The Geopolitics of Children’s Sexuality: Reframing Rights and Contesting Moral Sovereignty in Europe

This article develops the concept of the geopolitics of children’s sexuality to examine how childhood becomes a central arena of contestation in the global governance of gender and sexuality. Drawing on Polish and Hungarian legislative initiatives on the “protection” of children, it argues that childhood is strategically mobilized as a form of symbolic capital in transnational struggles. The framework foregrounds children’s sexual agency as a key object of dissensus linking the micro-politics of subject formation with the macro-politics of geopolitical boundary-making. Children’s rights, rather than constituting a stable legal framework, are reinterpreted by both liberal and illiberal actors, thereby revealing the constitutive ambiguity and normative elasticity of human rights. Illiberal actors deploy securitization strategies that construct childhood as a national good to be defended, framing gender and sexual diversity as threats to moral sovereignty. The article contributes to debates on norm contestation and the role of childhood as a technology of governance, showing how struggles over intimate life are constitutive of broader geopolitical conflicts.