A review of literature on children's rights and legal pluralism

Abstract

This paper reviews and reflects upon the literature in which children's rights and legal pluralism stand at the core. This scholarship has mainly addressed three research questions: how global children's rights standards interrelate with local normative orders and practices; how children as well as justice providers navigate legally plural orders; and how legal pluralism interplays with social change and the realisation of children's rights. As regards research topics, intra-family relations have received more scholarly attention than the position of children in the wider society. Even though, often implicitly, a variety of theoretical approaches may be discerned, particularly regarding the conceptualisation of children's rights (e.g. as semi-autonomous or static) and legal pluralism (e.g. as dichotomous or multi-level). In the conceptualisation of children and childhood, a social constructionist approach is predominant. On this basis, we formulate a number of suggestions for future research. It is concluded that further developing the subfield of children's rights and legal pluralism is worthwhile, not only because of the specificity of the knowledge needed, but also because this may deepen our understanding of the interplay between legal pluralism and human rights more generally.