Edited by Spyros Spyrou & Miranda Christou
Palgrave Macmillan 2014

This edited collection brings together scholars whose work explores the entangled relationship between children and borders with richly-documented ethnographic studies from around the world. The book provides a penetrating account of how borders affect children’s lives and how in turn children play a constitutive role in the social life of borders. Providing situated accounts which offer critical perspectives on children’s engagements with borders, contributors explore both the institutional power of borders as well as children’s ability to impact borders through their own activity and agency. They show how borders and the borderlands surrounding them are active zones of engagement where notions of identity, citizenship and belonging are negotiated in ways that empower or disempower children, offer them possibilities and hope or alternatively deprive them of both. With innovative cross-fertilization between Border Studies and Childhood Studies, this volume illustrates the value of bringing children and borders together.

 Contents

PART I: CHILDREN AND BORDERLANDS
1. Experiencing the State and Negotiating Belonging in Zomia: Pa Koh and Bru-Van Kieu Ethnic Minority Youth in a Lao-Vietnamese Borderland; Trần Thị Hà Lan and Roy Huijsmans
2. ‘Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me’: A Case Study on Residential Child and Youth Care in the Mexican-American Border Zone; Sylvia Meichsner
3. Growing up in a Portuguese Borderland; Sofia Marques da Silva

PART II: CHILDREN, BORDERS AND WAR
4. Arrested in Place: Palestinian Children and Families at the Border; Bree Akesson
5. Destination Europe: Afghan Unaccompanied Minors Crossing Borders; Barla Buil and Melissa Siegel
6. Crossing Borders of Geography and Self: South Sudanese Refugee Youth Gangs in Egypt; Marisa O. Ensor

PART III: CHILDREN AND CONTESTED BORDERS
7. What is a Border? Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Children’s Understanding of a Contested Territorial Division; Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou
8. Palestinian ‘Children of the Junction’: Contested Borders and Representations; Omri Grinberg
9. Bordering in Transition: Young People’s Experiences in ‘Post Conflict’ Belfast; Martina McKnight and Madeleine Leonard

PART IV: CHILDREN CROSSING BORDERS
10. Criminals in our Land! Border Movement and Apprehension of Children from Bangladesh within the Juvenile Justice System in India; Chandni Basu
11. Crossing Borders and Borderlands: Childhood’s Secret Undergrounds; Sonja Arndt and Marek Tesar
12. Unaccompanied Migrant Children and Youth: Navigating Relational Borderlands; Stuart C. Aitken, Kate Swanson and Elizabeth G. Kennedy

PART V: CHILDREN, BORDERS AND BELONGING
13. When the Border Becomes a Threshold: Children’s Visits to Relatives in Santo Domingo; Livia Jiménez Sedano
14. Borders Separating Families: Children’s Perspectives of Labour Migration in Estonia; Dagmar Kutsar, Merike Darmody and Leana Lahesoo
15. ‘Everything is a Spectrum’: Korean Migrant Youth Identity Work in the Transnational Borderland; Sujin Kim and Lisa Dorner