This text provides insights into the field of international human rights politics - the protection of children and their rights - by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Provides insights into a lively field of international human rights politics - the protection of children and their rights - by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. This book seeks to recover children’s agency and to recognise the complex variety of childhoods and the global issues that affect them. Written by an international list of contributors from Europe, Africa, North America and Australasia, chapters present highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time and space split into three broad sections: imagined childhoods, governed childhoods and lived childhoods. Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how IR is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability and incapacity.