckman, for which I am also always grateful.
At Palgrave, Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg were supportive of the
project from our earliest discussions and their enthusiasm did much to
underwrite confidence that the way the volume was framed would make
the most of its potential. In later stages, Rachel Moore guided the com-
pleted manuscript through the production process. I could not be more
appreciative for these efforts or for the time and talents of all the others
who work behind the scenes to see this and other projects through to
print. Many thanks are due as well for the valuable and supportive feed-
back from the reviewers for Palgrave that played an important part in
strengthening the volume and in urging its most interesting and original
contributions to the fore.
Finally, I extend my thanks to friends too numerous to list and, of
course, to my family. These are the relationships that sustain us and
which, therefore, are requisite to all that we do. My mother, Carole
Beier, my late father, Ron Beier, and my aunt, Myra Hurst have all been
present through the span of this project, discussed aspects of it with me
when I was still thinking them through, and forgave me for completing
the editing lakeside on a family vacation. As always, I am grateful to my
daughter, Kaelyn Beier, for her many contributions to my thinking along
the way and for continuing to teach by way of example on the indispen-
sability of young people’s daily contributions to the social worlds we all
inhabit.

Hamilton, ON, Canada J. Marshall Beier

January 2020
 Contents

1 Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

in International Relations 1
J. Marshall Beier

2 Decolonizing Childhood in International Relations 21

Katrina Lee-Koo

3 Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework

for Engaging Images of Children in IR 41
Helen Berents

4 Children as Agents in International Relations?

Transnational Activism, International Norms,
and the Politics of Age 65
Anna Holzscheiter

5 Doing IR: Securing Children 89

Helen Brocklehurst

6 A Tale of a (Dis)Orderly International Society:

Protecting Child-Soldiers, Saving the Child,
Governing the Future 115
Jana Tabak

ix
x CONTENTS

7 From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child

Soldier: How the Martial Regulation of Children
Normalizes and Legitimizes War 135
Victoria M. Basham

8 Toying with Militarization: Children and War

on the Homefront 155
Tara Woodyer and Sean Carter

9 Between Borders: Pop Cultural Heroes and Plural

Childhoods in IR 179
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy with Cole Byram,
Jaimarsin Lewis, Karaijus Perry, Trinity Perry,
Julio Trujillo, and Mikayla Whittemore

10 Revisiting ‘Womenandchildren’ in Peace

and Security: What About the Girls Caught
in Between? 199
Lesley Pruitt

11 Subjects in Peril: Childhoods Between Security

and Resilience 219
J. Marshall Beier

12 Centralizing Childhood, Remaking the Discourse 243

Alison M. S. Watson

Index 263
 Notes on Contributors

Victoria M. Basham is Reader (Associate Professor) in International

Relations at Cardiff University, Wales. Her research interests lie in the
field of critical military studies at the intersections of feminist interna-
tional relations, critical geopolitics, and international political soci-
ology. Her research explores how war, and war preparedness, shape
people’s daily lives and how daily life can, in turn, influence and facili-
tate war and other geopolitical outcomes. She is particularly interested
in how experiences of gender, racialization, sexuality, age, and social
class intersect with the prioritization and perpetration of military power.
Victoria is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Military Studies
and Co-Editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series, Advances
in Critical Military Studies. Between 2017 and 2019 she served as the
President of the European International Studies Association.
J. Marshall Beier is Professor of Political Science at McMaster
University. His publications include Childhood and the Production
of Security, ed. (Routledge, 2017); The Militarization of Childhood:
Thinking Beyond the Global South, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014);
Canadian Foreign Policy in Critical Perspective, ed. with Lana Wylie
(Oxford University Press, 2010); Indigenous Diplomacies, ed. (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); International Relations in Uncommon Places:
Indigeneity, Cosmology, and the Limits of International Theory (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, 2009). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical
Studies on Security and his work has appeared in journals including

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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.
Helen Berents received her Ph.D. (International Relations) from the
University of Queensland, Australia in 2013. She is currently Senior
Lecturer in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at the Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her research draws on
peace studies, feminist international relations, and critical security stud-
ies to consider representations of children and youth in crises and con-
flicts and engagements with lived experiences of violence-affected young
people. Her work has been published in journals including International
Feminist Journal of Politics, International Political Sociology, Critical
Studies on Security, and Signs. Her first book, Young People and Everyday
Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia, was pub-
lished by Routledge in 2018.
Helen Brocklehurst is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the
University of Derby. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from
Aberystwyth University and teaches in the areas of conflict, gender,
and global politics. She has published a number of articles and chap-
ters exploring the relevance of children for studies of security and is still
working on a second book. Her ongoing interests include contributing
to the reframing of juvenile informational material on war, terrorism,
and politics, and related to this, exploring how the publishing industry
and digital media companies might mitigate risk and social harm in their
management of photographic images of (young) people in adversity.
Cole Byram graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis, USA in
2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and Accounting
(double major). He was a member of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab stu-
dent think tank in 2018–2019. He began study at the Maurer School of
Law, Indiana University, Bloomington in the autumn of 2019.
Sean Carter is Associate Professor in Political Geography at the
University of Exeter. He has a particular interest in the ways in which
cultural and geopolitical practices are mutually constitutive, particularly
the interrelation between geopolitics and various forms of popular cul-
ture. This has been pursued through a number of research projects that
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

examine how the geopolitical world is framed, visualized, and performed.

These have included studies of the geopolitics of diaspora communi-
ties, film and cinema, photojournalism, and most recently, play. Sean’s
recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council, seeks to more fully understand the ways in which play
and geopolitics are intertwined, especially in the everyday lives of chil-
dren, and the ways in which an attentiveness to “play” can reframe cul-
tural and political geographies more generally.
Anna Holzscheiter is Professor of International Politics at TU Dresden
and Head of the Research Group‚ Governance for Global Health, at
WZB Social Science Center in Berlin. Prior to taking up her position
at TU Dresden, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations
at the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy,
Freie Universitaet Berlin (2006–2015). She has held fellowship positions
at Harvard University (2014–2015), the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine (2007–2010), and the European University Institute
(2004). In her research, she has been focusing on interorganizational
dynamics between governmental and nongovernmental organizations in
international politics and institutions as well as the emergence, consoli-
dation, contestation, and collision of international norms, particularly in
the fields of (children’s) human rights and global health.
Katrina Lee-Koo is Associate Professor of International Relations and
Deputy Director of Monash Gender, Peace and Security at Monash
University. Katrina teaches and researches in the areas of critical secu-
rity studies and feminist international relations. Her research examines
the protection and participation of civilians in conflict-affected areas and
during peace processes (focused upon women, youth, and children) as
well as the implementation of UN Security Council agendas on these
issues. Katrina is coauthor of Children and Global Conflict (Cambridge
University Press, 2015), with Kim Huynh and Bina D’Costa; Ethics
and Global Security (Routledge, 2014), with Anthony Burke and Matt
McDonald; and, editor of the forthcoming Young Women’s Leadership in
Asia and the Pacific (Routledge), with Lesley Pruitt. Katrina is an asso-
ciate editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and is on
the editorial board for the Australian Journal of Politics and History, the
Australian Journal of Political Science, and Politics and Gender.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jaimarsin Lewis is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,

