Children, postconflict processes and situated cosmopolitanism

Views of children’s citizenship and birthright citizenship in particular, have shifted a great deal in the wake of World War II. At the same time have children’s global rights to citizenship continuously expanded. When families migrate after military conflicts, (or after natural disasters or following a financial crisis) can the citizenship and senses of belonging of children and the ways in which these are related to their respective parents and different states become quite complex.
From a global perspective it could be claimed that researchers as well as practitioners with an interest in the political processes which follow military conflicts rarely concern themselves with children. In this chapter I argue that including children in our thinking about these processes is vital for the accomplishment of equality and justice after conflict. I use the rarely discussed case of the citizenship of Indo-European migrant children in the Netherlands to illustrate my argument. These are the mixed race children, who migrated from Indonesia to the Netherlands during and after the late 1940s in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch Indies during the Second World War and the immediately following Indonesian war for independence from Dutch colonial rule. The political processes that followed these events influenced the lifelong experiences of citizenship and senses of belonging of a first generation of Indo European children and young people in the Netherlands (and elsewhere), but also the lives of their children and grandchildren.
This case raises the question of how researchers should address the citizenship of children after conflict, notably as this concerns the citizenship of first and subsequent generations of migrant children in liberal democracies. Notions of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship are increasingly being used to take issue with the responsibilities we have towards strangers. Cosmopolitanism is important for our understanding of the political processes which follow conflicts, including the position of children in these processes.
Professor in political science and philosophy Seyla Benhabib has long been engaged in discussing the rights of aliens, residents and citizens in the context of ethical notions of justice and equality in the global era. Context and situatedness have always been important to her ethical thinking. I argue that the situated cosmopolitan thought as expressed in her recent work (2008; 2011) can be used to analyse the citizenship of migrant children in post-conflict processes.
Notions of childhood, age and generation are temporal in character, as are post-conflict processes. Unfortunately, since Benhabib, with her focus on multilevel governance, hardly mentions the impact of time upon her analysis, it seems that her cosmopolitanism prioritizes issues of space over those of time, where I would argue both are needed in an analysis of post-conflict processes. I turn to postcolonial, feminist and childhood research to compensate for this.
After an introduction to the case and to the thought of Seyla Benhabib I introduce the notions of childhood, age and generation. I analyze key elements of Benhabib’s thought in relation to my case. Finally, I use postcolonial, feminist and childhood research about unequal power relations to address assumptions of time in the political analysis of world politics, citizenship and generation. I conclude that cosmopolitan thought, postcolonial feminist thought and childhood research all have a lot to contribute to our thinking on the citizenship of migrant children after conflict in liberal democracies. Unfortunately, these theorists/theories are not often in conversation with each other. This presumably perpetuates the invisibility of migrant children in post-conflict processes.