Children, young people and the everyday geopolitics of British military recruitment

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Matthew F. Rech

Children, young people and the everyday geopolitics of British military recruitment

Introduction

In the wake of the War on Terror and amidst growing public disenchantment with war

and foreign interventionism, Anglo-American military institutions have worked hard to

reshape perceptions of military culture. As part of a Report of Inquiry into the National

Recognition of the Armed Forces issued by the Labour government in 2009, for example,

forty recommendations were tabled for ‘‘increasing visibility’, ‘improving contact’, ‘building

understanding’ and ‘encouraging support’ of the [British] Armed Forces’ (Sangster 2013: 86;

Davies et al. 2009). These would include a new national Armed Forces Day (gov.uk 2014a),

greater support for homecoming parades, and a ‘wider use of uniforms’, amongst other

things. Later government policies have included the Armed Forces Community Covenant – a

scheme modelled on small-town civic militarism in the US – designed to enable local

authorities, private companies, charities and individuals to regularly pledge their support to

the ‘Armed Forces family’ in the UK (Strachan et al. 2010).

Though contemporary scholars of militarisation have roundly critiqued these

initiatives (e.g. Ware 2012), few have done so from a critical geographical perspective, and

infrequently in a manner which reveals one of their primary objectives – the exposure of

children and young people to the military and to military values and ideals. Alongside the

National Recognition report and the Covenant, November 2012 saw the release of the

Department for Education’s Military Skills and Ethos programme (gov.uk 2014b). This

initiative seeks to ‘create a military ethos’ in state-funded schools in England via a ‘Troops to

Teachers’ scheme (see Stanfield and Cremin 2013), government support for fledgling

military academies and free schools, and an £11 million expansion of military cadet forces.

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The British military’s ‘Youth Engagement’, which costs £250 million annually (Plastow

2011; ForcesWatch 2012a), goes much beyond the ethos programme, and includes military

presentation teams in school assemblies, careers talks and fairs, mock interviews, work

experience, education bursaries, away days to bases, and the provision of lesson plans and

teaching resources (ForcesWatch 2012b). Not counting exposures to military publicity

outside of schools, ‘around 900,000 young people came into contact with the armed forces

within the [British] education system’ through ‘11,000 visits to state and independent

secondary schools and colleges…in 2011-12’ (ForcesWatch 2013).

Though not explicitly badged as ‘recruitment’ (indeed ‘youth engagement’ is often

said to have a different rationale altogether), the above initiatives can scarcely be uncoupled

from it. As Ministry of Defence (MoD) policy reveals, the access given via military outreach

enables the military to:

encourage good citizenship, provide an environment which raises awareness of the MoD and

Armed Forces among young people, provide positive information to influence future opinion

formers, and to enable recruiters access to school environments. (MoD 2008: ev167; see also

Sangster 2013)

Set in a context of the structured integration of militaries into state and federal education

systems and proven upturns in enlistment (Armstrong, 2007; Lutz and Bartlet 1995), there

should be little doubt that children and young people in the UK currently inhabit a world

where the solicitations of organised militaries “permeate…daily lives” (Solomon and Denov

2009: 165).

Military recruitment is geopolitical because it relies upon the popularisation of

specific geographical knowledges including ‘elusive spatial principles, such as the perception

that the world is a composite of hostile environments’ (Farish 2010: xviii). It entails the

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violent designation of people and places, and is ‘a social and political [consequence] of both

the preparation for and the actual use of military force’ (Dalby 1996: 656). As a topic for

critical geopolitical analysis, military recruitment is an opportunity to understand the ‘state’s

obligation to account for itself and its role…[just as it is an opportunity] to try to understand

the often violent visions, metaphors and templates [which are integral] to state-centric

narrative of global politics’ (Rech 2014a: 11).