USA. He has worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu
Peace Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center. In that
capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the
Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.”
Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at
Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and
Political Science at Butler University in Indianapolis, USA and Director
of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab, an innovative think tank for under-
graduate students interested in peace and justice research, education,
and activism. Her research focuses on children and youth in interna-
tional relations and critical studies of political violence, peace(building),
and memorialization. She is the author of numerous books, articles, and
book chapters on children and youth, including the results of in-depth
interviews and focus groups with young people in Northern Ireland and
Israel/Palestine. Her most recent book is Peace and Resistance in Youth
Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The
Hunger Games (Palgrave, 2018).
Karaijus Perry is a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,
USA. He worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace
Lab and the Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In
that capacity, he contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the
Career and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.”
Together with his coauthors, he presented the results of this paper at
Butler University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Trinity Perry completed her HSE (high school equivalency) diploma in
2019 and is based at the Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. She
worked as a youth researcher with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab and the
Martin Luther King Community Center in 2018–2019. In that capac-
ity, she contributed to a research paper on “The Barriers to the Career
and College Aspirations of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth.” Together
with her coauthors, she presented the results of this paper at Butler
University’s Undergraduate Research Conference.
Lesley Pruitt is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the
School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Lesley’s research focuses on recognizing and supporting young people’s
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

participation in politics and peacebuilding and advancing gender equity

in efforts aimed at pursuing peace and security. Lesley’s books include
Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender & Change (State University of New
York Press, 2013); The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Policing & the
UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit (University of California Press,
2016); Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combatting
Civic Deficit? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), with Mark Chou, Jean Paul
Gagnon, and Catherine Hartung; and, Dancing Through the Dissonance:
Creative Movement & Peacebuilding (Manchester University Press,
2020), with Erica Rose Jeffrey.
Jana Tabak is Assistant Professor in the Department of International
Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her publications
include: a forthcoming co-edited special issue of Childhood: Journal of
Global Child Research; a forthcoming book entitled, The Child and the
World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (University of Georgia
Press); 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.
Julio Trujillo graduated from Butler University, Indianapolis,
USA in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and
Criminology. He served as the Neighborhood Youth Liaison for the
Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019. He led a youth research team
to conduct interviews with young people in the community about the
barriers to the career and college aspirations of racial and ethnic minor-
ity youth. He has also worked as a community organizer with the
Martin Luther King Center in Indianapolis. He has received awards for
­servant-leadership and social justice advocacy and is a member of the
Alpha Kappa Delta Honor and Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Societies.
Alison M. S. Watson is Professor of International Relations at the
University of St Andrews and Managing Director and Co-Founder of
the Third Generation Project, a think tank focusing upon the human
rights implications of climate change. Her work has largely focused upon
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

examining the human rights of marginalized communities, with a long-

term specialization in considering the place of children in the interna-
tional community and the politics of childhood. More recently, she has
been co-developing, with Bennett Collins, a research approach that is
collaborative and “community”-led, as well as a teaching approach that
aims to provide students with practice-based as well as theoretical skills.
Her most recent article examines the meaning of ‘home’ and its impor-
tance as a site of political agency.
Mikayla Whittemore is a sophomore student in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at Butler University, majoring in Political Science,
International Studies, with minors in Peace Studies and Spanish. She
interned with the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab in 2018–2019 focusing on
mass incarceration and food justice. She is studying abroad at Valparaiso
University in Chile in the autumn of 2019.
Tara Woodyer is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the
University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research examines how childhood
is entangled in the (re)production of wider sociocultural processes. She
has a particular interest in ludic—or playful—geographies, advancing
theorizations of play and childhood agency through attention to embod-
iment and affect. Tara’s recent research on ludic geopolitics, funded by
the Economic and Social Research Council, has explored play as a crit-
ical lens for addressing conflict and militarization. This has focused on
using ethnographic, child-centered techniques to examine how children
express and enact contemporary geopolitics through everyday domes-
tic practices of play. This work interrogates militarization beyond areas
of actual armed conflict and highlights childhood political subjectivity
through consideration of embodiment.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Making Sense of Childhood

in International Relations

J. Marshall Beier

In a much-cited 1997 contribution to the New Internationalist, moral

philosopher Peter Singer described a thought experiment posed to his
students in which he asked them to imagine that, along their route to
the university, they happened upon a child drowning in a shallow pond.
In the scenario he sketched for them, the students could easily and safely
wade into the pond to perform a rescue but would have to weigh saving
the child against soaking their clothes and missing class. Unsurprisingly,
Singer’s students assessed the child’s life to be of greater value than the
comparatively inconsequential cost of wet clothes and a missed class and,
accordingly, they were unanimous in saying they would opt to perform
the rescue. The point of the exercise was to prompt reflection on the
ethical question of “what we owe to people in need” and, extending
the exploration, Singer found that the majority of his students felt they
would have the same obligation to a child far away whom they also had
the ability to save from death at no risk or significant cost to themselves
(Singer 1997). Of course, the ability to aid others in need routinely

J. M. Beier (*)
Department of Political Science,
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
e-mail: mbeier@mcmaster.ca

© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. M. Beier (ed.), Discovering Childhood in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46063-1_1
2 J. M. BEIER

fails to ignite that very sense of obligation and the apparent disconnect
between ethical reflection and lived experience, revealed in the experi-
ment, is Singer’s entre to making some weighty propositions on recon-
ciling ethics and self-interest as a route to the ethical life. Beyond the
particular insights Singer urges us to draw from his experiment, though,
it is interesting too for what it leaves unexplored: ironically, the child at
the center of the scenario.
What do we know about Singer’s child? On first gloss, it might seem
precious little. Despite repeated references to her/him/them in the first
paragraphs of the essay, nothing is said to give even the slightest hint
about, for example, age or gender or any other identity characteristic.
Indeed, no physical description of any sort is offered and the child is not
placed in a broader social context. We know that the child’s immedi-
ate situation is urgent but are not able to glean anything about any cir-
cumstances more generally or apart from that specific plight. And, while
Singer’s students are positioned as both the subjects of ethical deliber-
ation and hypothetical would-be rescuers, the child is imbued with no
agency whatsoever. In fact, the only thing said of the child is that he/
she/they is/are drowning. This, however, describes the child’s predic-
ament rather than the child, who is rendered utterly one-dimensional
as, simply, ‘child.’ The ostensible focal point of the scenario seems, par-
adoxically, to warrant no further ascription or elaboration. And yet, from
this it becomes clear that, while we have been told very little, we actually
know quite a lot—so much so, in fact, that the intelligibility of Singer’s
experiment depends on it.
Singer’s child is the quintessential person in need, understood at once
as the very embodiment of helplessness. Deployed as a rhetorical device,
the child in need of rescue or protection draws on inveterate ideas about
innocent, vulnerable, and precious childhood so pervasive and so deeply
held that they need not be explicitly described. ‘Child’ functions as the
byword of these qualities, which are customarily and reliably taken to
be its defining features, and therefore invites no dithering on questions
of the need for or propriety of intervention. Nothing of the widely var-
ied subject positions or complex intersectionalities of actual lived child-
hoods is held visible in this formulation, nor does Singer reflect on how
they—or, more particularly, their omission—might bear consequentially
on the responses of his students. It matters to the purpose of his sce-
nario that the object of rescue is the one-dimensional child of hegem-
onic imagining and it matters too that Singer’s students will undoubtedly
 1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD … 3

have brought the cultural competencies to decode ‘child’ as embodied

helplessness and vulnerability. Nothing more than ‘child’ is said because
nothing more need be said. And this is revealing of how much is already
‘known’ about childhood as well as of the cultural traction of the
deferred meaning behind the signifier ‘child.’
Children figure similarly in myriad narratives of global politics and in
the disciplinary stories we tell in International Relations. Though sel-
dom framed as political subjects in their own right, images of children in
abject circumstances have long been made potent political resources with
the potential to mobilize international political action and move shifts
in global policy. They likewise make fleeting cameo-like appearances in
IR textbooks in connection with entries on security, development, and
more, subtly populating conceptual propositions like liberal progress or
the ubiquity of threat with relatable “emotional scenery” (Brocklehurst
2015: 32). Half-noticed and rarely heard, they are nevertheless impor-
tant to global politics and to IR in the same way the nondescript ‘drown-
ing child’ is important to Singer’s lesson in ethical responsibility. And
yet, like Singer in his scenario, IR has paid almost no attention to chil-
dren and childhoods, per se, and has been similarly inattentive to the
important ways in which they are bound up in and bear upon issues of
rights, diplomacies, conflict and security, global political economy, and
other areas of traditional disciplinary focus.
If IR’s failure to take notice of these things belies the significance of
children and childhoods to the worlds of global politics, it is also out
of step with important developments in other fields of study. In paral-
lel with the rapid expansion of what began as a ‘new sociology of child-
hood’ in the 1980s and which gave rise to a burgeoning interdisciplinary
Childhood Studies since the 1990s, associated research programs have
emerged within and across a number of traditional arts disciplines. While
disciplinary International Relations has been something of a laggard in
this regard, slow to recognize the relevance of these developments for
its own subject matters and its ways of approaching them, there are
encouraging signs that this is beginning to change. In particular, recent
years have seen the emergence of an engaged and growing community
of scholarship problematizing IR’s omission of children and childhoods.
Looking to sources of the field’s failure to theorize childhood and to
take children seriously as political subjects in local and global contexts,
these interventions have revealed how International Relations is, some-
what paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of
4 J. M. BEIER

