Objects and subjects: Strategic use of childhood in the debate over the Canadian contribution to MINUSMA

Abstract

The debate over the scope of the Canadian military’s contribution to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali evolved from the ambitious promise of ground troops to the deployment of narrow support to the mission. This article examines how the strategic use of childhood in political persuasion shaped security discourse and the nature of the Canadian contribution to United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. This article analyzes political and media genres of discourse to examine mechanisms which (re)constructed, legitimized, and constituted childhoods during the debate on the Canadian peacekeeping deployment to Mali. Looking through the lens of critical discursive analysis, the article demonstrates the policy implications of rendering children as, what Marshall Beier defined, “security anxieties.” Representing children as potential security threats to the Canadian Armed Forces reveals their agency; it also, however, ignores the multiple, fluid roles of children in areas of conflict. This reductionist type of agency calls for correction on behalf of policy actors, furthering the objectification of children as a political problem. Examining how childhood is employed in influencing the debate about the use of military force, this article enhances our understanding of how narratives on childhood have consequences for global security. This article also displays significant opportunities to use the critical discursive approach to explore the diverse and complex experiences of children in conflict zones and (post)conflict societies.

Keywords

Agency Canada childhood discourse Mali peacekeeping security

Introduction

In August 2016, the Canadian government launched a debate over the nature and scope of their contribution to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission, with the promise of deploying up to “600 troops and 150 police officers to a UN peace operation” (Clark, 2016) in Africa. Ottawa’s ultimate contribution was, however, less ambitious than its initial pledges, with the Canadian government announcing its commitment to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), in March 2018. The deployment consisted of tactical airlift support, an aviation task force, and a reaction force including 250 Canadian Armed Forces members (Department of National Defence, 2018). The government provided strategic justifications such as reinforcing “Canadian investments in UN stabilization, peacebuilding and training” in Mali and the UN request for aeromedical evacuation assistance for containing both the scope and duration of the mission (Global Affairs Canada, 2018).

The current complex conflict in Mali, which goes back to the insurgency in the North of the country in 2012, is heavily securitized in both discourse and practice (Eizenga, 2019). This rebellion involved the Malian government, Tuareg militia groups, and Islamist armed groups such as Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Although the jihadist groups share the religious concerns of the Tuareg separatists, they have varying, incompatible agendas, which make the conflict more complex and difficult to resolve (Bere, 2017). Discursively, Mali has been produced as a failed state with a need for stabilization and security assistance (Gelot and Sandor, 2019). The engagement of global actors in the Sahel region in general and Mali specifically is increasingly characterized with the militarization of responses. The tools ranged from capacity-building projects, economic sanctions, and the use of military force (Bere, 2017; Charbonneau, 2017). International actors endeavored to make a distinction between the French-led counterterrorism operation and the UN peacekeeping operation mandate.¹ The latter concerned with counterterrorism operations, while the former was to focus on the range of tasks from the facilitation of the peace process to the protection of civilians. However, on the ground, international actors encounter local actors who represent multiple loyalties, which makes it challenging to “know where peacekeeping and counterterrorism should respectively begin and end” (Charbonneau, 2017: 6). All parties to conflict recruited and used children in a range of roles from direct participation in hostilities to supportive roles such as collecting intelligence and guarding prisoners, and their recruitment could be both forced and voluntary (Bleck et al., 2018). Non-state armed groups also used children for their political objectives to serve as “symbolic advocates for their armed struggle” (Bleck et al., 2018: 170). The presence of children on the battlefield and the potential for their radicalization became central to the debate on the scope of the Canadian mission.

