Helen Berents

The Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda acknowledges youth as positive contributors to peace and security in contrast to dominant negative stereotypes of youth. This article examines constructions of youth within a dataset of UN documents on YPS to reveal discourses for normative change on youth inclusion. We identify four key framings of youth: as future leaders, as resources, as deficient, and as exceptional. We demonstrate that conditionality of youth inclusion fosters normative institutional compliance indicating the complexities of normative claims for the inclusion of excluded populations, persistence of unequal power relations, and politicisation of marginal groups for strategic gain.

In 2015, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS), formalizing an agenda for positive youth participation in peace and security. However, youth peace activists have been leading peacebuilding long before this institutional recognition. This article explores the dynamics of how advocates and institutional actors conceptualize and negotiate compromise. To do this, it draws on in-depth interviews with youth and adult YPS advocates, a critical analysis of documents related to the agenda, and extended participant observation. It explores and develops a notion of a field of youth-oriented peacebuilding, drawing on Bourdieu. This makes visible a more complex field of struggle, showing how compromise can help explain how youth actively negotiate their participation in formalized agendas and persist in their own peacebuilding ambitions. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of compromise to understand the affordances and limitations of youth agency and institutional agendas.

Abstract: In 2017 Trump expressed pity for the ‘beautiful babies’ killed in a gas attack on Khan Shaykhun in Syria before launching airstrikes against President Assad’s regime. Images of suffering children in world politics are often used as a synecdoche for a broader conflict or disaster. Injured, suffering, or dead; the ways in which images of children circulate in global public discourse must be critically examined to uncover the assumptions that operate in these environments. This article explores reactions to images of children by representatives and leaders of states to trace the interconnected affective and political dimensions of these images. In contrast to attending to the expected empathetic responses prompted by images of children, this article particularly focuses on when such images prompt bellicose foreign policy decision-making. In doing this, the article forwards a way of thinking about images as contentious affective objects in international relations. The ways in which images of children’s bodies and suffering are strategically deployed by politicians deserves closer scrutiny to uncover the visual politics of childhood inherent in these moments of international politics and policy-making.

Abstract: Visuals are powerful mediators of global political events. Images, moving and still alike, are significant objects that play a role in shaping our understanding of international affairs. Through their multiple interpretations, these visuals can both represent reality and condition how we understand it. Within International Relations, there has been growing attention to the visual, with explorations of a wide range of theoretical concerns and empirical focuses. For instance, contributors to the burgeoning field of visual politics examine the affective power of images, how images become securitized and their role in framing politics.

Yet to date sustained attention has not been paid to the links between violence, images of violence and the effects of those images on policy-making. This special section draws on rich conversations in visual politics, alongside other disciplinary contributions, to pay particular attention to the co-constitution of visuality and violence in world politics. Visuals, whether still images or film and video, can help increase our field of view and make us aware of the many forms and manifestations of violence and its effects. The special section of this issue of International Affairs examines how images are implicated in direct and indirect violence, how emotional logics contribute to the political function of images, and furthermore how violent images inform the ways in which communities, policy-makers and scholars see and respond to complex political problems.

Abstract: Protectionist frames of children as passive, uncomprehending victims characterize the international architecture of responding to children in war. However, stories such as those in children’s war memoirs draw attention to the agency and capacity of children to negotiate and navigate distinct traumas and experiences in war. Children experience particular vulnerabilities and risks in conflict zones and their potential as contributors to the solutions to war must also be taken seriously. Children’s authoritative voices in memoir writing reveal the limitations of protectionist-dominated approaches and offer a rationale for taking the participatory elements of international humanitarian mechanisms and responses to conflict more seriously. Such a move may help address the comprehensive silencing of children’s voices in the institutional architecture concerned with children in war.

Abstract: Like other pop-cultural forms, videogames commonly reify militarist representations of warfare as straightforward, precise, and moral by obscuring conflict’s embodied messiness. But videogames do not just reflect militarist interests in their content; they are materially, symbiotically entangled with militarist interests. Recognising this intimate connection, and the phenomenon of virtuous warfare that results, this paper takes videogames seriously as material cultural artefacts. This paper draws on feminist IR, critical military studies, and game studies to explore three categories of bodies, and their gendered logics, produced by virtualised warfare: the hypermasculine, technologised soldier; the oft-ignored broken bodies of the soldier and game developer; and the obfuscated civilian. Together, this analysis argues that the consumption and production of videogames benefits certain parties, in ways that are reproduced and sustained through the production and obfuscation of bodies. Such entanglements have real consequences for how war, and its popular culture production, is understood and imagined.

