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Childhood and Citizenship: The viewpoint of the 21st Century
Infância e Cidadania: O ponto de vista do século XXI
Infancia y Ciudadanía: El punto de vista del siglo XXI
Tom Cockburn
*
Abstract
The latter part of the Twentieth Century saw an increasing recognition of children’s claims to citizenship. Signi-
cant inroads were made towards children’s rights, placed onto the global agenda by the United Nations Conven-
tion of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. The academic eld in childhood studies responded to this social
movement (Cockburn, 2013; Warming, 2011) by problematising conventional models of citizenship into one
that would be t for purpose to apply to children. This article will outline the key features of childhood studies’
approach to children’s citizenship in the twentieth century. It will then provide a short commentary on the deve-
lopments this century. Finally, it will identify the themes that are likely to be pertinent now and the near future.
Keywords: Childhood. Citizenship. Twentieth Century.
Resumo
A última parte do século XX viu um reconhecimento crescente das reivindicações de cidadania das crianças.
Incursões signicativas foram feitas em relação aos direitos das crianças, colocadas na agenda global pela
Convenção das Nações Unidas para os Direitos da Criança (UNCRC) em 1989. O campo acadêmico nos estudos
da infância respondeu a esse movimento social (COCKBURN, 2013; WARMING, 2011), problematizando modelos
convencionais de cidadania em um modelo que seria adequado ao propósito de aplicar às crianças. Este artigo
descreverá os principais aspectos da abordagem dos estudos da infância à cidadania infantil no século XX. Em
seguida, fornecerá um breve comentário sobre os desenvolvimentos deste século. Por m, identicará os temas
que devem ser pertinentes agora e no futuro próximo.
Palavras-chave: Infância. Cidadania. Século XXI.
Resumen
*
Doutor em Sociologia e diretor do Departamento de Ciências Sociais na Edge Hill University, Inglaterra. Preside a
Rede de Pesquisa da Associação Europeia de Sociologia da Criança e da Infância. Participa de projetos europeus de
pesquisa, sendo uma referência nos estudos europeus sobre a cidadania infantil e outros temas relacionados à infân-
cia e à juventude, Inglaterra. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4705-0633. E-mail: tom.Cockburn@edgehill.ac.uk
Recebido em 06/01/2020 – Aprovado em 25/03/2020
http://dx.doi.org/10.5335/rep.v27i2.11423
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En la última parte del siglo XX se percibió un creciente reconocimiento de las reivindicaciones de la ciudadanía
de los niños. Incursiones signicativas fueron hechas en relación a los derechos de los niños, puestas en la
agenda global por la Convención de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos del Niño (UNCRC) en 1989. El campo
académico en los estudios de la infancia respondió a ese movimiento social (COCKBUM, 2013; WARMING, 2011),
problematizando modelos convencionales de ciudadana en un modelo que sería adecuad a el propósito de
aplicar a los niños. Este articulo describirá los principales aspectos del abordaje de los estudios de la infancia a la
ciudadanía infantil en el siglo XX. Después, hará un breve comentario sobre los desarrollos de este siglo. Por n,
identicará los temas que debe ser pertinentes ahora y en el futuro próximo.
Palabras clave: I
nfancia. Ciudadanía. Siglo XXI.
Children’s Citizenship
Much of the literature in the Twentieth Century centred on what has been
termed the `Three Ps’ in children’s rights: protection, provision and participation
(Freeman, 2007). But before discussing these further; it is worth commenting
on natural rights. Natural rights are those basic rights that human beings
have by virtue of their existence (recently this has been applied to all living
beings). Discussion of these rights has a very long history and associated with
the development of Christianity and the idea of a soul, however, it is English
philosopher John Locke who developed the idea of natural rights into political
theory. Locke declared that all people have the natural, inalienable right to
“life, liberty and property” (Locke, 1986, first published1694). Thus, all humans
should have their personhood recognised in law and with government. However,
Locke certainly ruled out children from these natural laws as children possess a
“weakness and imperfection of their non-age” (LOCKE, 1986, 148). Thus, children
were to be locked out of political theories that formed the backbone of political
thought until the Twentieth Century.
