Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people's responses to the war in Iraq...

Political Geography 27 (2008) 587e609www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics eYoung people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003)

Kathrin Horschelmann*

Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Site, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper argues for a broadened vision of political agency to consider age as a relevant influence onindividuals’ political interests and actions and to recognise young people as engaged in the making, ne-gotiation and contestation of global politics. It is not a call to dispense with critical analyses of state powerand other structures which circumscribe the potential of social actors to become politically engaged. Yet, itjoins feminist theorists in challenging the state-centeredness of (critical) geopolitics’ notion of the politicaland asks that young people’s positioning in relation to international politics be acknowledged and under-stood as geographically and historically situated.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Critical geopolitics; Feminist geography; Youth; Agency; Iraq

Introduction

Every Monday evening, the square behind the house where we lived in Durham untilrecently used to change from an overflow car-park to an army training site. Through the trafficnoise, we could hear shouts of ‘‘About turn!’’ and then, most often, laughter. The square wasused as a temporary training ground for British Army Cadets, 11e16 year olds acquiring theelaborate art of marching, turning and following orders. The subjects were children, in uniform,‘having fun’.

Even without considering conflict zones, where children are drawn into military battle assoldiers, protesters, ‘terrorists’ and ‘casualties’ (Thorne, 2003), the involvement of young

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588 K. Horschelmann / Political Geography 27 (2008) 587e609

people under the age of 18 in military activities is not unusual and, as in the example of theArmy Cadets, often seen as a positive way of inculcating children into the nation, beneficialbecause of its disciplinary effects on ‘unruly’ youths. Despite this involvement in activitiesof (geo)political relevance, children and young people are frequently described as politicallydisengaged. Surveys on the political interests of young people have time and again attestedto a lack of engagement and an ‘apathetic’ stance (Forbrig, 2005; Wallace, 2003). These find-ings have been challenged by researchers on youth citizenship, who argue that political agencyneeds to be seen as more varied than voting and party-membership and that there are a numberof structural reasons for young people’s apparent lack of participation (Bynner, Chisholm, &Furlong, 1997; Jones & Wallace, 1992; Wallace & Kovacheva, 1998). Campaigns for active cit-izenship in the UK have led to greater involvement of young people in local decision making(Matthews, 2001). However, this has not increased attention to and involvement in decisionmaking at an international scale. There is an underlying assumption that the ‘worlds’ that chil-dren and young people know and inhabit are somehow more proximate than those of adults,although research in cultural studies and on youth transitions has shown their intricate engage-ment with global cultural flows (Buckingham, 1993; Carrington & Wilson, 2002; Miles, 2000;Roth, 2002) and the high demands placed on them to be mobile in societies of risk (Cieslik &Pollock, 2002; Furlong & Cartmel, 1997; Valentine, 2003). It is my contention in this paper thatin certain cases the geographically ‘far’ may be perceived as more relevant than the proximatefor and by young people, partly because of the enormity of its potential effects on their lives.The political agency of young people needs to be understood more consistently in relation tointersecting scales, as Hopkins (2007) has argued. Current political and media campaignsenhance this sense of interconnectedness in a pernicious way by producing an atmosphere offear that brings the far-away inextricably into everyday life (Pain & Smith, 2008).

I continue to use the term ‘scale’ here despite valid critiques of its inadequacy for explaininginterrelations, networks and flows (Amin, 2002; Marston, 2000), since it allows me to makemore explicit the relations which position young people as political subjects. More problematic,however, is the term ‘agency’. As Prout (1999) has explained, this term weakens rather thanstrengthens our explanatory capacity, since it implies a degree of intentionality and indepen-dence rarely afforded social subjects. Young people’s position in relation to (geo)politicalevents makes this particularly obvious. Child soldiers, for instance, are caught in power rela-tions within which they exert a degree of ‘agency’. Yet, they are certainly not ‘in control’ ofthat situation (see Carlton-Ford, Hamill, & Houston, 2000; Høiskar, 2001). The term ‘subject’,as defined by Foucault (1979, 1980), is more adequate here, since it entails an understanding ofbeing both subjected to and acting as a subject (Secor, 2001). Foucault’s (1980) concept ofsubjectivity is tied closely to his understanding of power, recognising the multiplicity of powerrelations through which we become subjects. Analysing children and young people’s political‘agency’ cannot take place outside of a careful examination of the myriad networks of powerwithin which they are caught, meaning, as Philo and Smith (2003) have argued, that ‘‘an adult-centred approach to the political geographies of children and young people must not be for-saken, certainly if the scholarship in question is to marry a sensitivity to children’s voiceswith critical analysis and progressive recommendations’’ (2003: 107).

I focus in this paper on the responses of young Germans in the city of Leipzig to the war inIraq (2003), well aware that this allows a position of comfort compared with those whose liveshave been, and continue to be, directly at stake as a consequence of that war. The responsespoint to the need to reconsider the scales, spheres and subjects that are politically entangledin global political events. They highlight the significance of age as a significant dimension

589K. Horschelmann / Political Geography 27 (2008) 587e609

on which to base an ‘ethics of care’ (Campbell & Shapiro, 1999), but at the same time showhow fear disrupts empathetic relations between other and self. Young people’s overwhelmingopposition to the war in Iraq, their participation in protest actions against the war and the scep-tical adult response to these actions as well as the inability of international protesters to haltmilitary action raises difficult questions for democratic citizenship in global politics.

The paper first explores how a feminist approach to critical geopolitics might enrich ourunderstanding of political agency and relates this to work in ‘‘Children’s Geographies’’, the‘‘New Sociology of Childhood’’ and Youth Studies. Some of the insights of this work are thenapplied to an analysis of the key sites through which young people engaged with and respondedto the war in Iraq, based on focus group interviews, diaries and photographic material. The con-clusion returns to the question of how we understand the political and its subjects. It asks what theconsequences of neglecting young people’s political views and activities might be.