Abstract: In recent years, digital games have emerged as a new tool in human trafficking awareness-raising. These games reflect a trend towards ‘virtual humanitarianism’, utilising digital technologies to convey narratives of suffering with the aim of raising awareness about humanitarian issues. The creation of these games raises questions about whether new technologies will depict humanitarian problems in new ways, or simply perpetuate problematic stereotypes. This article examines three online games released in the last five years for the purpose of raising awareness about human trafficking. In analysing these games, we argue that the persistent tropes of ideal victims lacking in agency continue to dominate the narrative, with a focus on individualised problems rather than structural causes of human trafficking. However, the differing approaches taken by the games demonstrate the potential for complexity and nuance in storytelling through digital games.

Abstract: Images of suffering children have long been used to illustrate the violence and horror of conflict. In recent years, it is images of dead children that have garnered attention from media audiences around the world. In response to the deaths of four children killed by the Israeli army while playing on a Gazan beach, Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu accused Hamas of generating “telegenically dead” Palestinian children for their cause (CNN 2014). In this article, it argues with this term to consider the appearance of images of dead children in global politics. I draw on a growing literature relating to the corpse as a subject in international relations (IR), asking how children’s bodies are understood, following Butler, as “grievable lives.” It explores the notion of “iconic” images and the politics of sharing images of dead bodies and consider global power relations that allow certain children’s deaths to be visible and not others. Through this analysis, the article argues that the idea of telegenic death might be productively considered to understand how the fleshy reality of children’s deaths contribute to discussions about the representation and visibility of children in contexts of crisis and conflict.

Abstract: Displacement is clearly gendered; age also has a strong influence on outcomes and experiences for the displaced, including a significant impact on how they are understood by the public and policy makers. It is important to keep this in mind when considering how children and youth are understood within contexts of conflict and insecurity, how they are affected by these forces, and how they navigate their lives in these contexts, especially in seeking peaceful outcomes. Here we engage with the current so-called European migration crisis as a potential watershed moment in understandings of children and youth as refugees. In particular, we suggest that the public representations of young people in this context can be deeply influenced by stereotypes and assumptions around gender and age that may—intentionally or inadvertently—lead to greater insecurity for people of diverse genders and ages. Likewise, we argue that when considering scholarship, policy, and practice in relation to migration, it is critical to develop and apply a lens that accounts for both gender and age.

Abstract: The dominant visual representation strategies of warfare through the virtual bodies of military-themed first-person shooter videogames obscures the corporeal embodied experiences of warzones. These games typically reinforce certain representational schema in which only certain kinds of bodies are visible. This article argues that the multi-million dollar videogame industry is intimately connected to institutional practices of war-making in the global order, and that it is crucial to pay attention to the embodied consequences of such a relationship.

Abstract: Violence and insecurity are often read as totalising narratives of communities in parts of Latin America, flattening the complexity of everyday life and the responses of occupants who suffer from fear. In this article we draw on ethnographic research undertaken in los Altos de Cazucá in Colombia and in San Luis Potosí in Mexico. While both sites are distinct locations with different historic, economic, social and political contexts they share features of communities affected by violence and insecurity: distrust of institutions of the state; rationalisations for managing violence in daily life; and narratives of fear that appear woven through the fabric of conversations. However, fear and violence are not all-encompassing experiences and individuals in both these communities describe practices of navigation of violence that draw on positive communal experiences. This article explores how, in these communities where violence comes to be expected but never normalised, people navigate their everyday lives.

Abstract: This article explores how gendered, racial and youth-ed concepts of girlhood shape the way conflict, violence and the lived experiences of girls in conflict-affected environments are understood globally. In particular, it examines the broader context and effect of social media campaigns that specifically invoke a concept of “girlhood” in their responses to crisis or tragedy. It focuses on two hashtags and their associated social media campaigns: #IAmMalala, started in response to the attempted killing of Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012 by Taliban gunmen, and #BringBackOurGirls, started by Nigerians and adopted globally in response to the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by terrorist group Boko Haram. In both instances, understandings of the broader political context are shaped by the focus on girls. Both hashtags also appropriate an experience: claiming to be Malala and claiming the Nigerian girls as ours. Through this exploration, I argue that particular ideals of girlhood are coded within these campaigns, and that these girls’ experiences are appropriated. I critique the limited representations of girlhood that circulate in these discussions, and how these limited representations demonstrate the problematic narrowness of dominant conceptions of girlhood.