Children² are most commonly classified into the reductionist categories of passive victims—objects of protection—or perpetrators—subjects with negative agency (Wagnsson et al., 2010: 9; see also Baines, 2009; Beier, 2015; Berents and McEvoy-Levy, 2015), including roles of child soldiers and child terrorists. In this article, I examine how children’s participation in armed conflict was deployed as a rhetorical device to produce a narrative of child soldiers as a potential threat to the Canadian Armed Forces. Informed by critical discourse analysis, I explore how political and media discourses (re)produce children as negative agents and the repercussions these have for both security practices and construction of children’s agency. The article explores how the rhetorical deployment of childhood in political persuasion shaped security discourse and the scope of the Canadian contribution to the peacekeeping mission in Mali. Through examining the role of the Canadian media in the construction of the discourse reported, the article poses two interrelated questions: How childhood is deployed as a rhetorical device in influencing the use of force? What security practices and policies have been legitimized in relation to the deployment of the Canadian contribution to UN peacekeeping operations? This article demonstrates how two interrelated discourses—representing child soldiers as an integral element of “new wars” and a threat for a new peacekeeping mission—were used to define the scope of the intervention. This article provides empirical evidence on how narratives on childhood have consequences for global security. This article also displays significant opportunities to use the critical discursive approach to explore the diverse and complex experiences of children in conflict zones and (post)conflict societies (Berents and McEvoy-Levy, 2015; Gilligan, 2009; Jacob, 2015; Lee-Koo, 2017).

The first section introduces the discourse-analytical framework and discusses the methodology of the study. Next, I present two interrelated discourses. I explore how the constitution of children as an integral element of so-called new wars and positioning them as a threat to Canadian Armed Forces discursively defined the scope of the peacekeeping mission. Finally, the conclusion outlines areas for future research.

Theoretical and methodological considerations

Discourses on security—as “systems of meaning-production” (Shepherd, 2008: 25)—delineate what is possible within particular contexts and who are the beneficiaries of protection, with consequences for the security of societies (Wagnsson et al., 2010: 8). Discourses on conflict do not just describe specific conflict; they also justify and legitimize particular security practices, their nature, and scope (Gould, 2014: 208). Feminist scholars theorized how strategic discourse may shape our understanding and prescriptions of security (Kinsella, 2004; Shepherd, 2008; Tickner, 2001). Scholars have further examined how discourse enables and justifies specific policies and practices across policy areas, such as human trafficking (Berman, 2003; Doezema, 2000; Lobasz, 2019), migration (Hart, 2015; Nguyen and McCallum, 2016; Van Dijk, 2018), gendered violence (McLeod, 2011; Seto, 2016; Shepherd, 2008), and postconflict resolution (Axelsson, 2015; Lahai, 2015; MacKenzie, 2009a, 2009b, 2015). This scholarship emphasizes that discourses on security are employed for creation, exercise, and maintenance of power. Roxanne Doty (1993) observes that this kind of power is engaged in producing meanings, subject identities, and relationships that legitimate one policy while proscribing others (p. 299). This conception of power is “inherent in the linguistic practices by which agents are constructed” (Doty, 1993: 301; see also Jabri, 2007).

In the domain of children, childhood(s), and security, scholars demonstrate how policy-relevant actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media, and government officials, approach children either as objects of security to be rescued and protected, or as subjects to be feared, corrected, and regulated (Baines, 2009; Beier, 2018; Gilligan, 2009; Hoffman, 2011; Macmillan, 2015; Rosen, 2005, 2015; Wagnsson et al., 2010). Alison Watson (2015) points out that “children are generally perceived as not having any ‘power’, as defined in a traditional sense, in the international system” (p. 53; Berents, 2015). State protection is embedded in innocence narratives, a perspective that positions children as essentially passive and lacking control over what happens in their lives (Namuggala, 2018). However, as Marshall Beier (2015) argues, while “children are constructed outside of political life it is not to say they are not politized” (p. 7). Lorraine Macmillan (2015), for example, demonstrates how the constructions of child civilians as inherently vulnerable and innocent played a significant role in legitimizing US intervention in Somalia. Children’s politicization “precedes, underpins, and sustains” (Brocklehurst, 2015: 34) many security practices. In this article, I explore how the rhetorical deployment³ of childhood(s) shapes, legitimizes, and constrains certain policy options in justificatory discourses.

