Introduction

Inside Wembley Stadium, the men’s England manager, Gareth Southgate, huddles his players together for a final team talk before the players step up to take their penalty kicks. First for England is Harry Kane, who scores with a shot that is low and to the goalkeeper’s right. Next is Harry Maguire, who smashes the ball into the top right of the goal. However, Marcus Rashford hits the post and Jadon Sancho’s and Bukayo Saka’s efforts are saved by Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma. It is the final of the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship (Euro 2020), held in July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and England have been defeated on penalties. Sadly, the online racist abuse which followed soured what should have been a proud moment for English football, as the national men’s team had reached their first major tournament final since 1966.

After the penalty kicks, in the ensuing moments online, the three young England players who missed theirs were rendered Black and ‘foreign’ above anything else, thereby exposing people’s deeply held views concerning race relations. Of particular interest here is the fact that a Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) report released in June 2022 highlighted that more than a third of the online abuse during the final came from online accounts based in the United Kingdom (UK). To offer further context, the abuse mirrored online reactions a decade prior towards Black English players Ashley Cole and Ashley Young, who also missed penalties against Italy during Euro 2012 (Press Association, 2012). The Euro 2020 case illustrates both the ease with which online racism is expressed and its frequency – it sadly represents yet another chapter in the history of online racism within football. What is clear is that forms of hate and forms of racism are evolving, with much of this moving online. Indeed, while racist chants and insults, and even bananas, were once hurled at players inside football stadiums, we can now observe these epithets in multiple digital forms. Many strategies (past and present) have sought to challenge online racism in football, some being more effective than others.

Introduction

Football has a long history of racial discrimination, and racism in football was first addressed officially at an extraordinary congress held by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) in 2001. There are cultural differences among the many nations playing football, and equally racism in football has many different shapes and forms – therefore, eliminating racism from the game of football is certainly an overwhelming task. In this context, it is useful to present the case of racism in football within different cultural settings. I first examine racism in English football and American ‘soccer’, because of the historical ties between these two nations; then I present the case of racism in the wholly different cultural setting of Italy in order to demonstrate the manifold shapes of racial discrimination in football across the world. My point of departure is FIFA’s Good Practice Guide on Diversity and Anti-Discrimination, for it openly states that ‘one racist comment … does not necessarily make a person racist’ (FIFA, nd: 91), further complicating the already obscure relationship between racial discrimination and the popular game of football.

How football governing bodies are tackling racism

Fédération Internationale de Football Association

FIFA first addressed matters pertaining to racism at an extraordinary congress in Buenos Aires in 2001. Despite FIFA’s good intentions, racism remained widespread. In March 2013, the FIFA Task Force Against Racism and Discrimination was set up, only to be terminated three years later with the statement: ‘A FIFA task force is a temporary structure with a defined mission. Once this mission is complete – as was the case with the FIFA Task Force Against Racism and Discrimination once it had made its recommendations – the structure is dissolved’ (FIFA, 2016). Its mission, it appears, was to identify relevant antidiscrimination initiatives in time for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

FIFA is, of course, genuinely committed to eliminating racism in football. If anything, it has accumulated much knowledge and experience on the issue of racism in football, and it has never hesitated to present us with relevant examples of, as well as possible clarifications on, what may constitute discrimination.

Introduction

We write this chapter about women footballers in the United Kingdom (UK) because we are mindful that many published collections focused on football seldom acknowledge that much of the work is about men’s football. In published work, the term ‘football’ is often assumed to mean the game played by men; ‘football’ is synonymous with men’s football, and women’s active involvement is usually prefixed, as in ‘women’s football’. The tags ‘women’ and ‘women’s’ operate to position women as the ‘Other’: ‘women footballers’ instead of ‘footballers’. However, this is not our intention here. Instead, we seek to make obvious that our discussions are about women players. This is a strategy that writers could adopt when writing about ‘men’s football’ (Caudwell, 2018).

