Why global? Children and childhood from a decolonial perspective

The notion of ‘global childhood’ as a local universalism about childhood

The globalized order is supposed to offer an inevitably universalizing modulation of human experience rendered conspicuous in child scholarship early in the 1990s through the representation of the child submitted to the constraints of global processes. In a 1996 editorial published in Childhood, globalization processes are argued to have made the world a ‘single place’ characterized by a common ecology, economy and technoscientific culture responsible for modelling human ontology and everyday experience both in the North or in the South (Childhood, 1996). As such, globalization concurs to the universalization of experience turning childhood part and parcel of a global issue concerning human identity under contemporary structural transformations. Undoubtedly, some time earlier, the steadfast consolidation of children’s rights in international and national legislations had contributed to the worldwide view of a global standard of childhood even though based on the historically and culturally bound ideals of Europe and the United States (Boyden, 1990). In this context, what also became universalized was a moral awareness with regard to deviations from such normative ideals of childhood.

The generalized concern with globalization as an imperative frame under which to consider the diverse cultural conditions of childhood mounted as if now local and national realities could not but be duly understood and theorized if the local was telescoped as a part ‘. . . of the larger forces that affect that microcosm’ (Rizzini and Bush, 2002: 372). As a necessary disjuncture which opposed structural global forces, on one hand, and localities under their siege, on the other, the global and the local gradually engrossed their reciprocal antinomy. Other childhoods that do not conform to the ubiquitous child representation of the Global North emerge from research in the South (Holt and Holloway, 2006). Thus, the child located in the far-off ‘Global South’ is thought to play a significant role in bringing about embodied differences and particularities to such a universalized view of the child. In this context, a plurality of childhoods, in terms of cultural diversity, becomes conspicuously highlighted, though, incarnated by peripheric forms of childhood and child subjectivities. Imoh (2016) makes the point that the marginalized childhood of the South has been unduly overstated, most probably as ‘. . . a desire to demonstrate the dissonance between the global hegemonic ideal, with its roots in the North, and the local realities of a significant number of children in many contexts in the South’ (p. 457, emphasis mine). According to this author, the global child, of Northern origin, is contrasted with local childhoods of the South. However, as a critic of the North–South dichotomy and favouring a holistic picture of childhood, Imoh fails to question the origins of the continued ‘othering of childhoods’ of the South. Therefore, the sheer search for commonalities between childhoods of North and South may eventually hinder how to evaluate the strikingly different impacts of globalization on local childhoods of North and South, as well as the possibilities of redressing the ways of how deviations from the global model are envisaged.

The local has been reiteratively theorized as countering ‘the idealised universal notions of childhood’ (Kesby et al., 2006) as it is there, in the South, that other real-life experiences of children are to be found. These authors point out that these other relevant dimensions of childhood and child subjectivities, such as children’s sexuality and child-headed households, are to be found in the cultural specificity of African societies. They argue, and I underscore this point, that universal models of childhood must be unpacked and ‘the diversity of “other childhoods” in the global South revealed’ (Kesby et al., 2006: 198, emphasis mine). The local is here again discursively produced as the place providing ‘real life’ or ‘embodied’ deviations from the universal canons of child subjectivization and ways of living to be found quite invariably in the global South.

Southern childhoods – South African, Ethiopian and Taiwanese – are also picked up to illustrate the impasses between local traditional practices and modern child rights, whereas Western European societies (Germany, Italy and Sweden) are characterized by global standardized processes articulated by children’s rights, individualized subjectivities and high-consumption styles of living (Buhler-Niederberger and van Krieken, 2008). In the same vein, Imoh and Ame (2012) make a similar point concerning childhoods in African societies. They refer to children’s lives as ‘at a crossroads between East and West, or between tradition and modernity’ (p. 9, emphasis mine). Tradition is thus equated to the ways of living in Eastern (or Southern) societies where modernity has not fully arrived yet, while Western (European) childhoods do not seem to be strained by tradition as they are not supposed to have any.

