Shifting the burden: childhoods, resilience, subjecthood

Abstract

Despite broadening of its boundaries over the past two decades, Security Studies has so far paid very little attention to childhood and its relationship to status quo circulations of power, to children as possessed of bona fide political subjecthood, and to the under-interrogated ideational commitments that have made these exclusions appear relatively unproblematic. In contrast, the rise of resilience thinking across a range of disciplines in recent years has attracted considerable attention from security scholars and practitioners alike. This article takes a critical perspective on the idea of resilience in connection with children’s (in)security, arguing that the failure to take seriously children’s political subjecthood has dire implications for the figuring and assignment of responsibility for traumas visited upon young people in a range of contexts. Moving beyond zones of conflict to consider also the everyday of (post)industrial societies of the Global North, it finds that resilience thinking together with an impoverished conception of childhood agency may move even the most benignly conceived interventions in cases of real or presumed childhood trauma to place responsibility for the work of forbearance on children themselves.