In aiming to take the critical geopolitics of military recruitment further, this chapter

moves beyond an analysis of representational materials (e.g. Power 2007), and will

demonstrate that recruitment is geopolitical also because it happens in place, and specifically,

places inhabited by children and young people. Recent conceptualisations of critical

geopolitics, ones echoed in cognate areas of International Relations, have begun to see

violence and militarisation as ‘not only fixed at the scale of international hierarchies, but also

rooted in embodied place-making practices’ (Dowler 2012: 492; see also Sylvester 2011;

McSorley 2013; Katz 2007; Nicley 2009). Though the essence of this polemic can be found

in work on geopolitics and visual culture (e.g. MacDonald et al 2010), geopolitics and peace

(Megoran 2011), and terrains of resistance (Routledge 1996), it is perhaps best captured by

feminist geopolitics. Namely, inquiring as to the geopolitics of everyday militarism – and this

is particularly the case with recruitment considering its everydayness– necessitates the:

traversing [of] scales from the macro security states to the microsecurity of people and their

homes; from the disembodied space of neorealist geopolitics to a field of live human subjects

with names, families and hometowns. (Hyndman 2007: 36)

In what follows, such efforts to ‘populate’ geopolitics will be rooted in a further

exploration of contemporary military recruitment practices in Britain, particularly as it is

targeted at children and young people. This enterprise is all the more important since, much

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like some of the world’s most oppressive regimes, the UK allows the recruitment of 16 year-

olds (with enrolment from the age of fifteen years, nine months for some positions) (Owen

2014). What this chapter also aims to do, building upon the geographies of young people and

military cadet forces (Hörschelmann 2008; Solomon and Denov 2009; Wells 2014), is to be

explicit about the geographies of military recruitment, outlining in turn how a critical

geopolitics of everyday militarism can speak directly to the aspirations of a critical

geopolitics of children and young people.

The chapter builds upon a Doctoral project (Rech 2012) which included archival work

in the film and sound collection at the RAF museum in Hendon, London; a critical analysis of

contemporary recruiting materials; and ethnographic studies at a number of the UK’s military

airshows. It turns firstly to a discussion of how recruitment is scaled, and to how it is targeted

at intersections of ‘risk’. Secondly, drawing upon a reading of campaign materials and

reportage, the chapter will outline efforts to resist military recruitment in that of counter-

recruitment activism.

Scaling recruitment for the at risk

A central theme in literatures around the geographies of children and young people is

risk. ‘Seen as both risky and at risk, young people’s bodies become markers of the state and

the social body now and in the future’ (Hörschelmann and Colls 2009: 4). Taking issue first

with the scripting and interpolation of young people as at risk and vulnerable, this opening

discussion explores how military recruitment does more than to script risk at the global scale

(e.g. Rech 2014a), and shows that it exploits this discourse at a more intimate level. Risk, fear

and vulnerability, Alexander (2008) argues, are crucial moments in the scaling of young

people’s experiences of the political, and when understood as intimate and everyday

encounters, illustrate how the global and local are linked (see also Pain et al. 2010). Through

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Hopkins’ (2010) notion of ‘placing young people’, the following account will explore how –

in an effort to ‘populate’ a geopolitics of militarism – British military recruitment is placed at

the intersection of the body and the nation.

Body-Nation

Being fundamentally about bodies – their acquisition, training, use, destruction and

loss – militaries place a marked emphasis on the body in recruitment. As a précis to basic

training, recruitment is the main ‘procedure by which civilian bodies are transformed…[and]

incorporated into military service and the principles of militarism’ (Armitage 2003: 3).

Insofar as the young military body is emblematic of the nation’s future (Adey 2010),

recruitment is tied to institutionalised practices of discipline and to the production of

‘physically strong and healthy youthful bodies, able to ‘defend’ or reproduce the nation’

(Hörschelmann and Colls 2009: 11). Disciplinary practices in recruitment materials can be

seen in the British archive from the late 1930s onwards. In the Royal Air Force (RAF)

recruiting film Raising Air Fighters (COI c.1938-9), for example, we are told that all new

RAF hopefuls needs to pass a ‘rigorous medical examination’ prior to acceptance: posture,

breathing and heart rate is checked by men in white coats; hand-eye-coordination is

monitored by means of a blindfolded link trainer exercise. Youthfulness and virility,

however, are clearly essential prerequisites: whereas we’re only shown medical assessment of

older men, the film concludes by profiling the successful (and young) recruit ‘Cadet Coburn’,

who, we’re told by the narrator, ‘isn’t a bad looking chap either – not all his conquests will be

in the air’.

