Foundations of well-being in children’s and youth’s everyday lives in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

The contributions in this special section deal with growing up in two post-Soviet states – Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. Each contribution has a different priority on the variety of forces that shape the wellbeing of children and youth as structured in the interaction between the efforts and abilities of their families, the state, as well as social and health policies in both national and cross-national contexts. In this special section, we understand infrastructure as places and institutions for day-care, education, leisure, social and health services. The papers identify barriers that children and young people encounter as they attempt to realize their potential and wishes in a variety of social, educational, and health contexts. These obstacles have something in common: they are rooted in a deficit of public and social infrastructure that is evident in these two states (European Commission, 2011; Sardarova, 2020; OECD, 2018; UNICEF, 2015).

Section Three – Introduction Living as a Child in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Türkiye: Navigating Between Solidarity, Collective Pressures and Kinship Support in the Times of Disruption

“…The authors focus on two countries, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, to discover various sources of influences on children's well-being with a shared thread of arguments centering upon dysfunctions within the countries' state-funded social infrastructure. Editors there posited that the interactions among such institutions as the family, the state and international human rights interventions form important impacts for the well-being and welfare of youth and children, and these observations were generalizable to the areas beyond the said geographic regions (Hunner-Kreisel et al, 2022). From this special issue we learned about several current challenges in the region.…”

“…The commitments made in international treaties did not align with the realities and practicalities of the various local circumstances and institutions. Second, the youth and children having the right to participate in society and needing protection were almost never consulted about how they can best access them (Hunner-Kreisel et al, 2022). Third, in understanding childhood and youth development in these two countries, relationships between the family and the state must be questioned on such parameters as "formal and informal education, questions of mobility and space, normality, and deviation from it through children's and young people's social and cultural practices, institutional welfare, social and health policies, and their problematizations including questions of socially ordered (power) relations according to class, gender and generation" (p. 1134).…”