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Childhoods from postcolonial perspectives

As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pumping on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling that was no escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, the little girls naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-cans, the little boy jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the filthy gutters. The sun bared the reality of our lives and everything was so harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one another or for anything at all. (Azaro, the little boy from the spirit world, in the novel The Famished Road by the Nigerian author Ben Okri, 1993, pp 160–1)

Introduction

Dutch anthropologist Olga Nieuwenhuys (2013: 4) explains the necessity of postcolonial perspective in childhood studies with three arguments: first, ‘the dominance of the North over the South is inextricably linked to Northern childhood(s) representations against which Southern childhood(s) are measured and found wanting’. Second, the normative dominance of Northern childhood(s) translates ‘in an overproduction of knowledge based in disciplinary strongholds that resist critique of their Eurocentrism’. Postcolonial thoughts could help subvert this process. Third, ‘the analysis of children’s agency, finally, while playing a seminal role in addressing the two first limitations, runs up against a lack of imagination about its wider social, political and ethical implications and risks missing its radical edge’. In a general sense, the postcolonial approach challenges otherwise unquestioned Eurocentric thought patterns, and can contribute to opening the intellectual arena for all those who are considered subaltern, or subordinate.¹

Describing colonized people as possessing a lower rank than those coming from ‘higher’, European civilization shows, according to Nieuwenhuys, ‘remarkable parallels with theories of child development that were emerging at the same time in Europe’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2013: 5). Postcolonial thoughts do not reject constructs such as ‘modern childhood’ or ‘children’s rights’, they rather question the supposed exceptionality or absolutism of these terms, by contextualizing them. They bring attention to the fact that, since the beginning of colonization, the colonial world was an integral part of, and even a prerequisite for modernization. The dominant perception of the child in Europe, as needing to be protected and supplied for, required the exploitation of the colonies. In rejecting the idea of modern childhood as a purely Western discovery or experience, the postcolonial perspective is able to inspire a generally positive tone, which, in place of an ‘us versus them’ attitude, opens the path for a conceptualization of childhood(s) as the unstable and uncertain result of an intercultural encounter.

From Nieuwenhuys’ perspective, postcolonial approaches invite us to constantly re-invent concepts of childhood and to pay attention to the unexpected and uncertain insights which can arise from such encounters. Here it is important to ‘put children’s perspectives and experiences, including their artistic, literary and material culture, at the centre of analysis’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2013: 6). This approach could in sum ‘offer a wealth of new information and support endeavours to take children seriously and stand by their side’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2013: 6). Thereby, children’s creativity and sensibility with respect to social inequality, and their resistant practice, which is widely overlooked, can receive due attention again.

Another author I would like to pick up on is Kristen Cheney. Starting from a critique of international development politics in which she sees a ‘colonization of childhood’ at work, she argues ‘for a decolonization of childhood research and practice – both in the conventional sense of confronting Western civilizing constructions of childhood and as a means to challenge the patriarchal underpinnings of the politics of knowledge production about children’ (Cheney, 2018: 91–2; italics in original). According to her, a vitally inclusive co-production of knowledge with children that aims to resist or even rupture the status quo of adults as the primary holders of knowledge is necessary:

In keeping with other decolonization movements, including decolonial feminism, childhood studies could strive not only to decolonize the curriculum by diversifying its contents but also to actively question broader structures of research, policy, and practice to make space for epistemic diversity that will in turn help children’s knowledge to be seen as more legitimate in the eyes of researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners. (Cheney, 2018: 100)

Based on the considerations of Olga Nieuwenhuys and Kristen Cheney, in this and subsequent chapters I will use postcolonial and decolonial thoughts for the study of the life and agency forms of children, principally those of the Global South.

First, I will follow some of the debates conducted in social childhood research, such as the question of whether a ‘global childhood’ has developed during the process of globalization. Then I will explain what I mean by postcolonial constellation and postcolonial childhoods, and illustrate it with some empirical data. Finally, I will look at which kinds of agency in children and young people of the Global South are to be found and how they are to be understood.

Limitations of the Eurocentric childhood pattern

The childhood pattern that prevails in the world today, emerging in modern Europe, confers on children a certain degree of autonomy, but on the condition that they are restricted to activities that have no significant current relevance for the formation of society. These are, on the one hand, activities which are imagined as not being purposive and have no direct impact on social life (understood as ‘play’) and, on the other hand, activities that prepare for later life and the pursuit of vitally important activities (understood as the ‘production of human capital’). This encompassing of children’s activities is accompanied by a strict division of childhood from adulthood and the corresponding attributes and spheres of action. It is assumed that children are, as a matter of course, inferior to adults and dependent on them.

This conception of childhood, often referred to as ‘modern’, comes from the claim that it is the culmination of a development into a better society and can be regarded as the yardstick for a good childhood. The childhood and children’s rights researcher Bob Franklin (2002: 17–18) notes critically:

The modern conception of childhood, which in Europe dates from the sixteenth century and stresses the innocence, frailty and dependence of children, forcefully ejected children from the worlds of work, sexuality and politics – in which previously they were active participants – and designated the classroom as the major factor of their lives. Children were no longer allowed to earn money or to decide how to spend their time, they were forced into dependency on adults and obliged to study or play. … Cute and contented, but dependent on adults and denied autonomy in important decisions concerning their lives, children are encouraged to be ‘seen and not heard’.

The prehistory of the modern conception of childhood sketched out here is certainly not free from romanticization by suggesting that children and adults could have had freedom of choice for work, sexuality, and politics, but it rightly points out that the supposed privileges of modern childhood had to be paid with a high price.