In Raising Air Fighters we’re given an indication of a broader tendency of British

military recruitment to render the prospective recruit’s body docile and analysable in the face

of sovereign authority and a medicalised gaze. We also see nascent military bodies marked,

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inscribed and forced to carry out tasks in ways that classify them as ‘bad’, ‘good’, ‘better’

and ‘best’. Youthfulness, here, is a crucial metric, one which signifies the ideal ‘subject-

citizen’ ‘whose destiny it [is] to secure and defend the nation’ (Adey 2010: 26). The

classification of bodies by the military, both as part of the recruitment process and during

training, serves the basic purpose of marking out which bodies are fit for which roles: a

pilot’s body must be of a certain height and must be capable of seeing without glasses; the

RAF Regiment body must be male and capable of lifting a load of a particular weight. It

works to preclude bodies which are unable to do a certain number of press-ups, pull-ups;

those which are unable to run a certain distance, or which are marked in certain places by

tattoos (RAF 2014a, 2014b). However, the classification of the body through recruitment also

serves to mark particular bodies out as being at risk and emblematic of societal concerns

around body size.

Age

Male and

Female

minimum

Male and

Female

maximum

Male maximum

with additional

assessment

Female

maximum with

additional

assessment

18+ 18 28 32 30

16 to < 18 17 27 27 27

Table 1. Body Mass Index prerequisites for the RAF (taken from RAF 2014a)

The table above represents the absolute prerequisites for entry into the RAF, as

indicated by Body Mass Index (BMI). As the RAF suggests, ‘those who fail to meet the

minimum and maximum BMI criteria will not be accepted into the service’ (RAF 2014a).

‘The dominant means of defining and diagnosing obesity in national and international public

health policy’ (Evans and Colls 2009: 1015), the use of BMI by the British military points to

a distinct medicalization of bodies of particular sizes (this table appears in the ‘Health’

section of the RAF careers site rather than in ‘Fitness’). More starkly, recruitment practices

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perpetuate risk, and in this case, the ‘seemingly unquestionable truth about the dangers’ of

bodies that are too large, or too small (Colls and Evans 2009: 1011).

Where the risky body comes to matter for children and young people, however, is

where it is willed to perform as part of recruiting practices. Alongside the recent Cadet Force

expansion, which is synergistic with the government’s ‘Health and Wellbeing’ policy for

young people (gov.uk 2014c), potential recruits are faced with a range of strategies designed

to reveal the dangers of risky (unhealthy, not optimally-shaped) bodies. First amongst these

are health and fitness initiatives designed to find their way into daily routines such as the

RAF’s ‘Fitness Challenge’ (RAF 2014c). As we’re told here, ‘RAF personnel are required to

reach and maintain a good level of fitness throughout their career, and by following our

advice, you can do the same’. Such advice comes, partly, in the form of a ‘fitness widget’ – a

computer-based tool which allows the prospective recruit to design their own 24-week

training programme around the rigours faced by Officers, NC Aircrew and Gunners. Other

assistance comes in the form of the health and fitness ‘Progress Tracker’ (RAF 2014d)

through which users receive daily text messages from a virtual PT instructor. Messages might

include reminders about ‘healthy living’ – so as not to ‘destroy your efforts’ in exercising,

one is reminded to stop eating takeaways, to drink plenty of water, and to get rid of certain

things from your fridge.

If, as Adey (2010: 26) suggests, a connection is made between body and nation

‘through a host of different ways of doing’, then performing the healthy RAF body points to

two crucial arguments. First, the ‘Fitness Challenge’ and other initiatives reveal the

commensurability of the ideal civilian and ideal military body. Just as with the use of BMI by

the RAF, recruiting materials which focus on the body tend to offer a vision of healthy

military bodies, and healthy bodily techniques as broadly applicable to civilian life. Being ‘fit

for ops’, as one promotional tagline has it, is the same as being ‘fit for health’ and ‘fit for

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life’. Moreover, recruiting is gendered, and insofar as it discriminates between male and

female bodies and their supposed capacities, is but one facet of a broader discourse of the

gendering of military service and citizenship (e.g. Dowler 2002; Sasson-Levy 2003).

