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Turning Global Rights into Local Realities: Realizing Children's Rights in Ghana's Pluralistic Society

Online ISBN:
9781529227659
Print ISBN:
9781529227628
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

Turning Global Rights into Local Realities: Realizing Children's Rights in Ghana's Pluralistic Society

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh

Associate Professor in Global Childhoods and Welfare

University of Bristol
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
15 July 2024
Online ISBN:
9781529227659
Print ISBN:
9781529227628
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

Dominant children’s rights discourses have long been critiqued as Western-biased due to their origins in 18th-century Western Europe. This historical context has been foregrounded in much of the literature on children’s rights, especially with the intention of illuminating the extent to which such discourses, based on their origins, are in sharp contrast to understandings of childhood and child development in societies in the South. While these critiques are valid, questions have emerged about the extent to which such arguments overlook the transformations that started to occur in so-called non-Western societies from the same period. Such transformations problematize arguments that foreground the inapplicability of children’s rights for contexts in the Global South due to the plurality that exists in children’s lived experiences. Therefore, instead of presenting children’s lived experiences in the South as being in sharp contrast to dominant rights discourses, the concept of a continuum, which highlights the varying intensity in the interactions between dominant children’s rights discourses and the realities of the lives of diverse groups of children, may better reflect a holistic picture of children’s lives. It is this continuum that this volume seeks to explore with a focus on Ghana, the first country to ratify the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. In particular this book will examine the various ways dominant children’s principles intersect with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives, with the view to not only highlighting the dissonance that exists, but also the synergies that can be identified.

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