What is posited as a global standard of childhood relates to its unequivocal locus and condition of production, Northern or Western countries, in the modern and contemporary context of capitalist economic growth and cultural dissemination. The local is inevitably couched as the difference (‘the colonial difference’ in terms of decolonial thought, Mignolo, 2002) between the universalized notion of childhood (towards which all childhoods should aim at) and its diversity to be invariably found in the Southern world depicted as other, traditional, non-modern and embodied. Local childhoods are positioned not only as receivers of the impact of globality but also those which are not yet there where they should be. Thus, globality positions Southern childhoods as different begging the question, inspired by a decolonial shift (Mignolo, 2011), whether such a difference can be problematized by questioning the self-referential status of definitions of otherness, tradition and so forth frequently made by Northern scholarship. This brings forth the point already made by Nieuwenhuys (2010) that we should mind to ask, ‘why global?’. Why, and if, should the packing up of childhoods all over the world by the theoretical cloak of being ‘global’ make sense at all in all places? Second, if differences there are, maybe they can be alternatively conceptualized other than what is other and non-modern. Abebe and Ofosu-Kusi (2016) have cautioned about falling back into a ‘deficit model of childhood’ when both indigenizing and victimizing approaches of African childhoods seem unsuitable. These authors have noted how local childhoods of the South cannot be simply reduced to non-modern, othered or deviant. Taking up these authors’ point, here what is emphasized is the need to re-appraise difference and diversity in childhoods in the scope of a critique of universalisms of knowledge which constitute local productions of universal intent.

The very notion of modernity as a single universal phenomenon whose centre is Europe as opposed to traditions in other parts of the world should be questioned. In this vein, the work of Balagopalan (2002, 2011, 2019) has provided powerful insights concerning the need to historicize modernity in Third World countries in order to critique the global western model of childhood as a hegemonic ideal (Balagopalan, 2002: 33). Accordingly, to admit the cultural variability of childhoods, as in the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ (Balagopalan, 2011), without addressing the issues of power and capital leads to a reading of other childhoods as ‘just another example’ of marginal and separate childhoods (Balagopalan, 2011: 293). Central to what has been argued here, and also already observed by Balagopalan, is the relevance of situating childhood experiences in the context of structural power relationships, both present and past. ² Most often, then, the periphery of a Eurocentric world system – the vastness of the South regarded as a diversity of cultures and traditions – is constructed as the alterity that is made to fit into, or deviate from, what is supposed to be global. In this vein, it seems that though such current expressions of Global North and Global South accord both geographical spaces the statute of globality, the South is reiteratively inscribed as not so, or fully, global yet. Escobar (2007) cautions that globalization processes make the local as the place for practising the production of the colonial difference in that there – Southern and Eastern places – difference continues to be inscribed as what is othered and needs to be surpassed.

The global–local divide in childhood studies and the hegemonic perspective of globality

As the local appears to render the diversity of childhoods possible and palpable, it is invariably read to fit into theories that have been mostly produced by Northern scholars. In a sense, a ‘denial of coevalness’, a perspective very much criticized by decolonial scholars (Mignolo, 2001: 34) because it locates peoples and individuals in a chronological scale as opposed to a geographical distance, gives support to the belief that global uniformity is a question of time as patterns of change in the South will follow (and should follow) the same line as those that took place in the North as time went by. Thus, given remedial aid and intervention programmes, childhoods all over the world will tend to resemble one another soon in the future.

Thus, under these circumstances, the search for convergence and integration is conceived as a relevant theoretical principle that should guide the understanding of the diversity of childhoods in a global world. Qvortrup (2018) has recently made the point that by exaggerating differences between Northern and Southern childhoods, a ‘truly global approach’ (p. 9) can be hampered as commonalities are overlooked. This certainly poses two problems: first, how to construct and interpret diversity and difference, and second, what it is that we have to integrate. As argued above, child scholarship has envisaged diversity as those variations in child subjectivities and social constructions that take place in those societies which remain most distant to the centres of global economy and culture. There, childhoods vary in comparison with a universal canon that has imposed itself globally. From this (euro)centred point of view, integration should safeguard the validity of the model, since as Qvortrup (2018) says, ‘. . . whether poor or rich they’re all children’ (p. 17). However, integration of diversity and variation begs the question about the legitimacy of the model: when, how and by whom it was produced. As far as central tenets of this model are concerned, such as for instance that of children’s rights, there has been a good deal of dissent about its overgeneralized adequacy and relevance to other cultural contexts, such as Africa (Imani, 2008; Masabo, 2016).