Secondly, these initiatives point to the deliberate placing of a military body-politics in

fora in which children and young people are likely to be engaged. The decision, made in

2014, to use Echo Customer Contact Services to extend and manage the RAF’s social media

presence – including the development of a mobile version of the careers site, a Facebook

careers page and @RAFReserves and @RAFCareers Twitter feeds – is a direct attempt to

‘match recruit expectations – especially as social media channels are an increasingly popular

choice for the younger generations…[a] key target demographic for recruits is the 16-24 age

groups’ (Heggie-Collins 2014: no pagination). In that these strategies are an attempt to

engage the young body directly they represent:

an anticipatory, bio-political strategy of military recruitment – one that is in line with wider

pacific, neo-liberal discourses of health and body image…it is a form of recruitment but

recruitment as a generalized, embodied condition. (Burridge and McSorley 2013: 74).

It is clear that social media is an increasingly important facet of military public relations (and

much more besides) in the UK and beyond (e.g. Maltby, 2010; DUN Project 2014). However,

where social media can indeed act to reinforce (rather than only to reconfigure) dominant

geopolitical and state narratives (Pinkerton and Benwell 2014), the placing of recruitment as

part of social media engagements is key. As “affective technologies, the use of which

predisposes the user to a variety of particular engagements with the geopolitical” (Dittmer

and Gray 2011), the social media of recruitment is only an indication of a broader geopolitics

of everyday militarism which works in various spaces at intimate scales.

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Figure 1. Body Composition Assessment. Waddington Airshow, 2009. Author

The final way the body of the recruit is put to work, and where risky, unhealthy

bodies are identified in recruitment, is through a host of practices of ‘doing’ at public events

such as military airshows. Airshows are an important space for the engagement of young

people who, at some events, make up over 20% of the visitors (Bournemouthair.co.uk 2014).

Shows like Farnborough often explicitly target youth and school groups through initiatives

like ‘Futures Day’, a scheme allowing free entry to 11-21 year-olds who are interested in the

careers in the defence and aerospace sectors (Farnborough.com 2014). Airshows, vitally,

enable all branches of the British military to engage the body directly through things like ‘Fit

for life’ cook-offs (Sunderland airshow 2010), where Royal Marines demonstrate in real-time

the sorts of culinary skills required to keep the body combat-ready. The prospective and

nearly always younger recruit is often encouraged to scale climbing walls, and at Waddington

airshow in 2009, to compete in the Body Composition Assessment (BCA) (figure 1). The

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BCA allowed young people to compete against each other at timed shuttle runs. Flanking the

Assessment was a series of posters which encouraged competitors (before they were to

compete) to locate their bodies on a BMI scale. In suggesting that ‘from 1st Oct 07, all RAF

personnel will have a BMI and WC [waist circumference] measurement taken at the

beginning of their fitness test’, the RAF here were clear to connect the requisite standards of

the military body to the medicalised discourse of the BMI. Indeed, as the posters read, ‘Body

Mass Index…measurement offers a simple, but very effective way of determining your body

composition and identifying your level of risk’. ‘Risk’, here, is that of cardiovascular disease,

diabetes, ‘various cancers’ and Alzheimer’s – all of which are a potential product of obesity.

The BCA, then, is but one example where young bodies are willed to perform in lieu

of a preference – both of the RAF and wider society – of bodies of particular shapes and

sizes. Central to the perception of these bodies is risk, and specifically, the risk to the self of

an unhealthy body, one which would be as unsuited to combat as it is to a civilian life. But

equally important here is the youthful body, both as a paragon of the militarily ideal, and

where it is worked upon though various practices of ‘doing’. Recruitment, therefore, provides

a vital instance whereby the bodies of military youth learn ‘mastery and awareness of

themselves, before [they] can be extended out toward their troop, their squadron, and

eventually the nation’ (Adey 2010: 41).

