ABSTRACT
Children’s rights, in legal terms, haven’t been the only structuring phenomenon in the past. This chapter illuminates the importance of other concepts – governance, surveillance, and the transformation of concepts – as well as mundane popular culture notions of children’s needs and interests. The study of rights must be set in a historical context with a sensitivity to the construction of historically defined welfare and children’s rights regimes. Social changes are timed differently in diverse geographical locations. Long processes of change of relevance for children/young people have different temporal logics. They may conflict with institutional changes that transform in a more limited timeframe – and childhood culture and lived experiences are also on other clocks. This chapter discusses how the analyses of long- and medium-term structural changes can give us tools to better understand the role of children’s rights in society. Negotiations of the fundamental conflict between long and short processes of change lead to the redefinition of rights, rights claims, and childhoods. It is historically not a homogeneous process, and the interaction between national, regional, and international transformations has been contradictory and conflict-ridden.
