Reconceptualizing Children's Rights in International Development: Living Rights, Social Justice, Translations

Reconceptualizing Children's Rights in International Development: Living Rights, Social Justice, Translations. By Karl Elanson and Olga Nieuwenhuys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 302 pp. $99.00 cloth.Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted 25 years ago, questions about the meaning and scope of the rights enshrined in it (and beyond) remain relevant in contemporary discourse on children's rights. Numerous reports suggest that violations of children's rights are still rampant in much of the world, with developing countries commonly being a major target of criticism by children's rights advocates. However, perhaps the most challenging aspect of the CRC's new legal order is the concept of children's agency. Notwithstanding the CRC's clear intention to shift the conceptualization of children from objects of enculturation to subjects in their own right, and from passive to active participants in their social, political, and familial milieu, answering what to make of the "child's voice" and how to incorporate it in the human rights discourse remains controversial.The book's editors, Karl Hanson and Olga Nieuwenhuys, compiled a collection of essays to address this question from a child-centered approach. Contrary to the view of the CRC as a neutral legal reform, as often portrayed by children's rights advocates, and the subsequent discourse on children as victims when they engage, for example, with work, the overarching goal of the book is to provide a contextual, bottom up account of how children understand, interpret, and act on their rights. Toward this goal, the book proposes a conceptual framework for children's rights comprised of three key, inter-related concepts: living rights, social justice, and translations of children's rights into practice. By so doing, the book aims to start to grasp the complexities of how rights take shape in children's living realities and daily struggles (p. 6), to help understand the complex ways in which children's rights come into play in today's developing world, and to develop a contemporary theory that extends beyond children to human rights more generally (p. 22).Accordingly, in addition to introductory and concluding chapters, the book's three parts correspond to these three concepts. Part I examines living rights. Analyzing girls' local discourse on marital practices, snapshots produced by children living and working on the streets, children's negotiation strategies in household livelihood activities and children's self-determination practices as migrant workers, the four chapters demonstrate how children shape the various rights in their social world. Part II focuses on the concept of social justice, which the editors interpret to encompass moral economy, the state as guarantor of necessary goods (from land and employment to health, education and food), and social movements challenging the elites. The three chapters in this part highlight conflicting local and international core conceptualizations of personhood, autonomy, and kinship and the need for recognizing the various cultural, political, and social forces to develop a fruitful conversation between the stakeholders of children's rights. …