Recent years have seen the emergence of an engaged and growing community of scholarship inquiring into issues of children and childhood in disciplinary international relations. Looking to sources of the field’s failure to theorize childhood and to take children seriously as political subjects in local and global contexts, these interventions have revealed how IR is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, perforce, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity. Rhetorically summoned as cherished objects of protection or made symbolic of some imagined future, children and childhood thus constructed are deployed as powerful visual and discursive resources underwriting myriad political projects, though very seldom of their own making. The hegemonic rendering of childhood, distinctly modern and Western in origin, has profound implications in terms of how young people are positioned with respect to questions of rights, security, sovereignty, and more. On these accounts alone, there is a need for greater attention in IR to ideas about childhood, as well as to the children, real and imagined, who populate its discourses and subject matters alike.

Robyn Linde’s investigation into the global diffusion of norms and law prohibiting capital punishment for persons under the age of 18 is a welcome contribution both to the emergent IR literature on childhood and to more established debates about norms and their diffusion. Linde sets out to understand the sources of the global proliferation of an age-based conception of childhood enclosing a segment of humanity deemed in need of special protections under law. This is, to say the least, an ambitious book, deriving important insights from the history of prohibitions on the death penalty in 137 countries, from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. Drawing from the database she has compiled on these many and varied cases, Linde brings into relief distinct phases in the elimination of the death penalty for children, from its genesis in Latin America and adoption by Britain and France, through two norm cascades in the latter half of the twentieth century, up to today’s near-universal elimination of the practice and its outright prohibition in all but a handful of countries. Organized into dedicated chapters, three broad mechanisms of norm diffusion are placed in historical perspective: “principled activism,” or moral entrepreneurship; “coercive socialization” through colonial relationships of control and influence; and, “globalized childhood” in the universalizing spread of hegemonic Western conceptions of children and childhood, bounded by the age 18 threshold to adulthood. These explorations are followed by a chapter addressing laggard states—China, Pakistan, and the United States—and their eventual acquiescence under the combined pressure of domestic activism and the weight of international consensus on a globalized model of childhood and corresponding expectations of all states.

In bringing a study of the death penalty to an IR readership, the book’s empirical focus is an original contribution in itself—one that does much to place some of the field’s key concepts and ideas in a new light, especially in connection with childhood. The reader will find, for example, a productive and illuminating engagement on issues of norms in the broad senses of their development and diffusion, as well as considerable grist for the mill in thinking about how they bear on fundamental aspects of customary international law. For the theorist, the historical widening of the ban on the child death penalty is interesting in that the United States, the global hegemon of the latter half of the twentieth century and throughout the span of the two norm cascades, was also a laggard state whose prohibition came by way of a 2005 Supreme Court decision. This is instructive in relation to the realist expectation of hegemonic leadership in norm diffusion.

Supported by her empirical findings, Linde proposes a hybrid sociological institutionalist and agential constructivist approach as better suited to an explanation of the remarkable spread and broad uptake of the ideational bases of a model of childhood that is, ultimately, the fulcrum of success in widely proscribing the child death penalty. The attention to late adopters also addresses something of a lacuna in the norms literature. This scholarship has tended not to distinguish between laggards and states that adopt and accede to the demands of a norm in its cascade phase, which may thus miss important differences in determinants, as well as the mechanisms through which norm conformity is eventually achieved.

Throughout the book, colonialism and its legacies loom large in ways that enrich both historical narrative and theoretical analysis. In a study taking on such a large number of states across the span of more than a century and a half, Linde’s emphasis on the colonial experience at various points in time and space is an important part of the connective tissue of the book—so much so that it provokes thinking about what might be gleaned from a turn to postcolonial theory. In particular, notions of mimicry and hybridity suggest a more complicated picture and more nuanced circulations of power in the context of “coercive socialization.” They might also work toward the recovery of subjecthoods that may too easily recede behind the centering of imperial power and authority.

Similarly, without at all discounting the importance of the contribution made in tackling the child death penalty in IR, it is a point of entry that raises other questions around subject/object relationships that call for the field’s reflection. Linde notes the relative paucity of IR scholarship that engages children as rights holders and, likewise, how little interest has been devoted to the part played by children and childhood in shaping our present rendition of international order. But bringing children into focus is still only a first step—albeit an indispensable one—toward discovering them as meaningfully present in IR. To what extent can we understand children as rights-bearing subjects as opposed to objects of protections conferred via the granting of rights by other subjects? Related to this, how may we navigate the tension between this and their relative powerlessness? These are questions not easily addressed from the standpoint of the book’s primary focus, in which children figure as objects of protection, and political subjecthood remains very much the exclusive preserve of the adult world.

Not surprisingly, given all that it takes on in the context of a field that has paid little attention either to children and childhood or to the development and diffusion of norms around the death penalty, this is a book that raises many questions. To note this is not a criticism, however. No book, especially one broaching underinterrogated issues and ideas, can do everything, and trying risks the loss of internal coherence. Another of its contributions, then, is that this is a book that provokes thought along lines other than those of its own commitments and analysis. Among other things, it highlights the need for wider scholarly reflection, hopefully generative of further contributions to the growing literature engaging children and childhood. The Globalization of Childhood is important reading not only for those who heed this call but also for anyone seeking to better understand international relations through greater awareness of the implications of some of its more enduring silences.