A lot happened over the 200 years or so since Locke was writing: the industrial
revolution, the abolition of slavery, universal adult and women’s suffrage were
events that began to enlarge the claims of citizenship from the rather limited and
privileged male property owners. By the Twentieth Century the political concerns
around children centred around their protection, provision and participation.
Starting with protection: children had long had the common law right to life.
The industrialised countries of the Nineteenth Century developed this further
with a process of protections of children. Beginning with state intervention into
children working in mines and factories, then protection from abuse and neglect.
By ratification of the UNCRC in 1989 the protections of children were firmly
established (protections from exploitation, inhumane treatment, participation
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in wars, amongst others), and a case made for their special status. However, it
was this special status, centred around children’s perceived vulnerabilities that
arguably excluded them from equality with adults.
The second element of children’s citizenship: their right to provision had also
developed by 1989. By the Twentieth Century children were entitled to the “social
rights” (Marshall, 1992) of an education and a basic income to their parents. Under
the UNCRC entitlements for children from governments are required to meet their
basic needs and help all children reach their full potential. Thus, children are
entitled to health treatment, education, leisure, play, culture, social security and
an adequate standard of living.
The final element: the right to participation, of all the rights generated the
most attention from academics and practitioners (COCKBURN, 2013). This is
arguably because it is very hard to get agreement on what participation is and the
degree to which `full participation’ is possible or indeed appropriate. Childhood
studies, in particular, placed a lot of attention on the processes of participation.
Illustrative here is Roger Hart’s (1992) concept of a `ladder of participation’ that
ranges from `manipulation’ through to “child initiated, shared decisions with
adults” (p. 8).
There are of course other important concepts of citizenship than rights.
Principally, the counter to rights-receiving individuals are the responsibilities
of citizens. Children of course do have responsibilities: a bare minimum is a
child’s responsibility to their own well-being, care and education; to the tangible
responsibilities that children have in the real world; often caring for adults or other
children; having responsibilities to earn a paid income, amongst others. Childhood
studies correctly addresses the fact that children’s responsibilities are rarely given
full recognition, as they are performed by children who are subject to processes of
misrecognition and whose actions and voice are rendered invisible and denigrated
by virtue of the fact that they are performed by children (THOMAS, 2012).
Another important element of citizenship is the notion of belonging. This
is becoming more acute in the increasingly globalised world of migration and
movement. Tensions within individual children over issues of identity become
an increasing focus: be they newly arrived migrants across and within borders,
generational mobilities, or sexual identities. All these shape how individual
children see themselves, see others, or are seen by others.
By the turn of the Twenty First Century childhood scholars, were grappling
with these issues and applied different analytic frames, often associated with
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other social groups asserting their citizenship rights, such as working class people,
women, disabled people, minority or indigenous cultures, languages or ethnicities.
Thus, childhood studies researchers were interested in citizenship ideas that
reflected an inclusive element to citizenship (Lister, 2008). Warming and Fahnøe
(2017) developed the concept of `lived citizenship’ (p. 4) drawing on ideas of radical
democracy and inclusion associated with the ideas of Moosa-Mitha (2005) that
emphasised processes of positioning and identity formation, rather than citizenship
as a state or status. Thus, the lived citizenship position was interested in “who is
and feels included, excluded or not least on the edges, emerges from the multiple
everyday interactions between people in which they perform, learn and experience
citizenship as a self-other relationship” (WARMING; FAHNØE, 2017, 5).
