Imagining Children's Rights in Central Africa: Francophone Fiction and State Discourse since 1999

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This thesis will explore the portrayal of children's rights in francophone fiction and state discourses from Central Africa since 1999, a period of consolidation of children's rights law, as well as widespread conflict in the region. It will take a post-colonial approach to analyse how such texts reflect differing conceptions of childhood and shed light on: i) the complexity of children's lives, in contrast to the moral clarity of children's rights discourse; and ii) the tensions inherent in the relationship of the child to the adult, the individual to the state, and African nations to the international human rights regime.Research questionsThis thesis will explore the representation of children's rights in francophone fiction and state human rights discourses in a context of conflict in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa since 1999. It will address the overarching question: - how do depictions of the child in fictional and state discourses adhere to or challenge universalised notions of childhood and children's rights? In doing so, it will explore the following sub-questions:- how do these representations show the child operating and assuming agency in an adult world (of conflict)? - how do state/fictional narratives support or question African ownership of human rights and child ownership of rights?- how do narratives of children's rights serve to separate or integrate the child and society? This thesis will explore the different conceptions of the child in society in fictional, legal, and governmental texts. It will explore how their respective visions relate to each other and to the core texts of international human rights law, and will consider:i) the role of imagination: the imagination of fiction; the adult imagining the child; imagining a better, rights-affirming world; ii) the tension inherent in post-colonial political discourse and (western-centred) human rights culture;iii) the wider tension between the universal and the particular, where human rights culture uses individual narrative to engage us in universal values, but universalism ignores the individual experience/circumstance.