Children and International Relations: A new site of knowledge?

Review of International Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 237-250

  Watson, Alison M S ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33144469212     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210506007005     Document Type: Review

References (93)

1. See, for example: R. Arts, M. Noortman, and B. Reinalda (eds.), Non-state Actors in International Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001);
2. R. Falk, 'The Global Promise of Social Movements at the Edge of Time', Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, 12 (1987), pp. 173-96;
3. and M. Hoffman, 'Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 16:2 (1987), pp. 231-49.
4. The only countries not to sign up to the UNCRC are the United States and Somalia, although Somalia did sign up to the Convention during the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children, held in May 2002, and at that time committed to ratification.
5. 〈http://www.unicef〉.
6. Child labour is defined as involving children below the age of 12 that are working in any economic activities, those aged 12 to 14 years that are engaged in harmful work, and all children that are engaged in the worst, forms of child labour. The latter, in addition to the involvement, of children in slavery, prostitution, pornography, and drug trafficking, includes work that is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morals of young persons. See International Labour Organisation (ILO), Convention 182: Convention on the Worst. Forms of Child Labor (Geneva: ILO, 1999).
7. See, for example: 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3401991.stm〉
8. and also 〈http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/index.htm〉.
9. Current estimates suggest that around 300,000 children are being used as soldiers in more than thirty countries around the world, including Angola, Colombia, Lebanon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda. At this point, it is useful to note that much of the literature concentrates on the generic 'child soldier', in actuality spending more time on the detailing of boys' experience in such roles. In many cases, however, the experience of girl soldiers is a different one, and one that has proved to be more intransigent in terms of efforts towards their post-conflict reintegration into society. See Dyan Mazurana and Susan McKay, 'Child Soldiers: What About the Girls?', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 57:5 (2001), pp. 30-5.
10. Graca Michel, The Impact of War on Children (London: Hurst and Co., 2001), p. 26.
11. Of course the counter-argument that can be made here is that whether children decide that they have to fight, or to labour, or to migrate for reasons of self-preservation, such decisions, and the fact that they have to be made, are in themselves a form of coercion. There are economic, cultural, social or political factors that have left these children with no alternative but to make such decisions.
12. Sandy Hobbs, Jim McKechnie and Michael Lavalette, Child Labour: A World History Companion (Oxford: ABC-CLIO Europe, 1999), p. 213. As an interesting example of the power of children to affect consumption habits, it is often children who have more information, frequently derived from school, regarding ethical consumption choices. Such ethical considerations may then lead to changes in consumption habits (for example, to buying fairly traded products) which may in turn have a long-term impact upon the international division of labour. Their influence therefore extends beyond their own purchases to the purchases that their parents make, including travel, computers, food, entertainment, and even cars.
13. 〈http://www.plan-uk.org/pdfs/literaturereview.pdf〉, p. 12.
14. As another examples of this, in Barra Mansa in Brazil, a children's participatory budget council has been developed in which 18 boys and 1.8 girls (between the ages of 9 and 15) have been elected by their peers as a way of ensuring that the municipal council addresses their needs and priorities. See Eliana Guerra, 'Citizenship knows no age: children's participation in the governance and municipal budget of Barra Mansa, Brazil', Environment and Urbanization, 1.4:2 (October 2002), pp. 71-84.
15. Of course the question that arises with all such examples is the extent to which children are still being manipulated in some way by adults. Even those organisations - private and public, national and international - that have emerged to advocate children's rights, it can be argued, are acting simply as an alternative source of opinion in the arguments regarding what is in a child's best interests, often rather than letting the child speak for itself. This is a criticism that a number of NGOs have taken on board, with the result that it is now commonplace to be able to read first-hand accounts of particular children's experiences, whether on the NGO's website or in any reports that they may release, and for children themselves to participate in online discussions where they have the opportunity of putting their views across. The question still remains, however, of how much any such interventions translate through to an active policy stance that directly involves the child.
16. See, for example, G. Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: Warburg Institute, 1996);
17. J. C. Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (London: Penguin, 1975);
18. Jens Qvortrup, Marjetta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta, and Helmut Wintersberger (eds.), Childhood Matters, Social Theory, Practice and Politics (Avebury, 1994):
19. Berry Mayall, Towards a Sociology of Childhood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002);
20. Allison James and Alan Prout (eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London: Routlodgo, 1997).
21. Priscilla Alderson, Institutional Rites and Rights: A Century of Childhood (London: Institute of Education, 2003), pp. 27-29.
22. One of the most major of these being the Childhoods conference (Children and Youth in Emerging and Transforming Societies) held in Oslo in June 2005, and involving over 1,000 participants.
23. This can be seen even with regard to the subject of this article. When an earlier version was presented at the 2004 ISA conference in Montreal, it was assigned, along with a number of other papers on children, to a panel entitled 'The Vulnerable at the Fringes of IR', the inherent assumption therefore being that children are not relevant subjects of study for mainstream discourse.
