Children's rights advocacy as transnational citizenship

Abstract

This paper develops conceptual tools for analyzing the practices of children's rights organizations and professionals as transnational citizenship. To this end, we set out to trace a continuum of citizenship practices where global and local influences and forces enmesh in ways that cannot be grasped if the two are treated as separate realms. To theorize the social dynamism and spatial constitution of transnational citizenship as a local-global continuum, we turn to Bourdieuan field theoretical thinking. By analyzing the handling of the Finnish Periodic Report on children's rights by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and the mobilization of its recommendations by Finnish children's rights advocates, we show that transnational citizenship in the field of children's rights is practiced not merely 'out there' but also 'right here'. We conclude by discussing what novel insights field theory has to offer to the study of advocacy practices as transnational citizenship.

The subject of citizenship – Can there be a posthuman civil society?

“…In other words -and this is how the notion is here understood -civil society refers to the socially and spatially variable contexts of normativity within which particular practices or acts may appear acceptable to some while objectionable to others, as citizenship to some and non-citizenship to others (see also Eckert, 2011;Edyvane, 2016;Nyers, 2006). This also allows for considerable scalar complexity whereby civil society can be seen at once as a local arena of political contestation between individuals and groups, and a transnational force field constituted around the question of human rights (Häkli & Kallio 2016;McConnell, 2013;McIlwaine, 2007).…”

Lived citizenship: conceptualising an emerging field

“…First, the spatialities of citizenship have been problematized to contest territoriality and its major manifestationthe stateas the naturalized context of citizenship (Linklater 1998;Isin 2000;Maestri and Hughes 2017). Whilst the physical boundaries of nation-states continue to have a profound effect on the political, social and economic rights people are entitled to, there is a growing recognition that citizenship needs to also be understood as a set of relationships through which it is constructedoften beyond territorial borders (Staeheli 2011;Bauman 2016;Häkli and Kallio 2016). In response, we join many scholars who argue for post-national and spatially more expansive understandings of citizenship characterised by flexible and multiple notions of identity and connectedness beyond the nation-state, especially in the context of heightened patterns of transnational migration (Isin and Turner 2007;Isin and Nielsen 2008;Nyers and Rygiel 2012).…”