Recruitment at intersections of the risky

Whilst military recruitment readily scripts children and young people as at risk at a

range of geographical scales, it also interpolates them as risky. As Valentine (2009: 24)

argues, a Dionysian understanding of children’s bodies ‘constructs children as dangerous,

unruly and potentially out of control in adultist public space’. Managing the transition from

childhood to adulthood thus becomes about ‘the management and discipline of children’s

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bodies both to…discipline them in order to ensure they learn to behave in controlled, what

are perceived to be adult-like ways’ (Valentine, 2009: 24). Present in many youth-focussed

recruitment initiatives is this unruly child who, without the remedying influence of the

military, is scripted as disadvantaged, lacking in self-discipline, poorly behaved and often as

dangerous. The ‘risky’ young person has been a staple of RAF recruitment since at least the

1950s. However, a closer look at contemporary youth engagement reveals how unruly

tendencies are currently remedied in practice. It also indicates how a range of imagined and

real intersections (unruliness, bad-discipline, disadvantage, class, race) are exploited by

military recruiters.

At the root of the British government’s Military Skills and Ethos programme, outlined

above, was a letter sent to the Telegraph newspaper titled Why the Military should Invade our

Schools, written by shadow secretaries Stephen Twigg (education) and Jim Murphy (defence)

(Twigg and Murphy 2012). In it, Twigg and Murphy suggest that:

We are all incredibly proud of the work our Armed Forces do in keeping us safe at home and

abroad. They are central to our national character, just as they are to our national security. The

ethos and values of the Services can be significant not just on the battlefield but across our

society.

What the shadow ministers had in mind was for ‘a cadre of Armed Services mentors, mainly

veterans and reservists, to work with those in need of guidance and support’ (Twigg and

Murphy 2012: my emphasis) in a range of educational contexts. One of these contexts was to

be the new Military Academies (state-funded schools with service specialisms).

Having since been instituted as part of the wider Ethos programme, key to the support

for the academies (currently being trialled by the coalition government) was a green paper by

Blond and Kaszynska (2012) at the ResPublica think tank. As they note, the summer riots of

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August 2011 (violent civil unrest following student and anti-austerity protests in London and

other major cities) indicated:

the danger of losing many of our most vulnerable children and young adults to criminality or

self-destructive behaviour. [They also recognised that] tens of thousands of our young people

are becoming hopelessly trapped by lack of opportunity and education and many lack the

sufficient skills to access the job market, let alone the discipline to hold down any position

they might obtain (Blond and Kaszynska 2012: 5).

What Blond and Kaszynska (2012) argue is the cause of the ‘hopelessness and cynicism’ of

‘troubled youths’ is the loss ‘from our most disadvantaged areas of the foundational moral

institutions which can build the resilience, discipline and confidence that our children need’

(5). And their suggested fix: ‘a whole chain of Military Academies officially backed by the

Armed Services and delivered by the Cadet Associations to be constituted in our most

troubled communities’ (5). As a start, Blond and Kaszynska call for the setting up of

academies in the UK’s youth NEET (not in employment, education or training) ‘blackspots’,

where up to 25% of 16-24 year olds are NEET, until, they suggest, there is a Military

Academy in ‘every Local Educational Authority area’ in the UK. To reiterate, the links

between military academies and recruitment is clear and should not be downplayed: the

overarching vision for military academies is not only to ‘rescue the young’, and to ‘help

society’, but also to simultaneously ‘revitalise the reserves’.