Children’s Citizenship Today
Childhood studies is currently adapting to other global processes. The first,
and in no particular order, is the climate crisis. This for children is a vital issue
and recently children and young people have taken up the role of leadership: Greta
Thunberg and tens of thousands of child activists like her around the globe staged
the Global Climate Strike, the latest held on 21
st
September 2019. The second
process involves the increasing geographical mobility of people across the world
today. Be that migration from the countryside to cities (Unicef, 2012), migration
within nation states and migration across countries (Falkingham, 2001) and at
times across continents (KAGITCIBASI, 1996, de GLIND; KOU, 2013). There is
an acknowledged sense of urgency on how migration effects children’s wellbeing
from 15 hours per week commute to school in Seoul to their risks in exploitation
and trafficking (WHO, 2018). Finally, there is an increasing recognition that
conventions, such as the UNCRC, require focus and attention by academics from
the Global South (HANSON, 2018). Amongst this attention has been a perceived
danger of imposing a minority world idea of `appropriate’ childhood on others; such
as a description of `globalised childhoods’ based on models of childhood premised
on minority world understanding of childhood identified and critiqued by Kaufman
and Rizzini (2002).
Childhood studies, therefore, in order to analyse the processes of lived
citizenship has focused on the concept of children’s agencies within specific spaces.
The latter part of the Twentieth Century childhood studies researchers have paid
attention to the `everyday’ spaces where children live and exercise their agencies.
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These everyday spaces include their relationships with families, their friends, their
streets, amongst their peer groups in schools and so on. Researchers wished to
`reclaim’ children’s agencies and counter the passive image of children in the then
existing sociological, psychological, educational and developmental discourses. The
seminal Prout and James (1990) book Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood
successfully argued for the position of taking seriously the idea of children as
effective social actors. The focus of the plethora of studies that followed looking
at children’s participation and agency identified two main conclusions. The first
identified that children’s agency in their social connections and participation was
seen in relatively consensual and structural terms: often these were understood
by placing children within generational orders (ALANEN, 2009) vis-à-vis
their relationships with adults and within the adult frameworks of education,
patriarchy, class and governance more broadly. Secondly, researchers noted that
children enact their agency in both positive and negative ways. Yes, when looking
at children in their lived social relations they made constructive, telling, observant
and important contributions (PERCY-SMITH, 2010), as Baraldi (2012) notes adult
structures have an element of unpredictability when subject to children’s actions.
However, these were made within adult structures where adults held the power.
Malcolm Hill et al (2004) noted that children’s institutional participation in adult
structures formulated a rather `thin’ form of agency; as participation was a way
of co-opting children into those very adult structures, leaving very little room for
directing social change.
This led to a large body of theoretical literature on creating a more nuanced
understanding of children’s agency. Madeleine Leonard (2015), for instance, looked
at how generational positioning within structures allows children to construct, co-
construct and reconstruct their lives in a process of `generagency’ (p. 4). In this
sense children’s agency unfolds in an interdependent and complex manner. David
Oswell and more recently Spyros Spyrou further problematise children’s agency
within a whole host of complex structures, not just between adults and children
but also between things and spaces. Thus, children’s agency becomes enacted or
constrained within specific geographical contexts, within discursive regimes and
mediated by texts and technologies.
So, given the complexities of children’s agency and their lived lives, where does
this leave childhood studies? As Claudio Baraldi and I argued recently (Baraldi
and Cockburn, 2018) this leads to six important elements to current research that
are firmly interlinked. Firstly, it is necessary to accept theoretical pluralism to
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match the heterogeneous nature of children’s lives across the globe and within
communities. Secondly, concepts, such as citizenship, need to be applied to the
lived citizenships as experienced by children in specific contexts: how do children
interact with the welfare state; what are their social identities of belonging; how
do children experience education systems? Thirdly, how do these lived experiences
intersect with intersectionalities of class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)abilities and so on?
Fourthly, it is necessary to make visible those lived childhoods that are not visible
in intergenerational relations. Children under seven years of age or those children
who have yet gained sufficient linguistic skills to express their wishes or concerns
are largely absent from citizenship discussions. Fifthly, it is still necessary to
continue to subvert existing social and cultural presuppositions of childhood by
elaborating children’s own lived conditions, experiences and explanations. Finally,
this must be achieved by seriously acknowledging the `glocal’ dimensions in
children’s lives.
