When I speak of children as social, political, or postcolonial subjects or actors in the subsequent chapters of the book, I try to take a broad view of their subjectivity. Accordingly, I do not understand their actions as the expression of a consciousness which is fed solely from rationality or even imagined as superior, but consider it an integral part and in the context of the diversity of human and non-human life and its existential foundations.
Notes
1‘Subaltern’, which goes back to the Italian philosopher and political activist Antonio Gramsci, describes social groups which are subjected to other groups and struggle for their emancipation. In postcolonial discourse, it was taken up by Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak, 1988; see also Chapter 3).
2Sharon Stephens (1995; 2012) recalls that since the 1980s there has been an accumulation of publications in the Global North about ‘Children without Childhood’ (Winn, 1984), ‘Stolen Childhood’ (Vittachi, 1989), ‘Children as Innocent Victims’ (Gilmour, 1988) or ‘Rise and Fall of Childhood’ (Sommerville, 1982). She sees in this signs that the ideas of childhood that had previously been taken for granted have fallen into crisis. This is also expressed in the fears that the dangers for children have increased (‘children at risk’) or that children have become a risk for societies (‘children as risk’).
3Heidi Morrison (2015: 17) attempts to analyse these processes in a historical study of the changes of childhood in Egypt, which are accompanied by colonialization, in a differentiated way and without a Western bias. For example, she indicates attempts by Egyptian authors to reinterpret Western influence: ‘The model of childhood that developed in Egypt had its roots in colonial resistance and Islamic heritage. For example, Egyptian intellectual Muhammad ‘Abduh justified his claims for western-style education by saying that western ideas about childhood were Eastern in origin as the East used to be the center of the Enlightenment.’ Morrison, however, reverts in the discussion of the colonial influences in a problematic way to the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.
4The frequently asked question of whether the situation of children in the world is better or worse today, in my opinion, cannot be answered. The attempt at an answer would have to compare apples with pears or create universal criteria that would always have a cultural bias or be historically prejudiced. However, this does not rule out the identification of historical trends, such as demographic changes or the rate of child mortality, which has clearly declined. Some trends and their assessments are highlighted in Grugel and Piper (2007).
5Some authors (for example Wagnleitner, 1994) speak of a ‘Coca-Colonization’, understood here as a propagandist weapon of Western capitalism in the Cold War, or call for a ‘De-Coca-Colonization’ (Flusty, 2004). The term Coca-Colonization goes back, to my knowledge, to the East German (GDR) writer Alexander Abusch (1950).
6However, this also applies to the conditions within the countries and regions of the Global South, which are also characterised by considerable social inequality.
7This is the reason why, for years, it has been repeatedly demanded to extend the catalogue of children’s rights to include ecological rights and the rights of future generations.
8In the case of such global data, it must be noted that there are also very great differences within the mentioned continents.
9In this connection, attention should be paid to a problematic and momentous form of ‘refugee aid’. Within the framework of a solidarity project, about 430 Namibian children from African refugee camps were taken to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1979 to 1989 to become the elite of a future liberated Namibia. After the end of the GDR, these children and young people were ‘transferred’ to Namibia, without being asked for their wishes, where only a few of them had lived before. In a study, along the biographical stations, it was examined how the young people were exposed to racist attributions, were looking at their own experiences in the search for affinity, and were looking for specific forms of agency (Schmitt and Witte, 2017).
10Anthropologist David Lancy (2012) also takes a critical look at the hegemonic, Western-based use of the agency concept, but pours the baby out with the bath water by rejecting any assumption of agency in children as counterproductive.
11Matej Blazek (2016) has impressively investigated in the middle of Europe the example of spatial appropriation as well as intra- and intergenerational relations in a poverty-stricken community of ‘post-socialist’ Slovakia.
12With reference to her studies in India, Sarada Balagopalan (2018: 31) criticises that ‘responsibility-based cultures’, in which shared responsibility between generations is practiced, are generally devalued as retrograde or unmodern and regarded as contrary to ‘rights-based cultures’.
13Since 2003 there has been a special journal for this research specialism called Children’s Geographies.
14I cannot go deeper into the actor-network-theory of Latour here, but I would like to say at the very least that in all the merits of its understanding of the complexity and contextual nature of human action, there is the risk of losing sight of the power and domination conditions in society by renouncing the category of social structure.