ABSTRACT
The framework of children’s rights inspired by the UNCRC not only ushered in hegemonic forms of social contracts that consolidate the sovereign, rights-claiming child subject of Western creation but also dislodged familial and community logics of childhood, detaching children from the complex webs of social and generational interdependencies. Drawing on research that situates children in broader contexts of development and social transformation in Ethiopia, this chapter draws attention to the notion of ‘generationing rights’ to critique the epistemic claim that views the human rights of children as different from the human rights of other generations, while simultaneously revealing how children’s rights are fundamentally a relational product imbricated in multiple relations of power. Recasting children’s rights as cyclical/reciprocal, relational, and interdependent renders intelligible the modes of existence of children outside modernity’s framework in ways that do not contradict their ethnocultural, ‘unwritten’ rights and responsibilities. This approach also makes it possible to reimagine the collective rights of children expansively and critically through the lenses of families and communities in which children are an integral part.