24. Martha Ellen Stortz, ' "Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent?" Augustine on Childhood', in Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Eerdmans, 2001).
25. See Bryan Caplan, 'Locke, Consent and the Rights of Children', 〈http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philri045.pdf〉.
26. Alison M. S. Watson, 'Seen But Not Heard: The Role of the Child in International Political Economy', New Political Economy, 9:1 (1994).
27. Norman Lewis, 'Human Rights, Law and Democracy in an Unfree World', in Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 98, 79.
28. Norman Lewis, Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal, Ibid., p. 96.
29. Norman Lewis, Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal, Ibid., p. 96.
30. Vanessa Pupavac, 'The International Children's Rights Regime', in David Chandler (ed.), Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 57-75.
31. Vanessa Pupavac, 'Misanthropy Without Borders: The International Children's Rights Regime', Disasters, 25:2 (2001), p. 95.
32. Helen Brocklehurst, Who's Afraid of Children: Children Conflict and Global Politics (Aldershot Ashgate, forthcoming).
33. Siobhan McEvoy-Levy (ed.), Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peacebuilding (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
34. Charli Carpenter, 'Surfacing Children: Limitations of Genocidal Rape Discourse', in Human Rights Quarterly, 22:2 (May 2000).
35. J. DeBerry, 'Child Soldiers and the Convention on the Rights of the Child', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 575 (May 2001), pp. 92-105.
36. Steve Hicks, 'The Political Economy of War-Affected Children', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 575 (May 2001), pp. 106-21.
37. Carol B. Thompson, 'Beyond Civil Society: Child Soldiers as Citizens in Mozambique', Review of African Political Economy, 26:80, pp. 190-206.
38. See, for example: Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Culture and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963):
39. Karen Orren and Paul Peterson, 'Presidential Assassination: A Case Study in the Dynamics of Political Socialisation', The Journal of Politics, 29 (May 1967), pp. 388-409;
40. and P. Beck and M. Jennings, 'Pathways to Participation', American Political Science Review, 76 (March 1970), pp. 94-108.
41. Children: Challenges and Prospects for the New Millennium, Journal of International Affairs, 55:1 (Fall 2001).
42. Children's Rights, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 575 (May 2001).
43. Carole Pateman, 'Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy', in The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
44. Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Family in Political Thought (Amhurst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), p. 289.
45. Charlotte Hooper, Manly States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 92.
46. Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 49-50.
47. See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
48. Once again, such segregation between public and private space can be seen as a highly Western construction. For example, Gottlieb notes (p. 5), that 'American society segregates people by age quite systematically. Children typically inhabit different social spaces from those populated by adults.' Gottlieb, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, ibid., p. 5.
49. Nadine Puechguirbal, 'Women and Children: Deconstructing a Paradigm', Selon Hall Journal of International Relations', p. 5.
50. Nadine Puechguirbal, Selon Hall Journal of International Relations', Ibid., p. 12.
51. Roland Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 274-5.
52. Richard K. Ashley, 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War', in J. Der Derian and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 269, 299.
53. Alderson, Institutional Rites and Rights, pp. 27-9.
54. Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine, 'Children's Geographies and the New Social Studies of Childhood', in Sarah T,. Holloway and Gill Valentine (eds.), Children's Geographies (Routledge, 2001), p. 2.
55. Moreover, the '18' threshold can be argued to be in itself a very Western concept, and one form of 'cultural convention premised on the Western calendar', see Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From, p. 44.
56. Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Family in Political Thought.
57. Emma Rothschild, 'An Infinity of Girls: The Political Rights of Children in Historical Perspective', paper for Centre for History and Economics (May 2000), p. 5. Indeed, as Rothschild notes: 'the failed apogee of the summer of 1794 was to have been a 'fate Heroique' for the internment of the remains of Bara and Viala . . . the urn of Viala to be carried by young republicans, 'from the ages of 11 and 13 inclusively', the dancers to perform 'lugubrious and military pantomimes', the music to express 'heartrending sounds'.
58. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 380.
59. Judith Ennew, 'How Can We Define Citizenship in Childhood?', working paper, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, vol. 10:12 (October, 2000).
60. John O'Neill, 'Is the Child A Political Subject?', Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 4 (1997), p. 241.
61. David Archard, Children, Rights and Childhood (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 53.
62. O'Neill, 'Is the Child A Political Subject?', p. 243.
63. More recently, Smith and Wallerstein moved beyond the concept of the unitary male breadwinner to include men's, women's and children's labour pooled as part of a family's income-earning strategies. Looking at the entire household in this way as opposed to simply the male breadwinner in the household - was crucial to their attempts to make sense of different wages paid in different parts of the world for the same kind of work. See J. Smith and I. Wallerstein (eds.), Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
64. For those countries with high levels of poverty and concomitantly high levels of child labour, the issue of securing improved legislation to protect children under such conditions may be the most immediately significant on the activists' agenda. On the other hand, where a child lives in a country which is economically much more secure, the issues that may be of more immediate significance may be ones advocating greater citizenship rights or input into the policymaking process in the country as a whole.
65. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations, p. 17.
66. For this reason, Frost calls postmodernists 'super-Realists'. See Boucher, Political Theories of IR, p. 376,
67. and Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 68.
68. E. Ardener, 'The problem revisited', in S. Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (London: Dent, 1975).
69. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, p. 5. He goes on to note: 'Within a linguistically self-reflective posture, the analysis of public policy deploys itself on a broader terrain to include not only what a society tends to regard explicitly as its problems but also the policy immanent in the ideas of the self and the order within which what is commonly thought of as public policy is executed'.
70. There is also, of course, debate regarding the beginning of childhood, which the UNCRC left unresolved. Thus the Preamble to the 1989 CRC contains a provision citing the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child . . . to the effect that children need special safeguards 'before as well as after birth'. However, the legal effect of this provision is mitigated by a statement that was included in the travaux preparatoires as a compromise between those states who oppose abortion and those who do riot. By making it clear that the Preamble does riot grant the foetus an absolute right to life, this statement essentially retains the status quo, leaving the question of when childhood begins to individual state discretion. See Jenny Kuper, International Law Concerning Children in Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
71. Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 114.
72. Such notions are reflected too in nineteenth century literature. For example in many of the works of Charles Dickens, agency translates to wilfulness, albeit with the possibility of redemption. As Wilt notes: 'all Dicken's children [are] cruelly tried and "bent" before the dawn of consciousness, but along that bias [choose] a full and flexible shape - which promotes alike the doing and the winning, the loving and being loved, the seeing and the being recognised.' See Judith Wilt, 'Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens's Esther', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32:3 (December 1977), p. 288.
73. Tamar Schapiro, 'What is a Child?', Ethics, 109:4 (1999), pp. 716, 729. Interestingly, Schapiro also takes time to mention the difficulty in classing everyone under the age of 18 as a child in that 'children at different stages of development differ from one another in the extent of their hegemony over themselves' (p. 734).
74. Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p. 11.
75. Sharon Stephens (ed.), Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
76. See Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 70-8, for a fuller discussion.
77. The UNCRC also, however, is a mix of rights and obligations. The language may mention rights, but there is a sense too of the obligation upon states of ensuring that children actually achieve these.
78. Children's Rights Development Movement (1994), p. 3
79. taken from Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 77.
80. Bob Franklin, 'Children's Rights: An Introduction', The New Handbook of Children's Rights, Comparative Policy and Practice (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), p. 3.
81. J. Hughes, 'Thinking about Children', in G. Scarre (ed.), Children, Parents and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
82. Onora O'Neill, 'Children's Rights and Children's Lives', Ethics, 98:3 (1988), p. 459.
83. Guido Maggioni and Claudio Baraldi, Children's rights and contemporary sociological perspectives on childhood', (www.cirfid.unibo.it).
84. In Norway, for example, there have at times, though admittedly without much support, been proposals put forward to give children the right to vote. See Anne Trine Kjorholt, 'Small is Powerful, Discourses on "Children and Participation" in Norway', Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 9:1 (2002), pp. 63-82.
85. However, Martha Minow has bemoaned the failure of the children's rights movement, and lists as the first cause of failure the fact that children do not vote and that their voice is riot adequately represented. See, for example, Martha Minow, Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics and the Law (London: The New Press, 1997).
86. Bay City News Service, 'Bill to Lower Voting Age to 14 Passes Senate Committee', May 7, 2004.
87. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation.
88. Lister, Citizenship, p. 40. Lister was talking about the case of women, but similar arguments can be made with regard to children.
89. While recognising the dangers of romanticisation of what, can be frustrating and exhausting work, political participation, in whatever sphere, contributes to the identification of 'women as political beings' See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center (South End Press, 1984), p. 127.
90. Carole Pateman and M. Shanley (eds.), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
91. Lister, Citizenship, p. 77: 'One group of children who could be said to have demonstrated at least some of the capacities for citizenship through their exercise of some of its responsibilities, often to the detriment of the rights enshrined in the UN Convention, are those providing community care for a parent or relative. Their existence in a number of Western European countries has only recently been partially recognised.'
92. If we examine the question of children's identification with political community we are, of course, back into the realms of political socialisation, which may take place at an age much younger than we may assume. Indeed more than forty years ago Easton and Hess were arguing that by the time children have reached the age of seven, the majority have formed a strong attachment to their own political community. David Easton and Robert D. Hess, 'The Child's Political World', Midwest Journal of Political Science, 6:3 (August 1962), p. 236.
93. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 220.