The childhood researcher Alan Prout, who contributed to the emergence of the New Childhood Studies, illustrates the central elements of this childhood conception in a simplified but concise way (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Childhood and adulthood in modern times

Childhood	Adulthood
Private	Public
Nature	Culture
Irrational	Rational
Dependent	Independent
Passive	Active
Incompetent	Competent
Play	Work

Source: Prout (2005: 10)

It is acknowledged today that childhood can be imagined and ‘constructed’ differently, and that children must be ‘listened to’ (according to Art. 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), but the basic pattern of separation and dependency is held. This is illustrated by a quotation from a UNICEF publication (UNICEF, 2005: 3):

What then do we mean by childhood? The quality of children’s lives can vary radically within the same dwelling, between two houses on the same street, between regions and between industrialized and developing countries. The closer children come to being full-grown, the more cultures, countries, and even people within the same country differ in their views of what is expected of children and on the level of adult or legal protection they require. Yet, despite intellectual debates about the definition of childhood and cultural differences about what to expect for and from children, there has always been a substantial degree of shared understanding that childhood implies a separate and safe space, demarcated from adulthood, in which children can grow, play and develop.

It should not be disputed here that the distinction between children and adults is not limited to the ‘Western’ concept of childhood that has emerged in Europe. However, it is specifically Western if this distinction is conceived as strict separation and the quality of childhood is measured by whether the children are kept away from adult roles. This is illustrated by another UNICEF publication, entitled ‘Children in adult roles’ (UNICEF, 2006: 62; translated from German):

Childhood should be a separate living phase, clearly separated from the adult world. Children should be able to grow, play, rest and learn. … When children have to take over the role of adults, they are deprived of their childhood.

Such statements are made in order to prevent children from being overwhelmed, exploited or abused but, added together, they attribute passivity and a one-sided dependency relationship between children and adults. They leave no space for the imagination of childhoods or lifestyles of children, which are accompanied by the self-chosen assumption of tasks in the sense of shared responsibility or mutual support (reciprocity). This not only condemns and stigmatizes children’s agency in such contexts as ‘not childlike’ or ‘premature’, but also imposes the Western image of a dependent and all-round cared childhood as the standard for the societies of the Global South. So they have a paternalistic and colonizing function.

Often, the emergence of the Western childhood pattern and its institutionalization in the ‘developed’ societies is attributed to the assumption that, because of the higher level of productive resources, the labour power of the children became unnecessary and a special learning phase has been required in which young people are prepared for their productive tasks. Such an explication assumes that the learning of abilities is in principle only possible beyond productive work. It is ruled out that the work at issue here is work that is subject to the maxims of economic exploitation and embedded in structures which hinder the development of abilities. The separation of a life phase of childhood from that of the adult has also become ‘necessary’ because the ‘gravity of life’, which is proverbial to childhood, is based on the exploitation of human labour, a circumstance that has changed its face but in essence continues to exist.

Already almost half a century ago, US-American women’s rights activist Shulamith Firestone, in a text that influenced the women’s movement, saw the ‘oppression of the children’ principally founded in economic dependence (Firestone, 1970: 95): ‘Anyone who has ever observed a child wheedling a nickel from its mother knows that economic dependence is the basis of the child’s shame.’ Firestone exaggeratedly criticized the widespread notion that the fortune of children had improved and their exploitation had been overcome when they went to school instead of working. According to her, it is precisely the segregation of the world of adults that goes hand in hand with the school, which ‘reinforces the oppression of children as a class’ (Firestone, 1970: 94) and, as a result, the ‘growing disrespect’ and ‘systematic underestimation of the abilities of the child’ (Firestone, 1970: 83). With regard to so-called child labour, we should be aware, according to Firestone (Firestone, 1970: 96; italics in original)

… rather than that children are being exploited just like adults, is that adults can be so exploited. We need to start talking not about sparing children for a few years from the horrors of adult life, but about eliminating those horrors. In a society free of exploitation, children could be like adults (with no exploitation implied) and adults could be like children (with no exploitation implied).

Such considerations are more recent than ever. It is observed worldwide that children no longer live only in the separate worlds that the Western childhood conception provides for them. It is true that the time of children is increasing, especially that in which they stay at school, but at the same time they are increasingly involved in processes and activities that were previously reserved for adults. This applies in particular to the use of new digital communication technologies, which are already presented to children at an earlier age and which they usually use competently for themselves or for the area of the commodity world, where children as consumers as well as innovative designers participate. It can also be observed that children increasingly accept co-responsibility for daily life, whether they are forced to do so by material necessity, or that they want to make new experiences beyond the educational space provided for them and interfere into the world of adults.

Such trends have repeatedly prompted social researchers in recent decades to speak of a breakup of the strict separation between the fields of activity of adults and those of children. Some of them, like the US-American sociologist Neil Postman (1982), were disappointed in the ‘disappearance of childhood’, others, such as the British media researcher David Buckingham (2003) or the German culture researcher Heinz Hengst (2013), saw these tendencies as an emancipation of the children from the restrictions of the Western conception of childhood and a new kind of generational relations.² Alan Prout (2005: 7) expresses these tendencies in the following way:

The distinction between adults and children, once firmly established as a feature of modernity, seems to be blurring. Traditional ways of representing childhood in discourse and in image no longer seemed adequate to its emerging forms. New ways of speaking, writing and imaging children are providing new ways of seeing them and these children are different from the innocent and dependent creatures that appeared to populate the first half of the twentieth century. These new representations construct children as more active, knowledgeable and socially participative than older discourses allowed. They are more difficult to manage, less biddable and hence are more troublesome and troubling.