A central point concerns how the notion of globalization is itself conceptualized and the global–local divide is understood. How differences are turned into an issue that should be minimized rather than highlighted depends on what standpoint is taken towards globalization, since this process is itself part of the problem. As Dirlik (2000) puts it,

A triumphalist account of globalization, as appealing to cosmopolitan liberals or leftists as it is to transnational capital, celebrates the imminent unification of the world, overlooking the fact that the problems that persist are not just leftovers from the past but products of the very process of globalization with the developmentalist assumptions built into its ideology. (p. 144)

It is precisely in this sense that Balagopalan (2018) adverts that the notion of globalization should be unpacked in terms of histories of capitalism, colonialism and racism in order that in the not-so-unified world of globalization, the enormous differences thus produced and maintained to render globalization possible can be understood. As globalization is telescoped through the lens of capitalism, colonialism and racism, a light-hearted approach to its ill-effects very much depends on what part of the globe you inhabit and write from. For the parts of the world which most benefit from the wealth produced by capitalist globalization, it may be more difficult to envisage how globalization exacerbates past legacies of inequalities and injustice rather than celebrates cosmopolitanism, ethnic multiculturalism and cultural integration.

A relevant issue in this debate is how the theoretical emphasis on the global reflecting the imperative to focus on the hegemonic logic of capital and market has turned the local invisible. The emphasis on globalization and, consequently, the foregrounding of the global child in scholarship, responds to the amplification of the effects of economic structural forces in determining ways of life, social and cultural practices and subjectivities thus positioning the local as a subordinate and determined concept (Escobar, 2005). Consequently, what is posited as relevant consists of the investigation of de-territorialized subjectivities in the modern conditions of de-localization, as pointed out by Giddens (1990). Movement and mobility, instability and change acquire, thus, a prominent value in social processes and subjective identifications, setting up an imaginary which tends to underestimate the value of permanence, stability and ‘tradition’. However, a more concerned search in Southern scholarship will bring up abundant evidence that social practices concerning the daily life of children are very much determined by the conditions of localities and communities, where their experience as children and their sense of being are acquired within the very circumscribed places of home and neighbourhood with scarce access and knowledge about other distant sites of the same city. As de Castro, (2001, 2004) has shown in various studies of poor urban children in different Brazilian cities, a great many of them had never ventured out of the skirts of their communities; had never travelled by car; or even, living at the seaside, had never gone to the beach. To suppose a generalized effect of de-territorialization and de-localization as far as subjectivities and social practices are concerned remains at best a wishful affirmation that converges on underscoring the relevance of the global in detriment of the local. Accordingly, it is important to also investigate the local logics in the production of culture and subjectivity to counter the privilege that has been accorded to the investigation of the global logic of capitalism, technology and so forth. Notwithstanding the fact that to greater or lesser degrees the local has suffered the conditions imposed by alien structural forces of capitalist economic expansion, the way one conceptualizes localities in this dynamic makes a great difference. To accord the local at least a symmetrical position (Dirlik, 1998) in relation to the global foregrounds the relevance of places in the production of cultural practices, ways of surviving and interpreting the world around in the daily experience of children.

