Governing the global child

This chapter shows how governmentality theory can illuminate the processes through which childhood is governed on a global scale. It attends to the intersection between liberalism, capitalism and the governing of childhood through an analysis of how NGOs, international law and academic disciplines produce and circulate specific ideas about the figure of the child. Locating the analysis in a historical perspective it demonstrates that the division between contemporary child-rights and historical child-saving is far from complete. It argues that child-rights and child-saving exist contemporaneously and construct the child as an immanently liberal subject. This liberal subject and the particular kinds of freedom that it affords are the figures through which the inequalities of global capitalism are partially obscured. For this reason, the chapter concludes, researchers and practitioners may wish to consider (and resist) the ways that they are incorporated into the governing of contemporary childhoods