Age and the subjects of feminist and critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has, in recent years, led to a significant re-examination of the ways inwhich (international) politics is produced, showing how spatial categories and metaphors areused to naturalise political strategies (Dalby, 1991, 1996; Dalby & O Tuathail, 1996; Dodds,1996, 2005; O Tuathail, 1994, 1996; Power & Crampton, 2005; Sharp, 2000). Despite strongemphasis on the contested nature of geopolitical meaning, however, there has been littleengagement with the question of popular interpretations and political agency beyond and out-side state and media institutions. As Dodds (2006:119) has recently argued: ‘‘The way in whichgeopolitical representations of the world are made intelligible and meaningful in an everydaysetting remains to be fully specified’’. Elite discourses have been scrutinized to reveal theirinherent spatialisations but their effects on popular understandings have been inferred ratherthan examined through in-depth empirical research (but see O’Loughlin, O Tuathail, & Kolos-sov, 2004). Challenging the discourses and policies of elite actors and institutions should cer-tainly remain central to critical geopolitics and it is not the aim of this paper to dispute therelevance of such work. However, lack of engagement with the multiplicity of subjects whomake sense of political discourses and practices, bear their consequences and/or contestthem risks reinforcing the privileged position of the state and of powerful media institutions,ultimately impoverishing the critique (Marston, 2003).

Feminist writers in critical geopolitics have been particularly aware of this oversight, empha-sising the intersections between private and public spheres and the embodied dimensions ofgeopolitics. Gilmartin and Kofman (2004) have thus argued for a feminist geopolitics that ‘‘in-volves an openness to conflicting geopolitical visions, strategies, and practices’’ (124), whileStaeheli, Kofman, and Peake (2004) call for a shift in focus ‘‘from the operations of elite agentsto the construction of political subjects and the ability of diverse subjects to act’’ (5). Arguingfor an expansion of the scales considered in geopolitical writing, they join Kofman (1996) inher critique of geopolitical landscapes without figures, ‘‘a ‘world without people’ or at leasta world of abstract, disembodied political subjects’’ (Staeheli et al., 2004: 5; also see Staeheli,2001). Dowler and Sharp (2001), in their introduction to the Space and Polity special issue onfeminist geopolitics, emphasise the need to recognise the inherent and unavoidable embodimentof geopolitical processes and geopolitical relationships at different scales, including commu-nity, home and the body (169). They draw on the example of recent anti-WTO campaigns toshow how local articulations of struggle and protest are linked to a number of global geopolit-ical visions. These arguments are echoed by Secor, who calls for increased attention to ‘‘lived


politics’’ and the ‘‘micro-mechanisms of power’’ that circulate throughout society, as recog-nised by Foucault (1980:101):

1 Thi

in relat

‘‘Unmoored from state and international scales, the political can be relocated beyond thedominant public sphere and reinterpreted as a process through which politicised identitiesand everyday spaces are created . Geopolitical reasoning, which has historically pre-sented a global perspective, is thus answered by a counter-geopolitics emanating from al-ternative and multiple loci of power.’’ (Secor, 2001: 193).

This is not, as Secor emphasises, a call to simply replace the ‘global’ with the ‘local’: ‘‘Onthe contrary, feminist approaches show how the [.] categories of public and private, global andlocal, formal and informal, ultimately blur, overlap and collapse into one another in the makingof political life.’’ (193)

Feminist political theorists advocate a gender-conscious, embodied perspective in order tounderstand how scales and spheres intersect and position subjects politically (Dowler & Sharp,2001; Enloe, 1993). Such a refocusing of the lenses through which we seek to understand and cri-tique formations of geopolitical power is well suited to the analysis of young people’s engage-ments with ‘the political’, although thus far the effects of age on political positioning have notbeen explicitly considered in work by feminists on geopolitics.1 Age, as an aspect of social posi-tioning, influences how people relate to others across multiple scales and form political opinions(Hopkins & Pain, 2007). It is helpful to consider this from an embodied, gendered perspective,since this allows a situated insight into the ways in which intersecting relations, stretched acrossa range of distances and with different durabilities, position (young) people as political subjects.Such an understanding corresponds with feminist arguments for a revisioning of political spheresand subjects (Dowler & Sharp, 2001; Kofman, 2003) and has the potential to significantly enrichcritical geopolitics’ conception of political agency. An embodied perspective, aware of the influ-ence of age and gender, as well as ethnicity and class, is one important step towards recognising the‘little things’ that Thrift (2000) sees missing in critical geopolitics.

In the subfields of ‘‘Children’s Geographies’’, the ‘‘New Sociology of Childhood’’ andYouth Studies, authors such as Philo and Smith (2003), O’Toole (2003), Furlong and Cartmel(1997), Frazer and Emler (1997), and Buckingham (2000) have recently begun to address thisgap and called for greater recognition of the inevitable political involvement of children andyouth, recognising ‘‘the full range of existing forms of young people’s involvement and action’’(Smith, Lister, & Middleton, 2005: 175; also see Aitken, 2001; Bynner et al., 1997; Cockburn,1998; Helve & Wallace, 2000; Pole, Pilcher, & Williams, 2005; Roche, 2003; Valentine, 2003).As Furlong and Cartmel (1997: 97e98) explain:

‘‘Young people can express an interest in politics without being active in the formalinstitutions of party politics, they may be involved in political action while not votingor expressing a strong party affiliation, or may be knowledgeable about political issueswhile remaining cynical about their ability to influence the political agenda . [A]lthoughyoung people may lack an involvement in formal politics, they do have a concern withbroader issues which may be constructed as political and, in particular, are sometimesinvolved in single issue political campaigns on issues which are perceived as havingrelevance to their lives.’’

s critique does not apply to other work in feminist geography, which has considered questions of age particularly

ion to social reproduction and sexuality.


