Child Refugees and National Boundaries

Abstract

Child refugees embody a dilemma, as national sovereign rights and universal children’s rights appear to demand opposite paths of action: the former to exercise the right to reject asylum seekers, the latter to implement the principle of the best interests of the child. In this light, child refugees expose an Achilles’ heel of democratic states, derived from the combined premises of nationhood and childhood. As social spaces, both nations and childhoods are defined and encompassed by context-specific boundaries. Understanding how these boundaries are (re-)enacted when it comes to specific cases may bring us closer to an understanding of how nationhood and childhood interact. In this chapter, I compare some criteria for refugee children’s crossing of national boundaries at four different socio-temporal sites: the UK and Norway, in the late 1930s and the early 2010s. My comparison is based on a closer look into the cases of four children, one from each of the four sites. Their situations and experiences serve to identify key criteria for the crossing of territorial, social, and symbolic boundaries into the two nation states at these different points in time. The 1930s and 2010s have in common internationally crisis-ridden and ambiguous refugee-producing situations, in contrast to the clear-cut alliances of the intervening periods. Norway and the UK share a close historical affinity as countries of refuge on the north-west margins of Europe, yet there are clear differences between their ideologies and practices of childhood and of nationhood. Furthermore, ideas and practices of childhood and of nationhood have changed considerably in all countries from the 1930s to the 2010s. Finally, I discuss some implications of the patterns revealed through the comparison, especially regarding connections between the practices of national boundary making and the changing ideologies and practices of childhood.