Governing through Abandonment

This article describes and analyses the “empowerment” form of child rights deployed in the move to democratise Cambodia in the 1990s, as it was embedded in 1990s “abandonment politics” (Povinelli, 2011). I sketch a genealogy for that form, and identify the problematic of abandonment as a generative link between the political and biological category of “child”, rights, and the technologies of liberal governmentality. Though available to other modes of government, these technologies emerged to manage the “condition of abandonment” of neophyte “abandoned beings” (Agamben, 1998:27). In the 1990s, defined largely by “abandonment pedagogies”, a new form of child rights seemed able to address long and short term cross-sectoral issues. To show how this elucidates the content of international child rights as deployed, I describe the international discourse of child rights as it was taught and translated into programs for street children on Cambodian ground.