childhood as, perforce, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapac-

ity. These investigations thus have much to tell us about our field itself
as well as beginning to equip us to productively approach what has
been a neglected area of study. Responding to the growing interest in
this developing area of research, a new network of interested scholars
has begun to take shape, drawing together and establishing connections
between emerging and earlier contributors and giving rise to collabora-
tive projects.
With opening interventions on children and childhoods in
International Relations reaching back well over a decade now and as
interest in this scholarship is gathering, there is a need for more thor-
oughgoing reflection on problems and prospects for doing work in
this area in a specifically disciplinary International Relations context.
Spike Peterson’s Gendered States (1992) answered an analogous need
in the early 1990s as interest in feminist theory and Gender Studies
was ascendant in the field. In retrospect, it would have been good to
have had such a collection of reflections on thinking about indigene-
ity in International Relations at the fore of the marked increase in work
in that area in recent years. Together, the contributors to Discovering
Childhood in International Relations bring a constellation of research
experiences, conceptual commitments, and points of intervention to,
in sum, give readers a sense of the terrain of problems, pitfalls, prom-
ise, and prospects of/for thinking about children and childhoods in
International Relations—specifically in International Relations and with
an International Relations readership foremost in mind.
As with any emergent area, these explorations, though animated by
specific curiosities and commitments, are carried out against the back-
drop of a host of much larger questions. How should students and
scholars of International Relations approach this sort of research? What
are those problems, pitfalls, promise, and prospects alluded to above in
the more specific undertaking to make sense of, draw upon, and speak
issues of children and childhoods in IR? Where and how should we look
to ‘discover’ children and childhoods and what might we perhaps have
to discover about our discipline (and ourselves) first? Thinking about
a readership already inclined to take this work seriously but also those
who situate themselves and their work in International Relations more
broadly and who might simply wonder why they ought to think about
children/childhoods, what can or should be said to both the former and
latter categories of colleagues?
 1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD … 5

With these questions in mind, contributors aim to speak to

International Relations quite broadly. Though some chapters land
closer than others to questions of, inter alia, security, or rights, or the
contours of the discipline itself, all turn on those four Ps (problems,
pitfalls, promise, and prospects) of taking children and childhoods seri-
ously in International Relations, informed in each instance by contribu-
tors’ own research projects. Thinking in terms of a collective disciplinary
enterprise of ‘discovering’ captures something of the four Ps as well as
the senses in which International Relations variously performs children
and childhoods (and the bounds of their possibilities) into being and is
itself performed into being through the manner of its inclusions, exclu-
sions, renderings, and deployments of children and childhoods. It also
pulls on the ways in which ‘discovering’ has been undertaken in other
disciplinary literatures, with reference to, variously, gender, race, culture,
class; likewise citizenship, discourse, aesthetics, among others. Similarly,
‘discovering’ is here intended to help draw out the ways in which chil-
dren and childhoods are not at all new to International Relations but
merely newly noticed. The task contributors to Discovering Childhood in
International Relations have set for us in the chapters that follow, then,
is both to think about how to approach this as a ‘new site of knowledge’
(Watson 2006) as well as to reflect on what it demands of the discipline
and what it tells us about how we might imagine International Relations
differently. Most fundamentally, this book is something of a preemp-
tion against ‘add children and stir’ projects of the sort previously seen
(and rightly problematized) in those initial moments when scholarship
on women, Indigenous peoples, or even research methods (ethnogra-
phy) and conceptual borrowings (resilience) emerged in International
Relations.

Discovering Childhood
Even without inquiring too deeply, it seems odd that IR should need to
be called on to discover children. More than a quarter of the world’s
human population, after all, is aged fourteen years and under, rising to
nearly one third when all those under age eighteen are counted (United
Nations 2017). What is more, despite having received little in the way
of focused attention from IR, the governance of children—from rights
regimes, to regulation of bodily autonomy and security, to the social
spaces they (may) occupy, and more—is nevertheless a key constituent
6 J. M. BEIER

of global political order. It is just as curious, then, that IR scholars have

shown so little interest in those global political processes and practices
involved in the governance of children and childhood. This is espe-
cially so where these things otherwise dovetail with issues traditionally
regarded as well within the usual disciplinary remit. The 1989 United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to take but
one example, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world
and suggests a number of intriguing puzzles that ought to be of inter-
est to students and scholars of International Relations. Among these, the
fact that the United States, which played a central role in the framing of
the Convention, remains the sole holdout on its ratification would seem
fertile ground for investigations on the interplay of norms, interests,
and more. Intriguing too is that many of the most celebrated aspects of
the UNCRC remain poorly implemented even where they are strongly
endorsed in rhetoric. International Relations is not at all well-equipped,
however, to make sense of these and other puzzles without, as the con-
tributors herein show, first discovering children and childhoods not as
incidental to global political worlds but everywhere and always integral
to them.
But what does it mean to discover? In its most literal sense, the com-
bined Latin prefix ‘dis’ (a removal or reversal) and root word ‘cover’ (in
the present context, a shrouding, cloaking, obscuring from view) point
to something revealed, not introduced. Discovery is a coming to aware-
ness of that which was already present but previously unknown, unrec-
ognized, or perhaps differently understood. The title of this volume,
Discovering Childhood in International Relations, thus resists suggesting
that childhood be brought to the discipline. Like the child in Singer’s
thought experiment, childhood has always been present, indeed indis-
pensable, to discourses of global politics, ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ alike.
The call to consider children and childhoods in International Relations
must begin, then, with the recognition that there is much that is already
‘known’—and a readiness to unlearn a great deal also. Discovering child-
hood, in this sense, demands critical interrogation of hegemonic ideas
that prefigure imaginable spaces for and renderings of children in IR.
And this already alerts us to some of the problems and pitfalls of which it
is necessary to build and sustain awareness.
To the extent that they have traditionally been visible, the chil-
dren populating conventional IR discourse are thoroughly objectified.
Whether as referent objects of security summoning the responsibility
 1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD … 7

of other subjects, hapless victims allegorical of atrocity, sentimentalized

metonyms of imagined futures, or some other like framing, they are sit-
uated in discourses and projects not of their making wherein they func-
tion as rhetorical devices in the same manner as Singer’s innominate and
one-dimensional ‘child’. It is as yet still rare to find them positioned
in IR’s stories about itself and its subject matters as complex and con-
sequential actors in and of the social worlds they occupy. Even in what
might seem exceptions where, figuring as child soldiers for example, chil-
dren may be read as performing roles to substantial political effect, their
agency still tends to be eclipsed by that imputed to those understood to
have manipulated or coerced them to these roles. Left unexamined are
the myriad ways children the world over participate in the (re)production
of global order in conflict, peacebuilding, moral entrepreneurship, labor
(waged and unwaged), caregiving, and in countless other circumstances
and settings that include both the spectacular and the mundane. They
are among the agents of status quo politics and of movements of resist-
ance. And yet they are relatively absent as such from IR.
Elsewhere, new developments in Childhood Studies over the last
few decades have fueled burgeoning and dynamic growth areas of spe-
cialization in a number of established disciplines. Broadly, this work
has turned on issues such as children’s locations in citizenship, con-
tributions to knowledge practices, and participation in myriad facets
of the social words of which they are part. It has critically investigated
the ideational bases of their disenfranchisement from social power and
challenged deeply held developmentalist ideas (Burman 1994) that,
approaching children less as human beings than as ‘human becomings’
(Uprichard 2008), work to delimit recognition of agency and efface sub-
jecthood. Attentive to the real and significant ways children participate in
and affect social life, research programs in Children’s Geographies, the
Sociology of Childhood, and others have given rise to specialized jour-
nals, new sections in professional associations, and lively communities of
scholarly research and exchange. These developments reflect the actively
interdisciplinary nature of Childhood Studies (Faulkner and Zolkos
2016) as well as a growing sense that the neglect of childhood in studies
of social life impoverishes all social inquiry, including all that may reside
beyond those spheres traditionally associated with children. In this sense,
childhood, like race, gender, class, and other social systems of identity
and difference is seen as always relevant.
8 J. M. BEIER