In such observations, it is not always clear whether they refer to the real life of the children or rather to childhood images and the hopes and fears of the adults that are reflected in them. There is also the question of whether it is possible to speak of a worldwide harmonization of childhoods, as expressed in the popular speech of a ‘global childhood’.

Unequal global childhoods

Looking at the history and at different parts of the world makes the idea that there is a single global form of childhood appear absurd. But it is also to be understood that the spatial and temporal concentration of the world through economic and technological processes as well as through international legal norms also influences the conceptions of ‘good childhood’ and the life of the children, bringing them closer together. That means in a certain way that they become ‘globalized’. Karen Wells (2009: 3–4) describes this fact as follows:

There is now a body of law and a group of international actors – intergovernmental, non-governmental and private – that is based on the presumption that childhood can be governed at a global level. One way of resolving the question of whether there can be a global form of childhood is by thinking of the global level, including international law and international actors but also global media, economic flows, war and politics, as a structure that shapes childhood at the local level. Thought of in this way the global becomes one of several structures – others would include the family, school and work – that shape the lives of children and concepts of childhood in any specific socio-cultural setting.

One question is how we can name the childhoods that result from their ‘globalization’. Would it be justifiable to describe them as more vicious, modernized, secularized, legalized, scorned or consonant? In his attempt to conceive a global history of childhood, Peter Stearns (2005, 2006) argues that the childhoods outside Europe would not have become ‘Westernized’ but changed ‘alongside’ the Western model. It is hard to deny that in the course of colonialization, for example, the school following the Western model occupies more and more space in the life of children and gains greater importance for their further life. But with regard to other aspects of the globalization of childhoods, it must be borne in mind that they do not run the same way for all children, do not attain the same meaning and are even reversible. Classroom education, as well as the legalization of social relationships or the use of digital technologies, can be very differently conceived and practised. Any attempt to use certain concepts for the globalization of childhoods is at risk of making a definite (usually the dominant Western) point of view absolute and established.³

The following tendencies are emphasized in a contribution that relates global influences and local traditions to each other (Bühler-Niederberger and van Krieken, 2008). The international discourse on children’s rights and, in particular, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child strengthened the tendency to measure the quality of childhood on the basis of universal standards, which were strongly oriented to the Western childhood pattern. Today, children are increasingly confronted with the spread and propaganda of consumer goods, which have created new preferences in consumer behaviour. Today, children spend more time outside of home privacy (as long as they were ever in the sense of the European-bourgeois small family) and are more visible. In some cases, they soon assume social responsibility. Global influences are picked up and processed in everyday practices, which are rooted in local traditions. Social inequalities are strengthened rather than reduced. The subordinate social status of children and the deprivation of girls against boys remains largely unaffected. Children show new forms of ‘social agency’, but their ability to express their own viewpoints is also more strongly undermined on the discursive as well as on the practical level by adult child experts.⁴

Perhaps the greatest challenge of social childhood research is to understand the connections and contradictions between the global and local dimensions of childhood and the lifestyles of children on the objective level, as well as at the level of subjectivity, thinking, feeling and acting. Children are also affected (if not in absolutely the same way) as well as adolescents and adults by what happens in other parts of the world, because there are no more isolated spaces. But the way in which they are influenced also depends on the parts of the world and under what conditions they live, and it is important to consider whether they are willing to be influenced at all. The globalization of childhoods is neither a one-sided nor an absolutely compulsive process, but implies many interdependencies (Twum-Danso Imoh et al, 2019). It does not produce a single uniform ‘global childhood’ but many, quite different ‘global childhoods’ (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014). Lorenzo Bordonaro and Ruth Payne (2012: 371) bring this to the point:

The notion of a ‘global childhood’ is based on an alleged natural and universal distinction between children and adults and has been formed in Western world imaginations and exported through processes of colonialism, the forces of globalisation, international development organisations and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Whilst it is, therefore, limited in its understanding and conceptualisation of childhood; it has nonetheless become an ideal against which all childhoods should be measured.

Take, for example, the thesis of ‘McDonaldization’ or ‘Coca-Colaization’ in the world. Such pictorial descriptions are intended to show, among other things, the fact that the Global North is going through the world imposing certain thoughts and patterns of consensus which follow uniform prescriptions, are directed towards quick satisfaction, and ultimately reveal superficial and noncritical personalities (see Ritzer, 2007).⁵ But even if we assume that almost every child has the desire to experience the atmosphere of a McDonald’s location and to embrace a burger or a Coca Cola, this does not mean that the whole life of this child or even an entire generation is stamped by this experience. Children’s lives always include other desires, experiences and challenges, which give them reason to think about their own lives and to make their own decisions.