Taking the last point as an exemplar of the challenges to understanding
children’s citizenship, it is important to acknowledge the diverse experiences, social
structures and lived lives of children both as a plurality across the world (chiefly
but not exclusively between the minority and majority worlds) but also within
specific nation states. As noted above childhood studies is increasingly recognising
the colonisation of childhood from the minority world and scholars in Europe, North
America and Australasia identify, have problematised and theorised the condition
of children in the Global South. The work of Sharon Stephens (1995) onwards have
studied the power relations that children in the majority world inhabit; playing
particular attention to hegemonic structures that international development
demands. Such work has, correctly, mapped processes of children’s poverty,
exclusion, injustices and marginalisation. It has also brought to the attention of
academics and policy makers in the minority world such processes and the role
the international development movement plays in sustaining those processes. For
instance, Pells notesthe ways in which the minority world imposition of `Western’
child rearing practices has located majority world children as lacking and in
deficit. They also suffer from process of misrecognition, emphasising vulnerability,
pathologisation and otherness, that is hard for those children and their carers who
strive through exploitational economic circumstances to make the most of their
lives (PELLS, 2012).
More excitingly, there is a growing body of work from academics from the
majority world itself. Such work provides more nuanced understanding of children
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in their local situations and how these fields are interconnected with global
political, economic and cultural structures (ABEBE, 2013). Abebe (2013) shows
how economic restructuring and neoliberal economic processes weaken a nation
state’s ability to support children. In Ethiopia Abebe maintains that the much-
needed foreign investment served to displace communities from their means of
subsistence in more collectivised societies. There becomes a disjuncture between
the needs and rights, based on a relationship with the state; and those reciprocal
belongings based on child/family and intergenerational relationships in their
communities. Children’s agency within majority world communities tends to be
obvious: children produce, reproduce and contribute. However, what is missing is
a focus on the ways economic and political oppression intersects with children’s
lives, according to age, ethnicity, gender, and so on. It is only when such processes
are understood that strivings for more distributive justice can be deployed.
It is therefore imperative for childhood studies to develop, or at least be
mindful of, a comparative analysis of the workings of the state and transnational
capital on the lives of all children, marginalised or privileged, in both the majority
and minority worlds. Relatedly, children’s lives are closely interrelated with
processes of international trade that effects labour and education markets. Trade
and labour markets have also increased processes of migration and mobility, both
within and between nation states and even across continents. Migration patterns
have thrown up further phenomena for citizenship analysis where families have
become more `intercultural’, or, the ways in which children are exposed to diverse
cultures, where their cultures interact and change in their interactions with
other cultures. This impacts on children in terms of their identities as they may
be children of parents through marriage or partnerships across cultures. Or they
may, as children, cross from one culture to another, most often through migration.
This has led to, at times, a `superdiversity’ where children may move multiple
times across different cultures, each experience leading to familiarity with other
cultures with all the potential opportunities and challenges this may involve. Thus,
there are situations where migrants and ethnic minority groups constitute a high
percentage of a population; their national origins are highly diverse and there is a
mix of migration statuses and associated rights (VERTOVEC, 2007).
The other process affecting citizenship identities and related to the
`intercultural’ experiences of children is around media communications. Firstly,
with the rise of social media, more traditional processes of media have been
subverted. On one level this is a good thing, in that traditional media tended to be
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owned by vested, and powerful interests; the rise of social media has allowed the
voices of those traditionally marginalised, such as children, to have a platform to
express their views and share information, discuss topics of mutual interest, and
work towards common goals. People, goods, services, and information from many
diverse locations flow in and out of places daily, creating a ‘progressive sense of
place’ (MASSEY, 2015, 19), where the character of a place is shaped as much by
processes from outside intersecting with it as those acting within it. This creates
tangible opportunities for children to express their citizenship identities, however,
as David Harvey (2001) has cautioned, technological developments are being
driven by the need to reduce the turnover time of capital, and produced in order
to facilitate capitalism’s reach and accumulate capital. Thus, locking all children,
wherever they are, into process of alienation, exploitation and control.
