children and war: the stray bullets!

Abstract

This essay seeks to answer the questions of which children in the contemporary world have been targeted and killed "unintentionally”or "at random" by the Brazilian State. In order to understand the place of children in this “war” we rely on the work, among others, of Achille Mbembe, Maurizio Lazzarato and Peter Pál Pelbart. Our text is structured in six sections. First, we take up the concepts of biopolitics, biopower and necropolitics , in an attempt to specify the type of governmental power that is exercised nowadays. Biopower is understood, not only as a military or political concept, but also in relation to a “biological” war (Lazzarato, 2016) against blacks, against certain sexualities, against some women and against some children. We than show how the construction of the universal idea of  “child” excludes children who do not belong to this representation, which is, in general,  disseminated as being the only image of a child. This diffusion of a single, universal notion of “child” is made through countless discursive and audiovisual imagery, and excludes black children and all those who diverge from or “flee” the hegemonic way of representing, thinking and writing about what a child is. Finally, we verify that the dead children are black and poor and we demonstrate the importance of children's political participation in social life.