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