Our member, Dr. Afua Twum-Danso Imoh (University of Bristol, UK), talks about her new book, Turning Global Rights into Local Realities: Realizing Children’s Rights in Ghana’s Pluralistic Society (Bristol University Press, 2024).
This book seeks to explore how dominant children’s rights principles, best represented by international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, intersect with the lived realities of a range of children’s Iives in Ghana, which was the first country to ratify the Convention in February 1990 just three months after its adoption by the UN General Assembly.
In exploring these intersections, the volume seeks to go beyond a focus on the inapplicability of, or resistance to, dominant children’s rights norms in this context. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate that as a result of the plurality of childhood conceptualisations and lived realities that exists, a variety of childhood experiences in relation to dominant rights norms are identifiable in Ghana.
The volume outlines the key factors that have driven this plurality of childhoods and lived experiences in relation to children’s rights with a specific focus on historical developments, notably the introduction of formal colonial structures, formal education and missionary activities which have led to the Christianization of large segments of the Ghanaian population today.
As a result of the variability in childhood understandings and lived experiences, the book argues that there is a need to adopt a more holistic approach to the study of childhoods, and their intersections with dominant children’s rights principles. This will allow for analyses of not only the dissonance that exists between global children’s rights norms and the realities of many children’s lives, but also a consideration of the synergies that can be identified.
For much of my career most of the academic literature that focuses on childhoods in the Global South, at least that which is available in English, has centred on the inapplicability of, or the challenges facing, global children’s rights norms within such contexts. This is primarily due to the fact that much of the literature centres around children whose lives are characterised by lacks, i.e. those living in conditions of deprivation and marginalisation. The resulting outcome has been a disproportionate focus on the limitations of dominant children’s rights norms in Southern contexts.
This is the literature that I engaged with when I was a student. Years later, my own students are also engaging with literature adopting a similar slant. This means that the literature available to my students offers partial portrayals of Southern childhoods which also has implications for how my students discuss these issues in assignments such as essays, for example, which require them to rely predominately on academic literature. Ultimately, it means that bar a few students, most leave the programme I teach on with one-dimensional understandings of childhoods in the Global South.
I have found this particularly concerning, especially in relation to Africa, which is the region of the world in which I am most interested, due to the fact that continued engagement with literature that portrays African childhood experiences primarily through its challenges in its intersections with dominant children’s rights norms reinforces unhelpful stereotypes about the continent and its peoples. It further overlooks the plurality of lifestyles and experiences that can be found on the continent largely as a result of history and more recent social changes.
The West and the Rest: Destabilizing the Concept of ‘the West’ as an Analytical Lens Through Which to Critique Dominant Children’s Rights Discourses
The existence of degrees of synergy, or alignment, between children’s lived experiences and rights discourses and principles in contexts in the South, attributable to history, and the positioning of individuals and groups relating to social and economic structures, requires us to move beyond critiques of the ‘Western-bias’ of dominant discourses of children’s rights as today, the legacy of the entanglements between Southern or ‘non-Western’ contexts and Western Europe and North America continue to influence many aspects of social, economic and political structures. They specifically force us to question what we mean by the terms ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western.’ As a term that was invented in the early modern period and expanded upon during the course of the 17th century, the concept of being ‘Western’ has long been recognized as applying to cartographically - or geographically-delineated locations, typically located in the Western hemisphere as well as being characterized by the following features:
Beyond referring to a geographical place or societies that are believed to share common traditions, it has also come to be seen as an idea. In interrogating the concept of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ Stuart Hall (1996) makes a distinction between ‘the West’ as referring to a group of countries linked by traditions or cartographical positioning and ‘the West’ as an idea which emerged within a specific set of historical circumstances affecting certain societies located in the Western hemisphere but was also reinforced by the growing ‘Western’ identity that started being deployed in those societies…While the idea of the West may have emerged within broader processes that sought to bind together certain European countries and facilitate their self-perception as one unit with a shared culture and religion, it also played a functional role in tightening these bonds. This was done through the establishment of a political system which ordered the world in a particular way as well as the creation of a system of knowledge production which prioritized ways of knowing and being which centred around the value and belief systems of European societies.
As a concept that consists of an idea as well as a geographical place, ‘the West’ came to be understood, over time, as a label to refer to countries which share a certain level of development and reflect, in their structures and lifestyles, urbanized, secular, modern and capitalist principles or values (Hall, 1996). While many of these were located in Europe, the term was also used to refer to other countries - the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (Kurth, 2003) – all countries that had previously been colonies of Britain and had witnessed significant European settlement.
In more recent decades other countries such as Japan have come to be included in this notion of ‘the West’ despite its Eastern location, thereby showing the extent to which the concept of ‘the West’ has long been understood as a complex and fluid set of ideas (Hall, 1996). Within childhoods - and children’s rights – studies specifically the term ‘the West,’ when deployed in publications, conference papers and teaching, normally as part of an argument seeking to critique of dominant children’s rights principles is often used to denote societies in Western Europe and North America and, on occasion, Australia, and New Zealand. Despite the fluidity that has, hitherto, existed in concepts of ‘the West,’ limits have been carefully imposed on how far this label can be stretched. For example, while ‘the West’ has, over the years, come to incorporate countries such as Japan, New Zealand and Australia, other countries, some of which are physically located in the Western hemisphere and have also witnessed mass European settlement as a result of colonization, have been excluded from being defined as part of ‘the West’.
References
Kurth, J (2003) ‘Western civilization: Our tradition’, Intercollegiate Review, 39 (1/2): 5-13.
Hall, S (1996), ‘The West and the rest: Discourse and power’, in Hall, S., Held, D., Hubert, D and Thompson, K (eds), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Oxford: Blackwell.