Yet, as the protests against the war in Iraq have shown, ‘‘when young people do act politi-cally they are, like many adults, disabled or rebuffed by organisational structures or by the factthat their demands cannot, within existing power and authority, be met’’ (Frazer & Emler, 1997:188). Matthews, Limb, and Taylor (1999) share this concern and argue that young people havefew opportunities to express their opinions publicly (but see Matthews, 2001). They call notonly for more participatory approaches in politics and research, but also for adult advocatesof children’s concerns (Matthews & Limb, 1999).

As the following discussion shows, however, recognising young people’s positioning aspolitical subjects raises further questions that need to be addressed. ‘Politics’ in young people’slives continues to be a terrain of contestation and as such also includes manifestations of anti-democratic values and views, as demonstrated in research on right-wing radicalism (Gibson,McAllister, & Swenson, 2002; Griese, 2000; Kleinert & de Rijke, 2000; Lubbers & Sheepers,2002). Seeing young people as political subjects means engaging with the multiplicity of theirviews and, just as with adults, tackling anti-democratic practices through continuous and openengagement. In turn, it means being responsive to the challenges that young people’s views maypose to ‘adult’ political perspectives and practices, in the process deconstructing the binary ofyouth/adulthood. Such a take on (youth) politics comes close to the agonistic pluralism advo-cated by Mouffe (1999) and Amin (2004) in that it ‘‘makes room for the expression of conflict-ing interests and values’’ (Mouffe, 1999: 756). It remains sensitive, however, to the risks thatanti-democratic practices pose to the ‘‘ethico-political principles of democracy’’ that shouldunderline an agonistic politics (755).

Amin (2004) further calls for a politics of connectivity, ‘‘a cosmopolitan ethos of solidarityand rights’’, which ‘‘frequently involves local groups developing voice and impact throughworldwide solidarity networks and social movements in order to shape and influence culturalpolitics both ‘at home’ and in other regions .’’ (42). Such a politics lends itself well to a broad-ened vision of young people’s political engagements, recognising their positioning within inter-secting globalelocal scales (see Hopkins, 2007; Horschelmann, 2008; Werbner, 2004). Theevents of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate this most clearly. If, asMannheim (2000/1936) has argued, major historical events can become markers of a person’sgenerational position in society (Schuman, Belli, & Bischoping, 1997),2 then the World TradeCentre attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate the extent to which such position-ing occurs today increasingly via transnational media. The global circulation of images on theterror attacks in New York produced a sense of presence for media consumers around the world(O’Loughlin et al., 2004), although the military response to them was localised as a national USstrategy, crowding out much of the rest of the world (Smith, 2001: 635; also see Abood, 2003;Kalantzis, 2003; O Tuathail, 2003). The international protests against the war in Iraq, however,challenged this view and showed an awareness of the interconnections between political eventsat different scales as well as a sense of compassion for others beyond the ‘local’ or ‘national’(Robinson, 1999).

Participation of young people in these protests was high and received much media attention.Yet, the responses, while partly supportive of the level of agency and political interest they evi-denced, were dominated by concerns over young people’s competence and the need for adultguidance (Such, Walker, & Walker, 2005). They thus mirrored conventional conceptions ofyouth as either na€ıve/innocent or ‘trouble’ (see Griffin, 1993, 2001; James, Jenks, & Prout,

2 Mannheim (2000/1936) is careful to counter an essentialist interpretation of his arguments on generation, empha-

sising that there is no direct or necessary link between historical events and the formation of generations.


1998; Jenks, 1996). The sit-ins and demonstrations showed, however, that adolescents areprepared to take action on issues they feel strongly about. This finding is supported by theresearch presented in the following section, where I look more closely at the sites throughwhich different scales of geopolitical action are interrelated. The analysis shows how youngpeople connect seemingly distant concerns with their own everyday lives and imagined futures,developing indeed a ‘‘‘local’ politics on the global’’ (Massey, 2004; original emphasis).

Methodology

The research on which this paper is based investigated young people’s engagements withglobal cultural flows and was conducted during the first half of 2003 in the Saxon city of Leip-zig, former East Germany. The project involved 15 groups of young people recruited throughyouth clubs in different parts of the city, capturing a range of socio-economic and educationaldifferences. Participants ranged in age from about 12 to 18, although some were younger andolder than this. Both mixed and single-sex groups were recruited and worked with for fiveweeks at a time (Horschelmann & Schafer, 2005, 2007). Focus group discussions wereconducted once a week with each group and supplemented with other methods such as briefquestionnaires, structured diaries, mental maps, self-directed photography and film analysis.

The research was divided into three blocks of time, working with five groups each inJanuary, March and May 2003. In this paper, I focus particularly on the five groups interviewedin March 2003, the month when the invasion of Iraq commenced. Participants in the Januaryand May groups raised the issue of impending or continuing war on occasion and, where rel-evant, I draw on their interpretations, but analysis of the diaries, photographs and group discus-sions shows that the events in Iraq touched young people’s daily lives most strongly at the timejust before and after the start of the war. Since the project’s focus was not solely on young peo-ple’s engagements with international politics, it misses information about their general politicalinterests and about influences on their opinions that would otherwise have been investigatedmore thoroughly. The diaries, photographs and group discussions nonetheless give a detailedinsight into young people’s responses to the war and into the sites through which they con-nected with the lives of others in Iraq.

All of the March groups were asked explicitly in the group discussions about their opinionson the war in Iraq and, during this month, more than half the participants (16 of 28) commentedon the war in their diaries, while a small number took photographs of anti-war protests that theyhad attended and of anti-war symbols displayed in their rooms at home. The diaries andphotographs were kept and taken in separate weeks and were open to a high degree of variationand coincidence. Participants were asked to record key leisure activities in their diaries and tocomment, amongst others things, on the content of TV or radio programmes, on newspaperarticles as well as on conversations with friends, parents and school teachers. The task forthe self-directed photography project was to capture the most significant places in participants’everyday life. Neither the diaries nor the photographs provide a complete record of young peo-ple’s daily engagements with the geopolitical events of March 2003. Nonetheless, they area useful complement to the group discussions, allowing a better understanding of young peo-ple’s regular interactions with international politics. The group discussions only capturedglimpses of these and focused instead primarily on participants’ interpretations.