This chapter is timely because of the 2022 UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championships (Euro 2022) and the rise in interest, among both the public and policy makers (UK Government, 2022), in women and girl footballers, and their opportunities to play the game in the UK. Research conducted during the championships evidenced the ongoing nature of sexism experienced by international players (Deutsche Welle, 2022). In addition to the documentation of persisting sexism, Caudwell (2022) highlights the specific issues surrounding race and racism: ‘The spectacle of England’s women winning Euro 2022 will drive change and progress. But from their first game on July 6 to the final, it was noticeable that every English starting line-up was made up of white players.’ The Whiteness of the team started an important discussion (Asante, 2022; Trehan, 2022), which included the particular legacies of racisms experienced by Eniola Aluko during her time as an England international. Aluko played for England over one hundred times, scoring more than thirty goals. She played at three world championships and two European championships and was in the Great Britain team at the 2012 Olympics. In this chapter, we consider the compounded operation of sexism and racism experienced by Eniola Aluko and Rinsola Babajide (Babajide has, to date, played 23 times for England Under 19s, Under 20s and Under 21s, and she played for Liverpool Football Club from 2018 until she left in 2022 to play in Spain).

Introduction

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are a widely used mechanism in the transitional justice toolkit today. The purpose and success of TRCs is widely debated within transitional justice scholarship (see Jeffery and Mollica, 2017: 531). Yet there is broad agreement among practitioners and scholars that their emphasis on storytelling provides important opportunities for dialogue within transitional communities, which enables these societies to confront past human rights violations (Quinn, 2010; Philpott, 2015). Participation of children in this dialogue is often ambiguous, inconsistent, highly mediated, and driven by political agendas. As demonstrated throughout this chapter, this ambiguity is evident in how TRCs manage their relationships with children, specifically their obligation to inform on the outcomes of their political participation. Of the 52 TRCs that have occurred since the 1970s, only the reports from Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, and Canada have been reproduced in forms that children can access and engage with substantively. As such, many TRCs perpetuate marginalizing, apolitical discourses of childhood by excluding children from the political outcomes of reconciliation that their knowledge contributed to through storytelling.

Where children are concerned, the value assigned to their stories by transitional justice mechanisms often denotes a politicized agenda, overlooking the empowerment potential for the individual. Through the act of public sharing, storytelling can ‘reconstitute families, communities and relations’ while allowing individuals to ‘find one’s voice in the making of … history’ (Baines and Stewart, 2011: 258). Yet children’s stories have become inextricably tied to broader peace narratives, thus producing a tension between the collective and the individual. This is compounded by the nature of their participation, which requires that their stories are retold and shared through mechanisms that are often inaccessible and disconnected from their reconciliation experiences, particularly during the dissemination phase. Children’s interactions with institutionalized reconciliation practices such as TRCs, therefore, are often static and unresponsive, as the use of their stories as symbols for external political pursuits or the international peace agenda has become normalized. To that end, within the international peace architecture, Children and their lived experiences are often reduced to political resources despite widespread performative political engagement through testimony at TRC hearings and other consultative forums.

Introduction

Among the many invisible subjects in contemporary international politics, children and young people undoubtedly belong to those whose political agency is most strongly contested. International institutions’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic acutely exposed this invisibility and the shocking extent to which children and young people are excluded from relevant sites of crisis politics and global policy making (Hettihewa and Holzscheiter, 2020). This invisibility is all the more troubling considering that children and young people were extraordinarily affected by the pandemic as they shared experiences of disrupted education, social isolation, psychological damage, and deteriorating access to essential medical services, such as routine immunizations (Human Rights Watch, 2020; International Labor Organization, 2020; Lee, 2020; The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2020; United Nations, 2020; Thorisdottir et al, 2021). Not only are children and youth conspicuously absent as speakers, agents, and informants in the global pandemic response, they are also indirectly under-represented through the marginal role of ministries, experts, and scholarly disciplines dealing specifically with child-and youth-related aspects in national and international pandemic governance. Has this invisibility of children and youth as agents of global health policy making been addressed in research? The answer we give in this chapter is clearly ‘no’. The overall absence of children and youth as pertinent subjects in International Relations scholarship has already been studied elsewhere. Holzscheiter (2020) highlighted the undeniable link between the low salience of young people as meaningful agents of International Relations and their limited possibilities to shape politics and law from inside international institutions.

In this chapter, we will focus more narrowly on questions of political representation and agency of young people in global health, in itself a muchneglected issue so far, at least until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter starts from the observation that there is a significant discrepancy between a broad endorsement for the codified norm of child participation, on the one hand, and the actual possibilities for political representation of young people, on the other hand. While child participation as established in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, ‘the right to be heard’) enjoys wide support among international institutions, formal access rules along with further institutional, material, and performative aspects continue to limit meaningful participation of young people in salient international forums.