What is clear in the ResPubilca paper and the wider Ethos programme is a consistent

scripting of young people as delinquent, potentially dangerous, as perpetrators of crime, and

as a risk to an otherwise moral, adult society. But whilst the scripting of risk in recruitment

can be debated, what is indisputable is that recruitment and military education policy targets

key intersections of ‘risk’ and inequality. Along with focussing the first round of military

academies in NEET blackspots, the British military’s broader recruiting policy targets

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‘schools with students from a more disadvantaged demographic’ with the end result being

that ‘the average reading age of a 16 year old signing up to the [British] army is 11’

(ForcesWatch 2012b). Moreover, a disproportionate number of recruitment visits are made

every year to state, as opposed to privately-funded, schools. For the period between 2010 and

2012, 85% of all state schools in Scotland were visited an average of four times, with one

secondary school being visited 22 times (this is compared to visits to only 50% of private

institutions). Similarly, in Wales, 74% of 219 state schools were visited by the Army alone,

whereas only 29% of private schools were visited (see ForcesWatch 2013). Mirroring an

trends in the US, whereby recruitment is targeted indiscriminately at poor and minority

communities (Wyant 2012), the young occupy but one intersection on a spectrum of

inequality and disadvantage. Thus, overall, what should be of key importance here is critique

of how economic and social disadvantage is compounded by a rhetoric of risk, along with an

understanding of how the British military both benefit from, and catalyse, this situation

though their recruiting strategies.

Engaging in politics, resisting recruitment

Beyond the at risk and the risky, a final thematic in the geographies of children and

young people useful for populating a notion of geopolitics is political engagement. Young

people, as Philo and Smith (2003) note, are often assumed to have little influence over the

workings of states, nations and geopolitics, having not the right to vote or to otherwise

contribute to the political process (though see O’Toole 2003; Skelton 2007, 2010; Kallio and

Häkli 2011). Young people’s exposure to military recruitment and the low age of possible

enlistment in the UK is, of course, clear evidence that this is not the case. First, negotiating

the solicitations of military recruiters should be considered a (geo)political practice in and of

itself. Second, tasked with orchestrating state-legitimised violence means that young people

who’ve enlisted, not least because they will often be still too young to vote, have significant

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geopolitical agency. But thirdly, young people’s engagement with the political is illustrated

through their involvement in and exposure to the burgeoning practice of counter-recruitment

– a theme which forms the chapter’s penultimate discussion.

Having grown over the past ten years in a climate of ‘heightened

militarism…[consequent of the US and UK’s]…involvement in long-term wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan’ (Harding and Kershner 2011: 79), the counter-military recruitment movement

has emerged as a ‘way not only to contest but to interfere directly with the execution of

war…by disrupting the flow of bodies into the military’ (Brissette 2013: 1). Confined

predominantly to North America (though with some notable exceptions in the UK), the

counter-recruitment movement takes a largely cultural approach, whereby the task of counter-

recruiters is to ‘alter the common sense around war and militarism’ (Brisette 2013: 377).

Vitally, it engages and involves children and young people directly.

Counter-recruiters take a trans-scalar approach (Rech 2014b) and use the immediate

spaces of contemporary militarism (most often schools) to mount challenges to the efforts of

recruiters which, as discussed above, manifest themselves across scales from the body to

global imaginative spaces. The predominant tactics employed by the movement, therefore,

are situated efforts to counter and disrupt the message promoted by recruiters. This might

take the form of flyering outside school property, ‘tabling’ on campuses at lunchtimes and at

sporting or careers events, or counterpropaganda and the defacement of recruiting materials.

The aim of these tactics, as Allison and Solnit (2007: xv-xvi) suggest, is to inform students as

to ‘what military recruits are used for in the world, understanding war, and creating viable

alternatives to…the deadlock of militarism’. It is also about challenging, Tannock (2005)

notes, the assumption that militaries provide a healthy environment in which to live, work

and learn, with counter-presences at military careers fairs offering alternative careers advice

especially in communities most susceptible to the ‘vocational visions’ offered by recruiters

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(Harding and Kershner 2011). Thus, the counter-recruiting narrative is one which targets a

range of the key emphases in recruitment – the global reach of militaries, nation and

patriotism, and personal achievement. It is also a narrative which is influenced by the spaces

occupied by counter-recruiters: for good or ill (see Friesen 2014) this kind of activism is

intimately connected to educational spaces, indicating that the place of counter-recruitment is

one among a ‘terrain of resistance’ (Routledge 1996).

