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After Beslan: Childhood, complexity and risk

This paper considers Beslan as a crisis point at which the postmodern celebration of difference spills into unbearable chaos. However this turns out to show dynamic, self -organising characteristics. Central to these interactions is the formation, however loose or opportunistic, of micro-identities that also produce outgroups open to deconstruction or loss of rights and abuse. At Beslan this reaches a crisis, both localised and universally challenging: it poses the problem of intolerability for a democratic community premised on pluralistic tolerance. The impact is a radical realignment of the sociology (of childhood) along the axes of human ecology and constrained possibility.