Precarities of non-citizen childhoods: temporal, multi-actor and ethno-national politics of migrant children’s (non)belonging

Increasing numbers of children worldwide grow up in liminal legality, precarious socio-legal status, semi-legality or de-facto stateless, as a result of migration. While the impact of legal precarity as fault-line of global inequality is widely recognized, research on non-citizenship of migrant children remains isolated within specific disciplines and centers mainly on the experience of the undocumented child in the global north. Yet, in a global migration system where legal insecurity has become a normalized tool for managing migration and restricting pathways to citizenship, the precarities of ‘non-citizen childhood’ consistently exceed the conceptual and geo-political reach of current scholarship. Providing original research that draws on a variety of temporal and geopolitical contexts and disciplinary perspectives, this special issue explores how socio-political transitions, multi-actor negotiations, and ethno-racial classification systems characterized by varying degrees of permeability condition the production, experience and struggles of migrant children’s (non)membership beyond the global north and in times of socio-political change. By addressing the temporal, multi-scalar and geopolitical processes that produce non-citizen childhoods and shape their diverse trajectories, we make a threefold contribution: we expand the political geography of contemporary encounters between migrant children, borders and the state to a broader variety of migration regimes, scales and forms of experience underrepresented in the literature; we identify the dynamics driving the precarization of political membership from the global ‘margins’ to the ‘center’ in times of change and crisis; lastly, we open the analytical spectrum for different conceptualizations of non-citizen childhoods beyond Turnerian concepts of ‘legal liminality’ assuming that ‘non-citizenship’ is an ‘in between’ and therefore anti-systemic category of classification. As such, we contribute to ongoing attempts to theorize non-citizenship as a non-residual and relational category of analysis.