‘You could start a new country, but you would need to discover new land’: Exploring understandings of statehood with primary school pupils in England

State-based imaginaries dominate how children are taught about the world in formal educational spaces. Geographical education in schools draws upon a range of representations from atlases to wall maps, which portray a highly ordered image of a world that is neatly divided up into bounded nation-states. While scholarship within political geography has long sought to challenge the ‘territorial trap’ which underpins these approaches, and there is increasing awareness and prominence of children's political geography within the subdiscipline, little attention has focused on how children themselves conceptualise and think about the state. This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates on children's geopolitics and work on the production of geographical knowledge to explore children's understandings of statehood through a focus on English primary school pupils (aged 9–11). We have developed and run an educational activity which addresses the question of ‘what is a country’ and creates space for pupils to critically engage with ideas of statehood. This paper draws upon participation observation of this activity with 441 pupils from 17 classes across 10 state-maintained primary schools in England. We find that children have complex geopolitical understandings of the world which encompass nuanced articulations of the politics of difference, legitimacy, the act of recognition, and legacies of colonial practices. While the norms of a state-based international system are firmly established by the end of primary school in the UK, pupils do not merely accept the status quo of the current international system, but can offer nuanced critiques, thinking creatively about different forms the state could take, and engaging with questions of justice and equity. We thereby argue that children should be thought of as critical and creative geopolitical thinkers who can imagine more just and equitable futures.