Introduction

Until relatively recently, the notion that children could be considered meaningful political actors was rarely considered within either academic studies or more generally in public discourse (see Beier, 2015). This chapter seeks to argue that, in part, this has been because of the ways in which political acts, (in this case, specifically resistance), have come to be defined and understood. Hughes (2020) has recently argued for a re-thinking of what counts as resistance, not least in relation to the ‘logic of intention’ that has, to date, formed a central part in its definition. When conceived only as an intentional act, with pre-determined outcomes and goals, it is difficult to recognize the potential capacity of children enacting such political agency. Here we use the example of children playing with war toys as one means of thinking differently about their political agency in general and their ability to enact resistance in particular.

The study of popular culture and global politics has also suffered at times from an unwillingness to ascribe political agency to the consumers of various forms of popular culture, and studies have frequently taken as their starting point that the power-laden ideological meanings of any given cultural text or artefact are capable of overwhelming audiences and consumers (for critiques of these positions, see Sharp, 2000; Dittmer and Gray, 2010). With regard to both the political lives of children and the politics of popular culture, there is a sense that the task of the critical academic is to uncover or decode the ways in which the lives of children, on the one hand, or the political lives of audiences and consumers, on the other, are overwhelmed or dominated by powerful external others. Resistance is sometimes offered as a possibility for critical or knowing audiences with regard to forms of popular culture, but it rarely features in accounts of the ways in which childhood and the political intersect. We briefly return to this theme in the conclusion.

Introduction

Children are ever-present in arenas of armed conflict. In contemporary consciousness, pictures of suffering children are almost synonymous with ‘new wars’. When we interrogate our mental image-bank, we struggle to identify the child in these pictures as one with agency, the capacity to enter freely into conflict without coercion or compulsion. Plenty has been said about the political utility of constructing the conflict-affected child in this way, which will be elaborated on below; states, regional actors, NGOs, and international organizations (IOs) of varying mandates make use of this norm of children lacking agency. This chapter examines the presence of this norm in annual reports of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG-CaAC), based on a wider textual analysis project conducted by the author. Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes’ (1997) concept of symbolic technologies is introduced through a discussion of the non-agentic child soldier as a norm, and then utilized to explain the way norms are afforded common phrases in these reports, which allows the reader to analyse their frequency and spread as well as gain insight into how the presence of this norm may be impacting the perception of child protection at a high policy level in the United Nations.

The non-agentic child in conflict: contemporary discussion

Scholars in anthropology, critical security studies, International Relations (IR) and broader studies of childhood have all discussed the normative assumption that conflict-affected children lack agency. For example, David M. Rosen (2005) has written on the agency of children during the Warsaw Uprising in World War II and examined how this is ignored by contemporary narratives of the event. Such discussions of conflict-affected children’s agency typically engage across two central points. The first is the question of who, exactly, is a child – when ‘adulthood’ is or should be reached, and what the relative difference in autonomy is between adult and child. The second is the representation of childhood itself as a condition in which agency is assumed to be inherently absent because adulthood and agency are considered synonymous. Both points of this discussion are engaged with in post-colonial arguments relevant to the analysis in this chapter.

Introduction

The protection of children under the age of 18 by the state has been so firmly embedded within United States law, practice, and policy that it regulates nearly every aspect of childhood. Collectively, these laws and practices create a shared expectation of children’s experiences and development that, in their ideal form, should produce adult citizens in service of the state in terms of their health, intellect, morality, and abilities. Certain deviations from the norms of childhood – sexual exploitation, abuse, and even some forms of juvenile sexual activity – have historically been addressed with new policy, law, education, and adjudication. In some cases, however, a disconnect exists between the expectations of childhood and the actual lived experiences of diverse groups of children, leading to pathologies of child governance, defined here as unintended consequences or outcomes from laws and policies that exacerbate the abuse, delinquency, criminalization, and exploitation of children. While this chapter examines the US case, pathologies of child governance can be found throughout the international system, including within key institutions of the children’s rights regime (see Chapters 1, 4, and 9 in this volume).