However, it should not be overlooked that interdependencies are embedded in an extremely unequal global power structure in the development of global childhoods. How unequal these global interdependencies can be is shown most clearly by the widening gap between wealthy and poor regions of the world and the significantly lower chances of life for children in the poorer parts of the world, as the UNICEF annual reports on the situation of children in the world demonstrate tirelessly.⁶

For example, the 2016 UNICEF report on the situation of children in the world (UNICEF, 2016a: 9–11) reveals that the gap between the extent of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and wealthy countries has hardly diminished for a quarter of a century. Children born in sub-Saharan Africa are 12 times more likely to die before their 5th birthday than children in wealthy countries. For example, a child who is born today in Sierra Leone is 30 times more likely to die before they are five years old than a child in Great Britain. The proportion of children who die shortly after birth is larger. Almost half of the children die because of infectious diseases, pulmonary infections, diarrhoea, malaria, meningitis, tetanus, maize, blood poisoning or AIDS, all of which would be avoidable with better living conditions and better medication. According to the UNICEF report, the risk of dying from these diseases is particularly high among the most disadvantaged. In rural regions, life expectancy is particularly affected by the lack of access to land, credit and property rights. In cities, people living in informal or ‘illegal’ settlements and slums are particularly vulnerable to dangerous diseases due to overpopulation, lack of sanitation, high transport costs and discrimination practices. Climate change brings additional risks. Widespread water deficiency forces people to access unclean water, which leads to illnesses such as cholera and fatal diarrheal diseases. Climate change also has an impact on the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and is associated with growing food insecurity, malnutrition and air pollution, which are particularly detrimental to the life expectancy and development of children.⁷

In another report, UNICEF (2016b) draws attention to the fact that 300 million children live in areas where air pollution is at least six times higher than internationally agreed limits. According to this report, 2 billion children are living in areas where fine dust pollution exceeds the annual limit of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (10 μg/m³) set by the World Health Organization (WHO). Up to 88 per cent of all deaths caused by outdoor air pollution and over 99 per cent of all deaths caused by indoor air pollution occur in low- or middle-income countries. Asia is currently the worst continent for air pollution, while values in Africa are on the rise, due to intensified industrialization, urbanization and traffic. People in urban areas, where poverty is particularly high, are particularly vulnerable to air pollution. Poor families also have fewer opportunities to protect themselves from air pollution by using fans, filters or air-conditioning systems, which, however, would be associated with increased energy consumption.⁸

The high rate of child mortality highlighted in the UNICEF report on the situation of children in the world (UNICEF, 2016a) also logically coincides with poverty, to which people in the Southern world regions are condemned. It is true that the proportion of people living in absolute or extreme poverty has declined worldwide in the past two decades, but the absolute number of the poor and the gap between living conditions in poor and prosperous regions of the world has increased. The measurement of poverty is a complicated undertaking and must take into account other aspects, apart from income, that are equally important for quality of life, such as living conditions, educational opportunities, access to drinking water, sanitary conditions, and so on. But due to the fact that life, as result of capitalist production, today is largely monetarized in all societies, disposable income is particularly important.

The World Bank assumes that people who have less than US$1.90 a day to live on are considered extremely poor. According to UNICEF (2016a: 72), nearly 900 million people were living in extreme poverty in 2012, almost half of whom were children under the age of 18. The UNICEF report rightly points out that even children above the poverty definition of the World Bank are often severely restricted in their lives and have lower life expectancy. Let us consider, for example, a family that does not have access to housing, food, drinking water, sanitation, education, health services or information. Children in such a home are also affected, and even more so, by poverty. Taking into account these non-monetary aspects, UNICEF estimates that in 2015, 1.6 billion people lived in ‘multidimensional poverty’. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the results of research are alarming. Here, in 30 countries from which data was available, 247 out of 368 million children under the age of 18 had met at least two out of five poverty criteria that put their survival and development at risk (see Plavgo and de Milliano, 2014). Another study found for the years 2008 and 2009 that the life expectancy of 81 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean was limited by at least one poverty indicator (see ECLAC-UNICEF, 2010; UNICEF, 2016a: 78).

In the UNICEF reports, the reasons why high poverty, air pollution and child mortality are mainly affecting the people of the Global South are not or only vaguely named. It is clearer in other UN reports, in which not only poverty itself is depicted, but also the increase in worldwide material inequality over longer periods of time. For example, a United Nations Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999: 3) shows that:

… the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960. In the nineteenth century, too, inequality grew rapidly during the last three decades, in an era of rapid global integration: the income gap between the top and bottom countries increased from 3 to 1 in 1820 to 7 to 1 in 1870 and 11 to 1 in 1913. By the late 1990s the fifth of the world’s people living in the highest-income countries had: 86% of world GDP – the bottom fifth just 1%.

In other investigations on the worldwide distribution of income and wealth (for example, Milanović, 2012; Piketty, 2014), it has been shown that material inequalities in the global context have long been extremely high and further growth is to be expected if those inequalities are not specifically politically counteracted.

The French economist Thomas Piketty (2014: 463) points out that wealth inequality is growing not only between states and regions, but is also reflected in an increasing privatization of assets, which he calls the ‘oligarchic type of divergence’. That is a process in which all countries ‘come to be owned more and more by the planet’s billionaires and multimillionaires’ (Piketty, 2014: 463) and therefore would not be available to the states, for example, for infrastructure, social or educational programmes. While assets are concentrated among a small minority of the super-rich, less than 5 per cent of the world’s total assets are available to the poorest half of the world’s population. According to a report published by Oxfam (2017), which is based on data from the Swiss bank Crédit Suisse, the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population has as many assets as the rest of the world combined. In 2015, the 62 richest people on earth had as much as the poorer half of humanity – about 3.6 billion people. While the wealth of the rich grew by 44 per cent over the five years to 2015, the wealth of the poorest half fell by 41 per cent. The discrepancy between rich and poor has never been so great.

Growing social inequality reflects the unequal distribution of power between the Global North and the Global South, which arose in the colonial era, and which now exists in covert institutional forms. It no longer expresses itself openly in colonial expansion, conquest and dominance, but in the less visible dependence of apparently independent national states in the Global South, which in turn internally reproduce social and political inequality. The role of the former colonial powers has now been taken over by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, which in turn are largely acting in the interest of rich countries and multinational corporations. The fact that their interventions are based on neoliberal maxims continually leads to increasing debt for the countries of the Global South. An important role in growing global inequality is played by free trade treaties pursued by the rich countries and state blocs such as the European Union, which push the former colonialized countries into the role of commodity suppliers and contribute to the destruction of their internal economies.

