In 1947, Naif al Zir’ini submitted a petition to the High Commissioner of Palestine on behalf of his son, Ahmad, who had been convicted of rape and sentenced to a term of hard labor. Al Zir’ini claimed that, under the government’s own laws, his son should have been sentenced to serve his time in a reformatory school as he was under the age of sixteen. Furthermore, the father wrote, he had given his son’s birth certificate to the police, but the police had neglected to turn it over to the court. “Your Excellency,” the petition concluded, “the imprisonment of a child is neither in accordance with the law nor with conscience.” The colonial socio-legal structure that Naif al Zir’ini confronted in the waning days of Mandate Palestine claimed the power to make and unmake childhood. The questions at the heart of his son’s case were: what did childhood mean in the context of the criminal law, did Ahmad “count” as a child, and who held the power to decide? Like other institutions of child welfare in Palestine during this period, the Mandate’s juvenile delinquency regime both constituted the child as a new subject of governance and rendered that subjecthood precarious, able to be taken away through the deployment of legal, medical, or sociological expertise. Using Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of “unchilding,” this paper examines how childhood was in turns bestowed and denied to the young people who passed through the Mandate’s criminal justice system. Employing the governmental records of young offender cases, it argues that the same institutions and instruments that constructed children as a new category of governable subject – the scientific disciplines of sociology and psychology, forensic medicine, and theories of child development – were also the mechanisms through which childhood was dismantled and revoked. Furthermore, this paper shows that the process of childing and unchilding Palestinian youth in the Mandate period was realized within the interactions between the legal structures of the government and the socio-political specificities of local communities. Who got to be a child and how childhood was granted was an arena of contestation between the rhetorical and physical power of colonial law and the actions and advocacy of parents, families, and the young offenders themselves.

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking youth in Greece: Protection, liberation and securitization This paper examines how shifting local attitudes and migration management policies (from child care and liberation to temporality and criminalization) shape the migration and integration experience of Unaccompanied Minors (UAMs) in Greece, many of whom are of Syrian origin. The study finds that the state’s shift from child protection to migration management policies occurred following the steep rise in the official numbers of UAMs during 2014-2018. The shift manifested in three contradictory ways: 1) official endorsement of the international child rights and child protection legal framework while ignoring unofficial practices that violate children’s rights; 2) assigning law enforcement agents to protect the best interests of the child, and child care agents to enforce migration control policies; and 3) deploying a ‘migration crisis’ language over the child protection discourse to justify protective custody as a ‘means of last resort.’ The study suggests that the current international child protection framework disproportionately promotes the interest of the state over the child. The state’s interpretation of the ‘best interests’ principle disregards both the UAMs’ needs and their rights for protection and ethical care under international law. Minors seeking asylum are regarded as ‘guilty’ of voluntary migration and exposed to arbitrary imprisonment. Thus, UAMs are unchilded (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2019) by being placed into zones of segregation, incarceration, criminalization and isolation. “Unchilding” is marked by young people’s social exclusion from various contexts (both local and global) and spaces (educational, welfare, economic). The paper concludes by suggesting that UAM’s performativity, as voluntary migrants –– leaves many of them exposed to violence and abuse by both state (e.g. police, welfare services, migration officials) and non-state (NGO workers) actors. Hence, the state and non-state actors take part in the “Unchilding” process and push the minors to ‘invisibility,’ which in turn increases their vulnerability to illegal and criminal activities (i.e. gangs, smuggling, trafficking, sexual exploitation and kidnapping). The research for this paper is based on a qualitative data, including NGO reports; policy briefs; statistical data; testimonies of UAMs receiving child protection services in Greece; and semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with 10 professionals who work with the local municipality of Thessaloniki and The Association for the Social Support of Youth (ARSIS), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that runs youth reception centers and shelters for UAMs across Greece.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of “unchilding” is particularly apt for settler colonial societies such as Israel. In this paper, I would like to extend the concept to a relatively understudied case, that of Kurdish children in Turkey. I argue that the experience of Kurdish children in Turkey’s Kurdistan structurally resembles in many ways that of the Palestinian children described by Shalhoub-Kevorkian. Relying on an oral history archive of interviews with Kurdish youth in the city of Diyarbakir, I discuss the experiences of children at the height of the war between the Turkish army and the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê or Kurdish Workers’ Party) in the 1990s. Exposed to violence and forced displacement, these children migrated from rural areas to the margins of the city with their families. Unchilding took many forms, including exposure to violence and war, the need to learn Turkish and work in order to provide for their parents and siblings, and strategic adjustment to exclusion in the city. Despite its negative consequences, unchilding also made it possible for these children to make their mark upon the city at a time when the Kurdish movement was strong in the public sphere, and to transform themselves from the excluded to the representatives of a new urban generation of young people.

Earlier studies show how colonial regimes target colonized children’s lives, bodies and futures as part of the colonizer’s logics of elimination (Wolf 2006), genocide (Smith 2010) and as an articulation of sovereignty (Mbembe 2003). Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) argues that Palestinian children are political capital in the state’s hands. She examines the way the settler colonial state uses children, invokes violence to govern their childhood, and reproduces sovereignty marking children’s bodies and lives as unchilded others. Unchilding for Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an Israeli colonial machinery of dispossession that intentionally targets children, maintains children in a constant state of mundane dismemberment and eviction from humanity and childhood, in their homes, schools and neighborhoods. Responding to the colonial machinery of elimination, dispossession and killing of colonized children, this study will focus on Palestinian fathers’ encounters when dealing with unchilding of their sons and daughter by looking into the individual, familial and collective psycho-social modes of dealing, coping, resistance and growth. Looking at the workings of power that affects, frames and re-constructs fatherhood and childhood under an ongoing politically violent context, and based on 30 interviews with Jerusalemite fathers, this presentation will examine fathers’ experiences of unfathering (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019) and handcuffing (Otman, in press), which hinders their ability to protect their children. My analysis of the interviews reveals that although fathers experience fear, anxiety and loss in their everydayness, fathers’ love, care and resistance motivate them to give new meanings and open new spaces of protection, to challenge the Israeli colonial machinery of dispossession. By standing against state power and its violence, colonized fathers insist on their fatherhood against colonial unfathering, maintain their right to father, build new context-sensitive modes of protection, and search for spaces of life under ongoing machinery of trauma and loss. By engendering the analyses, and offering an indigenous and feminist reading to the voices of Palestinian fathers against unchilding, I argue that in contexts of structural oppression and danger, scholars need to challenge the mainstream concepts of protection and “good fatherhood” and open these concepts up to reveal contextual complexities, and the various and innovative modes of fatherhood. By challenging state power and its violences, fathers’ narrations offer us new knowledge regarding their constant struggle against unchilding and unfathering, and the plurality of modes of resistance and survival in life and after death.