Abstract
This book shows the centrality of global childhoods to the colonial process and Global Northern culture, tracing how it emerged out of intersections among Western European nations, developing nations, Christian missionaries, non-governmental social reformers and professionals. The book consists of two parts. Part 1 has four chapters (Chapters 1–4). Part 2 has five chapters (Chapters 5–9). While part 1 deals with fundamental ideas and theoretical approaches in the study of children and childhood, part 2 deals with case studies. Chapter 1 discusses the global Northern ideas of children and childhood, which are mostly premised on theories of children as adults in ‘development’. The second chapter provides historical antecedent that details the dominant meaning of children and childhood in the global North, and how modernity has shaped its construction. The third chapter addresses the discourse of ‘remaking’ children as ‘objects’ of the state and the international community – with particular reference to policy and legal efforts. The fourth chapter concentrates on the formulation and global implementation of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Children, as well as the concerns between the universalists and cultural relativists in terms of the applicability of international children’s rights norms in African context.
Beginning the second part of the book, Chapter 5 begins with the primacy of ‘places’ and ‘spaces’ in childhood discourse – with emphasis on home, school and work. Chapter 6 analyses approaches to children in ‘disasters’, using two categories of children as examples: child soldiers and orphans. Children as ‘victims’ of state persecution and forced migration form the basis of discussion in the following chapter (with illustrative examples from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and former British colonies). Chapter 8 focuses on the ambiguities within the idea of the value of children, with illustrative case studies that outline some of the variables in how the value of children is framed economically, socially and politically. The final chapter discusses the future of children and childhood, using examples from the interventions of biomedical ‘innovations’ (i.e. assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and implantation of viable human embryos).
This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of global childhoods and of its connection to child development and international development policy. Unfortunately, the book appears to be limited by its Northern frame. While there is concern about the dominant Northern approaches to child development, the authors still use Northern approaches and worldviews to form the study. The way biomedical interventions are reshaping the identity and encouraging individual perfectibility is an interesting debate for the remaking of ‘future children’. For example, as the authors note, evidence suggests that IVF has ‘revolutionised parental perceptions of pregnancy, psychological attachment to the infant-yet-to-be born …’ and enhanced fertility treatments (p. 159) – a technological innovation that enables the idealisation of a ‘perfectible child’.
My concern, here, hinges on the limitations of such approaches in use, in terms of their inadequate representation of the range of childhoods in the countries from which approaches were drawn, as well as their irrelevance or inappropriateness to the lives of children in other countries. Almost all the ideas in childhood research that circulate internationally and address psychological functioning, economic or cultural globalisation are based on concepts and methods developed in the global North. When speaking empirically of child soldiers in Colombia and Democratic Republic of Congo, child orphans in Uganda, or child sex slaves in Southeast Asia, most of the research that circulates widely, and that is accessible through mainstream databases, remains deep in the theoretical world of Piaget, Locke, Rousseau, Foucault, among others. This literature tacitly assumes that the global South produces issues and data, but does not produce theory.
I consider theory as the moment in a broader process of knowledge formation that changes data or experience, often in some ways moving beyond the given. That the global South does not produce theory is the general assumption in almost all fields, from biomedical science to comparative education. Added to this is the universal (with the exception of the United States) subscription to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which marks ‘child rights’ as a privileged legal norm around which global relations take place. This legal norm has come to mediate socio-economic relations between international and national child-focused agencies such that it can also obscure recognition of child rights and evaluation of the agencies’ practice (Burr, 2006; Laurie and Bondi, 2005).
This is an area that is ridden with paradox(es). The tug of war between global politics and Eurocentric theory has helped drive global childhood’s emphasis on global diversity – whether understood as postmodern fluidity and multiplicity of identities, or as local (cultural) difference. The Eurocentric constructs leave us with dilemma about how to understand the fundamental understanding of global childhoods and the status of key concepts ranging from ‘vulnerability’ and ‘identity’ to ‘childhood’ itself. Besides, the categorisation of a child points to different bases for knowledge. Each is based on a specific culture, religion, language, historical experience, or fragment of identity and thus has its own terminology and category. Each has its own claims for validity and none should be ‘universalised’ as the master narrative for the global world. However, this is not an easy position either because this is exactly the way colonialists saw the world of cultures and ethnic groups, each unique, with only the colonising power having the integrating vision (Hountondji, 2013).
Scholars in childhood studies in different parts of the world urgently need ways to cross-fertilise, rather than separate, their work. But how would this be done without a shared theoretical language and its Eurocentric epistemology? The paradox of choice between two flawed approaches to the remaking of childhood – Northern ethnocentrism and epistemological construct – is a major challenge in global childhood discourses.
This book is as clear as the phenomena it analyses. Its appealing gravitas comfortably makes it a standard text among works on global children and childhood – especially with the addition of further reading at the end of each chapter. In my own view, the most valuable contribution may lie in the authors’ analysis of children as ‘objects’ of the state and the international community since both children and the condition of childhood have been imperilled by modern turbulence (with some illustrative case studies). From this book, a range of issues and debates open up the coloniality of childhoods, global diversity of childhood, contestations on a world scale and biomedical interventions for future children. All these contribute to debates about spatiality in the contemporary social studies of childhood and offer new perspectives for pragmatic theory in childhood studies. In spite of my concern about its theoretical frames, any one contemplating research involving analysis of global childhoods would do well to acquaint themselves with this book.