Empowered inclusion: theorizing global justice for children and youth

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary child and youth experiences of globalization call for retheorizing global justice around a new concept of empowered inclusion. The first part of the paper examines three case studies in globalization–child labour movements, child and youth migration, and young people’s organization around climate change–and shows how, in each case, young people, through their struggles against injustice, are simultaneously disempowered and empowered by their deep global interdependency. The second part proposes new theoretical advances in global justice that better respond to child and youth experiences through a childist concept of the empowered inclusion of both children and other marginalized groups. And the third part advances some preliminary suggestions about how a more child-responsive conception of global power and justice might be operationalized in practice across global policies, institutions, and culture.