These discursive practices, as I further demonstrate, impact and (re)define children’s agency⁴ in the Malian context. The discursive construction of agency allows for examining the ways in which subjects are ascribed with an agency in various discursive practices and the meanings attributed to such representations of agency (Åhäll, 2012). The article contributes to the debate on the positioning of children and childhood(s) in security studies by examining how narratives are constructed to perpetuate dominant discourses on the experiences of conflict-affected children.

The discourse-analytical framework allows for exploring the “exclusionary forces of social structures and the exclusionary practices of agents” (Holzscheiter, 2011: 7). I have selected documents from the time period of February 2016, when the debate over the Canadian contribution to UN peacekeeping operations entered the agenda of Canadian decision-making, to July 2018, when the first Canadian deployment joined MINUSMA forces. Drawing on Van Dijk’s (2018) classification, this article focused on political and media genres of discourse (p. 231). The former included analysis of parliamentary debates, witness testimonies in the legislative committees, public statements, interviews and speeches of politicians⁵ that discussed roles of children (either as objects or as subjects) in areas of potential Canadian peacekeeping contribution. This analysis of Canadian media discourse examined practices which “maintain, construct and constitute, and legitimize meaning” (Shepherd, 2008: 21) on the recruitment and use of children during the debate on the Canadian peacekeeping deployment to Mali. The media wields control over meaning structures and language practices (Caldas-Coulthard, 2003; Van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b). Media texts recontextualize social practices, simultaneously explaining and legitimizing new constructs (Wagnsson et al., 2010). This power of storytelling diminishes marginalized groups’ participation in “discourse concerning them, and constructs stigmatizing beliefs as popular discourse” (Saewyc et al., 2013: 97). In the debate over security practices, media is positioned “at both the local and the global levels——often aiming to connect the two” (Wagnsson et al., 2010: 12). It is salient to examine how the media constitutes children as subjects or objects of security, through discourse to reaffirm the legitimacy of particular truths (Khosravinik, 2010). My sample includes a total of 157 news articles. Specifically, I survey 68 articles from The Globe and Mail, 28 from The National Post, 37 from The CBC and 24 from The Toronto Star.⁶

In my analysis, I draw on Roxanne Doty’s (1993) classification of discursive mechanisms to analyze discourses that justified certain security practices and precluded others. Presupposition allows for constructing “background knowledge and in doing so constructs a particular kind of world in which certain things are recognized as true”(Doty, 1993: 306). Predication involves “the linking of certain qualities to particular subjects through the use of predicates and the adverbs and adjectives” (Doty, 1993: 306). Predicates provide specific attributes to objects such as “innocence,” “threat,” “terrorist,” and “vulnerability.” The mechanism of subject positioning situates actors in a hierarchical relationship, which is “evident in the kind and degree of the agency assigned to the subject” (Doty, 1993: 306). These three tools provide analytic categories that enable me to get at how discursive practices constitute subjects and objects and organize them into a “grid of intelligibility” (Doty, 1993: 306).

Representation of child soldiers in the Canadian news media

Discourse on child soldiers as part of “new wars”

