The main title of the book, Political Children, will for many be a radical, or even disturbing idea in itself. This is understandable. The notion that it is our task, as adults, to keep our “innocent” children as far away from the “corrupting” political world as possible has become a foundational premise around which we structure our societies. Yet whereas this has proven to be a powerful normative script, it bears little resemblance to what it is actually like to be a child in the world, no matter if one grows up in Stockholm, New York, Gaza City, Nairobi or, as the children described in Luttrell-Rowland’s book, in and around Peru’s capital Lima. Showing just how political children’s lives are, and how important it is to take them seriously as political actors if we truly wish to understand their place in society, remains one of the main tenants of critical childhood and children’s rights scholarship. Luttrell-Rowland’s book is an important contribution to this body of work, as it seeks to expose and understand the various ways in which state power operates by listening to two different groups of children whose lives are characterized by structural violence, poverty, and work. The first group of children live and work in Lomas, a town on the outskirts of Lima whose local economy revolves around a garbage dump. The second group of children live closer to Lima’s center and are members of a social movement of working children, named Movimiento de Adolescentes y Niños Trabajadores Hijos de Obreros Cristianos (Movement of Working Adolescents and Children of Christian Workers; hereafter: MANTHOC).
Before discussing some of the book’s main findings and theorization, a few words on the methodology. Luttrell-Rowland started her research for this book in 2007 already, but it remains rather vague how exactly the following 16 years shaped out. In the introductory chapter, she explains her account is based on “extensive interviews” with policy makers and other officials working on children’s rights (p. 10), as well as “doing field visits” to talk to the children that are central to her book (p. 11). A more elaborate description of the nature, quantity and dates of these interviews and fieldtrips, and how she went about selecting her participants, would have benefited her account. As it stands, I found myself reading the subsequent chapters without fully grasping Luttrell-Rowland’s role as the researcher, or the implications of the extended period over which the research took place. Her main methodological approach is “relational listening,” which she describes as a way of listening to children that is contextually attentive, in particularly in relation to Peru’s history of colonial violence, the internal armed conflict that raged during the 1980s and 1990s, and structural/slow state violence (broadly understood here to include state absence and neglect). While it does not become entirely clear how relational listening differs from how social and legal anthropologists normally situate and contextually understand their research participants, Luttrell-Rowland yields important insights into the legal and political consciousness of these children, and what it says about the power relation between them and the state.
For instance, in chapter 1 – which together with chapters 2 and 3 forms Part 1 of the book focusing on the children in Lomas – she describes how she invited children to draw their neighborhood. She reads these drawings not solely as visual representations, but as prompts for these children to be “interpreters, curators and narrators” of the place they live in (p. 38). She remarks that the children tend to focus on the parts they like, while the everyday violence they face is left out. Lomas’ garbage dump, which constitutes both a major health risk as well as a source of income for the children and their families, does not feature in the drawings. Luttrell-Rowland theorizes this in relation to the other systems of violence and injustice (colonialism, and the internal armed conflict in particular) that also “float” around the edges of their lives. These forms of violence are experienced and talked about by the children, but not explicitly articulated. Chapters 2 and 3 further explore how the children of Lomas experience and talk about state power and violence by focusing on three contested dimensions of their lives: their struggle to combine work and education, their ambivalent relation to the police and the political murals that are scattered around Lomas. Despite the claim of one of the children that “there are no politics in Lomas,” Luttrell-Rowland shows how these children constantly but perhaps unknowingly politically engage with the state through fears, fantasies and hopes.
In Part 2 of the book, which comprises chapters 4 and 5, she shifts the focus onto a second group of children who, unlike their counterparts in Lomas, explicitly cultivate their political identity as workers, citizens and members of MANTHOC. Fighting for better working conditions and children’s political recognition, they show how “the state” is also a public space for children to manifest themselves as political participants. For instance, as movement members, these children partake in public demonstrations, and claim a say in processes of law and policymaking that concern them. The author theorizes these attempts at political participation as exposing the subversive potential of children’s rights discourse. She argues that the Peruvian government has embraced a framework of children’s rights to depoliticize the role of state power in children’s lives, which subsequently masks structures of state violence. It also leaves the children of MANTHOC, who seek to be legible to the state, little choice but to translate their political claims and objectives into a deradicalizing language of rights.
One of the main conclusions that Luttrell-Rowland draws from her longstanding and multisited fieldwork is that recognizing and taking seriously children’s every day and institutional political participation makes clear that the state is not to be understood as a situated central site from which power and violence flows to the margins, but as implicated and embodied through affect, discourse, action and inaction. While this might not come as news to anyone familiar with the critical scholarship on state power that is cited by Luttrell-Rowland throughout the book, the fact that she makes this clear in relation to children, a group that continues to be overlooked and ignored in critical socio-legal scholarship, makes this book a worthy read for anyone interested in the important role and resistance of children in the politics of rights.
