What Is Critical in Critical Children's Rights?

Children's rights have gained an important position in research in recent decades. Certainly, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter: UNCRC), a significant incentive was created ‘to do’ children's rights research (Bendo, 2019; Quennerstedt, 2013; Reynaert, 2009). It resulted in both a quantitative increase in the number of published research articles in scientific databases and a qualitative expansion of the object of study in terms of themes, approaches, disciplines, etc. (Quennerstedt, 2013). Today, children's rights research seems to be an ‘established and legitimate field of study’ (Quennerstedt, 2013: 233), even to the extent that increasingly this field is referred to as 'Children's Rights Studies'. With this, it presents itself in the academic landscape alongside other research fields such as childhood studies, human rights studies, welfare studies, development studies. Notwithstanding this slow evolution of a research field's 'coming of age', more and more critical questions have been raised in recent years about the central object of study, that is to say children's rights. These critical questions are very diverse in nature and originate from different disciplines. However, the common thread that underpins them all is that they do not seek to disqualify the concept of children's rights; instead, they strive for a more profound and nuanced understanding of children's rights, beyond the UNCRC. Although these critical issues mostly start from a critique of mainstream children's rights discourses, the stakes are primarily a search for providing alternative pathways to understanding and enacting children's rights. This book approaches this issues.