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 recognize 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 international relations is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity.

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J. Marshall Beier is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada.

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Helen Berents is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Griffith University, Australia.

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"Extending and enriching our understanding of how children and childhoods are always already imbricated in the practices of global politics, the various essays in this impressive and diverse volume demonstrate the significance of children as subjects of political discourse and intervention, and agents of political change. The collection is both coherent and wide-ranging, articulating clearly not only why children and childhoods matter in global politics but also how these political actors and processes can be – indeed, are – pivotal to the constitution of global-local connections and to the reproduction of, or resistance to, existing structures of power." Laura J. Shepherd, The University of Sydney

“This groundbreaking volume demonstrates in brilliant and wide-ranging detail why studies of children and childhoods are not just peripheral but essential for understanding the realities and possibilities of global politics.” John Wall, Rutgers University