A useful example in the UK is Forces Watch, an activist and pressure group which has

had some success in advocacy around the conditions of military service (ForcesWatch

2014a). Central to the work of Forces Watch, however, is the involvement of children and

young people in the resisting of recruitment and militarisation. Chief among their initiatives

in this area is the recent film Engage: the Military and Young People (see ForcesWatch

2014b) which was crowd funded and produced by young people in tandem with a charity

working to empower young people through journalism (Headliners.org 2014). Engage charts

military activities in UK schools, and explores a range of young people’s exposure to, and

opinions of, the military’s youth engagement strategy. Characteristically, the film offers a

range of first-hand perspectives, and rather than presenting only a critique of militarising

influences, offers an insight into the perceived benefits gained by young people who attend a

military cadet organisation, or who welcome military influence in educational spaces.

Providing an outlet for opposing views is taken forward as part of a broader strategy for the

Engage film, which forms the basis for a workshop for use in schools and youth groups

aiming to encourage critical reflection and debate around (rather than merely an outright

rejection of) the government’s military engagement strategy. Mirroring a broader effort by a

coalition of activist groups under the banner of the Peace Education Network (Peace-

education.org 2014), Engage points to the key importance of educational spaces for

envisioning alternatives to militarism. This is especially the case where a wide range of anti-

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militarist organisations, not just those associated with the Peace Education Network, plan a

range of interventions throughout the period of the WWI centenary (e.g. the Martin Luther

King Peace Committee (2014) teacher’s recourse pack).

Conclusion

What this chapter has done is to briefly outline how a critical geopolitics of children

and young people might be applied to the practice of military recruitment. Recruitment

reflects and compounds many of the problematics in the geographies of children and young

people. Inherently, recruitment scripts risk at the scale of global imagined space. But the

practice of recruitment also places risk at different and more intimate scales, whereby the

youthful body is seen as emblematic whilst at the same time at risk if it is not of the

militarily-required size. The ‘risk’, here, is not only that of unhealthiness, but of not

conforming to more broadly-held beliefs about young (and gendered) bodies. Military

recruitment also scripts (and benefits from the perception of) young people as risky: much of

the current policy around youth engagement in the UK is based on the assumption that

delinquent and perhaps dangerous young people might well benefit from the remedying and

moralising influence of the military.

However, military recruitment also points to the crucial fact that young people are

fundamentally part of and complicit in (geo)politics. This is clearly the case where, in the

UK, people who are officially ‘children’ are able to serve in the military as agents of

geopolitics. But it is also the case where children currently negotiate a landscape of

geopolitical persuasion (i.e. recruitment) denoting the ‘complex entanglement of young

people’s lives with international politics’ (Hörschelmann and El Rafaie 2014: 444). The

practice of counter-recruitment demonstrates, moreover, that children and young people do

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not passively accept the solicitations of military recruiters, and are often active in the

contestation of geopolitics.

A critical geopolitics of children and young people should involve, following the

potential of a young-person-centred counter-recruitment effort, listening to children and

young people (after Pain 2008). But it should also involve thinking seriously about what

young people’s engagement with the everyday geopolitics of militarism says about

‘geopolitics’ and the ‘geopolitical’. What an everyday geopolitics of militarism requires is the

placing of children and young people (after Hopkins 2010), and an understanding of how

children’s experiences of the geopolitical are ‘materialised…within spaces’ (Colls and Evans

2009: 1016). Young people’s engagement with military recruiting does not just happen in

imagined spaces of globalised fear (though this is a vitally important space). Rather, for

recruitment (and counter-recruitment) to work, these practices must be located in place;

around the body, in neighbourhoods, and in schools – spaces which might easily be

overlooked if we accept a normative definition of ‘geopolitics’. Thus, in line with scholarship

which has begun to rethink the epistemology of critical military studies, a critical geopolitics

of children and young people is an imperative which demands we ‘populate’ geopolitics. The

changed and expanded notion of the ‘geopolitical’ which this argument implies is essential if

critical geopolitics is to usefully inform activism, anti-militarism and a vision of peace.

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