Tables 1 and 2 give an overview of diary results for the groups interviewed in March. Theybegin to map the key sites of geopolitical engagement that will be analysed in greater depth inthe following section. Table 1 shows the proportion of participants in the March groups who

Table 1

Groups interviewed in March 2003: diary entries on the war in Iraq

Group Age range Educational

background

No. in

group

No. of completed

diaries

No. of participants commenting

on the war in Iraq in their diaries

D 13e16 Medium/high 4 4 4

G 15e17 High 7 7 6

C 17e19 High 7 7 5

F 11e13 Medium 6 5 1

A 10e13 Low/medium 5 5 0

Total 29 28 16


commented on the war in Iraq in their diaries. A major difference is discernible here betweenparticipants in groups D, G and C, of whom the vast majority commented on the war in Iraq,and participants in groups F and A who, with the exception of one, did not comment at all. Theformer were older and attended higher-level schools, while the latter came from lower tomedium level schools and were on average five to six years younger. While the diaries hereindicate a major difference in political interest, this is not born out by the group discussions,where participants from groups F and A engaged in lengthy, detailed debates about the causesand consequences of war, displaying much knowledge and great empathy with the victims ofwar, as can be seen in the analysis below. Table 2 gives an indication of the main ‘‘sites’’through which participants engaged with unfolding events in Iraq. It is again based on thediaries and shows the primary relevance of television and discussions with friends, followedby information from newspapers and discussions with parents.

In the following section, I examine these and other key sites of young people’s geopoliticalengagement as focal points for the intersection of scales, where empathetic relations betweenother and self are forged as well as disrupted. I aim to show, with Nagar (2004), how internationalpolicies and practices ‘‘are actively deployed locally and regionally by historical agents in theireveryday lives’’ and how ‘‘through this interpenetration . structures and practices of the socialrelations of production and reproduction are maintained, subverted, and reconstructed’’ (33).

Sites of connection

Young people engaged with the war in Iraq through a number of key sites that brought thegeographically distant into the centre of their everyday lives. These sites were not only points of

Table 2

Groups interviewed in March 2003: discursive sites

Group No. of participants

who watched TV

programmes about

the war in Iraq

No. of participants

who discussed the

war with friends

No. of participants

who read newspaper

articles about the

war in Iraq

No. of participants

who discussed the

war with parents

No. of participants

who listened to

radio programmes

about the war in Iraq

D 0 3 1 2 0

G 5 2 2 2 1

C 3 1 3 2 1

F 0 1 0 0 0

A 0 0 0 0 0

Total 8 7 6 6 2


intersecting information flows, but also sites of affective connections that young people madebetween themselves and others in seemingly distant places. I focus here particularly on themedia, on sites for political discussion in everyday life, on the city, the home and the genderedbody as focal points for the construction of a sense of co-presence and interdependence.Through these sites participants encountered, negotiated, embraced or challenged the policiesof international state actors in their everyday lives.

With very few exceptions, participants opposed the invasion of Iraq. They expressed theirdissent in strongly emotional terms, highlighting particularly what they perceived as the injus-tice of unilateral action, the disproportionality between means and ends in the ‘war on terror’,the human costs of war and the contradiction between US actions and claims about democracy.As such, their responses constituted at least the beginnings of a challenge to the taken-for-granted norm of war-making, as called for by Sidaway (2008). While participants voiced strongfeelings of empathy for those who had or would become victims of war, their sense of connec-tion was also based on concerns for the self, on fears about a possible spread of military actionto Germany, on worries about friends serving with the German Army in Afghanistan, and onxenophobic fears about migration to Germany from countries affected by war. Their oppositionto the war was thus based on quite contradictory emotions, from empathy and care for the‘other’ to a desire to keep that other safely contained in a foreign, distant place. While the sitesI discuss next are thus certainly points of connection in globalelocal network space, they canalso mark lines of division and reinforce the boundary between other and self.

Media

Media played the most significant role for connecting young people in Leipzig with theunfolding events in Iraq. Their diary entries show that television news bulletins and special re-ports were a particularly important source of information. Newspaper articles were also men-tioned with some frequency, while radio rarely featured (see Table 2).

Both the group discussions and diary comments show the extent to which media produceda sense of presence and of historical positioning for young people. When discussing the attackson the World Trade Centre in 2001, reflections inevitably started with the question ‘where wereyou when .?’, which allowed participants to place themselves in relation to an event that theyperceived to be of major historical significance while paradoxically confirming their ownauthenticity and historical positioning through this highly mediatised event. The diary entriesof March 2003 likewise show not only an increase in the level of young people’s news con-sumption as the invasion of Iraq became imminent, but also their heightened sense of presence,immediacy and involvement:

‘‘White House briefing on the War in Iraq: The ultimatum ends at 2 o’clock tonight . anultimatum with impossible conditions . Bush is mad!’’ (Lisa, Group C)

‘‘America is getting serious about Iraq.’’ (Tim, Group G)

‘‘Pro-7 News: It seems like the war in Iraq will start soon e I am worried.

Only 6 hours until the U.S. ultimatum ends, the war is very, very close. I am scared that itwill also affect Germany. (Sophia, Group G)

Media provided not only information and a range of arguments, but also a particular language forspeaking about the war, a discursive framework which participants used in their discussions. Thus,


the linguistic repertoire of even the youngest group members included terms such as ‘weapons ofmass destruction’, ‘war against terror’, or ‘ultimatum’, and the frequent use of names such asSaddam Hussein and George Bush as metonyms for countries or political agents was repeated bymost, independent of their educational background. The war in Iraq was described predominantlyas a conflict between personalities who were forcing their will upon a dissenting global majority:

Interviewer: Did you think that it would start tonight?