Working through the implications of these insights, a new

International Relations literature speaks to a discipline that has paid very
little attention to childhood and its relationship to status quo circula-
tions of power, to children as possessed of bona fide political subject-
hood, and to the under-interrogated ideational commitments that have
made these exclusions appear relatively unproblematic. Early contribu-
tions (see, for example, Watson 2004, 2006, 2009; Brocklehurst 2006;
Holzscheiter 2010) spoke both to IR’s silence on children and their
paradoxical importance to so much of what is normally taken to be its
disciplinary ambit. Besides doing essential ‘ground-clearing’ work in cre-
ating a space for thinking about children and childhoods in a discipline
that has been late to take notice, initial contributions have inquired along
lines of their implications for various spheres more readily associated with
International Relations scholarship. This has included explorations of
children’s indispensability to particular ways in which security is practiced
(see Brocklehurst 2006) and how childhood is constitutive of security
discourses and practices, enabling some political possibilities while simul-
taneously foreclosing others (see Basham 2015; Jacob 2015; Berents
2016, 2019; Beier 2018). Others look to how childhoods intersect and
are bound up in the reproduction of militarized global politics (see Beier
2011; Woodyer and Carter 2018). Another current plies ways in which
taking childhood seriously challenges accustomed ways of thinking about
human rights (see Holzscheiter 2010, 2018; Linde 2016; Beier 2019).
Unsettling simplistic renderings of child victimhood (see Rosen 2005;
Hart 2008; Baines 2009; Gilligan 2009), still other contributions have
highlighted how subject positions are instantiated in respect of political
projects, often benevolent in their founding, that reduce young people
to objects of protection in often highly problematic ways (see Macmillan
2009; Lee-Koo 2011, 2013; Jacob 2014; Brocklehurst 2015).
Recovering a more complicated and nuanced picture of lived child-
hoods, a number of works reveal the complex entanglements of child-
hood, peace, and conflict and the ways in which children affect and are
affected by them while simultaneously engaging in forms of resistance
and producing possibilities for alternate futures (see McEvoy-Levy 2006;
Huynh et al. 2015; D’Costa 2016; Berents 2018; Martuscelli and Villa
2018; Tabak 2020). In keeping with the shift in Childhood Studies from
developmentalism to approaches attentive to agency (see, for example,
James and Prout 1990; Matthews 1994; Qvortrup 1994; Jenks 1996)
and centering capabilities (see Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2003; McNamee
 1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD … 9

and Seymour 2013), these resist renderings of children’s disempower-

ment as a force so powerful that it may be seen to overwrite subjectiv-
ity, producing only objects of protection or oppression and obscuring the
innumerable ways in which children are meaningfully engaged in civic
life (see Chou et al. 2017).
Aligned with the aesthetic turn and the increasing interest in popular
and material culture in critical International Relations but tending also
to theorizing childhood, a number of important contributions reveal cir-
cuits of everyday political participation that raise a significant challenge
to children’s reduction to passive objects. This includes revealing explo-
rations of subjecthood expressed in youth cultures (McEvoy-Levy 2018)
or activated through music (Pruitt 2013). Investigations into young
people’s interaction with and through online gaming give a more com-
plicated picture of adult game developers’ influence than is sometimes
imagined, finding gamers’ interventions evince significant resistances to
themes of the adult world as well as, and even concomitantly with, par-
ticipation in their reproduction (Crowe 2011). The significance of these
insights is that they alert us to how a focus on adult agency alone misses
much of what is interesting and important. And in these and other con-
tributions, this is exposed only by learning how young people fashion
their engagements with and through their socials worlds and how they
understand and situate themselves in relation to them.
What this brief representative survey of the existing literature sketches
are the contours of a vibrant new community of scholarship taking
shape to address International Relations’ relative silence about children
and childhoods and raising both challenges and opportunities for how
we think about the discipline and its subject matters. Coming at a time
when interest in this new area of research is growing, this volume is,
among other things, a goad to further inquiry. Without any particular
pretense to agenda-setting, it is inspired by a collective desire to widen
and deepen conversations in International Relations around issues con-
cerning children and childhoods. As an edited collection, it brings
together a range of areas of experience and expertise developed through
contributors’ own pioneering curiosities, conceptual commitments,
and programs of research. Together, they explore issues and offer new
insights that build on initial treatments of childhood in International
Relations while shedding light on the unique problems, pitfalls, prom-
ise, and prospects that inhere in taking up this area of research in IR’s
specific disciplinary milieu. More broadly still, they contribute also to
10 J. M. BEIER

scholarship on the importance of children and childhoods in global polit-

ical contexts that has likewise been ascendant in other disciplinary con-
texts (see, for example, Benwell and Hopkins 2016) and thus highlight
openings for potentially fruitful interdisciplinary conversations as well.

Structure of the Volume

Challenging the dominant thinking about childhood as it is still
expressed in prevailing commitments and common senses, in Chapter 2
Katrina Lee-Koo brings children’s agency into relief through a criti-
cal examination of the paradox of children’s and childhood’s simul-
taneous invisibility in and indispensibility to both global politics and
disciplinary International Relations. Arguing that the narrative pol-
itics through which childhood is deployed reflect investment in
­developmentalist-inspired ideas about children that play a crucial part
both in enabling action and sustaining status quo relations of power for
the discipline and the worlds it makes its subject matter, Lee-Koo shows
how constructions of childhood and the lived realities of children bear
in consequential ways on how we (might) practice global politics and
disciplinary IR alike—and how this figures vis-à-vis possibilities for chil-
dren’s emancipation. Tending directly to the problems, pitfalls, promise,
and prospects implied in explorations inspired by this critical insight, she
reveals what is at stake and for whom in the growing interest around this
emergent area in International Relations. In so doing, she shows how
attention to children and childhoods produces a fuller account of global
politics as well as a unique vantage point from which to reflect critically
on IR as social practice, shot through as it is with unequal relations of
power. Taking a view of children as consequential makers and bearers of
knowledge, the chapter concludes with a call for IR to be not only inclu-
sive of children but responsive to them as well.
In Chapter 3, Helen Berents takes up a key dimension of the chal-
lenge to imagine children differently, proposing a critical framework
for the way we literally see them. Calling on us to critically consider the
purposes behind the deployment of images of injured, suffering, and
threatening children, she interrogates the framings of ‘victims,’ ‘delin-
quents,’ and ‘icons’ in reflecting on how IR scholars ought to con-
sider such images. Arguing that they “are not always about the child,”
Berents urges us always to ask ‘what,’ ‘how,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘why’
when confronted with images of children. Doing so points not only to
Another random document with
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form communities consisting at times of a countless number of
individuals; but it has not been thoroughly ascertained whether these
are the produce of a single queen, as in the case of the hive-bee, or
whether there may be more than one egg-producer in each
community. The late F. Smith thought the former of these alternatives
would prove to be correct. These mosquito-bees are frequently
spoken of as stingless bees, but this is not quite correct, for although
they do not sting, von Ihering[34] says that all the essential elements
of the sting are present, the pointed or penetrating part of the
apparatus being stunted.

It would serve no useful purpose to attempt to construct the social

history of these stingless bees from the numerous brief scattered
accounts in entomological literature, for they refer to different
species; it is, however, positively stated by Smith on the authority of
Peckolt[35] that Trigona mosquito sends off swarms after the manner
of the hive-bee in this country, and that after searching six hives only
one royal female could be found in each.

Fig. 24.—Melipona sp. ♀. Amazons.

