| In the early 1990s, the Royal Kingdom of Kampuchea [Cambodia] became a test-case for a United Nations role in democratization, and the focus of a major human rights project that included establishing an autonomous state, and building a civil service including the training of social workers. "Child rights," through the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, with its focus on child participation---and the proper rationalization of sympathy for justice as part of healthy development---articulated the current bio-political forms of rights. Drawing on two years of fieldwork between September 1998 and January 2001, I examine this as an encounter between multiple rationalities and their pedagogies---ethical modes of caring for self and other---each drawing complex genealogies and inequalities of power into the field of debate and action. Through the work of social workers implementing child rights, a particular form of rights were folded into the intimate lives of Kampuchean youngsters and their loved ones.;I look at the freedom of liberal rights as a pedagogy of gentle abandonment, and I follow Kampucheans elders and youngsters through rights workshops, in the writing and deployment of curriculums, and into the field as they translate, implement, discuss, and transform that pedagogy in programs for 'street children.' They reinvent familiar technologies for transforming ethical substance in the making of citizens---and simultaneously attempt to reform, redirect, and heal a rift in loving connection that they perceive the rights process producing. Implicated in the invention of yet another version of "Khmer child," this process re-politicizes young and old as it reorganizes 'generation.' At stake for the kids is the shape of suffering and happiness: "What it means this thing called life." At stake for would-be governors from national, international and supranational organizations is the form of 'free' citizen and possibilities for governance. |