The rhetorical deployment of child soldiers contributed to conflict in Mali being constituted as “new wars” with their “disregard for conventional distinctions between people, army and government” (Duffield, 2014: 55). “New wars” is an example of globalized discourse, which revolves around the dangers of state failure and the security–development nexus (Gelot and Sandor, 2019: 526). The Canadian media employed the discursive mechanism of presupposition in advancing the understanding of child soldiers as the product and integral element of so-called “new wars.”⁷ In the initial stages of the debate, media outlets emphasized that “regardless of location it is likely the troops will be deployed in mostly violent, unstable nations” (Brewster, 2017). One of the profound implications of adopting classificatory lens such as new war frame is that it provides “discursive and institutional backdrop to define a local instance of violence [. . .], which have direct repercussions on the population targeted” (Gould, 2014: 2011; see also Bhatia, 2005). The national news narrative reiterated that the deployment of Canadian troops to Mali would be equivalent to walking into a “combat zone” (The Globe and Mail, 2018d; see also Campion-Smith, 2017; The Globe and Mail, 2018a; Walkom, 2018), that Mali is a “safe haven for terror groups” (Fife and Chase, 2017; see also Brewster, 2016; LeBlanc, 2016) and “the deadliest place to serve for UN troops” (Chase, 2 March 2017). Media also cited “deadly attacks against UN peacekeeping troops” (The Globe and Mail, 2016; see also The Globe and Mail, 2018e) to demonstrate the high-risk nature of the mission. News media claimed that “Mali and similarly troubled countries are really complex civil wars. Canadian military personnel might find themselves in terrain they are untrained for, fighting child soldiers” (CBC, 2017a; DiManno, 22 March 2018; The Globe and Mail, 2018c).⁸ During the debate in the Canadian parliament, representatives of the opposition—the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC)—also advanced this discourse of potential mission to Mali. There was no “no peace to keep” in Mali, and the mission amounted to the deployment to “war zone” (House of Commons, 2018a; see also House of Commons, 2018b; Senate of Canada, 2016a). Senator Dagenais (CPC-Canada) argued, following the announcement about the deployment of Canadian soldiers to the mission in Mali,

According to the United Nations, 162 soldiers have lost their lives during the mission in Mali, making it one of the most dangerous international operations currently being led by the UN. Peace does not exist in Mali. (House of Commons, 16 April 2018c)

Representatives of the government also acknowledged that child soldiers were integral to this type of conflicts. Mark Gwozdecky,⁹ in his testimony before Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on the changing nature of peacekeeping during his testimony, said,

There is often no clear peace accord to be monitored. Violence frequently occurs in intra-state conflicts, many of which spill over to neighbouring countries, creating deep regional strains. [. . .] Combatants rarely represent formal armies of recognized states and operate without regard for international norms. Children and rape are often used as weapons of war. (Senate of Canada Committee on National Security and Defence, 2016b)

Historical discourses also informed the discourse of child soldiers as a key element of “new wars” around Canada’s potential peacekeeping deployment. Viviene Jabri (2007) argues that the “temporality of war is never confined to its immediate ramifications [. . .] so too its spatiality cannot be confined to the battlefield if such a battlefield exists” (p. 24). The experience of the country’s previous peacekeeping deployments and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) engagements contributed to discursive framing of the scope of the peacekeeping mission in Mali and the construction of children as potential risks either to the mission or to personnel. In constituting conflict in Mali as a complex civil war, media draws the comparison to Canadian engagement in Afghanistan (2001–2014). The potential deployment, according to the discourse, would have been “complete with child soldiers, inhospitable conditions, and all sorts of other threats [. . .] many of the same things they had to deal with in Afghanistan” (CBC, 2018). Teun van Dijk demonstrates the potential for the discursive mechanism of presupposition to manipulate the knowledge and beliefs of the audience. Presuppositions indicate that some fact is known to be the case, even when it is not (i.e. presupposing the similar nature of conflict and level of threat for both Mali and Afghanistan).¹⁰