The nests of many of these little bees are rich in honey, and they
have a host of enemies from man and monkeys downwards; and as
they do not defend themselves by stinging, it might be supposed
they would have but a poor time of it. From the accounts that have
been published we may, however, gather that they are rich in
devices for the protection of their nests, and for the exclusion of
intruders. Bates has given some particulars as to Melipona interrupta
(fasciculata); it is about one-third shorter than the hive-bee, and its
colonies are composed of an immense number of individuals. The
workers are usually occupied in gathering pollen; but they also
collect clay in a similar manner, and convey it to the nest, where it is
used for building a wall to complete the fortification of the nest, which
is placed either in a suitable bank, or in a trunk of a tree; in either
situation it is completely built in with clay. A nest which Bates saw
opened contained about two quarts of pleasantly-tasted liquid honey.
Forty-five species of these little bees were found in different parts of
the Amazons Valley, the largest kind being half an inch in length, the
smallest very minute, not more than one-twelfth of an inch. These
little creatures are thus masons as well as workers in wax and resin,
and they are also gatherers of nectar, pollen, and resin.

According to Gosse, one of these bees is well known in Jamaica,

where they are called "Angelitos," in consequence of their not
stinging people. He observed a nest of this bee in a tree, and found it
to be much infested by black ants anxious to obtain entrance to it;
three bees, however, stood sentinel in the entrance, so as to
completely block it and keep out intruders, but the middle bee moved
on one side out of the way directly one of its fellows wished to come
in or out of the nest. The honey accumulated by this species is kept
in clusters of cups about the size of a pigeon's egg, at the bottom of
the hive and away from the brood-cells. The queen or mother-bee is
lighter in colour than the others, and has the hind body twice the
length of theirs.

Hockings[36] has given us some details as to the natural history of

two of these bees that inhabit Australia, where they are called
"Karbi" and "Kootchar," the first being, it is supposed, Trigona
carbonaria, Smith: it is usually about three-sixteenths of an inch in
length, the queen, when fully developed, being nearly twice that
length. The comb is built in a most peculiar form, being, it is said, in
the shape of a spiral staircase, and tapering towards the ends:
honey-pots and pollen are constructed for the storage of food. The
comb is encased in wax, and outside it a labyrinth of waxen
passages is formed. The entrance to the colony is guarded by a line
of bees who inspect every one that arrives, and it is surprising to see
how soon a stranger is discovered and pounced upon before it has
time even to alight; the intruder, when caught, is held by several
bees, who put it on the rack by holding and stretching out its limbs to
their full extent, retaining it in this position for as long as an hour, by
which time the unfortunate prisoner is usually dead. These bees, as
well as many other allied species, fight desperately with their
mandibles, and are apparently of a very fierce disposition. The other
species, called "Kootchar," is said to produce a very large number of
drones, and the habits and dispositions of the bees differ
considerably from those of the "Karbi": the entrance to their hive is
guarded by a pipe of propolis (a sort of resinous wax) about an inch
in length, having an exceedingly sticky outer edge, and it is by this
pipe alone that access to the interior can be gained. At night the
entrance is closed by numerous minute globules of semi-fluid gum
placed against it, thus forming a thin wall full of air-holes. The
colonies of "Kootchar" can be united by taking away a queen and
then packing her brood-nest, bees and all, against that of the colony
it is to be joined to. This cannot be done with the "Karbi." The
account given by Mr. Hockings contains a great many other
interesting details, and there can be no doubt that a full account of
the natural history of these Insects would be very instructive.

Fritz Müller has recorded a singular case bearing on the instinct of

these social Insects: he says that a nest of a small Trigona was built
in a hollow tree, and that as a consequence of the irregularity of the
hole the bees were obliged to give a very irregular shape to their
combs of honey. These bees were captured and put in a spacious
box (presumably together with the irregular comb, but this he
unfortunately does not mention): after a year, "when perhaps not a
single bee survived of those which had come from the canella tree,"
they still continued to build irregular combs, though quite regular
combs were built by several other communities of the same species
that he had kept. These bees, he also tells us, do not use pure wax
for the construction of their combs, but mix it with resin or gum that
gives it a peculiar odour and appearance. He captured two
communities of a common Melipona, one of which had the combs
made of dark reddish brown, the other of pale yellowish brown, wax,
and in captivity in a distant locality each of the two communities
continued to form its comb in the same way, thus showing the
continuity that prevails in these cases as long as circumstances
permit. Müller thinks this due to imitation, but it seems at least as
probable that it is due to perception of the properties of the nest. The
nest has a certain colour that the worker-bee matches.

Several species of the Melipona and Trigona were imported from

Brazil to France, and kept there for some time in captivity by M.
Drory. Girard has published[37] some details as to these colonies,
and is of opinion that some of them indicate an intelligence or instinct
superior to that of the honey-bee. The queen-bee of M. scutellaris
seems to display more intelligence than the corresponding sex of A.
mellifica. The mode of feeding the larvae apparently differs from that
of A. mellifica, a provision of pollen being first placed in the cell, then
some honey; when sufficient food for the whole consumption of a
larva is accumulated the queen deposits an egg in the cell, which is
at once completely closed by the worker. The interior of the abode of
these bees is quite dark, only a very small orifice being left, and in
this a sentinel is constantly on the alert. The same writer states that
Trigona crassipes has the very peculiar habit of always locating its
brood-comb in the nest of a species of Termes.

The honey-bee, Apis mellifica (Fig. 6), is considered the highest form
attained by the Anthophilous division of the Hymenoptera. The
differentiation of the three forms, male, female, and worker, is here
carried to a greater degree of perfection than in the other bees. The
drones are the males; the individuals we see gathering honey are
always workers, neither the male nor the female in this species
taking any part in procuring food for themselves or for the colony. In
addition to this the colonies formed may be described as permanent:
they do not come to an end at the close of one season, and
provision is made for the formation of a new colony while the old one
still persists, by means of a peculiar process called swarming. The
life-history of Apis mellifica and its anatomy and physiology have
been discussed in a whole library of works, and we need only notice
the chief features. When a swarm of bees leaves a hive it consists of
the queen-bee or female, and a number of workers, these latter
being, in fact, the surplus population that has been produced in the
hive. The swarm is not a nuptial flight, as is often supposed, but an
act of emigration. When this swarm has been housed, the bees
commence operations in their new quarters, by secreting wax; they
are enabled to do this by having consumed much saccharine food;
the wax is produced by means of glands in the hind-body over the
inner faces of the ventral plates of the abdominal rings, and it makes
its appearance there, after passing from the interior of the body
through some peculiar membranes on the ventral segments, in the
form of thin projecting plates. These the bee takes off with an
apparatus on the hind pair of legs and applies, after working up with
the mandibles, to form the cells in which young ones are to be
reared and food stored. A large number of bees working in common
thus produce the regular and beautiful structure known as the comb;
the queen afterwards lays an egg in each cell, and as these soon
hatch, great labour is thrown on the workers, which have then to
feed the young; this they do by eating honey and pollen, which,
being formed into a sort of pap by a portion of their digestive organs,
is then regurgitated and given to the young, a quantity of it being
placed in the cell, so that the larva is bathed by it, and possibly may
absorb the food by the skin as well as the mouth. When the colony is
in good progress and young bees emerge, these act as nurses, the
older ones cease to prepare food and act as foragers, bringing in
honey and pollen which are each stored in separate cells. The larva
in the cell increases its size and sheds a very delicate skin several
times; when the larva has reached its full size no more food is
supplied, but the worker-bees seal up the cell by means of a cover
formed of pollen and wax, in such a manner as to be pervious to air:
sealed up in the cell the larva spins a cocoon for itself, remains
therein for a little time as a larva, then changes to a pupa, and
thereafter bites its way out through the cover of the cell, and appears
for the first time as a new being in the form of a worker-bee; the
whole process of development from the egg-state to the perfect
condition of the worker-bee occupies about three weeks.
When the denizens of a hive are about to produce another queen,
one or more royal cells are formed; these are much larger than the
ordinary worker-cells, and of a quite different form. In this cell is
placed an egg, not differing in any respect from the egg that, if
placed in an ordinary cell, produces a worker; when the egg has
produced a larva this is tended with great care and fed throughout its
life with royal jelly. This food appears to be the same as that supplied
to an ordinary worker-larva when it is first hatched; but there is this
difference, that whereas the worker-larva is weaned, and supplied,
after the first period of its existence, with food consisting largely of
honey, pollen and water, the queen-larva is supplied with the pap or
royal jelly until it is full grown. Some difference of opinion exists as to
this royal jelly, some thinking that it is a different substance from
what the workers are fed with; and it is by no means improbable that
there may be some difference in the secretion of the glands that
furnish a part of the material composing the pap. The queen is
produced more rapidly than workers are, about sixteen days being
occupied in the process of her development. Only one queen is
allowed in a hive at a time; so that when several queen-cells are
formed, and queen-larvae nurtured in them, the first one that is
developed into a perfect queen goes round and stings the royal
nymphs to death while they are still in their cells. The production of
drones is supposed to depend chiefly on the nature of the egg laid
by the queen; it being considered that an unfertilised egg is
deposited for this purpose. There is still some doubt on this point,
however. Though there is no doubt that drones are produced in great
numbers from unfertilised eggs, yet there is not evidence that they
cannot also be produced from fertilised eggs.[38] The drone-cells are
somewhat larger than the ordinary worker-cells, but this is probably
not of much import, and it is said that the larvae intended to produce
drones receive a greater proportion of pap than worker-larvae do:
about twenty-four days are required to produce a drone from the
egg.

