ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, children, teenagers and young adults were central to sustaining the anti-apartheid Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London. This chapter considers youth involvement in British anti-apartheid activism as a means of exploring how children and young people engage in geopolitics. It argues that youthful concerns about global geopolitics are always entangled with the everyday politics of growing up. The chapter extends the scope of critical geopolitics by suggesting how retrospective, historical methodologies might expand geographers' understandings of how young people engage with geopolitics and produce geopolitical knowledge. It introduces some of the young people who participated in the Non-Stop Picket, their motivations for doing so, and give some indication of how they fitted their (geo)political commitments around the rest of their lives. The chapter explores not only the geopolitical approach that informed their actions, but also the Cold War rhetoric mobilised against South African Embassy.