I examine here one such pathology – the exclusion of a cohort of children, a significant percentage of children involved in the sex trade, from treatment as victims under the law and the subsequent protections afforded other children involved in the sex trade in the United States. Precise numbers of children involved in the sex trade in the United States are difficult to come by, unsurprisingly, but studies have put the number between 5,000 and 21,000 (NCSL, 2017; Hounmenou and O’Grady, 2019). The protections studied here are Safe Harbor laws, a patchwork of US laws that seek to protect some children from criminal penalties associated with involvement in the sex trade. Boys, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQIA+) children, and those children with LGBTQIA+ clients make up the majority of children excluded from Safe Harbor protections. Of these groups, Black and Latino children are overrepresented. The common connection among these excluded children is twofold. First, children in this cohort tend to deviate from the expectation of what a ‘victim’ should be, usually a white, cisgender female child naively derailed from her prescribed path to adulthood (Baker, 2013; Austin and Farrell, 2017).

Introduction

What agency do refugee children have in the face of policies and practices that emerge from global migration management paradigms? The critical literature on migration, asylum seeking, and refugees makes the key point that, due to securitized borders around destination countries, child migrants will encounter walls, detention, forced deportation, and other harsh measures which deprive them of freedoms (Bhabha, 2014; see also Chapter 9, this volume). Children sit in an uncomfortable relationship with the increasingly bifurcated categories of ‘criminal alien’ and ‘deserving refugee’ (Heidbrink, 2014; Herz, 2019; Wernesjö, 2020). Meanwhile, a corollary migration management paradigm in refugee hosting states in the Global South incentivizes and encourages would-be migrants to stay in the South. While countries in the North seek to curtail the number of refugees entering their borders, states in the Global South, close to refugees’ home countries, work with donors to reconfigure how they host and discourage secondary migration (Crawford and O’Callaghan, 2019; Nigusie and Carver, 2019; Graham and Miller, 2021). These host countries are situated to engage in a form of humanitarian borderwork on behalf of countries in the North (Rumford, 2008; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; Little and Vaughn-Williams, 2017).

Care for children is key to this humanitarian borderwork. We focus on one component of that care – integration into local schools. This process has come to be accepted as the best practice for large hosting states in the Global South, as adopted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2019). It is a key component of broader policies aimed at curtailing migrant flows northward by locally integrating refugees into local economies and institutions (Crawford and O’Callaghan, 2019). However, local integration policy neglects the salience of long-standing regional political histories which belie the goals of welcoming and integrating refugees as they play out in refugee’s everyday personal lives.

In this chapter, we examine the diverse experiences of Somali and Eritrean refugee students as they experienced local integration into government schools in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Focusing on the agency of refugee children and their families, we explore how refugees navigate interconnected axes of global policy, regional politics, and relationships with local actors.

Introduction

Recent decades have demonstrated an unprecedented institutionalization and mainstreaming of children and youth participation in international decision-making processes (Holzscheiter et al, 2019; Kwon, 2019; Knappe and Smith, 2021). In the UN system, children and youth have been identified as one of the ‘major groups’ (United Nations, 1992) whose participation is critical for effective and just global governance of sustainable development. As a result, we have witnessed a significant growth in the organization of youth constituencies, working groups for children and youth, child rights strategies, and youth forums in a wide range of areas such as climate, peace and security, health, and migration (UNICEF, 2014; United Nations, 2018; Holzscheiter and Pantzerhielm, 2023). The development follows a broader shift in international politics, from nation-state-centred negotiations to the opening up of global institutions to include actors such as NGOs, philanthropies, cities, businesses, and experts to tackle some of the most pressing global issues of our time (Tallberg et al, 2013). This is also the case in the global governance of migration (Schierup et al, 2018). In a time when global migration is reaching unprecedented heights and states of the Global North are trending towards restrictive border regimes, international organizations like the UN and the International Organization for Migration are seeking to find durable solutions to ‘safe, orderly and regular’ migration through the inclusion of new stakeholders.

However, while the inclusion of children and youth as political actors in international politics has certainly enabled new inclusionary forms of global political representation, the institutionalization of young people’s participation remains contested. Scholars have critically noted that the mainstreaming and implementation of children’s rights and their participation do not necessarily mean that the life situation of children and youth is becoming better or that young people’s experiences of injustices are being recognized (Reynaert et al, 2012; Josefsson and Wall, 2020). It has been pointed to how the institutionalization of young people’s rights and voices in decision-making processes has also become an instrument to govern, regulate, and control children and youth (Prout, 2003; James, 2007; Holzscheiter et al, 2019; Kwon, 2019). Further, the massive mobilizations of children and youth against global injustices of racism, climate change, labour, oppressive policing, and restrictive migration policy seriously contest the ways in which they are politically represented at local, national, and global levels (Cummings, 2020; Josefsson and Wall, 2020; Bessant, 2021; Josefsson et al, 2023).