So, what does all this mean for theorising children’s citizenship in this complex,
interconnected and fluid world? One alluring idea is that of cosmopolitanism. To be
‘cosmopolitan’ is to be ‘well-travelled’ and genuinely curious about the world. With
roots stretching beyond Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century and arguably
to the European classical period. With processes of `glocalisation’ outlined above,
the hybrid nature of many people’s identities, the superdiverisities of much of
the localities where people live, ideas of cosmopolitanism have proved attractive.
Theorists have turned to ideas of cosmopolitanism to create environments that are
less essentialised and demonising in order to bond class, ethnic and other divisions
and create greater social solidarity and respect (Amin, 2006).
A final note on the current state of research into children’s citizenship is the
influence from the `post-humanist’ turn in childhood studies associated with the
work of Nick Lee (2001) and later, Spyros Spyrou (2011, 2018). This important
research provides further nuance to capturing the complexity of children’s agency
by critiquing the `humanist’ and `rationalist’ assumptions in research with
children. Spyrou (2011) captures the point well in his reflections on his research
into Greek-Cypriot children’s understanding of national identity. Spyrou begins by
questioning current childhood studies research that claims to capture a true and
authentic children’s `voice’; beginning with pragmatic observations about the time
constraints that are part of a modern researcher’s contractual life to identifying
three key observations. The first of these is that researchers do not sufficiently
critically reflect upon their positions of power in their representations of children’s
voices. Secondly, researchers do not adequately make clear their own assumptions
about children, the language we deploy as researchers and theorists, the ideological
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and institutional contexts in which research operate. These multiple factors
constrain and shape our constructions of children in our research, in what children
say and the identities that they express. Finally, Spyrou cautions researchers who
seek to identify a unitary subject speaking the truth; rather, it is necessary to
acknowledge the `polyvocality’ of children’s voices where children’s voices shift
and change according to the discursive possibilities that range and vary according
to context. He describes this point well when reflecting upon his own work with
Greek-Cypriot children constructing their identities, They:
resorted to a more official, nationalistic voice when expressing their identities at school.
The structured and highly controlled space of the school encouraged children to provide the
`correct’ answer while the more child-controlled neighbourhood playground provided them
with significantly more leeway to draw upon alternative discourses which in some cases
undermined or contradicted the ones they drew upon at school (SPYROU, 2011, p. 155).
At the first level, the Greek-Cypriot children understood `Turks’ as invaders,
evil, and so on. However, after time and with more understanding the notion of
`Turks’ and the negative attributes was associated with some Turks, such as the
government and army, but not all Turks. Indeed, children in more informal, relaxed
contexts referred to a more positive viewpoint of Turkish-Cypriots in a more
hyphenated and nuanced manner. The important point made is that children’s
citizenship identities and their viewpoint of others, even traditional `enemies’, can
be framed differently in different discursive contexts by the same children. The
importance for childhood studies scholars is the necessity to lay bare the varying
practices, discourses and narratives of citizenship.
Children’s Citizenship: Future Directions
In terms of thinking through children’s citizenship we have the benefit of
recent theoretical contributions. Following the point made in the last section is the
significance of the `post-human turn’ and the prominence to taking `relationality’
seriously. Of course, this is not new; this author’s early writings on citizenship
emphasised the requirement to take interdependence seriously for both adults and
children (COCKBURN, 1998). Building on the requirement of childhood studies to
go, as Peter Kraftl maintains, `beyond children’s agency’ (2013, 14) it is necessary
to take a reflexive approach to our own standpoints and our representations of
children. Children’s lives involve close family members, are located in local
communities, in local education systems, local economies, local (social) media
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that are at the same time increasingly shaped by global forces. Each of these
elements profoundly shapes children’s lives, those of their parents and carers,
the professionals that work with children and the communities in which children
live. In this respect the natural rights theories of John Locke and the individual,
independent, rational person his theory assumes is inadequate - for adults as well
as children. Relationality is built in to the human experience.