The unequal global power structure is evident not only on the material level. It is also reflected in the fact that the ways of life of these children and the childhoods in which they manifest themselves are devalued, disregarded and made invisible. The children are seen as existing ‘outside childhood’ (Ennew, 2005), and they are met with compassion at best. Kate Cregan and Denise Cuthbert (2014: 8) put it this way:

The fact that geopolitical power was centred in the Global North over the course of much of the twentieth century – and that proceedings, policies and conventions in those global bodies were, as a result, infused with Global Northern ‘world views’ – has led to the domination of particular understandings of children and childhood that have often been at odds with the realities of children’s day-to-day lives in local settings … of the Global South.

A further consequence of this power structure is that while the spread of schools and new digital media has expanded opportunities to gain information and knowledge, at the same time it depreciates and destroys the life-practical knowledge that the children in non-Western, precolonial cultures get through their proximity to nature and the inclusion in communitarian-family activities. This knowledge related, for example, to the characteristics of plants and animals and the need for their care and maintenance or to the handling of risks and dangers in the children’s environment. It was a knowledge that resulted from practical experiences and participation in important tasks (not only ‘homework’ for the school). The anthropologist Cindi Katz (2004: 125) states:

The links between practice and knowledge were extensive and durable. Most of what the children learned in their everyday engagements, whether among their elders or their peers, was important to both the contemporaneous reproduction of their community and its future.

These connections have been largely broken, and have, in particular, marginalized and discriminated against children in and from rural regions, as Cindi Katz (2004; 2012) exemplifies with the example of Sudan and Sarada Balagopalan (2014) with India. Nevertheless, children and young people remain important to their communities. They are often, with newly acquired knowledge and their better knowledge of the world, actors who show new ways, whereby not infrequently traditional knowledge and related lifestyles are updated (see Young Lives, 2016).

The destruction of traditional production methods, often connected with land robbery, leads to material hardship and often violent internal conflicts in the Global South. These have resulted in displacements and migrations within the countries from the countryside to the city, into neighbouring countries and into the richer Northern world regions. The migration movements caused by material hardship and social inequality lead to new forms of childhood, whether children themselves become actors of migration (‘children on the move’), or that they return to their native places where they rely on themselves, relatives or neighbours. These movements are associated with separations, life-threatening risks and suffering, but they also create new identities, new experiences and new knowledge. Some communities and families in the Global South are dependent on the income and the newly acquired cultural and social capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) of their young migrants for their survival and progression. Transnational childhoods emerge, which have not existed so far, and they question ‘how national boundaries and cross-bordering are produced and inscribed in social constellations of childhood’ (Himmelbach and Schröer, 2014: 494). With regard to the children of immigrants living in the US, Cinthya Saavedra and Steven Camicia (2010: 33–4) speak of ‘transnational bodies’ with ‘diverse and changing identities’. They advocate a ‘geopolitics of childhood’, which considers that the children with transnational biographies produce remarkable knowledge and trigger new cultural impulses.

Although suffering is growing with global inequality and migration, it also increases the challenges of dealing with this suffering and organizing it. Children are ‘mature’ earlier, they are part of the world. Syntheses from knowledge, acquired modes of life and the newly available information are the result. The Eurocentric understanding of childhood does not do justice to these changes and obscures them rather than nurtures them. On the normative level, that understanding of childhood spreads to the South, but is in conflict with the real-life conditions and lifestyle of the majority of children living there, and leads to hybrid childhoods as well as to distorted perceptions of the children’s reality. It is a question of what makes this childhood pattern so appealing, ‘that it gets anyhow more attention and interest than the real childhoods that it can produce, the social inequalities that it may strengthen, the conditions that make its implementation problematic’ (Bühler-Niederberger, 2011: 67). Today’s postcolonial childhoods of the Global South are, in any case, not ‘autonomous’ and ‘separated’ childhoods in the sense of the idealized Eurocentric childhood pattern, but childhoods closely linked to society and its existential challenges. And they are by no means confined to the Global South, but are spreading through migration processes, the precariousness of a growing number of people, and the dissolution of the strict separation of the working and reproduction spheres in the Global North (see Hunner-Kreisel and Bohne, 2016).⁹

Agency in childhoods

Here the question arises as to how the capacity for action and the forms of practice of the children in the Global South can be conceptually grasped and understood. The concept of agency customary in today’s childhood research is, at all events, hardly suitable for this purpose as long as it is guided by the bourgeois concept of an individually acting, basically, male and ‘white’ subject (see Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Sutterlüty and Tisdall, 2019 for criticism).¹⁰ According to Wyness (2015: 10), ‘the individualistic strand of thinking has generated an over-romanticised conception of agency’. Measured against this conception, which is self-centred in Europe itself, the aggravated practice mentioned by Olga Nieuwenhuys (2013) can only appear distorted or remain completely invisible (see Valentine, 2011; Edmonds, 2019). This practice manifests itself neither in separate social spaces of a particular childhood world, nor in extraordinary, individualized heroic deeds. Nor is it aimed primarily at adults against whom children insist on their own childhood world or demand an upgrading of their own status (see James, 2011). It is more to be understood like the desire to reconstitute the social space with other people in similar social situations and facing similar problems, where common interests can be expressed.¹¹ This form of agency is, in my opinion, best understood as a materialization of shared responsibility.¹²

