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Children's rights advocacy as transnational citizenship

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Global Networks

Published online on

Abstract

In this article, we develop conceptual tools for analysing the practices of children's rights organizations and professionals as transnational citizenship. To this end, we set out to trace a continuum of citizenship practices in which global and local influences and forces enmesh in ways that are difficult to grasp when treated as two separate realms. To theorize the social dynamism and spatial constitution of transnational citizenship as a local–global continuum, we turn to Bourdieu's field theory. By analysing the Committee on the Rights of the Child's handling of the Finnish Periodic Report on children's rights, and how Finnish children's rights advocates mobilize its recommendations, we show that transnational citizenship in the field of children's rights is practised not merely ‘out there’ but also ‘right here’. We conclude by discussing what novel insights field theory has to offer to the study of advocacy practices as transnational citizenship.