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Preface and acknowledgements

The idea for the book arose from my many years of experience and studies with children in Latin America and Africa. My first significant experience was in the 1980s in a camp of Salvadorian refugees in Honduras and in a rural region of Nicaragua, where a cruel civil war was underway. There I experienced children who had to endure unimaginable suffering and fought for their survival in a way that astonished me, often on their own. These experiences turned a lot of what I thought I knew about children upside down. My thoughts about children of the Global South, especially those living in extreme poverty, were soon put to the test again, when I found an opportunity to volunteer for a ‘social brigade’ (as it was then called) to accompany children on the streets and markets of the Nicaraguan capital Managua (and other cities in the country). Here the children provided for their livelihoods and in some cases also for their families. I kept wondering where these children found the strength to cope with such oppressive living conditions without losing courage and even humour.

I began to understand that the children often drew their strength from taking care of themselves and others and taking responsibility, and – which I consider decisive – found recognition in their environment. Observing that the children often supported each other, together with my colleagues who tried to support the children, we came up with the idea of promoting the children’s self-organization. I was familiar with this idea from the social movements of school and university students and young workers, who have rebelled in Germany and other countries since the late 1960s against authoritarian control and fought for a freer and self-determined life. Nevertheless, the idea of self-organization gained a new meaning in many respects in view of the living conditions of the children I was dealing with. It was not only about freedom and self-determination, but also, to a much greater extent, about social equality and justice. In Nicaragua and – as I have experienced since the 1990s – in other regions of the Global South, the idea of self-organization manifested itself in various social movements of young people against discrimination, disregard, poverty, exploitation and war and for a peaceful and secure life in which their human dignity is protected. Increasingly, the idea of children’s rights, understood as the human rights of children, was also approached.

One of the social movements that influenced my thinking about children and childhoods to a particular degree is that of working children and adolescents, which began in Latin America, starting from Peru in the late 1970s, and appeared in Africa and Asia from the early 1990s. This movement, which has different local characteristics, shows an understanding of childhood that contradicts the concept of childhood that emerged in modern Europe in many respects. It is characterized by the fact that children do not live in a sphere separated from the world of adults, but want to participate in society as a whole and exert an influence on it. According to this understanding, children do not stop being children (for example, when they work or take joint responsibility in society), but it no longer excludes children from society and does not make them ‘smaller’ than they are and see themselves (which is sometimes referred to as ‘infantilization’). The expectations associated with this can perhaps best be described as a new form of citizenship of children that comes from below and is not limited to preparation for ‘real’ citizenship.

The more intensively I dealt with this understanding of childhood embodied in children’s lives, the more it became clear to me that children in the Global South are often met with incomprehension even by people and organizations who claim to help them. This incomprehension can even take on forms of enmity when, for example, children are persecuted and criminalized by the police at the insistence of international organizations simply because they help their mothers on the market (as I have seen in Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and India). It can also lead to the degradation of children when they are displayed on posters as suffering and helpless beings (without being asked) in a kind of pornography of misery to collect donations for charity projects. Such and other forms of disregard have led me over time to see it as an unspoken continuation of colonial subjugation and conquest.

Through my intensive engagement with the history of colonialism, with so-called postcolonial theory and with studies that made visible colonial stereotypes, for example in development policy and development education, I wanted to reflect on and express in a more comprehensive and structured way my experiences and unease have grown over the years. I also had to experience how even well-meaning people who wanted the best for the ‘poor little ones’ – children and families who did not meet their standards – secretly met them with contempt and arrogance, even if they did not express this openly or wanted to admit it. This book is the result of all this.

It was helpful for my enterprise that I have been able to participate in several meetings of the movements of working children and adolescents over the years and that I kept in constant contact with many active and former active children and their adult collaborators. I was also able to exchange ideas with experts of different ages, backgrounds and professions at various workshops and conferences in Latin America, Africa and India. In Germany and some other European countries, I found the opportunity to reflect on this experience in solidarity groups to support the rights of working children as well as with students and colleagues of the master’s programme ‘Childhood Studies and Children’s Rights’ at Free University Berlin (established in 2007) and continuing at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.

In particular, I would like to thank the following persons for their suggestions, stimulating conversations and critical remarks on individual parts of the manuscript: Rebecca Budde, Alejandro Cussiánovich, Elizabeth Dieckermann, Ina Gankam Tambo, Antonella Invernizzi, Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage, Bea Lundt, Urszula Markowska-Manista, Philip Meade, Brian Milne, Olga Nieuwenhuys, Iven Saadi, Giangi Schibotto, Peter Strack and Elisabeth Weller. Rebecca Budde and Courtney O’Connor in particular supported me in the elaboration of my thoughts in the English language. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Sarah Bird of Policy Press for their critical comments on the book project and their suggestions for its revision.

Manfred Liebel

Berlin, September 2019