In a changing world we constantly need to adjust our thinking patterns and frameworks to help making sense of the continuing transformations that have a bearing on children, childhood and children’s rights. Many authors and initiatives contribute to that task. In 2016 Florian Esser et al. edited a collected volume entitled Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, which engages with the theoretical, practical, historical and institutional dimensions of the concept of agency in childhood studies. In their edited volume published in 2018 entitled Reimagining Childhood Studies, Spyros Spyrou et al. discuss future directions of the expanding and vibrant field of childhood studies that they locate at an important junction in its 25 years old history of research and theorising. A few years earlier, in 2013, Olga Nieuwenhuys and I participated in the field’s collective reconceptualization efforts through our edited volume entitled Reconceptualizing Children’s Rights in International Development. In that book, we presented a conceptual framework composed of the notions living rights, social justice and translations that wants to capture the complex flux and interrelations between legal arrangements, social practices and discourses on children’s rights. More recently, the online Reconstructing Children’s Rights Institute has been hosting in 2021 a series of conversations and resources to critically examine racism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy in humanitarian and development efforts to protect children and support families. The initiators posit that humanitarian and development aid, if practiced incorrectly and without making explicit the underlying power dynamics and funding mechanisms, ‘can cause harm and undermine the dignity and autonomy of those it intends to support, who become othered “beneficiaries.”’¹ To counter the negative consequences of the international children’s rights and child protection regime, the online institute wants to set in motion reflections and practical experiments how to ‘dismantle and reconstruct’ the existing children’s rights system. In this editorial I want to move the undertaking a step further and reflect on what it would entail to ‘reinvent’ children’s rights altogether. The act to reinvent is a challenging and unstable one that might lead to replacing the extant regime with an entirely new and better adapted version, but it can also lead to merely duplicating an already existing framework, in which case it would be a wasted effort. As we are all newcomers (Kannan et al., 2022) who must constantly reappropriate the field’s histories and concepts, the costs for reinventing something that already exists are not very high compared to the potential benefits of bringing even if it is only a few novel ideas to the conversation. How can children’s rights be reinvented to keep pace with the incessantly changing environments in which they operate?

中文翻译：

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重塑儿童权利

在不断变化的世界中，我们需要不断调整我们的思维模式和框架，以帮助理解影响儿童、童年和儿童权利的持续变化。许多作者和倡议为这项任务做出了贡献。2016 年 Florian Esser 等人。编辑了一本名为Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood的合集，其中涉及儿童研究中代理概念的理论、实践、历史和制度层面。在他们于 2018 年出版的编辑卷中，题为重新想象童年研究, Spyros Spyrou 等人。讨论他们在其 25 年的研究和理论研究历史中处于重要转折点的不断扩大和充满活力的儿童研究领域的未来方向。几年前，在 2013 年，我和 Olga Nieuwenhuys 通过我们编辑的题为“重新概念化国际发展中的儿童权利”的著作参与了该领域的集体重新概念化工作。在那本书中，我们提出了一个由生活权利、社会正义和翻译概念组成的概念框架，旨在捕捉法律安排、社会实践和儿童权利话语之间的复杂变化和相互关系。最近，在线重建儿童权利研究所在 2021 年举办了一系列对话和资源，以批判性地审查种族主义、新殖民主义和父权制在人道主义和发展努力中保护儿童和支持家庭。发起人认为，如果人道主义和发展援助实施不当并且没有明确说明潜在的权力动态和筹资机制，“可能会造成伤害并损害其打算支持的人的尊严和自主权，这些人会成为其他“受益人”。” ¹为了应对国际儿童权利和儿童保护制度的负面影响，在线研究所希望启动反思和实践实验，如何“拆除和重建”现有的儿童权利体系。在这篇社论中，我想进一步推动这项工作，并思考完全“重塑”儿童权利需要什么。重塑行为是一项具有挑战性且不稳定的行为，可能会导致用一个全新的、更好适应的版本取代现有的制度，但它也可能导致仅仅复制现有的框架，在这种情况下，这将是一种浪费的努力。由于我们都是新人（Kannan et al., 2022），必须不断地重新调整该领域的历史和概念，与带来的潜在好处相比，重新发明已经存在的东西的成本并不是很高，即使它只是一些新颖的想法。如何重塑儿童权利以跟上他们所处的不断变化的环境？