From this sketch it will be seen that the production of the worker (or
third sex, as it is improperly called, the workers being really females
atrophied in some points and specially developed in others) is
dependent on the social life, in so far at any rate as the special
feeding is concerned. There is good reason for supposing that A.
mellifica has been kept in a state of domestication or captivity for an
enormous period of time; and this condition has probably led to an
increase of its natural peculiarities, or perhaps we should say to a
change in them to suit a life of confinement. This is certainly the case
in regard to swarming, for this process takes place with comparative
irregularity in Apis mellifica in a wild condition. The killing of
superfluous queens is also probably a phenomenon of captivity, for it
varies even now in accordance with the numbers of the colony. It is
interesting to notice that in confinement when a swarm goes from the
hive it is the old queen that accompanies it, and this swarm as a rule
settles down near the old hive, so that the queen-bee being already
fertilised, the new swarm and its subsequent increase are nothing
but a division of the old hive, the total products of the two having but
a single father and mother. When a second swarm goes off from a
hive it is accompanied by a young queen, who frequently, perhaps,
in the majority of cases, is unfertilised; this swarm is apt to fly for
long distances, so that the probability of cross-fertilisation is greatly
increased, as the fertilisation of the young new queen is effected
during a solitary flight she makes after the colony has settled down.
But in a state of nature the colonies do not send off swarms every
year or once a year, but increase to an enormous extent, going for
years without swarming, and then when their home is really filled up
send off, it may be presumed, a number of swarms in one year. Thus
the phenomena of bee-life in a wild condition differ considerably from
those we see in artificial confinement. And this difference is probably
greatly accentuated by the action of parasites, the proportions of
which to their guests are in a state of nature liable to become very
great; as we have seen to be the case in Bombus.

Under these circumstances it is not a matter for surprise when we

find that the honey-bee has formed distinct races analogous to those
that exist in the case of the domesticated vertebrate animals. The
knowledge of these races is, however, at present very little
advanced, and is complicated by the fact that only imperfect
information exists as to the true species of the genus Apis. There is
a bee very like our common honey-bee found in southern Europe
called A. ligustica; this is certainly a variety of A. mellifica, and the
same remark applies to a bee found in Egypt, and called A. fasciata.
This gives the honey-bee a very wide distribution, extending possibly
over the whole of the palaearctic region: besides this, the species
has been introduced into various other parts of the world.

According to Karsch the honey-bee shows in Germany several

varieties, all of which belong to the northern form, which may be
spoken of as the A. domestica of Ray; the A. ligustica and A. fasciata
form as we have said distinct races, and it is a remarkable fact that
these races remain distinct even when imported into other climates;
though for how long a period of time this remains true there is very
little evidence to show. The northern form, A. domestica, is now
found in very widely separated parts of the world, in some of which it
is wild; Smith mentions it as occurring in the West India islands,
throughout the North American continent as far south as Mexico,
even in Central and Southern Africa, and in Australia and New
Zealand. The var. ligustica has been found also at the Cape of Good
Hope. The other species known of the genus Apis all belong to the
Old World, so that there is very little doubt that A. mellifica is also a
true native of the eastern hemisphere, and its original home may
possibly have been not far from the shores of the eastern portion of
the Mediterranean sea. Seven or eight other species of Apis are
known, all but one of which occur in Asia, extending as far as Timor
and Celebes. The exceptional one, A. adansonii, occurs in tropical
Africa and in Madagascar. Gerstaecker thought these species might
be reduced to four, but Smith's statement that the males and even
the workers show good distinctive characters seems to be correct.
Very little is known as to the honey-bees of China and Japan.

The queen-bee greatly resembles the worker, but has the hind body
more elongated; she can, however, always be distinguished from the
worker by the absence of the beautiful transverse, comb-like series
of hairs on the inner side of the first joint of the hind foot, the planta,
as it is called by the bee-keeper: she has also no wax plates and
differs in important anatomical peculiarities. The male bee or drone
is very different, being of much broader, more robust build, and with
very large eyes that quite meet in the middle of the upper part of the
head: he also has the hind leg differently shaped. The form of this
limb enables the male of A. mellifica to be distinguished from the
corresponding sex of allied species of the genus.

Fig. 25.—Portions of hind-feet, 1, of male, 2, of worker, 3, of queen, of

the honey-bee; series on the left, outer faces; on the right, inner
faces. a, Tip of tibia: b, first joint; c, second joint of tarsus.

We are indebted to Horne for some particulars as to the habits of A.

dorsata, an allied East Indian species. He informs us that these bees
greatly disfigure buildings, such as the Taj Mahal at Agra, by
attaching their pendent combs to the marble arches, and are so
pertinacious that it is almost useless to destroy the nests. This bee is
said to be so savage in its disposition that it cannot be domesticated;
it attacks the sparingly clad Hindoos with great ferocity when they
disturb its nest. Notwithstanding its inclination and power to defend
its societies this Insect appears to be destroyed wholesale. Colonel
Ramsay failed to establish hives of it, because the Insects were
eaten up by lizards. The crested honey-buzzard carries off large
portions of the comb, and devours it on a branch of some tree near
by, quite regardless of the stings of the bees; while the fondness of
bears for the honey of the "Dingar," as this species is called, is well
known.
Note to P. 33: It has just been discovered that a most remarkable
symbiosis, with structural modification of the bee, exists between
the females of Xylocopa, of the Oriental sub-genus
Koptorthosoma, and certain Acarids. A special chamber, with a
small orifice for entry, exists in the abdomen of the bee, and in
this the Acari are lodged.—See Perkins, Ent. Mag. xxxv. 1899, p.
37.

Note to P. 80: referring to the habits of social wasps in warm

countries. The anticipation we ventured to indulge in is shown to
be correct by the recent observations of Von Ihering.[39] He
states that social wasps in Brazil may be divided into two great
groups by their habits, viz. 1. Summer communities, lasting for
one year, and founded annually by fertilised females that have
hibernated—example, Polistes; 2. Perennial communities,
founded by swarms after the fashion of bee colonies—examples,
Polybia, Chartergus.

Note to Vol. V. Pp. 545, 546: The development of Encyrtus

fuscicollis has now been studied by Marchal, who has
discovered the existence of embryonic dissociation. The chain of
embryos and the epithelial tube in which they are placed, are
formed as follows: the Encyrtus deposits an egg in the interior of
the egg of the Hyponomeuta. This does not kill the egg of the
Lepidopteron, but becomes included in the resulting caterpillar.
The amnion of the Chalcid egg lengthens, and forms the
epithelial tube; while the cells within it become dissociated in
such a way as to give rise to a chain of embryos, instead of a
single embryo.—C.R. Ac. Paris, cxxvi. 1898, p. 662, and
translation in Ann. Nat. Hist. (7), ii. 1898, p. 28.
 CHAPTER II

HYMENOPTERA ACULEATA CONTINUED—DIVISION II. DIPLOPTERA OR

WASPS—EUMENIDAE, SOLITARY TRUE WASPS—VESPIDAE, SOCIAL
WASPS—MASARIDAE

Division II. Diploptera—Wasps.