The association of the potential deployment to Mali with “troubled operations” (The Globe and Mail, 2018b), “peacekeeping disasters” (Stewart, 2016), and “imbroglios” (The Globe and Mail, 2018e) in Somalia (1992–1993) and Rwanda (1993–1995) further allowed for depicting it as an archetypal conflict of the post–Cold War security environment. Canadian participation in the peacekeeping mission in Somalia was overshadowed by the death of a teenager leading to an “extensive inquiry which recommended a substantial upgrade to the Canadian peacekeeping training regimen” (Dorn and Libben, 2016: 261). The media discourse referred to a “disgraced 1993 deployment to Somalia, where a local teen was tortured and killed” (Campion-Smith, 2016; see also Dawson and Labbe, 2018) as well as the “ill-fated 1994 UN mission during the Rwandan genocide” (Brewster, 2017; see also York, 2018) to demonstrate the perilousness of conflicts in Africa in general and in Mali in particular. The Toronto Star acknowledged that “memory of” these deployments “loomed large as Canada ponders dispatching another military contingent to Africa” (Campion-Smith, 2016; DiManno, 22 March 2018). The news media discourse also incorporated testimonies from former peacekeepers to relate and create background knowledge about potential threats during future deployment to Mali:

Retired Canadian Forces Major Brent Beardsley encountered child soldiers on both sides of the Rwandan conflict in the ’90s when he served in the peacekeeping mission. My personal bodyguard who was given to me to take me to various locations was 14-years-old and he’d been a veteran for three years of combat. And that was my first exposure on a personal level to a child soldier. (CBC, 2017b)

These representations of children as potential threats transcend spatial and temporal boundaries—without addressing the complexity of children’s involvement in armed conflict in these localities—further strengthening the construction of the conflict in Mali as an archetype of “new wars.”

Discourse of child soldiers as threats

The second major discourse, and interconnected with the first, involved depiction and (re)production of child soldiers as a potential threat to Canadian peacekeepers. In the initial stages of the debate about Canadian contribution to the peacekeeping, Senate Committee on National Security and Defence was concerned about child soldiers as potential threats for deployments:

The threat, continuity and sustainment of conflicts in the world are very much focused on the fact that they’re using generations of children to sustain it, to build them, to create an atmosphere of war within them and give them absolutely no other option than to sustain those wars. The threat we face is being sustained by the use of children in every conflict out there. It’s an operational threat. That’s what we face. We’ve taken casualties because of children and soldiers having to kill children in missions because of lack of new skills and how to handle them in this new era of the use of children. (Senate of Canada, 2016c)

The construction of the subject is evident in the kind and degree of agency assigned to the subjects (Doty, 1993: 313). Children while being constituted as “undeniable actors of consequence, are not imagined to be the authors of their actions” (Beier, 2018: 177). Here, the agency of children as potential threats is acknowledged. However, as Beier (2015) notes, it is also pathologized, therefore lacking legitimacy and “cannot be abided as robust political subjecthood” (p. 9).

The Canadian media further used various predicates such as “volatile risks” and “battle-hardened Islamist militants” (Fife and Chase, 2017) to describe child soldiers, implying their potential threat to Canadian Armed forces. This discourse also emphasized that armed groups recruited and used child soldiers “in a number of capacities” (National Post, 2017) such as “suicide bombers, fighters, and spies” (Fife and Chase, 2017; see also MacCharles and Campion-Smith, 26 November 2016). These descriptive practices gained political significance (Jabri, 1996: 40) as the media advocated that “child soldiers are one of the reasons why Canada should refrain from going into Mali” (CBC, 2017b). In representing children as a threat and negative agent, the media narrative evaded the complexity of their experiences. The National Post quoted Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan:

We know that child soldiers, for instance, represent a near endless supply of fighters for radical groups bent on exploiting them [. . .] Not only are these youth the most vulnerable victims of conflict, but they are also the very fuel that powers the militias who enslave them. (Pugliese, 2016)

In March 2017, Canada adopted the official military doctrine on the engagement of its armed forces with child soldiers (Department of National Defence, 2017). Canada became the first NATO member state that established a doctrinal document on the issue. The doctrine provided specific guidelines on how to engage with child soldiers in different areas and types of operations. The media discourse, however, emphasized, “new Forces’ doctrine note released last week also serves as a wake-up call for the Canadian public” (Fife and Chase, 2017) on the potential threat from engagement with an underage combatant. The CBC, for example, argued that “Canadian peacekeepers would inevitably have to face child soldiers who are fighting in the civil war. Canadians would have to kill—even kill children—or be killed” (Krayden, 2017). The Globe and Mail warned that “Canada could suffer major psychological trauma should they find themselves firing on children” (Fife and Chase, 2017). The media discourse employed the doctrine, aimed at outlining key rules of engagement with child soldiers, to further emphasize the negative agency of child soldiers on the battlefield.

