The unequal global power structure is evident not only on the material level. It is also reflected in the fact that the ways of life of these children and the childhoods in which they manifest themselves are devalued, disregarded and made invisible. The children are seen as existing ‘outside childhood’ (Ennew, 2005), and they are met with compassion at best. Kate Cregan and Denise Cuthbert (2014: 8) put it this way:
The fact that geopolitical power was centred in the Global North over the course of much of the twentieth century – and that proceedings, policies and conventions in those global bodies were, as a result, infused with Global Northern ‘world views’ – has led to the domination of particular understandings of children and childhood that have often been at odds with the realities of children’s day-to-day lives in local settings … of the Global South.
A further consequence of this power structure is that while the spread of schools and new digital media has expanded opportunities to gain information and knowledge, at the same time it depreciates and destroys the life-practical knowledge that the children in non-Western, precolonial cultures get through their proximity to nature and the inclusion in communitarian-family activities. This knowledge related, for example, to the characteristics of plants and animals and the need for their care and maintenance or to the handling of risks and dangers in the children’s environment. It was a knowledge that resulted from practical experiences and participation in important tasks (not only ‘homework’ for the school). The anthropologist Cindi Katz (2004: 125) states:
The links between practice and knowledge were extensive and durable. Most of what the children learned in their everyday engagements, whether among their elders or their peers, was important to both the contemporaneous reproduction of their community and its future.
These connections have been largely broken, and have, in particular, marginalized and discriminated against children in and from rural regions, as Cindi Katz (2004; 2012) exemplifies with the example of Sudan and Sarada Balagopalan (2014) with India. Nevertheless, children and young people remain important to their communities. They are often, with newly acquired knowledge and their better knowledge of the world, actors who show new ways, whereby not infrequently traditional knowledge and related lifestyles are updated (see Young Lives, 2016).
The destruction of traditional production methods, often connected with land robbery, leads to material hardship and often violent internal conflicts in the Global South. These have resulted in displacements and migrations within the countries from the countryside to the city, into neighbouring countries and into the richer Northern world regions. The migration movements caused by material hardship and social inequality lead to new forms of childhood, whether children themselves become actors of migration (‘children on the move’), or that they return to their native places where they rely on themselves, relatives or neighbours. These movements are associated with separations, life-threatening risks and suffering, but they also create new identities, new experiences and new knowledge. Some communities and families in the Global South are dependent on the income and the newly acquired cultural and social capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) of their young migrants for their survival and progression. Transnational childhoods emerge, which have not existed so far, and they question ‘how national boundaries and cross-bordering are produced and inscribed in social constellations of childhood’ (Himmelbach and Schröer, 2014: 494). With regard to the children of immigrants living in the US, Cinthya Saavedra and Steven Camicia (2010: 33–4) speak of ‘transnational bodies’ with ‘diverse and changing identities’. They advocate a ‘geopolitics of childhood’, which considers that the children with transnational biographies produce remarkable knowledge and trigger new cultural impulses.
Although suffering is growing with global inequality and migration, it also increases the challenges of dealing with this suffering and organizing it. Children are ‘mature’ earlier, they are part of the world. Syntheses from knowledge, acquired modes of life and the newly available information are the result. The Eurocentric understanding of childhood does not do justice to these changes and obscures them rather than nurtures them. On the normative level, that understanding of childhood spreads to the South, but is in conflict with the real-life conditions and lifestyle of the majority of children living there, and leads to hybrid childhoods as well as to distorted perceptions of the children’s reality. It is a question of what makes this childhood pattern so appealing, ‘that it gets anyhow more attention and interest than the real childhoods that it can produce, the social inequalities that it may strengthen, the conditions that make its implementation problematic’ (Bühler-Niederberger, 2011: 67). Today’s postcolonial childhoods of the Global South are, in any case, not ‘autonomous’ and ‘separated’ childhoods in the sense of the idealized Eurocentric childhood pattern, but childhoods closely linked to society and its existential challenges. And they are by no means confined to the Global South, but are spreading through migration processes, the precariousness of a growing number of people, and the dissolution of the strict separation of the working and reproduction spheres in the Global North (see Hunner-Kreisel and Bohne, 2016).9
Agency in childhoods
Here the question arises as to how the capacity for action and the forms of practice of the children in the Global South can be conceptually grasped and understood. The concept of agency customary in today’s childhood research is, at all events, hardly suitable for this purpose as long as it is guided by the bourgeois concept of an individually acting, basically, male and ‘white’ subject (see Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Sutterlüty and Tisdall, 2019 for criticism).10 According to Wyness (2015: 10), ‘the individualistic strand of thinking has generated an over-romanticised conception of agency’. Measured against this conception, which is self-centred in Europe itself, the aggravated practice mentioned by Olga Nieuwenhuys (2013) can only appear distorted or remain completely invisible (see Valentine, 2011; Edmonds, 2019). This practice manifests itself neither in separate social spaces of a particular childhood world, nor in extraordinary, individualized heroic deeds. Nor is it aimed primarily at adults against whom children insist on their own childhood world or demand an upgrading of their own status (see James, 2011). It is more to be understood like the desire to reconstitute the social space with other people in similar social situations and facing similar problems, where common interests can be expressed.11 This form of agency is, in my opinion, best understood as a materialization of shared responsibility.