Why Children? Why Now?

In asking the questions why children? why now? we want to set stage for a discussion on the import of the global contexts of children and young people. There is significant discussion in the academic literature on this topic, and yet we feel that this discussion either does not go far enough in highlighting the role of young people in local and global processes or it is suffused with platitudes about children purported as our future. What we do here is something different. We want to challenge, in a very direct way, conventional wisdoms on both economic-development and child-development by bringing these concepts together and highlighting the ways they no longer enable appropriate understandings of our world and the place of young people in it. There is a tired inevitability to the progressive rhetoric of academics and policy makers, from local community activists to elected representatives of the United Nations, that requires energizing with new ways of knowing. This paper sets the stage for a new way of knowing couched in post-developmental, post-structural theories that are sensitive to the global lives of young people and that open up those lives to the political in new ways.