ABSTRACT
Despite the age of universal citizenship, there is one group of billions of people who do not have full citizenship in any society in the world. Children are a rapidly growing population with a history of special “private” status in states, burgeoning universal rights claims, and vastly increased mobility. Millions of these children are “out of place”: doubly displaced from family and state in sweatshops, refugee camps, bordellos, and orphanages. Children across borders are often invisible, or treated as permanent exceptions to wider social processes. The movement of children across borders and state responses to their movement reveal important characteristics of the citizenship gap between international rights and global realities.