Anterior wings longitudinally plicate in repose; the pronotum

extending back, so as to form on each side an angle reposing on
the tegula; the basal segments of the hind body not bearing
nodes or scales; the hind tarsi formed for simple walking. The
species either solitary or social in their habits; some existing in
three forms, males, females, and workers.

Fig. 26—Upper aspect of pronotum and mesonotum of a wasp,

Eumenes coarctata. a, Angle of pronotum; b, tegula; c, base of
wing; d, mesonotum.

This division of Hymenoptera includes the true wasps, but not the
fossorial wasps. The name applied to it has been suggested by the
fact that the front wings become doubled in the long direction when
at rest, so as to make them appear narrower than in most other
Aculeata (Fig. 27). This character is unimportant in function so far as
we know,[40] and it is not quite constant in the division, since some of
the Masaridae do not exhibit it. The character reappears outside the
Diploptera in the genus Leucospis—a member of the Chalcididae in
the parasitic series of Hymenoptera—the species of which greatly
resemble wasps in coloration. A better character is that furnished by
the well-marked angle, formed by the pronotum on the dorsal part
(Fig. 26). By a glance at this part a Diplopterous Insect can always
be readily distinguished.

Three families are at present distinguished in the Diploptera, viz.

Eumenidae, Vespidae and Masaridae. We anticipate that Eumenidae
and Vespidae will ultimately be found to constitute but one family.

Fam. 1. Eumenidae—Solitary True Wasps.

Claws of the feet toothed or bifid; middle tibiae with only one
spur at tip. Social assemblages are not formed, and there is no
worker-caste, the duties of nest-construction, etc., being
performed solely by the female.

The Eumenidae, or solitary wasps, are very little noticed by the

ordinary observer, but they are nevertheless more numerous than
the social Vespidae, about 800 species being known. In Britain we
have sixteen species of the solitary, as against seven of the social
wasps. The Eumenidae exhibit a considerable diversity in form and
structure; some of them have the pedicel at the base of the abdomen
very elongate, while in others this is so short as to be imperceptible
in the ordinary position of the body. A repetition of similar differences
of form occurs in the social wasps, so that notwithstanding the
difference in habits there seems to be no satisfactory way of
distinguishing the members of the two families except by the
structure of the claws and tibial spurs.

Fig. 27.—Eumenes flavopicta ♀. Burma. The wings on the left in the

position of repose, to show folding.
Fabre has sketched the habits of a species of Eumenes, probably E.
pomiformis. This Eumenes constructs with clay a small vase-like
earthenware vessel, in the walls of which small stones are
embedded (like Fig. 28, B). This it fills with food for the young. The
food consists of caterpillars to the number of fourteen or sixteen for
each nest. These caterpillars are believed to be stung by the parent-
wasp (as is the case in the fossorial Hymenoptera), but complete
evidence of this does not seem to be extant, and if it be so, the
stinging does not completely deprive the caterpillars of the capacity
of movement, for they possess the power of using their mandibles
and of making strokes, or kicking with the posterior part of the body.
It is clear that if the delicate egg of the Eumenes or the delicate larva
that issues from it were placed in the midst of a mass of this kind, it
would probably suffer destruction; therefore, to prevent this, the egg
is not placed among the caterpillars, but is suspended from the
dome covering the nest by a delicate thread rivalling in fineness the
web of the spider, and being above the mass of food it is safe. When
the young larva leaves the egg it still makes use of the shell as its
habitation, and eats its first meals from the vantage-point of this
suspension; although the mass of the food grows less by
consumption, the little larva is still enabled to reach it by the fact that
the egg-shell splits up to a sort of ribbon, and thus adds to the length
of the suspensory thread, of which it is the terminal portion. Finally
the heap of caterpillars shrinks so much that it cannot be reached by
the larva even with the aid of the augmented length of the
suspensory thread; by this time, however, the little creature has so
much increased in size and strength that it is able to take its place
amongst the food without danger of being crushed by the mass, and
it afterwards completes its metamorphosis in the usual manner.
 Fig. 28—Nidification of solitary wasps: section through nest, A, of
Odynerus reniformis; B, of Eumenes arbustorum. a, The
suspended egg of the wasp; b, the stored caterpillars. (After
André.)

It is known that other species of Eumenes construct vase-like nests;

E. unguiculata, however, according to an imperfect account given by
Perris, makes with earth a closed nest of irregular shape, containing
three cells in one mass. The saliva of these builders has the power
of acting as a cement, and of forming with the clay a very
impenetrable material. One species, E. coarctata, L. of this genus
occurs in Britain. The clay nests (Fig. 29) of this Insect are often
attached to the twigs of shrubs, while those of the two species
previously mentioned are usually placed on objects that offer a large
surface for fixing the foundations to, such as walls. According to
Goureau the larva of this species forms in one corner of its little
abode, separated by a partition, a sort of dust-heap in which it
accumulates the various débris resulting from the consumption of its
stores.

Eumenes conica, according to Horne, constructs in Hindostan clay-

nests with very delicate walls. This species provisions its nest with
ten or twelve green caterpillars; on one occasion this observer took
from one cell eight green caterpillars and one black. It is much
attacked by parasites owing, it is thought, to the delicacy of the walls
of the cells, which are easily pierced; from one group of five cells two
specimens only of the Eumenes were reared.

Fig. 29—Nest of Eumenes coarctata: A, the nest attached to wood; B,

detached, showing the larva. a, the larva; b, the partition of the
cell. (After André.)
Odynerus, with numerous sub-genera, the names of which are often
used as those of distinct genera, includes the larger part of the
solitary wasps; it is very widely distributed over the earth, and is
represented by many peculiar species even in the isolated
Archipelago of Hawaii; in Britain we have about fifteen species of the
genus. The Odynerus are less accomplished architects than the
species of Eumenes, and usually play the more humble parts of
adapters and repairers; they live either in holes in walls, or in posts
or other woodwork, or in burrows in the earth, or in stems of plants.
Several species of the sub-genus Hoplopus have the remarkable
habit of constructing burrows in sandy ground, and forming at their
entry a curvate, freely projecting tube placed at right angles to the
main burrow, and formed of the grains of sand brought out by the
Insect during excavation and cemented together. The habits of one
such species were described by Réaumur, of another by Dufour; and
recently Fabre has added to the accounts of these naturalists some
important information drawn from his own observations on O.
reniformis.

Fig. 30.—Odynerus antilope ♀. Britain.

