ABSTRACT
In aiming to take the critical geopolitics of military recruitment further, this chapter moves beyond an analysis of representational materials and demonstrates that recruitment is geopolitical also because it happens in places specifically inhabited by children and young people. It outlines the efforts to resist military recruitment in terms of counter-recruitment activism. The chapter builds upon a research project that included archival work in the film and sound collection at the Royal Air Force museum in Hendon, London; a critical analysis of contemporary recruiting materials; and ethnographic studies at a number of the UK's military airshows. While military recruitment readily scripts children and young people as at risk at a range of geographical scales, it also interpolates them as risky. Mirroring a trend in the US, whereby recruitment is targeted indiscriminately at poor and minority communities, the young occupy an intersection on the spectrum of inequality and disadvantage.