The complexity of our theorising of citizenship identities becomes further
intricate when we add the importance of `differences’ and other `intersectionalities’
into our theorising. Such intersections include gender, as gender identities still
profoundly shape the experiences and life chances of boys as well as girls across
the globe. This calls for a close interest in recent feminist theorising around
citizenship, some feminist theorising specifically focusses on the gendered
citizenship identities of children. This involves a review of our sociological ethics
and theory (SEVENHUIJSEN, 1998; Cockburn, 2005) and an engagement with
feminism’s `post-human turn’ (BRAIDOTTI, 2006) as well as other intersections
based on ethnicity and colonialism (SAADA, 2012).
Added to the importance of interdependence and intersectionalities to
children’s citizenship identities are the processes of `social recognition’; a full
analysis of recognition theory and its application to children has been undertaken
by Nigel Thomas (2012). Children, he argues, are morally responsible persons, are
therefore rights-bearers and entitled to respect. In addition, children are embodied
people with talents and capabilities, who contribute in a variety of ways to society
and culture, and so are deserving of esteem. Thomas convincingly argues that
an analysis of children’s intersubjective claims to love, rights and solidarity are
crucial to understanding the dialogue between children’s identities, what children
think is right, and their ability to change things (THOMAS; STOECKLIN, 2018).
It is worth now returning to the beginning of this text and note Freeman’s `three
Ps’ of participation, protection and provision. Processes of recognition are key to
understanding children’s participation and protection but also to provision. Nancy
Fraser (1997) correctly focuses on a radical redistribution of social resources in
favour of marginalised or misrecognised groups of people. However, `redistribution’
usually involves top-down interventions by the state, either from the political left
or the right. Neither of these approaches involves what might be called `bottom
up’ interventions. This must involve a politics of redistribution that on the one
hand speaks to individual rights and belonging but also to more collectivist
claims through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender alluded to above.
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It is necessary therefore to have recognition of children that avoids a `top-down’
clumsy manner before redistribution can happen; at the same time redistribution
is necessary so that groups can find a way of greater community mobilisation.
Finally, it is essential to identify the greatest challenge to children’s expressions
of citizenship and that is by acknowledging the form of control over children. This
will be difficult to develop fully in the context of this text. However, control over
children happens on a number of levels; each profoundly shaping and constraining
the social recognition of children. These processes link to the discussion above
about the limits to children’s agency. Control of children occurs at the basic familial
level where children’s citizenship is shaped by family mechanisms; notably there
is a persistence to processes of patriarchal control, even in economically developed
countries with long established equal opportunities legislation. Children’s location
within households have their views shaped by the familial cultures in which they
live, these are dominated by parents or other senior (adult) family members. In
terms of economic control these are sometimes controlled through families directly,
but economic wellbeing is assigned as an accident of birth where some children
are dealt the cards more fairly than others. Children’s social recognition is still
constrained discursively; Nicolas Rose’s (1999) Foucauldian analysis established
the discursive construction of reality of societies and the crucial means by which
social control is directed through children in the education and health systems by
defining as `normal’ an unquestioning striving for educational qualifications, `good’
bodies and `ill’ bodies. Children remain discursively constructed as `vulnerable’,
`innocent’. `blank slates that education is needed to shape’, `damaged’ bodies
to which power/knowledge deploys its medical and psychological regimes upon,
and so on. These discourses continue to shape and damage children’s claims to
political citizenship, across all parts of the globe and still remains a major project
of childhood studies to analyse, deconstruct and challenge such constructions.
Childhood and Citizenship: Changing the Narrative?
Challenging discourses that marginalise children, producing work that
supports children’s social recognition and redistribution, affirming intersectional
solidarities, as well as locating these amidst children’s processes of interdependence
is an important agenda for childhood studies researchers and their supporters.
However, what discourses for citizenship are available for children? As mentioned
above, ideas of Cosmopolitanism would fit well, especially in cities, as exemplified
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by Delanty’s (2006) `critical cosmopolitanism’ and in understanding day-to-day
forms of social solidarity as described through Paul Gilroy’s (2004) analysis of
the `conviviality’ of social groups in superdiverse communities. As Gilroy (2004)
notes in the optimistic side of his book, race and ethnicity become less important
for young people in today’s British cities. However, this does not mean an end to
racism and division in our societies, panics about asylum seekers; hostility to new
eastern European immigrants; fear of “black” gun crime; fear of infiltration by
foreign or Muslim terrorists, suggest in many respects a backward step in race
relations.