Sonja: Well, yes.

Interviewer: Why?

Sonja: Well, because Bush absolutely wants it and he, well, and Rumsfeld, because theyabsolutely want that because there is no way back anymore for them. (D)

Political personalities here become ‘iconic’ signs standing in for complex, abstract conditionsand allowing engagement through affective registers (van Zoonen, 1994; ElRefaie, forthcom-ing). The use of personifications and metonyms in media discourse enables quick comprehen-sion but at the same time caricatures complex situations and evades more probing questionsabout the varied interests fuelling war.

In some cases, this personification of political conflicts combined with an appreciation ofmore complex reasons for the war in Iraq. Group A thus developed a broader politico-economicargument about access to Iraq’s oil reserves, but nonetheless concentrated on George Bush and‘that president’ (Saddam Hussein) as key political agents:

Ronny: For instance, I don’t know, what I have heard about the war is just like that. If hedoesn’t get the oil then, he will go there, that Bush, he needs the oil and he knows that. That’sin Iraq. And that’s where they want to go so that, well, so that the Americans get the oil.

Maurice: Oh yes, they want to set all those oil fields alight, don’t they.

Ronny: No.

Maurice: Yes they do. This president, this president. Yes, even so.

Ronny: Yes, but it’s not him who sets them alight.

Maurice: But that’s what he has threatened to do.

Ronny: All those big businesses [Konzerne], they would go bankrupt in that case .Because of that, he is starting the war, because most of the oil is there. (A)

As the above quotes indicate, participants shared a strong sense of disempowerment and exclusionfrom democratic policy making, not because of a lack of national or local citizen participation, butdue to their perception of powerlessness in the face of global US hegemony. Despite the fact thatthe German government opposed the invasion of Iraq and thus acted in line with the opinion ofanti-war protesters, the actions of the US government and its allies confirmed to young peoplethat the geopolitical terrain is dominated by the interests of hegemonic powers who act unilaterallyand anti-democratically as well as irresponsibly. They were deeply troubled by the discrepancythat they perceived between democratic claims and anti-democratic actions:

Flo: Well, it’s awful that it’s happening, because they [Americans] see themselves as thecradle of democracy and call themselves a super-democratic and free country and yet inso many ways, what is happening there, proves the exact opposite. (C)


Feelings of powerlessness also characterised participants’ descriptions of the consequences ofwar. They critiqued the coalition’s disrespect for human suffering, its disproportionate use offorce and what they perceived as the irrationality of war, as the following diary entries show:

‘‘I think war is totally stupid .’’ (Tanja, Group D)

‘‘Iraq / War / Soon Bush is mad.’’ (Lisa, Group C)

‘‘Terror ., War . Outrageous.’’ (Robert, Group C)

‘‘Terrible. So many people injured .’’ (Diana, Group F)

Media reports about bombing raids and the casualties of war raised participants’ empathy withthe victims of war, thus bridging geographical distance by forging emotional connections thatcould contribute to an ethics of care (Campbell & Shapiro, 1999; Robinson, 1999). The youngpeople we interviewed were, however, also concerned about the flip side of this type of mediareporting, particularly its tendency towards sensationalism and the neglect of other issues.Participants from higher-level schools complained particularly vocally about the tendency ofturning the plight of others into a spectacle for (western) media consumption. They also criti-cized how private media profited from increased advertising revenues during crisis situationsand differentiated between media types, genres and programmes:

Matthias: There are people fighting for their freedom and, I don’t know, people are dyingin Iraq and we watch that! .

Jan: You know what’s really bad? That they exploit situations like that, like for instancethe war. You switch on the radio, they have this news, you switch on the television, theyshow that news. It just carries on and on .

Matthias: . And then it’s interrupted by advertising.

Lars: That’s exactly what I was going to say. They cut out all the programming because ofthe war in Iraq, but strangely there is always time for adverts, and then they make moremoney from it, because it’s more expensive when those current events are on. (G)

Participants frequently commented that they felt bored with the constant flow of news about thewar (Hoskins, 2004), leading to what Boltanski (1993) and Moeller (1999) call compassionfatigue. Some complained that there was little attention paid to other issues, including thosethat might affect them more directly:

Interviewer: Would you like to talk more about [the war in Iraq] or not?

Sonja: Well.

Josie: What are we supposed to talk about? I mean, there’s already enough talk about it. Imean, other things aren’t discussed at all anymore. There could be a mass murderer onthe loose in Germany and the news would still be talking 90 per cent about the war, Ithink. (D)

They also looked towards well-known personalities such as film makers and music stars fororientation:

Michael: ., while the war in Iraq was on, they brought out some songs against the war.

Dominique: ‘‘Cool Savage’’, for instance.


Michael: ‘‘Kriegstagebuch’’ [war diary] or ‘‘Boom’’.

Interviewer: Do you like listening to that?

Michael: So, so.

Interviewer: Or would you prefer if it wasn’t so political?

Frank: It depends how they do it. But if its only war, war, war, then no, I don’t like that.(J)

Katta: There were also a lot of actors against the war in Iraq. One of those actors had senta letter to Bush himself.

Mona (youth worker): He organised a whole petition.

Katta: Hm.

Mona: With all the signatures and all that.

Petra: Well, I think that’s right.