Towards a decolonial political economy of knowledge production

Scientific knowledge production and its diffusion today percolate along certain paths and directions, keeping up to its mission of enlightening and civilizing the minds towards certain world views and values. Part and parcel of the legitimation discourse of colonizing states was the modernization of backward and primitive societies and the introduction of modern European science. From then, Europe and, eventually, North America have stood as authority centres in the production and diffusion of scientific knowledge in the capacity of securing the development and the progress of societies (Nandy, 2011). Nowadays, this process has been co-opted by and included in the gigantic commercial establishment set up by international corporations to market knowledge and its products, such as books, articles and so forth. Not only indigenous knowledge in Africa, Central and South America was made invisible but also the scientific entrepreneurship of Southern countries remains irrelevant and unknown to the North. Why are not Nigerian, Colombian or Indian child scholars so much read as English, Norwegian or North American ones? This should be a point of concern as childhood knowledge is intended to become truly international. What conditions determine the most relevant paths and choices of ‘academic delivery’ and consumption, and why this is so, should be interrogations that child scholars should mind to ask. The intense focus and interest in globalization in childhood scholarship point inevitably at how production and circulation of scientific knowledge is structured by inequalities that privilege Northern scholarship in the diffusion of theories, concepts and perspectives.

The invisibility of Southern scholarship in what is assumed to be an international forum of discussion on childhood concurs to a plethora of misunderstandings about scientific and academic work in the South, and consequently, an opportunistic agenda for Northern scholars to ‘read outwards to societies in the periphery’ (Connell, 2008: 66) according to their own system of categories. In this most instigating series of interviews conducted by Childhood along 2018, the issue of uneven knowledge production between North and South was scrutinized bringing about some rather startling viewpoints such as that, most research on children in the global South is carried out by scholars in the global North (Aitken, 2018: 284), or the absence of Childhood Studies in the majority world universities (Punch, 2018: 287). Since the vast production of knowledge about childhood and children in Southern countries goes completely unnoticed, unread and unknown by Northern scholars, a self-referential standpoint can be a pitfall. It must be noted that most of the scientific knowledge produced in the South is published in the vernacular – and this means, not in English. This is true for Latin America, Russia, China and some South Asian countries. To be able to access this vast literature would demand an immense learning disposition of Northern researchers in order to be fluent in different languages other than English. As it appears, not being able to access any literature unless it is written in English, Northern scholars become prey of the scarce literature they can get hold of that is written in English which is neither representative of what is produced nor, quite often, the most significant one. Many times their own research based on a limited time spent in the South is inadequately generalized.

Dasgupta (2009) has rightly pointed out that globalization processes consist of ‘English-ization processes’ suggesting that ‘language is the key of the process of globalization’ (p. 30) going on to affirm that hegemony manifests itself through the dominance of the English language worldwide. However, this process of dominance of the North also produces home effects in Southern countries and scholarship. Those Southern researchers who are keen on being included in the Euro-North American circles of academic debate on childhood must be fluent in English and, above all, must be able to assimilate and identify with those conceptions and theories produced in the North of ample circulation in international journals in order to take part in the dialogue. As part of neo-colonial entrapments in Southern countries, academic insignia remain dependent on the authority centres of the North which provide supposedly legitimate ‘internationalization’ mechanisms. This series of demands do have depoliticizing effects on Southern academics and their research once such relationships of academic dependency on the North are not problematized and research interests of Southern scholars remain tied up to what is mainstream in international (Northern) child scholarship (a psycho-epistemological process named ‘extraversion’ by the African scholar Hountondji, 1990).

Of academic interest, though, is the kind of research that is produced by Northern child scholars who happen to have an interest in the periphery, many of them having spent a couple of years doing field work for their doctoral degree, or as professionals or researchers for international agencies of international development. Quite often, the research thus produced is not published locally but in international journals to which Southern researchers may have little access. A noteworthy point is that most international journals of high prestige are not in the Open Access System – OAS – so that universities in the South have difficulties to afford the immense costs of maintaining such international bases of reference. Therefore, research about the South by Northern scholars ends up serving Northern readership and the interests of scientific commodification of international publishing corporations. Besides, as Collyer (2018) has pointed out, scientific knowledge about the South is not referenced by whatever research has been carried out by Southern researchers themselves but by Northern literature so that the ‘South’ becomes at most a case example of theories, concepts and perspectives originated elsewhere. Shouldn’t this methodological posture be considered an issue to be discussed? What, if the other way round would take place? As a result, scientific knowledge about Southern childhoods thus obtained is likely to reaffirm and corroborate research preferences, themes and concepts of Northern researchers influencing researchers in the South who bypass a more organic commitment to the social demands of their localities rather than ‘de-linking’ (Mignolo, 2007) from knowledge assumed to be valid everywhere. In the present unequal structure of the international division of scientific labour, what can be aimed at – if not the construction of conditions for theory construction – are dispositions of critically evaluating the preponderant role of the South as the ground for the application of social knowledge produced in the North and as consumer, rather than producer, of theory.

