Decentring the History of the Idea of Children's Rights
Roy Huijsmans2016, The International Journal of Children's Rights
Review essay of: S. Balagopalan Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 237. isbn 978-0-230-29642-8 (hardcover)/isbn 978-1-137-31679-0 (eBook). $110 (hardcover)/$79.99 (eBook). H. Morrison Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 176. isbn 978-1-137-43277-3 (hardcover)/isbn 978-1-137-43278-0 (eBook). $74.99 (hardcover)/ $62.99 (eBook). With the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (un-crc) turning 27 in 2016, there is by now an impressive literature on children’s rights. Some of it evaluates the progress made, some of it takes the form of critical reflections (e.g. Valentin and Meinert, 2009; Arts, 2014). This includes a number of titles that focus specifically on children’s rights in non-western contexts (e.g. Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2013; Twum-Danso Imoh and Ansell, 2013). This latter work is important because of the paradox that most Latin American, African and Asian countries were as quick to ratify the un-crc as rich countries in the Global North (and sometimes even quicker) despite the oft-heard and also contested critique that the un-crc is ‘based on a Western ideal of an autonomous rights-bearing citizen that has limited applicability outside the industrialized West’ (Montgomery, 2008: 8). Beyond the formal history of the process leading up to, and the drafting of the un-crc (e.g. Van Bueren, 1995), as well as aligning national law with the un-crc (e.g. Huijsmans, 2010: 144–5), the historical dimension has received relatively little scholarly attention in children’s rights literature. This is especially true for histories of the idea of children’s rights that are not narrated from the centre (i.e. Eurocentric perspectives or from dominant perspectivesin the non-West). Consequentially, critical discussions on children’s rights in non-western contexts, often framed in various forms of “global-local” analyses, are typically historically lopsided. Much is said about the particularity of the history of the idea of children’s rights as enshrined in the Convention and little about the knowledge production about childhood in both the Global South and North, including the emergence of ideas about children’s rights, as part of the colonial encounter. This state of affairs leaves unchallenged the problematic claim that western ideas about childhood, including children’s rights, are “exported” as it fails to acknowledge that such globalised ideas are always localised and seldom (fully) displace pre-existing sets of ideas (Burman, 1996: 48–9).