Katta: So you can see that in the end it was just Bush who did what he wanted. (L)

While media and public figures played an important role in informing and bolstering politicalviews, the young people worked with also discussed their opinions with friends, parents, youthworkers and other adults. Group L, who are cited above, thus debated the events in Iraq with theyouth worker, who met regularly with them and was present during the focus group discussions.The youth worker here had a crucial role to play, not by dictating activities and opinions to thegroup, but by mediating between different views and introducing more nuanced arguments, es-pecially in relation to immigration. Group members trusted her, but also felt able to argue anddisagree with her. She was crucial in promoting an atmosphere of acceptance without stiflingconflict in the group, thus practicing in many ways a politics of agonistic pluralism. Likemost of our participants, the girls in group L had very little opportunity, however, to engagewith ethnic others. This meant that, although there was conflict in the group about reasonsfor and effects of immigration, they did not engage in an exchange with those most affectedby Germany’s harsh citizenship laws.

Themes discussed with parents and at school

Sebastian: ‘‘War and other things’’ (D)

Sonja: ‘‘About Iraq, then five minutes silence’’ (D)

Sandra: ‘‘Mostly about Iraq’’ (C)

Tim: ‘‘War in Iraq. My parents and I share the same opinion.’’ (G)

Karin: ‘‘Iraq-War’’ (G)

Like Tim, several participants mentioned that they agreed with their parents’ position on thewar. None of them gave any examples of disagreement on this issue, though in relation to othertopics, such as music and fashion tastes, parents and young people often held conflicting views.

Schools were a further focal point for the expression and exercise of youth political agency.Many teachers made time for in-class debates and pupils organised protests on the schoolgrounds as well as walk-outs:

3 The

noted a

while w

to atten


Interviewer: How about the war in Iraq. Did you talk about it in the Geography lessons?

E: In Geography no, not at all, but in German and History.

Interviewer: So could you all say what you thought about it?

E: Yes.

M: We also had a strike and that was like .

E: Oh yes, yes.

M: We went on strike (laughs) .

Interviewer: But are you interested in these things?

E: Well, yes. I mean, we also took part in the demonstration, the small demonstration. (E)

The school debates did not always attract positive feedback, however. On the one hand, partic-ipants complained that discussions in school felt too imposed and artificial, while on the other handthey explained that only a few interested students ever participated in these discussions:

Sonja: There comes a point when you don’t want to talk about it anymore, you’d rather doyour school lessons, because we all know what opinion we have and, through the news wehave all got plenty of information. You don’t need to discuss that a thousand times over,because there isn’t anything new and, when we do talk about it in class, people just switchoff, close their ears. ‘I’m not interested, it doesn’t bother me.’ (D)

While school is thus a site that can be utilised to enhance young people’s sense of citizenshipand political participation, the lack of translation from talk to action and the rather forcednature of discussion in a context where young people’s views and knowledge are otherwiseassessed rather than equally valued, means that its potential is limited.

The city as a site of protest and collective memory

The city of Leipzig became a further key site of youth political action against the war in Iraq.Of the 101 young people who participated in the research project, 10 declared that they tookpart in organised protests and five documented this with photographs (Figs. 1e3). The actualfigure of protest participation is likely to have been higher, however, since on average 34%of young people took part in anti-war protests in Germany (Polis survey, cited in Der Spiegel,29 March 2003). Adult participation was less than half this (15%). In Leipzig, up to 50,000people took to the streets in February and March 2003 (Der Standard, 25 March 2003).3

Those young people who attended the demonstrations usually went as part of larger friend-ship groups. For Sonja, who was one of the most active anti-war protesters in our groups, thesewere not occasions for discussion but sites of action:

Sonja: We went to the demonstrations every Monday for those three, four, five weeks.

Interviewer: With your whole class?

lower figures of youth participation in our research are primarily explained by the methodological limitations

bove, but also by our wider age range. In the Polis survey, young people were classified as 14e19 year olds,

e worked with children from the age of 12 and, in some cases, 11, who would have been less able and less likely

d protest marches.

Fig. 1. Anti-war protesters moving from St. Nicolas Church to the main market square (Jan, Group G).


Sonja: No, no. Like . six people from my class and then another two, who are not in myclass, friends, yes, and we went there and that’s where you get talking. Although we don’treally talk about it then . And even on the way home we don’t, but when we get home, Istill went to my friend’s place and that’s where we talked about it. (D)

The city thus functioned differently to the sites examined above. It became primarily a placefor embodied, material engagements with international politics, motivated by symbolic connec-tions with the east German past. The protests in Leipzig received much of their momentumfrom association with the peaceful revolution of autumn 1989, which had led to the downfallof the GDR government and the end of state-socialism in eastern Germany. Just like 1989,peace prayers at the Church of St. Nicolas were followed by a march through the main streetsof the city centre every Monday evening. The protesters congregated at Augustus Square, wherethe local mayor, the priests of St. Nicolas Church and St. Thomas Church, other peace activistsand well-known personalities (such as musicians) spoke out against the war. As in 1989, theprotests stood under the motto of peace and anti-violence:

‘‘The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig are a phenomenon. Nobody organises them, no-body calls for them. No flyers are distributed, no telephone campaigns conducted. . It’sthe iconic status of St. Nicolas Church, it’s the tradition of the Monday demonstrations,and it is a strong civil consciousness that mobilises people. And of course it is the expe-rience that Leipzig has made: You can change things, even if it seems impossible. ‘‘Backthen, we learnt that it is not just money, economy and armies that change things. It isworth getting personally involved and making the impossible possible’’, says Fuhrer[priest of St. Nicolas Church]. (Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 March 2003, my translation)

Fig. 2. Anti-war protesters along the ‘Ring’ road. The main banner emphasises US interests in oil: ‘‘Stop the oil-junkie

.’’ (Peter, Group H).