If one considers the subaltern position of Southern countries as far as an international dialogue is concerned, the proposal for a ‘dialogue between cases’ aiming at comparing different research results on Northern and Southern childhoods (Punch, 2015) underscores the importance of cross-comparison of empirical data though overlooking the fact that Northern and Southern countries are not levelled equally as far as the construction and the formulation of the theories to be verified are concerned. In this sense, the dialogue becomes commensurate with ascertaining the deviations from the theoretical models and conceptualizations whose legitimacy, adequateness and relevance for different political and cultural contexts are taken for granted prioritizing, thus, the scientific agenda of the North. A case in point is illustrated by how one reads what is at stake in this major division between North and South, ‘economic factors’ being regarded as prominent divisors: ‘it is a simple fact that much of the Majority World is economically poorer than most of the Minority World and that overall levels of income and standards of living are extremely unequal’ (Punch, 2015: 691, emphasis mine). In this sense, comparisons could be enhanced if this variability could be controlled in order to either obtain the structural commonality of childhood (beyond wealth or poverty, children are children wherever) or make conspicuous its ‘cultural’ diversity in face of global influences. Understood as, and reduced to, indexes of income and standard indicators of living, economic factors are supposed to draw up a dividing line between the so-called Majority and Minority Worlds, the former, poorer, though greater in size and population (among other aspects!), the latter, wealthier and smaller. As far as childhoods are concerned, their reality across these regions is unhesitatingly affirmed, which does not put into question either the conception of childhood itself or how such a conception owes to a certain model of development, progress and capitalistic modernization characteristic of European societies.

The division between North and South entails more complex features, rather than simply economic factors, taken as income levels and standard indicators of living conditions. As a matter of fact, social groups have their own particular ways to consider what their well-being should consist of, these definitions being enmeshed in cultural values, past legacies, resources availability and normative visions of the future, what makes comparisons about wealth and poverty between regions of the world much more complex than just the factoring out of income-level effects. Foregrounding material affluence can veil the ideological affirmation of the superiority of the Northern model of childhood which feeds up the contempt for Southern children, as Nieuwenhuys (1998) has noted. Child scholarship should take into account how different cosmologies about thrift, expenditure, needs and deprivation impact conceptions of human differentiation along the lifecycle and the production of generational relationships.

Interconnectedness in globality and a politics of the local: An agenda for Southern researchers