In studies on childhoods in the Global South, which are influenced by conceptual considerations on the social geography of children’s worlds (see Holt, 2011; Kallio and Hakli, 2015; Kraftl and Horton, 2018)¹³, and under the influence of feminist and other relational action theories, the key concept of agency is (self-)critically discussed by childhood researchers. In an anthology on this subject (Esser et al, 2016), the editors explain the ‘almost dogmatic insistence on agency and its constitutive importance for Childhood Studies’ (Esser et al, 2016: 2) as a critical response to the adult-centricity of almost all previous research on children and childhood. This research had seen children primarily as a result of socialization processes and as an appendix to a family. In contrast, agency has now been discovered as a specific property of children, which allows their emancipation. Their voice should be heard and their subordinate and marginalized position overcome. The ‘new social movements’ (see, for example, Laraña et al, 1995) and the Ariès’ (1962) perspective on childhood as an invention of modern bourgeois society, or, in the words of Shulamith Firestone (1970), as an ‘oppressed class’, had a great influence on this new orientation.

Today, the agency concept is once again under criticism. The previously dominant concept of childhood as a development stage, with an adult imagined as perfect and the child imagined as vulnerable by nature, has been replaced by an essentialist version of agency. This has been hypostatized, on the one hand, as an anthropological fact opposite to the idea of the vulnerable, developing child, and, on the other hand, as the most advanced expression of ‘modernity’ (see Esser et al, 2016). By imagining the child in an absolute manner as an actor in itself, the link to the biological basis (body) and the social conditions of the life of children were lost or not sufficiently observed (see Prout, 2000). The relation to the generational order, another key concept of childhood research, has also been lost where the actions of children can have reproductive as well as transformative functions (see Närvänen and Näsman, 2007). This is now connected with the basic question of how children are individually and collectively positioned in different social contexts, making it necessary to introduce not just one, but different childhoods.

Another critique comes from feminist-oriented care concepts, which had already conceptualized interdependent relationships against the conceptions of an autonomous subject (see Wihstutz, 2016; Cheney, 2018). A theory of agency cannot simply assign the fictions of autonomy attributed to the (male) adult to children and thus negate their dependence on other people who care about them. In this context, relational social theories, in particular the Actor-Network-Theory founded by Bruno Latour (1993; 2005), have also had an influence on the re-conceptualization of agency (see Oswell, 2016; Raithelhuber, 2016; Spyrou, 2018). They are based on the assumption that agency is not an inherent personal property, but is always inherent in and interwoven with social relationships. Instead of hypostatizing agency as a quasi-natural property, it must be seen as part of a complex network of different human and non-human actors.¹⁴ This could also refer to the concept of ‘multidimensional agency’, which Daniel Stoecklin and Tobia Fattore (2018) formulated with reference to the Capability Approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011). According to them, ‘agency is constituted intersubjectively, within parameters set and enabled through structures represented in social space. Children’s agency is thus always constituted through constraints and opportunities, whether they are accepted, negotiated or resisted’ (Stoecklin and Fattore, 2018: 15; see also Stoecklin, 2013; Larkins, 2019).

The new theoretical reflection on the concept of agency is remarkably related to non-European contexts. In the past few years, various concepts of agency have been formulated in order to analyse, in accordance with the concrete conditions of life and in a culture-sensitive manner, the ability of children in the Global South to act. These concepts are to be critically appreciated here and linked with my own thoughts, which also form the basis of the following chapters.

Most attention so far has been paid to a concept developed by Natascha Klocker (2007) in research with children from rural areas of Tanzania working as domestic workers in homes of more or less well-off families. Klocker (2007: 85) distinguishes between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ agency:

‘Thin’ agency refers to decisions and everyday actions that are carried out within highly restrictive contexts, characterized by few viable alternatives. ‘Thick’ agency is having the latitude to act within abroad range of options. It is possible for a person’s agency to be ‘thickened’ or ‘thinned’ over time and space, and across their various relationships. Structures, contexts, and relationships as ‘thinners’ or ‘thickeners’ of individuals’ agency, by constraining or expanding their range of viable choices. Between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ agency there is a continuum along which all people (including rural young people) are placed as actors with varying and dynamic capacities for voluntary and willed actions.

The author justifies the concept by the fact that it was difficult for her to ignore the pressure on the girls, which is caused by poverty and various sociocultural factors. Above all, the girls were affected by ‘powerful hierarchical age-structures’ which largely restricted their options for action (Klocker, 2007: 85). Nevertheless, according to the author, among the child domestic workers, ‘all of the girls replied unequivocally that they had decided for themselves’ (Klocker, 2007: 91; italics in original). This obvious contradiction, into which the author does not go further, points out that the distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ agency she has made does not meet the complexity of the contexts of action (Esser, 2016).

It is also apparent from other research in Africa and Middle East, as well as Latin America, that the material and sociocultural framework conditions do not necessarily lead to restrictions on the capacity to act, but can also become a kind of action provocation, which causes children and youths to take on new and independent actions. For example, studies on children in Ghana (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010; Ofosu-Kusi and Mizen, 2012), Kenya (Omolo 2015) or Peru (Aufseeser, 2014a; 2014b) who live on the street show, in the words of Alderson and Yoshida (2016: 77), ‘how children’s self-reliant agency similarly keeps knocking against very hard contexts and discrimination against children’. A study carried out in a rural region of Mexico (Carpena-Méndez, 2007: 45) concludes that boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 who are compelled to emigrate because of poverty are creating networks and behaviour patterns on their own initiative which become effective as ‘social capital’ and which also serve as an orientation for older people. These children ‘are “juggling” and improvising with their own life trajectories as they intersect with rapidly changing social and economic contexts of development, where local, rural-urban, and transnational processes overlap’ (Carpena-Méndez, 2007: 53).

