Description
International Studies has often overlooked how global power is lived and negotiated in intimate spaces. This paper highlights the importance of considering how everyday politics shape lives from below by looking at girls’ experiences. Drawing on a rare longitudinal dataset that follows twenty-four girls and their caregivers in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic from early childhood to adulthood (ages 6 to 18), this paper explores how politics is forged within familial and community constraints.
Parents’ efforts to “protect” daughters by restricting movement and relationships reveal how global hierarchies of gender, morality, and development are reproduced through care and control. On the other hand, girls’ acts and attitudes of negotiation, resistance or adherence shed light on the ways agency emerges within constraint, transforming the mundane into political encounters.
Drawing from feminist IR and development, the paper reframes the international as a lived, relational process. It demonstrates that the politics constituting global orders are also enacted in households and communities, where gender, social norms, and power intersect. Attending to these spaces challenges the discipline to rethink who counts as a political actor and where politics truly takes place.