Leipzig, and iconic locations within it, thus became a site of collective memory (Halbwachs,1992; Nora, 1996) that can motivate and galvanise contemporary political struggles, giving riseto ‘local’ interventions in ‘global’ politics. The protests placed young people in the midst ofseveral imagined collectivities, making connections with those who protested against politicaloppression in the past, with those who opposed the war internationally and with protesters ofdifferent ages in the politicised spaces of the city. As one participant somewhat optimisticallyput it:

What I find cool is that the whole world is going onto the streets and protests against thewar, yes, the whole world. (Diana, Group F)

References to Germany’s ‘other’ past were also made by protesters. Thus, one of the bannersshown on the photographs is a well-known poster by the artist Kathe Kollwitz (‘‘Nie wiederKrieg’’, War e Never again), whose drawings, prints and sculptures were dedicated to the vic-tims of two world wars (Fig. 3). Connections are thus drawn not just to the events of 1989, butalso to Germany’s troubled past as a perpetrator of war. A number of participants from higher-level schools referred to Germany’s Nazi-past explicitly as one reason why they opposed thewar in Iraq and why they thought the coalition countries acted irresponsibly:

Interviewer: What did you think when Germany said, well, together with some othercountries, that they are against the war?

Josi: Well, I think that the countries which were against that, they are the ones which havelearnt from the second world war, first or second.

Fig. 3. A group of young protesters on Leipzig’s main shopping street. The poster is an anti-war print by Second World

War artist Kathe Kollwitz (Sandra, Group C).


Sonja: They have understood that and the Americans have not understood it yet. Andeventually they will, hopefully, understand that. (D)

Despite insisting on Germany having learnt from its past, participants did not however cri-tique their own state’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Further, Germany’s history asa perpetrator of two world wars could also be used as an argument for the invasion of Iraq:

Tom: Back then it was the same, when 30 million people died in the world war . Andnobody said anything then, when so many thousand people died. (Group E)

History and collective memory are thus unpredictable as anchors of political position and donot offer a straightforward explanation for young people’s stance on the war in Iraq. They none-theless inform their understanding of events and, to some extent, provide a reason to care forothers in comparable situations, thus providing an axis from the geographically far/temporallynear to the geographically near/temporally far.

The home as a site of political identity

The multiple ways in which scales and collectivities intersect in and through individualsare further demonstrated by photographs taken of participants’ home spaces. The home is theprimary site for media consumption (Morley, 2000) as well as for conversations with parents,siblings, other relatives, and sometimes friends. It is a nodal point for numerous lines ofconnection and in many ways acts as a medium through which they are refracted and partic-ularised. The micro-scale of the home thus becomes simultaneously a key site through which


the macro-scale is realised and experienced in everyday life. Young people perform theiridentities in part through such translations between scales. This was notable, amongst otherthings, in their room decorations. Most of our participants had a room of their own that theywere able to decorate in a style they preferred. While posters of music and film stars wereclear favourites, the photographs of six participants also showed anti-war symbols and ob-jects displayed in their rooms. Interpreting these images is not straightforward. However,they appear to work in a number of ways. On the one hand, the symbols and images canbe read as extensions of the self, as mementoes of events the young people have takenpart in and as reminders of their political position. While referencing a public event, the im-ages here become a private expression of identity and carry specific meaning only for theyoung person herself. They do, however, also express an identity to others, such as friendsor parents. In the case of this research project, the images communicate a particular positionto the researchers and thus become part of the young person’s outward facing performance ofidentity, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Amongst the objects displayed in participants’ rooms, we find posters from the protestmarches, such as ‘‘Stop the war’’ (Fig. 4) and ‘‘Germany: No to the war in Iraq’’, a paper peacedove above a bookshelf and a collage of anti-war and anti-Nazi symbols drawn like graffiti overa map of the UK and Ireland that is affixed to a wardrobe (Fig. 5). This latter image, while dif-ficult to decipher in detail, includes references to the war, several anti-Nazi slogans as well asa crossed-out swastika and the word ‘‘Peace’’, traced over with the symbol of the Campaign forNuclear Disarmament. A further photograph, by Karin (Group G, Fig. 6), shows the partici-pant’s friend in front of a rainbow flag. It thus speaks both to the political stance of Karinand her friend.

Fig. 4. ‘‘Stop the war!’’ poster above her desk in Sonja’s room (Group D).

Fig. 5. A collage of anti-Nazi and anti-war symbols traced over a map of the UK and Ireland in Matthias’ room (Group G).


All of the images, together with participants’ accounts of media representations and of theirdiscussions with parents, demonstrate vividly the extent to which the geopolitical events following11th September 2001 have touched on the lives of young people, affecting even the more intimatespace of the home. Although they were far removed from those who suffered the most severeconsequences of the military invasion of Iraq, young people wove a net of material and imaginaryconnections with the victims of war through their daily personalepolitical engagements.

Age, the body and the consequences of war

Participants’ sense of connectedness was further nourished by their consciousness of thesocial structuring of age and by bodily fears and affects. Girls and boys across the age rangesand independent of their educational background expressed an emotional connection to the fateof those most severely affected by the war. Age was an important dimension here, as partici-pants empathised particularly with children who they saw as victims of adult decisions. Dis-tance and proximity were thus constructed less on a geographical and cultural basis than onthe basis of age and social hierarchy.

Age, as a social structure that bestows privileges and disadvantages, thus becomes the basisof empathy with others in Iraq. Children’s position as ‘defenceless’, ‘innocent’ and at the mercyof adult decisions was a primary reason for several of our participants to oppose the war in Iraq.They connected their questioning of the legitimacy of war to a manifest critique of adult dom-inance and irresponsibility:

Corinna: Well, at least they could have taken the children and the babies somewhereelse, if they want to do that, because the children still have a e well, the grown ups

Fig. 6. Karin’s friend in front of the rainbow flag that covers her bookshelf (Group G).


too e a right to live, but the grown ups can help themselves more, when they get hit .the babies, they also want to grow old like other children.