Similarly, reference may be made to children involved in armed conflicts or participating in insurgency campaigns against repressive regimes. Although they are particularly in danger, they are also always looking for ways to make the situation the better for themselves and the people around them. Sometimes, as shown, for example, in the sometimes armed battles against apartheid in South Africa or the Intifadas against the Israeli occupation in Palestine, children are among the protagonists of the resistance (see Punamäki et al, 2001; Boyden, 2003; Brett and Specht, 2004; Rosen, 2005; 2014; 2015; Özerdem et al, 2017). In the civil war in Syria, children take over, for example, tasks to care for severely injured people in the improvised underground hospitals, or to encourage by singing their fellow citizens not to be put off (see Syrian Revolt, 2013; Taylor, 2016). All this does not diminish and even exacerbate the dangers that children are exposed to, but it also helps to reduce the psychological consequences of traumatic experiences and can make children more resilient (see Punamäki et al, 1997).

For children growing up under precarious conditions in the Global South, I therefore consider that a concept of agency, which Lorenzo Bordonaro and Ruth Payne (2012) call ‘ambiguous’ (see also Bordonaro, 2012), is more appropriate. It is based on the observation that children must assert themselves in situations for which there are no clear or definitive solutions and for which there are usually no legal ways. Or that children are in situations which are not envisaged in the dominant Western childhood concept, with the result that they are sometimes regarded as victims, sometimes as perpetrators, delinquents, disturbers or transgressors. They act out of the self-contradictory situation and their actions cannot be judged to be clearly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (such as children in street situations, children in armed conflicts, working children). Michael Gallagher (2019: 197) speaks in a similar sense of the fact that agency is always ‘ambivalent’: ‘it does not have intrinsic ethical value’. With regard to the everyday practice of children who live on the streets of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and seek to achieve their livelihood and a minimum of security, Sally Atkinson-Sheppard (2017) coined the concept of ‘protective agency’. The children considered here can be understood neither as helpless victims, nor as individuals who can act as they please or who can find a flawless answer to all the problems which are charged to them.¹⁵

In a similar way, Ruth Payne (2012b) speaks of ‘everyday agency’ in the context of so-called child-headed households. The term is intended to underline the fact that, in the case of children whose lives do not correspond to the prevailing pattern of childhood, agency is not developed solely from crisis situations or related to their coping, but is part of their daily life. The behaviour arises from the life situation, and it pragmatically aims to cope with daily needs in order to achieve a minimum of social reliability and security. The children support each other, look for allies, and create networks that they can access in special emergency situations. This type of children’s agency in the Global South is often simply seen as problematic ‘because it fails to fulfil a normative notion of childhood based on minority world ideals in which children and young people are protected, rather than protectors, and cared for, rather than carers’ (Payne, 2012a: 301). Therefore, their behaviour, instead of being acknowledged, is often ‘considered to be a social problem in need of fixing by the international development community’ (Payne, 2012a: 301; see also Burman, 1996; Guest, 2003).

Accordingly, it can be said that the opposition of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ agency is secretly caught up in a Eurocentric conception of agency, which regards its ‘thick’ form as the preferred normal case of which the ‘thin’ unfortunately differs. It also lacks an understanding of the differences in the cultural placement of childhood in communities and in accordance with generational relations, which differ fundamentally from the Western model. This criticism also applies to other occasionally represented concepts such as ‘restricted’, ‘limited’ or ‘tactical’ agency (Honwana, 2005; Robson et al, 2007). Such characterizations go past the complex reality in which children live under the postcolonial constellation. They insinuate that there can be a context-free, absolute standard for real or complete agency. David Oswell (2013: 263) rightly criticizes this notion as an ‘ontology of agency’ and emphasizes that agency ‘is always relational and never a property, it is always in-between and interstitial’ (Oswell, 2013: 270). It could also be said to be under the influence of the idea of an autonomous bourgeois subject.

The challenge for researching the agency of children living in precarious conditions is to capture it in a contextualized way. Just as it makes no sense to contrast right and wrong consciousness, agency cannot be measured and evaluated against given criteria, but must be understood from the situation. In this sense, Ruth Edmonds (2019: 208) pleads for ‘situated theories of agency’ that do not make normative specifications from outside, but interpret the children’s ‘agentic practice’ from the local context. Agency is not a fact that exists or does not exist, that is perfect or imperfect, right or wrong, but arises and always changes in a concrete context in which it more or less contributes to protecting oneself from risks, enabling the survival and shaping of one’s own life. A further differentiation of the different forms of agency could be whether children contribute to reproducing or transforming the living conditions under which they have to assert themselves. One of the characteristics of an ‘inventive’ (Gallagher, 2019) or ‘transformative’ form of agency is that the children at their places of living gain ideas of a better life together and engage collectively for it. This form of agency can be found, for example, in the social movements of working children and is occasionally referred to as ‘children’s protagonism’ (see Liebel et al, 2001; Liebel, 2007a; and Chapter 9). But the judgement in what this better life consists must be left to the acting children.

