Children’s rights advocacy as transnational citizenship

Abstract

This paper develops conceptual tools for analyzing the practices of children´s rights organizations and professionals as transnational citizenship. To this end, we set out to trace a continuum of citizenship practices where global and local influences and forces enmesh in ways that cannot be grasped if the two are treated as separate realms. To theorize the social dynamism and spatial constitution of transnational citizenship as a local-global continuum, we turn to Bourdieuan field theoretical thinking. By analyzing the handling of the Finnish Periodic Report on children´s rights by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and the mobilization of its recommendations by Finnish children´s rights advocates, we show that transnational citizenship in the field of children´s rights is practiced not merely out there but also right here. We conclude by discussing what novel insights field theory has to offer to the study of advocacy practices as transnational citizenship.