There are, of course, important localised projects that children become engaged
in to challenge for social justice. Notable examples are led by those children
and young people in the developing world. The `Penguin Revolution’ in Chile in
2006 were a series of protests by high school students between April and June
2006, culminating in strikes and marches on 30 May being the largest student
demonstration the country had seen. The protestors’ demands ranged from the
delivery of free travel passes on buses to a high-quality education of all. Some of
the demands were accepted by Michelle Bachelet’s government and served to quell
some of the demands of the students. This did not end the discontent with other
surges in protests in 2008 and between 2011-13, not all the demands have been
met and Chile continues to have a large portion of schools under the private sector.
However, some demands were accepted by the government and children remain a
vociferous opposition to national state politics.
In Brazil the Rozelinhos consisted of crowds of young people in 2013 and 2014,
including many people of colour, coming together to protest at being excluded from
shopping malls and exclusive sites of consumerism and other public spaces. The
protests were organised on social media and included other marginalised groups
of young people, such as those who are homeless. While the protests had very
little of their objectives realised they had certainly registered alarm amongst social
elites. The focus of protestors on commercial places demonstrates the intertwining
of citizenship with consumption and citizenship; a new claim to citizenship and
protest against exclusion that is likely to be shared with all young people across
the globe. While nation states guarantee the formal equality and inclusion of
citizens, however, the substantive distribution of rights is still done along the lines
of privilege and unequal power relations.
This arguably for this author hits the crux of the problem for children’s
citizenship in today’s neo-liberal world. John O’Neill (1994) in his classic book
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The Missing Child in Liberal Theory provides a critique of market societies,
then and now, being advocated in today’s market capitalism. O’Neill observed
an encouragement of minimal civic obligations and a maximum participation in
market capitalism and consumption. O’Neill centres the importance of the context
of children’s lives: children themselves; their families; and communities, but places
this in the wider context of political economy and market capitalism. The latter
providing children with very little civic attachment and will produce a society that
is hostile to social solidarity and justice. The solution, for O’Neill is to provide a
re-affirmation of the civic foundations of the state. While, a re-affirmation of a
civil state with a generational contract is an admiral ambition, how we get there
is open to debate. The experiences of the Pinguino `Revolution’ and the Rozelinhos
testify divisions and class antagonism prevail if the aims of the movements base
themselves on narrow narratives of `consumption citizenship’. A deeper series of
narratives are required. A variety of radical narratives do exist, the most exciting is
the global phenomenon of children opposed to the climate emergency, led by Greta
Thunberg and other children and young people. However, the objectives will not
be achieved through narratives of market and consumer capitalism but through a
deeper societal retrenchment willing to adopt redistributionist policies and this is
only coming from the political left.
Across the world there is a resurgence of `community politics’: from the recent
Brexit vote in the UK; nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland; the re-
election of Narendra Modi in India; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; Rodrigo
Duterte in the Philippines; and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. However, this
`community’ politics is populist and dominated by the divisive and toxic discourses
of a resurgent far right. The discourses deployed are simplistic and feed into the
discomfort and scepticism of politics in general, perhaps as identified and feared
by O’Neill. The discourses deployed by populists engage with fundamental issues
such as education, housing, transport and health with the blame for inadequate
policies, not neo-liberal policies which they share, but with a myth of an `urban
elite’ and an influx of immigrants that have placed residents at the bottom of the
pile. This must be opposed, and new narratives deployed in their place. These must
include redistribution of wealth, a central role for local, national and international
state polities, and an inclusive rhetoric based on shared humanity. This can only
be delivered from the political left. The question remains whether those from
the political left are able to shift from the limited and sometimes poor practices
of socialist states in the twentieth century to develop a political and economic
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vision able to engage with processes of social interdependence, fluid identities,
misrecognition and generational structures that pattern the citizenship of children
today.
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