Political Futurity and the Child-soldier Figure

AbstractThe vision of the universal child encapsulated in the international human rights declarations and conventions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is meant to transcend political divides in order to protect the child in the interest of political futurity. This is precisely the vision humanitarian agents appeal to in their efforts to intervene on behalf of child soldiers. Yet the child-soldier figure dramatizes not only the extent to which the universal child is the offspring of a particular, liberal ideological project, but also the extent to which (neo)liberalism is complicit in the violence done to and by the child soldier. This essay takes the case of one particular child soldier as representing a limit-case for the discourse of the universal child and a crisis for the futurity of liberal political formations. The liberal construction of childhood can only with difficulty be reconciled with the real challenges posed by child soldiers.Keywordschild-soldier figureKhadr, Omarliberalismnation-stateuniversal child Notes1 Many of the memoirs of former child soldiers are marked by the chiasmatic narrative structure of making and unmaking. Particularly exemplary in this regard is Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (Citation2007a); in fact, an excerpt published in the New York Times Magazine from his memoir is entitled 'The Making and Unmaking of a Child Soldier' (Beah Citation2007b).2 Let me be clear: my focus in this essay is on the child-soldier figure and on the idea of childhood, rather than on actual children, even though I will address the case of a particular child soldier. I also want to stress that despite the idealized version of North American childhood centred on healthy, happy, protected children, the numbers of children living in poverty in Canada and the United States and the numbers of North American children subjected to state regulation tell a different story. See Grossberg (Citation2003), Ladd-Taylor (Citation2010), Dubinsky (Citation2008), Comacchio (Citation2006), Myers (Citation2010).3 The crimes with which Khadr was charged would not be regarded as war crimes under international law.4 Gar Pardy, who worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time, drafted the press lines that signalled Khadr's youth and his status as a child soldier. Pardy recounts how the legal adviser to the department then issued a directive to 'claw back on' references to Khadr's age and criticism of the US government for holding a minor in contravention of international protocols. See Pardy (Citation2010); Shephard (Citation2008: 116–17).5 The United States is a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on children in armed conflict and to the International Labour Organization Convention NO. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, both of which set out appropriate treatment for child soldiers. The Optional Protocol stipulates that the age of permissible involvement in combat is 18.6 Canada only agreed to repatriate Khadr after the 2010 verdict, agreeing to bring him home after he has served out the first year of his additional eight-year sentence under the plea-bargain.7 The Canadian government apparently paid British philanthropic societies involved in emigrating these children 2 dollars per child and subsidized their travel expenses, such was the need for labour in the dominion (see Buis Citation2009; Parr Citation1994). Clearly these children were not quite 'priceless' yet.8 See also Valverde's (Citation1991) analysis of the racializing of 'character' in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social reform movement.9 For accounts of the complex interleaving of 'race' and 'character' in the US context in the same period, see Salazar (Citation2010), Boeckmann (Citation2000), Potts (Citation2007).10 For an indication of Canadian public opinion on George Bush, see Harper (Citation2006); an CitationAngus Reid Strategies poll indicated that only 29 per cent of Canadians believed Omar Khadr would get a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay, though a higher percentage were in favour of his being tried there, regardless.11 A public inquiry ordered by the Canadian government cleared Arar of any links to terrorism; in 2007 the Canadian government also issued a public apology to Arar for the involvement of Canadian officials in his extraordinary rendition, and awarded him a $10.5 million settlement. The RCMP commissioner also offered Arar a public apology in 2006.12 Khadr's lawyers nonetheless point to evidence that casts doubt on the charge that he threw the grenade that killed a US soldier.13 The conference was organized into three sets of meetings: the Youth Meeting, the Experts' Meeting and the Ministerial-level Meeting, with the first two groups making representation to the third.14 ILO Convention NO. 182 concerns the prohibition of 'the worst forms of child labour,' including 'forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict'. Canada announced its ratification of this convention at the International Labour Conference in Geneva in June 2000.15 Retired Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who led the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda during the genocide, and who has since devoted his energy to the cause of child soldiers, has occupied the unique, and by his account, very difficult position of attempting to get military personnel and human rights organizations to work together on solutions, keeping both the child and the soldier in view at the same time by examining the use of children as a 'weapons system' (Dallaire Citation2010: 11–13).16 Beah has spoken at the United Nations and at the 2007 conference in Paris that established the Paris Commitments and the Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups. Beah is also affiliated with the Child Soldier Initiative led by retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire.17 Even middle-class childhood in the Global North is not as removed from the cash nexus as it is ideally conceived to be. Gayatri Spivak has for some time been pointing to the unacknowledged geopolitical ties between the child investor of the North and child labourer of the Global South. See Spivak (Citation2004).

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