To understand the forms of agency created in postcolonial constellations, we must treat the concept of the subject carefully. It is stamped by a history that was characterized by the idea of an autonomous, self-governing, nature-subordinating and, finally, world-conquering figure largely identified with the ‘white’ European man. It was first expressed in pure form in the formula of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) and has led to the predominance of a rationality which is superior to all other aspects of human existence. To be freed from this history and the associations it suggests, is occasionally spoken of social subjects and the intersubjective aspects of human existence, as well as the dialogical and respectful relationships to the non-human nature are emphasized. If, in this context, we speak of subjectivities instead of subjects, an understanding of humanity is addressed which does not separate rationality from the body, but links rationality with physical and psychical proportions (see Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015). In South America, for example, this understanding of subjectivity is expressed in the revival of the indigenous cosmovisions of Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir (good living; see Acosta, 2013) and has also led to debates on a new understanding of ‘political subjectivity’ (Díaz Gómez, 2005; Alvarado et al, 2008; González Rey, 2012) or ‘postcolonial subjectivity’ (Rivas, 2010).

When I speak of children as social, political, or postcolonial subjects or actors in the subsequent chapters of the book, I try to take a broad view of their subjectivity. Accordingly, I do not understand their actions as the expression of a consciousness which is fed solely from rationality or even imagined as superior, but consider it an integral part and in the context of the diversity of human and non-human life and its existential foundations.

Notes

¹‘Subaltern’, which goes back to the Italian philosopher and political activist Antonio Gramsci, describes social groups which are subjected to other groups and struggle for their emancipation. In postcolonial discourse, it was taken up by Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak, 1988; see also Chapter 3).

²Sharon Stephens (1995; 2012) recalls that since the 1980s there has been an accumulation of publications in the Global North about ‘Children without Childhood’ (Winn, 1984), ‘Stolen Childhood’ (Vittachi, 1989), ‘Children as Innocent Victims’ (Gilmour, 1988) or ‘Rise and Fall of Childhood’ (Sommerville, 1982). She sees in this signs that the ideas of childhood that had previously been taken for granted have fallen into crisis. This is also expressed in the fears that the dangers for children have increased (‘children at risk’) or that children have become a risk for societies (‘children as risk’).

³Heidi Morrison (2015: 17) attempts to analyse these processes in a historical study of the changes of childhood in Egypt, which are accompanied by colonialization, in a differentiated way and without a Western bias. For example, she indicates attempts by Egyptian authors to reinterpret Western influence: ‘The model of childhood that developed in Egypt had its roots in colonial resistance and Islamic heritage. For example, Egyptian intellectual Muhammad ‘Abduh justified his claims for western-style education by saying that western ideas about childhood were Eastern in origin as the East used to be the center of the Enlightenment.’ Morrison, however, reverts in the discussion of the colonial influences in a problematic way to the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.

⁴The frequently asked question of whether the situation of children in the world is better or worse today, in my opinion, cannot be answered. The attempt at an answer would have to compare apples with pears or create universal criteria that would always have a cultural bias or be historically prejudiced. However, this does not rule out the identification of historical trends, such as demographic changes or the rate of child mortality, which has clearly declined. Some trends and their assessments are highlighted in Grugel and Piper (2007).

⁵Some authors (for example Wagnleitner, 1994) speak of a ‘Coca-Colonization’, understood here as a propagandist weapon of Western capitalism in the Cold War, or call for a ‘De-Coca-Colonization’ (Flusty, 2004). The term Coca-Colonization goes back, to my knowledge, to the East German (GDR) writer Alexander Abusch (1950).

⁶However, this also applies to the conditions within the countries and regions of the Global South, which are also characterised by considerable social inequality.

⁷This is the reason why, for years, it has been repeatedly demanded to extend the catalogue of children’s rights to include ecological rights and the rights of future generations.

⁸In the case of such global data, it must be noted that there are also very great differences within the mentioned continents.

⁹In this connection, attention should be paid to a problematic and momentous form of ‘refugee aid’. Within the framework of a solidarity project, about 430 Namibian children from African refugee camps were taken to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1979 to 1989 to become the elite of a future liberated Namibia. After the end of the GDR, these children and young people were ‘transferred’ to Namibia, without being asked for their wishes, where only a few of them had lived before. In a study, along the biographical stations, it was examined how the young people were exposed to racist attributions, were looking at their own experiences in the search for affinity, and were looking for specific forms of agency (Schmitt and Witte, 2017).

¹⁰Anthropologist David Lancy (2012) also takes a critical look at the hegemonic, Western-based use of the agency concept, but pours the baby out with the bath water by rejecting any assumption of agency in children as counterproductive.

¹¹Matej Blazek (2016) has impressively investigated in the middle of Europe the example of spatial appropriation as well as intra- and intergenerational relations in a poverty-stricken community of ‘post-socialist’ Slovakia.

¹²With reference to her studies in India, Sarada Balagopalan (2018: 31) criticises that ‘responsibility-based cultures’, in which shared responsibility between generations is practiced, are generally devalued as retrograde or unmodern and regarded as contrary to ‘rights-based cultures’.

¹³Since 2003 there has been a special journal for this research specialism called Children’s Geographies.

¹⁴I cannot go deeper into the actor-network-theory of Latour here, but I would like to say at the very least that in all the merits of its understanding of the complexity and contextual nature of human action, there is the risk of losing sight of the power and domination conditions in society by renouncing the category of social structure.

¹⁵While there is a differentiated international discussion about agency in working children and children in street situations, children in armed conflicts or ‘child soldiers’ are presented almost exclusively as victims. Remarkable exceptions, in which attention is also paid to the aspect of agency, can be found in Huynh et al (2015), Fernando and Ferrari (2013); Cook and Wall (2011), and Feinstein et al (2010).