What would global political life look like without children and childhoods? If the question seems an odd one, it is perhaps because it presumes something quite outside the ambit of what global politics is usually understood to enclose, and well beyond the realm of possibilities normally imagined about childhood. Certainly, for students and scholars of disciplinary International Relations (IR), the association is not an intuitive one, but neither has it figured significantly in the wider interdisciplinary spaces concerned with critically interrogating the politics of the global. And yet, the provocation is important because, despite a dearth of attention to children and childhoods, they are indivisible from and indispensable to discourses and practices of global politics. Though the dominant understanding of childhood is premised on developmentalist-inspired assumptions of children’s incapacity and the consequent deferment of their meaningful participation in the social worlds we share, this belies not only their competence as everyday social actors but also the ways in which they are relied upon as such. And while imagined childhood is sentimentalized as a time of innocence, understood to demand a unique claim on protection from the harsh realities of the world, the fact is that children the world over contend daily with ‘adult’ life through, among other things, participation in labour markets, shouldering domestic responsibilities on which households and communities depend, enduring structural deprivations, navigating complex emergencies, and experiencing armed conflict. What is more, the everyday functioning of global systems of material production and the maintenance of status quo power relations depends on millions of children performing essential functions and fulfilling important roles across these and other contexts.

While recognizing and taking seriously this indispensability of children to socio-political life is a critical first move towards finding them in global politics, coming to a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of childhood(s) themselves is no less crucial. On first gloss, the meaning of childhood may seem self-evident as a temporally delineated formative stage of the human life course. This aligns well not only with vernacular usage and but also with culturally and historically specific common senses that hold childhood – and, by extension, children – sequestered behind some nominally fixed age threshold. For juridical purposes, this lends straightforward criteria for the governance of children through agecontingent deferment of rights, participation, bodily autonomy, and more.

Introduction

Peace support operations of various kinds implemented by the United Nations or other national, regional, and international actors are key forms of intervention and order making in global politics: they are some of the largest foreign deployments of military forces, are mandated to address a complex range of political problems, and are reasonably effective at reducing violence, ending civil wars, and preventing conflict recurrence (Walter et al, 2021). Since the end of the 1990s, protection has become a central focus of many peacekeeping missions, with an emphasis on the protection of civilians, the protection of children from grave violations of their rights, and the protection of women from sexual violence (Kullenberg, 2020). Children make up a substantial portion of the population of states hosting peacekeeping missions, and violations of children’s rights, particularly their recruitment and use as soldiers, are considered to be particularly grave. Consequently, peace support operations provide a fruitful site for investigating how a universalized conception of childhood helps to sustain certain forms of global politics and is reproduced in doing so. International discourses on child protection primarily construct children as universally innocent, vulnerable, and dependent on adults and the state, in need of protection so that they can mature into responsible adult citizens. Deviations from this form of childhood, such as child soldiering, threaten this progression and necessitate intervention (Tabak, 2020). However, this construction of childhood does not align with children’s own experiences of the specificity of their circumstances and their exercise of agency (Denov, 2012; Drumbl, 2012). Children play a range of active, political roles during armed conflict which should be considered in research on peacekeeping (Jacob, 2015).

Consequently, in this chapter, I focus on the practices of peacekeepers involved in child protection to examine both how this universal conception of childhood influences and is contradicted by peacekeeping practice, and how children actively navigate the social environment of war in ways that peacekeepers have to account for. I do so through analysing practice-oriented documents from the UN, such as training materials and manuals, and interviews with military, police, and civilian peacekeepers with experience in a range of child protection functions in several UN missions. This analysis both demonstrates one site where children play an active role in the global political world and illustrates how universalizing discourses like those on children are disrupted and contested in practice. Despite the dominance of discourses of children’s lack of agency during war, child soldiering and the UN’s response to it shows one way in which powerful global actors understand and implicitly acknowledge children as political actors.