Simone: Especially if in that war, if there is a little boy and a bomb falls down a few kilo-metres away, then he gets a real trauma. Something that stays with him for years. (F)

While in political and media discourse the arguments for war were often expressed at a highlevel of abstraction, the girls in group F here focused their discussion on the figures of particularchildren (‘‘a little boy’’), imagining how their physical and psychological wellbeing would beaffected. Rather than judging this as na€ıve and subjective, I would argue that it provides animportant counterargument to the apparent rationality of war.

While their common positionality as children gave our participants an important startingpoint for empathising with the victims of war in Iraq, they also expressed great concern abouteffects of the war on their own lives. For Jenny (Group F), these potential effects were feltintimately through the gendered body. She saw herself existentially threatened. It was throughher gendered body that Jenny connected the geopolitical with her own, personal life and future:

Jenny: . Maybe in the end it’s going to hit us as well. Because they have said that some-thing will come over here at some stage and that’s also what they wanted to do. It’s just atthe moment we can count ourselves lucky that nothing has come over here yet.

Simone: Exactly.

Jenny: And I hope it stays that way. So you don’t have to have a war straight away.Exactly. Because I still want to have children! (F)


Both age and the gendered body thus became points of connection between others and self.The girls in group F extended their own sense of vulnerability to that of others, especially tochildren in Iraq, possibly leading them to develop the first steps towards an ‘ethics of care’that recognises the dependence of the ‘self’ on ‘the other’ (Campbell & Shapiro, 1999).

Rather than seeing Iraq as far removed from their own lifeworlds, participants from othergroups also showed much awareness of its potential wider effects, assuming that it would even-tually impact on Germany and on their own life-plans. For Josie, from group D, war wasalready more than a distant event. She had a 19 year old friend serving in Afghanistan andexpressed particular concern about the possibility of her boyfriend joining the army and beingcalled to serve there. This example shows most clearly how larger-scale geopolitical decisionstaken elsewhere and played out ‘elsewhere’ intersect intricately with young people’s own livesand relationships. As Josie made clear, her boyfriend retained some ‘agency’ in decidingwhether or not to join the army at this time of crisis. His decision was influenced by the pos-sibility of personal fulfilment, tied to the assertion of masculine identities:

Josi: My boyfriend mentioned it [joining the army]. And I said, no, you go and do yoursocial service. Then he said, but I really, really want to. So somehow he is really keen ongoing to war, I don’t know why .

Sonja: Um, well, the money.

Josi: No, it’s not about the money. They have to prove themselves.

Another way in which the events of 9/11 and the war in Iraq related to participants’ ownlives was their heightened sense of fear about terrorist attacks. For the following group ofboys aged 11e12 (E) this led to a rise in xenophobic prejudices and an immediate associationof ‘Turks’ with dangerous others:

Interviewer: Do you mind, which country they (foreigners) come from?

Axel: No, as long as they don’t bring anything bad with them.

Martin: Yes, like for instance, as long as they don’t make terror here .

Axel: In general, foreigners and so on, yes.

Tim: The Turks are really bad!

Likewise, the group of 12e13 year old girls (F) who showed such great concern for thewelfare of Iraqi children explained that they were worried about immigrants coming toGermany from the war-zone, indicating how discourses of terrorist threats have reinforcedanti-immigration sentiments.

The xenophobic views voiced here should make us pause before celebrating too quicklywhat otherwise appear to be expressions of an ‘ethics of care’. They show that empathy forthe plight of a distant other, even if combined with political action, is only one step towardsbridging the divides between other and self. Discourses of fear counter this sentiment by callingfor a politics that keeps the ‘other’ securely in place.

Conclusions

This paper has argued for a revisioning of the terrain of geopolitics as one of multiple spheres,scales and subjects. It has called for greater recognition of young people’s situated (geo)political


engagement, acknowledging both their inevitable subjectification to forces beyond their controland their participation in political activities that go beyond the ‘local’. I have examined young peo-ple’s engagements with the war in Iraq through a number of key sites that became focal points forthe intersection of international politics with their everyday lives, placing them in the midst of sev-eral trans-local and trans-temporal collectivities. Young people saw themselves quite clearly inproximity to the events in Iraq, and not as unaffected outsiders. They sought to estimate the likelyeffects of the war on their own lives and on those of others and constructed explanations througha range of interpretative schemas drawn primarily from media, but also from discussions withteachers, youth workers, parents and friends. Feelings of injustice, danger and lack of voice leda significant number of them to protest, thus showing that their understandings of ‘democracy’and ‘freedom’ differ significantly from those espoused by proponents of the war. Recognitionof this protest and of the counternarratives that young people constructed in their analysis ofUS and allied military action is one small step towards challenging an expansionist geopoliticallogic which claims to be justified by spreading ‘universal’ values such as liberty and democracy.

Rather than simply celebrating young people’s involvement in the anti-war protests as evidenceof their political engagement, however, we need to be mindful of the contested nature of politics.What may appear as ‘progressive’ motives can be intertwined with anti-democratic, racist viewsand practices, especially when affective responses to the question of other people’s pain and one’sown safety, fuelled by media campaigns on the ‘war against terror’, muddy the waters of moralpositioning. Taking young people seriously as political subjects also entails a readiness to engagein critical exchanges, akin to the agonistic politics advocated by Mouffe (1999) and Amin (2004),while remaining aware of the need for shared democratic principles and the responsibilities arisingfrom local-global connectivity. In the case of the war in Iraq, young people exercised citizenshipthrough participation in globally networked political movements. Their anti-war protests mappedthe outlines of a politics that extends citizenship beyond the local and national and that challengesthe hegemonic exercise of geopolitical power. Both our research and political efforts to promoteyouth citizenship should seek to support and extend this endeavour.

Acknowledgements

I would like to first and foremost thank Nadine Schafer for her excellent research assistance andthe ESRC for funding the project on which this paper is based (R000223955). Three anonymousreferees made very helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper, for which I am grateful.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at seminars in Reading, Exeter and Manchester. Iwould like to thank the audiences for their generous feedback and stimulating ideas.

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