The Rights of Children, the Rights of Nations: Developmental Theory and the Politics of Children's Rights

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The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), U.N. General Assembly (1989) is a major breakthrough in defining children as fully human and working to ensure them the attendant benefits worldwide. While children's rights as equal human beings may seem obvious in the 21st century, the politics of establishing and ensuring such rights are contentious. The CRC is a brilliant negotiation of conceptions of the child and international relations, yet certain tensions in the children's rights process lead to a lack of clarity in a global situation that continues to leave millions of children at risk. Analyzing the CRC and related practices from a developmental perspective can help identify obstacles to the advancement of children's rights, especially those related to opportunities for rights‐based thinking and the exercise of self‐determination and societal‐determination rights. In this article, I offer a qualitative analysis of children's rights in the context of what I refer to as the CRC activity‐meaning system. I present a theoretical framework for considering this system of policy and practice as enacted in the CRC treaty and related monitoring, reporting, qualifying, and implementing documents. A discourse analysis of conceptions of the child and those responsible for ensuring their rights in seven representative documents (including the CRC Treaty, a report by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, minutes of a U.N. Security Council meeting, reports by a State‐Party, and a report by a civil society group in that country) reveals tensions inherent in the CRC activity‐meaning system.1 Emerging from this analysis is a tension between children's rights and nation's rights. Created in part via explicit and implicit assumptions about child development in the CRC as these posit responsibilities across actors in the broader CRC system, this tension challenges the implementation of children's rights and the development of children's rights‐based understandings. I use this analysis to explain why future research and practice should address the development of children's rights‐based understanding not only in terms of maturation or socialization but also as integral to salient conflicts in their every day lives.