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Question 1

What are children defined as?

a) Children are distinguishable from adults in key respects: they have no agency or power and are unable to engage in moral and ethical reasoning.

b) Children are biologically defined. Children are physically differentiated from adults by having maturing and developing bodies. Children are those persons vulnerable in a different and disproportionate way compared to adults, and may be specifically maltreated with this intention.

c) Children's experiences are shaped not only by their underdevelopment as persons, but by their conceptions of them, earned and bestowed, constructed and determined by individuals and collectives who hold certain expectations.

d) Children are a universal 'ideal' construct of what it means to be a child that serve to fix many current global assumptions. Children, having vulnerable and 'innocent' qualities, are valued members of most communities.

Question 2

In what ways might children be considered as an object of national security policy?

a) From the 1990s the world's population has been deliberately and systematically imbalanced where there is pressure to increase the number of children to fill care giving and staffing vacuums.

b) Protonatalists view women primarily in terms of their symbolic past confining their role to care-giving and nurturing within the social sphere. Protonatalist practices marginalize women and childbirth from the political body of the state and from security policy.

c) Protonatalist practices may serve as the dual strategy of violence and re-nationalization against the enemy in which the woman's body formed a part.

d) Children are viewed as a security strategy in which national identity becomes bound to population and becomes the paramount strategy of securing the political body of the state.

Question 3

In what ways can we define children and their relations to war?

a) Children's role and identity are dependent to varying degrees on the manipulation of children and appropriation of the child or the civic familial sphere through violence, peace or their symbolic value. Within each role gender also plays a part in determining the nature and the cost of their participation

b) The nationalization and militarization of mobilization through political socialization of education, social and familial space.

c) Children's vulnerability gives rise to the targeting by the enemy group. Children's status as precious or valued within a family gives purpose to their systematic killing, an act in which children are killed strategically.

d) Children are perceived as essentially peaceable and their essence kept in place as a physical claim to territory and a symbol of nationalism.

Question 4

What are young soldiers in international law?

a) Under 10 years of age

b) Under 15 years of age

c) Under 16 years of age

d) Under 18 years of age

Question 5

What roles may child soldiers have?

a) Government/ militia and armed combatants/ unarmed

b) Voluntary/conscripted/forced and uniformed/uniformed

c) Recruiters and trainers of children / commanders of units

d) None of the above

Question 6

In what ways is the experience of warfare complex?

a) There is a cyclical impact of war: insecure children may seek security - attracted by familial-style environment, food and clothing - and may allow them to survive in the face of other threats - starvation, isolation, abduction, physical abuse or exploitation - children may therefore join to live not to be killed

b) Child soldiering may be experienced as development and apprenticeship and children may develop morally through war and maintain the right to act in defense of their values and family.

c) Children may imitate adults in combat but only in specific positions that do not exceed their strengths or place them at risk of physical harm.

d) All of the above.

Question 7

How are warfare experiences changing?

a) There is a problem with distinguishing between moral understanding and agency. Because children are encouraged to play at war how far can they be regarded to be culpable for their actions?

b) Children are physically unable to fulfill all the tasks that their adult counterparts can do. As a result opportunities in war for recruited / abducted child soldiers reduces children's agency.

c) Child soldiers create potential dilemmas in combat for their adversaries and leave post-conflict challenges of personal and societal restoration.

d) Children's status in international law distinguishes that soldiers of sixteen or seventeen may be treated as victims in international law but are not permitted to become child soldiers in international law.

Question 8

What examples of child soldiering are applicable to the security studies debate?

a) The majority of the world's young soldiers used in armed groups is opposed to central government and can be composed of ethnic, religious, minorities and clan or factional groups fighting governments. It is very rare for government-backed paramilitary groups, militias or self-defense units to recruit young soldiers.

b) The number of estimated children actively involved in armed conflict in government armed forces, government militias and armed opposition groups is believed to be highly unstable. This suggest that there a number of causal variables that impact on conflict zones.

c) Child (combative) soldiers are typically almost exclusively the province of the male aged between 8 and 14. Although there is increasing evidence of increasing numbers of girls enlisting their role is normally limited to an extension of household duties.

d) Most research shows that adolescents see few alternatives to involvement in armed conflict. There is a relationship between poverty, social and economic collapse and reduced educational opportunity to enlisting in armed forces.

Question 9

In what ways are children a challenging new factor?

a) Children who have been active in political warfare have often become aware of a personal concept of security.

b) Conceptually 'young soldiers' are understood to be used for male and female collectives, contributing to a feminized understanding of political violence.

c) Rehabilitation often has the effect of depoliticizing children of their moral agency developed through political concept of security.

d) Conceptually political experience and childhood has been interrelated based on a shared understanding that political violence politicizes.

Question 10

In what ways do practices of infantilization embody national security consciousness?

a) The very young and/ or feminine images of children are contained by manipulation for the strategic harnessing of political ends.
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b) The linguistic construction of the child has created 'disassociation' with security culture and coercive capability, whilst studies of children have contained children to pre-social political beings precluding them from participation.

c) Ideas and functions of children are frequently used to negatively endorse genocidal and destructive capacity. Language is used to construct the child to create 'association' at the highest level of strategic culture

d) Children are regarded as social actors. Social science literature has made children complicit in the construction of the security nation, able to participate and mutually constitute ideas that form the community.

Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 20.

Chapter 20

Instructions