Our member, Dr. Manfred Liebel (Germany), talks about his new book (written with Rebecca Budde, Urszula Markowska-Manista, and Philip Meade), Childhoods of the Global South: Children’s Rights and Resistance (Policy Press, 2023).
With this book, I follow up on reflections I set out in the book Decolonizing Childhoods, published by Policy Press in 2020. In particular, I am interested in exploring the meaning of children’s rights for young people who suffer from postcolonial inequality and related forms of marginalization and oppression. I understand these rights as a possible tool for children’s action that can facilitate the visibility and affirmation of their own individual and collective needs and interests. My own interest is focused on how children’s rights can help strengthen the social position of these children. In this sense, I understand them as rights from below or counter-rights in the hands of children.
I group the children who are at the centre of the book under the term childhoods of the Global South and ask about the specific views, forms of action and life perspectives of these children. To make the meaning of rights comprehensible to them, I use historical examples to illuminate some legal traditions that attach particular importance to children’s participation in social and political life. With a view to the present, I explore the question of how children cope with their precarious living conditions and under what conditions forms of political subjectivity emerge that can be understood as resistance.
With this book, I want to contribute to doing these children justice and making visible their real lives in all their objective and subjective diversity. As a White adult who enjoys academic privilege and has not experienced racism first hand, this is certainly only approximately possible for me. Moreover, I can only refer to some aspects of these children’s lives. The focus is on Latin America, but occasionally I also draw on examples from other continents.
In the course of my involvement with the topic of children’s rights, new questions have repeatedly come to mind that I believe have been inadequately addressed to date. Fundamental to my understanding of children’s rights and their relevance to children’s lives have been my experiences and studies with children in southern or postcolonial parts of the world, particularly in Latin America. In this context, I have been most inspired by meetings with working and indigenous children and youth and their adult collaborators.
The idea of calling children’s rights counter-rights is relatively new. I use the term to refer to earlier terms such as ‘children’s rights from below’ or children’s rights as ‘living rights’. I make them more precise and, in some cases, place other emphases. On the one hand, I locate the discourse on counter-rights in the so-called Critical Children's Rights Studies. On the other hand, I place it within the critical legal discussion on the paradoxes of human rights and on a self-referential reification of rights (also known as ‘juridism’, ‘legalism,’ or ‘legal formalism’). Both discourses are based on the fundamental idea that legal relations are only a reduced reflection of social reality. They must be understood as ‘discursive constructs’ (Hedi Viterbo) and therefore always be socially and culturally contextualized.
So why counter-rights? The starting point is to look at social groups that are socially disadvantaged, marginalized, discriminated against and, in many cases, also oppressed or subjected to particularly precarious conditions. This includes, in the case of children, those who live in grave poverty or have to work under exploitative conditions, those suffering from racist or sexualized violence, those experiencing disability, and many others. While calling them ‘children of the Global South’, I address the challenges facing them in contexts of both coloniality and decolonization.
With this book, I hope to have provided numerous reasons to rethink the prevailing discourse and practice of children’s rights. As such, I believe it is indispensable to transform the hitherto dominant concepts of (state) law and (subjective) rights. In the international human rights system, the principle of formal equality of legal subjects, which has repeatedly led to ‘paradoxes’ (Wendy Brown) in the enjoyment of rights, has been expanded by the introduction of specific rights (women’s rights, children’s rights, rights of persons with disabilities, rights of indigenous peoples, and others) in the sense of powerless and disadvantaged groups of people. But it cannot stop there.
Counter-rights in the sense I understand them do not distance themselves from the idea of subjective rights, but rather expand, modify and specify them. They are not derived from human nature and are not fixed only to individual human beings, but arise in connection with other human beings living together. Counter-rights consider the ‘sociality of human subjectivity’ (Daniel Loick). As such, they are social as well as political rights that are dependent on a society in which people do not compete with each other and prioritize what is their own. Instead, the focus is put on what is common for all and what is done for each other as characteristics of intersubjective relations. Such a society and world order require a minimum of social and political equality and mutual recognition of individuals with their own life histories and everyone’s particular characteristics and thoughts. Equality and diversity are not opposites in this society and world order, but are mutually dependent.
Understood in this sense rights do not require state authority to guarantee and enforce them with power, but are based on the communal self-government of people in the places where they live. They embody a new ‘concept of right(s) that overcomes etatistic reductionism’ and abandons the ‘ideology of the free person that underlies conventional subjective right’ (Fischer-Lescano). These rights are necessarily counter-rights, since such self-government must first be enforced against existing unequal power and, if necessary, state violence. They require not only a fundamental democratization of decision-making and rights enforcement, but a democratization of the national and international legal systems themselves. This poses a particular challenge with regard to children, as they have so far been systematically excluded from law-making and jurisdiction.
Likewise, these rights must further be conceived as counter-rights, because people who are socially and politically marginalized, oppressed and disadvantaged are particularly dependent on them. This is true both within nation-state territories and in the relationship between the Global North and Global South (‘coloniality’). In the case of children, the unequal power is embodied by ‘adults’ who presume to rule over the ‘not-yet-adults’, as they see fit (‘adultism’). However, children’s rights as counter-rights are not directed against adults as persons or generations, but against dominant social habits, rules, laws and structures that subordinate children to adults and that extend and prolong children’s dependence on care and protection beyond what is anthropologically required. In order to make them a reality, young people are dependent on joining forces with other young people and becoming a countervailing force in the places where they live and, where possible, beyond them. In doing so, their subordinate and relatively powerless position makes them dependent on adults in solidarity and a minimum of opportunities to take their lives into their own hands in collective action.
Children’s rights understood in this sense arise and have their best chance of realization in the places where children live. Nevertheless, they are not necessarily limited to the local level. They gain in importance and power when young people can network beyond their localities and express their common interests. As rights that emphasize what young people have in common, they are more than subjective rights in the individual sense. They are inter-subjective or trans-subjective rights that emerge from young people’s communication and awareness in social spaces determined by themselves and claim validity beyond these spaces.
Such processes can be observed wherever children come together in their own movements and organizations to remind adults and, in particular, those with political responsibility of their obligations to young and future generations, as is expressed today, for example, in the climate justice movements Fridays for Future or The Last Generation and, particularly in the Global South, in social movements of working and indigenous children. Such aspirations can be seen wherever children from subaltern and indigenous sectors gather to resist the silence imposed on them, their stigmatization and social contempt as ‘poor’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘retarded’, ‘naughty’, or ‘minor’. In this way, young people reaffirm themselves as collective subjects of rights against every form of social injustice, racism, sexism and adultism at once.