Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress

Jana Tabak's book "The Child and the World" explores the constructions of child-soldiers as both vulnerable and risky, challenging the boundaries that separate them from normal children and contributing to the reproduction and promotion of a particular version of the international political order.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 30 December 2019
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Child-soldiers are a constant presence in almost every armed conflict around the world, challenging the notion of childhood as a happy and predictable story with a happy and predictable ending. Their participation in wars raises questions about the idea of childhood as a protected and innocent time, disrupting the natural idea of a protected and innocent childhood and eliciting fear, uncertainty, revulsion, horror, and sorrow. Jana Tabak explores the constructions of child-soldiers as children at risk and risky children using the perspectives of childhood studies and critical approaches to international relations in her book, The Child and the World. The book aims to problematize the boundaries that articulate child-soldiers as necessarily deviant and pathological in relation to normal children and to show how these specific limits participate in the (re)production and promotion of a particular version of the international political order. The focus of the work is not on investigating child-soldiers' lives and experiences per se but on their presumed threatening feature as they depart from the protected territory of childhood, disquieting everyday international life.

Weight: 296g
Dimension: 224 x 157 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820356402