Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born free and equal in possession of a rational mind. The CRC does not define the begining of childhood, only its end at the age of 18. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique because, depending on national legal regulations around abortion, it is possible to apply it from the moment of conception and does not require being live-born.

Making the child-rights identity detached from its social context and the possibility of self-identification serves to protect the child from traditional and social harmful practices directed toward children. At the same time, the monist identity of the child becomes placed out of reach of democratic deliberations and self-determination. The intersectionality of race and gender becomes two socially constructed concepts that cannot be addressed within the child-rights identity, which both serves to protect the child from discrimination but also risks making child rights detached from addressing crucial structural inequalities based on race and gender.

Childhood is a critical period in terms of growth and development regarding cognition, language, social, emotional, and physical competence. This takes place within the context of different and varying social environments, which can impact on children’s learning and understandings of the worlds in which they live and how they fit into them. Childhood is a critical period in terms of addressing issues of discrimination and inequality that exist in society — discrimination that children and their families from minority cultures, and from other points of difference, can encounter, including in educational contexts. However, it is also a critical time in which to address the discrimination that children perpetuate in their daily interactions with others. Research shows that children are aware of and participate in, for example, racial, gendered, classed and (dis)ablist based discriminatory practices early, perpetuating the power relations that exist in the broader society around difference. However, much of this practice can go unnoticed or rationalised by adults through discourses of childhood, child development, and childhood innocence.

This chapter introduces approaches to materiality and biology within anthropological scholarship on sex and gender. It emphasizes how biological subfield of eco-evo-devo (which emerged in dialogue with feminist studies) can contribute to anthropological debates. The authors focus on hormones, signaling molecules that regulate many physiological processes in humans, animals, and plants. Hormones are a particularly productive site for considering how anthropologists interested in sex, gender, and bodies might benefit from additional attention to biological processes and biological knowledges, as they challenge prevailing concepts and categorical oppositions of self/world, nature/culture, and mind/matter. The authors first sketch out a history of the relationship between anthropology and biology and, within that history, how feminists have confronted biologism. They then introduce eco-evo-devo and explore how its insights about hormones and development can serve as a prompt to rethink the body within anthropology. Last, they review examples of social scientific engagement with hormones, arguing that a deeper engagement with the materiality of hormones rather than only with their popular representation can help anthropologists continue their ongoing efforts to reframe the social and apprehend gender and sexuality as entangled within complex ecologies of industrial capitalism.

The peer review process of publication has limitations, which are discussed. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry can be beneficial and harmful, both of which are examined.

The Introduction outlines the main premise of the book: the mass closure of public schools has serious consequences for American democracy. It begins with one mother’s – Ms. Leanne Woods’ – fight to save Steel Elementary School in Philadelphia. Using the example of Steel elementary, it argues that citizens learn about politics through the institutions they interact with the most, and that for many Americans, schools are those institutions. Accordingly, when schools close en masse, these blunt policy instruments play a significant role in shaping citizens’ – specifically African Americans and Latinx – relationship with government, politics, and political participation. And yet, despite the direct consequences of these policies on the lives of these Americans, the connection between educational policy experiences and democracy remain understudied in political science. In the impending chapters, Closed for Democracy takes on this investigation and demonstrates how affected citizens come to win policy battles to save schools but lose their faith in government.

Extreme weather events and catastrophic disasters have led to the widespread damage and destruction of homes and communities, and have produced large levels of involuntary displacement. Globally, the numbers of displaced persons are expected to grow due to the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, increased population exposure, and vulnerability to natural hazards. Several sociolegal complexities and dilemmas arise in addressing the needs of displaced populations and disaster survivors for which policy, governance, and legal solutions are not clearly defined. In this chapter, we draw on theories of social constructionism and contend that social constructions of displaced populations can affect the adoption, design, and implementation of laws and policies that apply to disaster survivors and displaced populations. Specifically, we examine how the perceptions, framing, and characterization of target groups of displaced populations such as school-aged children, homeless and highly mobile families, and long-time residents who have precarious forms of immigration status, can influence governance issues that may arise during post-disaster recovery both within affected and host communities. The findings suggest that despite formal expectations of equal legal treatment, positive and negative social constructions of target populations can lead to benefits and losses for those affected and displaced by disaster.

This chapter concludes by addressing how this book’s analysis reconsiders sovereign power in IR and speculates on a structural model of responsibility that takes hybrid sovereignty seriously.

This chapter introduces the main argument of this book that global sovereign power is constituted by public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty, while sovereign authority is recognized as indivisibly public in Idealized Sovereignty. Public/private hybridity takes on different characteristics of contractual, institutional, and shadow forms based on the formalization and publicization of relations. In relation to hybrid sovereignty, the lived realities of different types of public/private hybridity are in tension with the idealized imperatives of determining what is public versus private.

This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.

This chapter develops the analytical dynamics of public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty. It first situates public/private hybridity in the global governance literature and then introduces three ideal-types. Contractual hybridity features formal and publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity features informal and partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity features nonformalized and nonpublicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. Finally, the chapter presents a Weberian-inspired research design to show off the three ideal-types in the empirics that follow.