Abstract: The introductory essay presents a locally-grounded theoretical framework for studying youth and everyday peace(building). Drawing on examples from fieldwork as well as insights from the articles to follow in the journal, the essay highlights three interrelated and overlapping spheres of inquiry. First, it makes the case for examining the age-specific as well as gender-, and other contextually-specific roles of youth as they relate to everyday peacebuilding. Second, the essay draws attention to how everyday peace is narrated by or through youth. It poses questions about what values, policies, and governmental structures are specifically being resisted and rejected, and how peace is conceptualised and/or hidden in the narratives of youth. Third, along with these concerns, the nexus of global and local (including discursive and institutional) structures that facilitate, curtail, and curtain everyday peace (building) practices are important to identify and evaluate for their impacts on the roles and ideas of youth. In proposing this theoretical framework that recognises the complex and multiple ways youth are engaged in their everyday worlds, this essay asks how we can engage this recognition within knowledges and practices of everyday peace(building).

Abstract: Orthodox notions of peace built on liberal institutionalism have been critiqued for their lack of attention to the local and the people who populate these structures. The concept of an ‘everyday peace’ seeks to take into account the agency and activity of those frequently marginalised or excluded and use these experiences as the basis for a more responsive way of understanding peace. Furthermore, reconceptualising and complicating a notion of ‘everyday peace’ as embodied recognises marginalised people as competent commentators and observers of their world, and capable of engaging with the practices, routines and radical events that shape their everyday resistances and peacebuilding. Peace, in this imagining, is not abstract, but built through everyday practices amidst violence. Young people, in particular, are often marginalised or rendered passive in discussions of the violences that affect them. In recognising this limited engagement, this paper responds through drawing on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected young people in a peri-urban barrio community near Colombia’s capital Bogota to forward a notion of an embodied everyday peace. This involves exploring the presence and voices of young people as stakeholders in a negotiation of what it means to build peace within daily experience in the context of local and broader violence and marginalisation. By centring young people’s understandings of and contributions within the everyday, this paper responds to the inadequacies of liberal peacebuilding narratives, and forwards a more complex rendering of everyday peace as embodied.

Abstract: Discourses on in/security are often concerned with structures and meta-narratives of the state and other institutions; however, such attention misses the complexities of the everyday consequences of insecurity. In Colombia’s protracted conflict, children are disproportionately affected yet rarely consulted, rendering it difficult to account for their experiences in meaningful ways. This article draws on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected children in an informal barrio community on the periphery of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, to explore how children articulate experiences of insecurity. It examines how stereotypes of violence and delinquency reinforce insecurity; how multiple violences impact young people’s lives; and how children themselves conceive of responses to these negative experiences. These discussions are underpinned by a feminist commitment of attention to the margins and engage with those for whom insecurity is a daily phenomenon. The effects of deeply embedded insecurity, violence, and fear for young people in Colombia require a more nuanced theoretical engagement with notions of insecurity, as well as the complexities of connections and dissonances within everyday life.

Abstract: The multiple forms of violence associated with protracted conflict disproportionately affect young people. Literature on conflict-affected children often focuses on the need to provide stability and security through institutions such as schools but rarely considers how young people themselves see these sites as part of their everyday lives. The enduring, pervasive, and complex nature of Colombia’s conflict means many young Colombians face the challenges of poverty, persistent social exclusion, and violence. Such conditions are exacerbated in ‘informal’ barrio communities such as los Altos de Cazucá, just south of the capital Bogotá. Drawing on field research in this community, particularly through interviews conducted with young people aged 10 to 17 this article explores how young people themselves understand the roles of the local school and ngo in their personal conceptualisations of the violence in their everyday lives. The evidence indicates that children use spaces available to them opportunistically and that these actions can and should be read as contributing to local, everyday forms of peacebuilding. The ways in which institutional spaces are understood and used by young people as ‘sites of opportunity’ challenges the assumed illegitimacy of young people’s voices and experiences in these environments.