On War and Infancy: Modern Imaginations of Violence at the Borders
David Oswell
The task of a public sociology is framed by C. Wright Mills in the context of a ‘direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles’. But today, on the one hand, the platform of public sociology is littered with inchoate voices demanding to speak and, on the other, Mills’ bureaucrats insist that the social sciences speak with impact. The line of public reason is thus voiced with uncertainty. That much, perhaps, is always clear.
In this paper I take to task classical formulations of contemporary geo-political space in the context of the bare, biopolitical, ordinary, and everyday life of infancy and violence. In conflicts today, violence with children is as much inside as outside the home. This is much as it has ever been. But the figure of the ‘war-child’ is invoked now not only as the subject or the object of violence, but increasingly as the means and medium of its expression. In the public imagination the photographic visualisation of such a figure is significant, but at what cost is such a muted figure invoked and through what others might they speak.