Political Strategies of Self-representation: The Case of Young Afghan Migrants in Sweden

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore how children and youth make use of particular strategies of self-representation to seek political representation. I do so by taking my point of departure in a group of young Afghan migrants in Sweden and their political mobilization for their right to residency permits. In dialogue with debates in political theory around democracy and representation, I examine how young political actors contest and recast dominant regimes of political representation to claim political space and a voice of their own. Focus is put on the ways in which various actors struggle over the authority to represent and give meaning to the interests, rights, and well-being of young migrants and how these processes of representing children and youth become politically productive. Four different strategies are identified and suggested to constitute a politics of self-representation: Rejecting previous forms of representation; establishing, shaping, and controlling political identity; creating political space; making opponents and allies. Based on these empirical observations, I argue that the mobilizations of young non-citizens against deportation reveal a critical dimension to the politics of childhood, namely, how the strategies of self-representation used by children and youth disrupt current legal and political orders and open up new avenues for political representation.

Constructing the child as refugee: Visual representations of refugee children in digital news media

“…Her analysis shows how climate activists used different visual strategies to disrupt adultist figurations of the child as vulnerable and in need of protection in order to re-conceptualize the child (also) as a formidable political agent. To much similar ends but with different means, young Afghan migrant activists in Sweden employed different political strategies of self-representation to disrupt adult-centered assumptions regarding the legitimacy of their political participation as children and to counter structural barriers in their fight for their right to stay in the country (Josefsson, 2023).…”

“…In the vast majority of the news article images collected refugee children were pictured to be at some form of risk: crammed on a ready-to-capsize boat at sea, standing in tears in the midst of bombarded buildings, laying on mattresses at detention centers or refugee camps, or solemnly hauling the load of their belongings on the move. Unsurprisingly at first glance such images evoked notions of a childhood innocence lost too soon and of a child in peril (Josefsson, 2023). This is no coincidence as innocence, according to Ticktin (2017: 578), is a “boundary concept” that regulates “a space of purity”, at times taken to mean free from knowledge, free from intention, or free from desire and guilt.…”