Description
How would centring accountability to children and youth shift our understandings of this current moment of global crisis and what comes next? Can seeing young people as ‘who counts’ offer new pathways for International Studies to meet emerging challenges? This panel explores what an accountability to children and young people lens adds to approaches to addressing global challenges. Accountability is often equated with punitive and/or technical administrative matters rather than questions of peace and justice. By centring children and young people as the ‘who counts’ in accountability in theory and practice, this panel explores the contested place and status of children and young people in the international. Amidst rapidly declining investments in peace and development and vast increases in investments in war and conflict, young people’s rights are sidelined. Threats to promotion and protection of children’s rights and agency exacerbate how we can imagine the scale and impact of global insecurities. This panel reflects on normative, theoretical and empirical conceptualisations of accountability to children and young people, and draws on how particular formations and applications of youth accountability shape possibilities in countering adultist lenses and opening space for counter-narratives of, for and by young people.