This Insect provisions its cell with small caterpillars to the number of
twenty or upwards (Fig. 28, A.) The egg is deposited before the nest
is stocked with food; it is suspended in such a manner that the
suspensory thread allows the egg to reach well down towards the
bottom of the cell. The caterpillars placed as food in the nest are all
curled up, each forming a ring approximately adapted to the calibre
of the cell. Fabre believes these caterpillars to be partly stupefied by
stinging, but the act has not been observed either by himself,
Réaumur, or Dufour. The first caterpillar is eaten by the wasp-larva
from its point of suspension; after this first meal has been made the
larva is supposed to undergo a change of skin; it then abandons the
assistance of the suspensory thread, taking up a position in the
vacant chamber at the end of the cell and drawing the caterpillars to
itself one by one. This arrangement permits the caterpillars to be
consumed in the order in which they were placed in the cell, so that
the one that is weakest on account of its longer period of starvation
is first devoured. Fabre thinks all the above points are essential to
the successful development of this wasp-larva, the suspension
protecting the egg and the young larva from destruction by pressure
or movement of the caterpillars, while the position of the larva when
it leaves the thread and takes its place on the floor of the cell
ensures its consuming the food in the order of introduction; besides
this the caterpillars used are of a proper size and of a species the
individuals of which have the habit of rolling themselves up in a ring;
while, as the calibre of the tube is but small, they are unable to
straighten themselves and move about, so that their consumption in
proper order is assured. Some interesting points in the habits of an
allied species, O. (Pterocheilus) spinipes have been observed by
Verhoeff; the facts as regards the construction and provisioning of
the cell are almost the same as in O. reniformis. The species of
Odynerus are very subject to the attacks of parasites, and are, it is
well known, destroyed to an enormous extent by Chrysididae.
Verhoeff says that the wasp in question supplied food much infested
by entoparasites; further, that a fly, Argyromoeba sinuata, takes
advantage of the habit of the Odynerus of leaving its nest open
during the process of provisioning, and deposits also an egg in the
nest; the Odynerus seems, however, to have no power of
discovering the fact, or more probably has no knowledge of its
meaning, and so concludes the work of closing the cell in the usual
way; the egg of the Argyromoeba hatches, and the maggot produced
feeds on the caterpillars the wasp intended for its own offspring.
Verhoeff observed that the egg of the wasp-larva is destroyed, but
he does not know whether this was done by the mother
Argyromoeba or by the larva hatched from her egg. Fabre's
observations on allied species of Diptera render it, however, highly
probable that the destruction is effected by the young fly-larva and
not by the mother-fly.
Mr. R. C. L. Perkins once observed several individuals of our British
O. callosus forming their nests in a clay bank, and provisioning them
with larvae, nearly all of which were parasitised, and that to such an
extent as to be evident both to the eye and the touch. In a few days
after the wasps' eggs were laid, swarms of the minute parasites
emerged and left no food for the Odynerus. Curiously, as it would
seem, certain of the parasitised and stored-up larvae attempted (as
parasitised larvae not infrequently do), to pupate. From which, as Mr.
Perkins remarks, we may infer that (owing to distortion) the act of
paralysing by the wasp had been ineffectual. Mr. Perkins has also
observed that some of the numerous species of Hawaiian Odynerus
make a single mud-cell, very like the pot of an Eumenes, but
cylindrical instead of spherical. This little vessel is often placed in a
leaf that a spider curls up; young molluscs of the genus Achatinella
also avail themselves of this shelter, so that a curious colony is
formed, consisting of the Odynerus in its pot, of masses of the young
spiders, and of the little molluscs.

Horne has recorded that the East Indian O. punctum is fond of

availing itself of holes in door-posts where large screws have been;
after the hole has been filled with provisions, the orifice is covered
over level with the surface of the wood so that it eludes human
observation. It is nevertheless discovered by an Ichneumon-fly which
pierces the covering with its ovipositor and deposits an egg within.

The genus Abispa is peculiar to Australia and includes some very

fine solitary wasps, having somewhat the appearance of very large
Odynerus: these Insects construct a beautiful nest with a projecting
funnel-shaped entrance, and of so large a size that it might pass for
the habitation of a colony of social wasps; it appears, however, that
this large nest is really formed by a single female.

The species of the genus Rhygchium are also of insecticide habits,

and appear to prefer the stems of pithy plants as the nidus for the
development of the generation that is to follow them. Lichtenstein
says that a female of the European R. oculatum forms fifteen to
twenty cells in such a situation, and destroys 150 to 200 caterpillars,
and he suggests that, as it is easy to encourage these wasps to nest
in a suitable spot, we should utilise them to free our gardens from
caterpillars, as we do cats to clear the mice from our apartments.

The East Indian R. carnaticum seems to have very similar habits to

its European congener, adapting for its use the hollow stems of
bamboos. Horne has recorded a case in which a female of this
species took possession of a stem in which a bee, Megachile lanata,
had already constructed two cells; it first formed a partition of mud
over the spot occupied by the bee, this partition being similar to that
which it makes use of for separating the spaces intended for its own
young. This species stores caterpillars for the benefit of its larvae,
and this is also the case with another Eastern species, R. nitidulum.
This latter Insect, however, does not nidificate in the stems of plants,
but constructs clay cells similar to those of Eumenes, and fixes them
firmly to wood. Rhygchium brunneum is said by Sir Richard Owen to
obliterate hieroglyphic inscriptions in Egypt by its habit of building
mud nests amongst them. An individual of this wasp was found by
Dr. Birch when unrolling a mummy—"There being every reason to
believe that the Insect had remained in the position in which it was
found ever since the last rites were paid to the ancient Egyptian."

Fam. 2. Vespidae—Social Wasps.

Claws of the feet simple, neither toothed nor bifid, middle tibiae
with two spurs at the tip. Insects living in societies, forming a
common dwelling of a papery or card-like material; each
generation consists of males and females and of workers—
imperfect females—that assist the reproductive female by
carrying on the industrial occupations.

The anterior wing possesses four submarginal cells, as in the

Eumenidae. The attention of entomologists has been more directed
to the habits and architecture than to the taxonomy of these Insects,
so that the external structure of the Insects themselves has not been
so minutely or extensively scrutinised as is desirable; de Saussure,
the most important authority, bases his classification of the Insects
themselves on the nature of the nests they form. These habitations
consist of an envelope, protecting cells similar in form to the comb of
the honey-bee, but there is this important difference between the
two, that while the bee forms its comb of wax that it secretes, the
wasps make use of paper or card that they form from fragments of
vegetable tissue,—more particularly woody fibre—amalgamated by
means of cement secreted by glands; the vegetable fragments are
obtained by means of the mandibles, the front legs playing a much
less important part in the economy of the Vespidæ than they do in
that of the bees and fossorial Hymenoptera.

In most of the nests of Vespidæ the comb is placed in stages or

stories one above the other, and separated by an intervening space,
but in many cases there is only one mass of comb. It is the rule that,
when the cells of the comb are only partially formed, eggs are
deposited in them, and that the larva resulting from the egg is fed
and tended by the mother, or by her assistants, the workers; as the
larvae grow, the cells are increased in correspondence with the size
of the larva; the subsequent metamorphosis to pupa and imago
taking place in the cells after they have been entirely closed. The
food supplied is of a varied nature according to the species, being
either animal or vegetable, or both.

Fig. 31—Section of the subterranean nest of the common wasp, Vespa

germanica, in position. (After Janet.) a, One of the chambers of an
 ant's nest, Lasius flavus, placed above the wasps' nest; b, root to
which the first attachment of the nest was made; c, secondary
attachments; d, the first-made attachment; e, a flint within the
envelopes of the nest; f, the chief suspensory pillar of the second
layer of comb; g, lateral galleries; h, one of the secondary pillars
of suspension between two layers of comb; i, the layers of wasp-
paper forming the envelope of nest; j, vacant space round the
nest; k, flints that fell to the bottom during the work of excavation;
l, numerous larvae of a fly, Pegomyia inanis (?) placed vertically in
ground beneath the nest; m1 to m7, the layers of comb, in m2 the
cells are indicated, in m8 (above the main figure) the arrangement
of the three cells forming the commencement of the new layer of
comb, m7, is shown; n, gallery of access from surface; o, burrow
of a mole; p, interval of 90 mm. between top of nest and surface;
q, height of the nest, 163 mm.

Although the nests of the social wasps are very elaborate

constructions, yet they serve the purposes of the Insects for only a
single season. This is certainly the case in our own country. Here
each nest is commenced by a single female or queen; she at first
performs unaided all the duties for the inauguration of the colony;
she lays the foundation of the cells, deposits the eggs in them, feeds
the young, and thus rears a brood of workers that at once assist her,
and for the future relieve her of a considerable portion of her former
occupations; the nest is by them added to and increased, till the cold
weather of the autumn is at hand; at this time many males and
females are produced; the cold weather either destroys the
inhabitants of the nest, or reduces their vitality so that it is impossible
for them to pursue successfully the avocations necessary for their
subsistence, and they succumb to adversity. The young females,
however, hibernate, and each one that lives through the winter is the
potential founder of a new nest in the way we have already
described. It might be supposed that in tropical countries where no
cold season occurs the phenomena would be different, that the
colonies would be permanent, and that the nests would be inhabited
until they were worn out. De Saussure, however, informs us that this
is not the case, but that in the tropics also the colonies die off
annually. "The nests are abandoned," he says, "without it being