Adopting a “new wars” narrative simplifies the conflict in Mali and children’s involvement in it as the antagonism between Islamist groups and weak state forces. Instead, as discussed in the introduction, this conflict involves a myriad of non-state actors, terrorist groups, organized crime networks, and a range of external actors with different mandates to stabilize the country. This dominant narrative of violent extremism is also disconnected from local perceptions of the threat when intercommunal grievances over resources or livestock and identity play a greater role (Bleck et al., 2018; Hernann, 2016). Acknowledging that today’s peacekeeping mandates, such as MINUSMA, operate in demanding and challenging environments will contribute to specialized training for military and civilian personnel engaged in these peace operations (Dorn and Libben, 2016). Instead, the representation of children as negative “problems” sanitizes the images of children in conflict zones who also “demonstrate positive political agency—such as building social cohesion—can become useful ‘agents of change’” (Lee-Koo, 2017: 168). This dominant description of children in zones of conflict also erases gender dimensions related to their different experiences (James and James, 2004: 22, 114). As Didier Bigo notes, categories “are result of power relations.” Designation of individuals or groups (i.e. children involved in armed conflict) “as a danger, risk, threat, or simply unwanted” (Bigo, 2013: 125) further justified policies that limited scope of Canadian deployment to the peacekeeping mission in Mali. The rhetorical deployment of childhood allowed to engage in the categorization of children’s experiences and furthered particular narratives about the nature of the potential peacekeeping mission in Mali.

Conclusion

This article examined how the strategic use of childhood in political persuasion shaped the security discourse on the scope of the Canadian contribution to the peacekeeping mission in Mali. Discourses represent subjects as embodying specific characteristics and legitimate specific sets of practices “while rendering others undesirable, unethical, or unthinkable” (Lobasz, 2019: 13). The article examined the construction of the two interrelated discourses: child soldiers as a potential threat and constituting understanding of child soldiers as the product and integral element of so-called “new wars.”

Through discursive practices of predication, presupposition, and subject positioning, these discourses ascribed children with a negative agency that served as a political justification for the limited Canadian contribution to MINUSMA. These justifications were weaved into a broader geopolitical narrative to cultivate the discourse of child soldiers as an integral part of so-called “new wars.” My analysis elucidated how the dominant discourse on children in armed conflict conditioned the scope of intervention as contributing to a consensus that the contribution needs to be “modest in scope, with risks minimized” (York, 19 March 2018).The article also contributes to the scholarly conversation on the role of media in the constitution of children’s agency and its significance for formulating and debating security practices (Hansen, 2006: 5; Wagnsson et al., 2010: 12). The rhetorical deployment of childhood implicated a reductionist understanding of children’s experiences. Ultimately, diminished agency of children, in the context of the conflict in Mali, demonstrated the power of discourse both to enable and define and to silence by excluding and restricting who is authorized to speak and to act (Milliken, 1999: 229). The connection between discourse and security reveals how the language of strategic discourse constrains the ability to envision the agentive role of children in conflict.

The reductionist view of children’s agency marginalizes their “capacity to make a political contribution to the development of their societies” (Lee-Koo, 2017: 164–165). Alison Watson (2015) contends that children are affected by the structures that surround them, but they can also affect those same structures. They are more resilient in “conflict and post-conflict environments than they are credit with being” (p. 53). This research contributes to elucidating that children’s perspectives of conflict and, in particular, their experiences of conflict can contribute significantly to alternative discourses regarding war and security.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Iuliia Hoban

Notes

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