Interconnectedness among distant regions of the globe has been a rather celebrated aspect of globalization processes. In child scholarship, the point has been raised that interconnections have launched processes that transform localities by the force of structural global changes making it less relevant the dichotomy between North and South, developed/developing (Holt and Holloway, 2006) as multiple differentiations can now appear in the way children live both within the North and the South. There is no doubt that globalization is everywhere in its power to raid human life and experience. However, what has been argued here is that global processes tend to produce rather different impacts in different parts of the globe. The notion of ‘glocalisation’ as a way to take into account the multiple differentiations produced by global processes in different localities does not seem to resolve the opposition between the global and the local, but, as Connell (2008) affirms, rather asserts both terms ‘as a static polarity all at once’ (p. 57). Besides, theories of globalization refrain from tackling the issues of both the past experience of colonialism and that of neo-colonial exploitation so that the relevance of the dichotomy of North and South can be unrepentantly erased. Thus, North and South are not positioned equally with regard to a plethora of dimensions. First, it seems noteworthy that the global North and global South expressions are mostly used as descriptive – geographical – constructs rather than geopolitical ones. This way of setting up the problem overlooks the epistemic and political basis at the origin of the North–South division which remains relevant to this day. This division accounts for the important political standing that goes back to post-war international politics when colonized countries and those not aligned either with the capitalist US/Europe block or the communist one assumed positions in relation to these ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Worlds. A political solidarity among Southern countries emerged inspiring the creation of a Third World. For Dirlik (1997), the North–South dichotomy ought to express not merely geographical locations but metaphorical references where North denotes the pathways of transnational capital, and South, the marginalized populations of the world. Accordingly, for Escobar (2008), to the Third World is reserved the ‘enslavement of the market and the selective genocide; massive displacements, internal wars and the effacement of places, peoples and communities for the profit of international capital’ (p. 214). Furthermore, Dirlik (2012) also points out how globalization processes and capitalism derive their legitimacy from developmentalism, a modern European ideology that exerted a hegemonic effect over all nations, as ‘the only way to go’ (p. 18). Therefore, as one evokes the expressions of ‘global South’ and ‘global North’ turning them to mere geographical mirrors of each other, one is masking the long-standing structural and imperial division that has separated, and thereby interconnected, these parts of the world and the political claims of the South to confront Northern ideologies. Above all, one is masking the asymmetrical position of these global actors concerning their potency to influence, command and normatize the flows of global commodification and marketization.

A focus on the effacement and/or the superseding of the North–South division is at stake as the notions of ‘intersections’, ‘hybridization processes’ and ‘glocalized worlds’ are put forward which tend to obfuscate a crucial aspect of the interplay between global processes and Southern places which is the resulting violent and alienating aspects of such processes, whose consequences often lead to structural and functional social disorders and deformities, as the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (2008) has shown. Thus, rather than hybrids, the interplay of global processes and local needs and demands produces a violent tearing apart of local rationalities and modus operandi ‘. . . breaking different cultures down and remaking them in accordance with the requirements of production and consumption’ (Dirlik, 1997: 93). A theory and a politics of the local seem urgent inflecting the debate towards the interconnections which relate to the macro-scale of the dominating global forces of the market and the kind of social and subjective resistances, struggles and dysfunctionalities they engender in the social and cultural processes of childing, parenting, education and so forth. Therefore, rather than providing children with opportunities for global/transnational identifications and collective identities, as put by Hengst (2005), globalized consumer culture can be rather theorized alongside the effects of epidemic obesity and malnutrition of children in Mexico and Brazil. As another example, commodification of child subjectivities can be related to children’s expertise as junior football players or child YouTubers who earn fabulous amounts of money and stand as role models for millions of other children who come to aspire the same life of success, wealth and celebrity, limiting their capacity to invest in other self-projects which can more probably enhance their career and work opportunities (Tomaz, 2017). Therefore, in a different vein, researchers in the South must forward novel perspectives about generationing (Alanen, 2001) that put into question canonical forms and positions of children in the family, the school system and the urban environment (de Castro, Uglione and Souza, 2018).

Final considerations

As far as child theorization and research is concerned, a differential perspective results from how child scholars problematize globalization processes and childhood. Criticism of such processes, rather than assuming their natural fate, is to be expected from Southern scholars who see the ‘emergence of the global child’ as an essentialism (Nieuwenhuys, 2010), or a universalism (de Castro, 2018), much in the same way that developmental theory once was. Therefore, globalization issues and the study of the global child cannot be embraced naively, or apolitically, since they are a key factor in producing greater social and economic inequalities and injustice in the South. Furthermore, as argued, the global child research topic seems to constitute another conceptual ‘global localism’ of Northern scholarship which manages to obtain high visibility and impact the direction of research interests not only in the North but worldwide.

A truly international dialogue must seek other bases of scientific and academic communication and exchange. Some of them seem more difficult to change though recognizing its ill-effects can mitigate the way they have conformed international dialogue so far. Above all, there is a responsibility and a task for Southern scholars here who must assume the various subjective, epistemological and political costs of dissenting and searching for more relevant ways of producing theory about their countries through research.