Whether children and adolescents are adults-in-the-making or social actors in their present state is not a new debate. But it has taken on a particular salience in the past 20 years, which have seen both the almost universal acceptance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (or CRC; the United States and Somalia remain the only holdouts) and the rise of child soldiers as key actors in a range of conflicts around the globe. Politically, the “becoming” or “being” question translates into whether to emphasize how children are socialized to develop into citizens or, rather, how their political knowledge, orientations, and practices matter in the present, for which the child soldiers phenomenon is a chillingly compelling example.

In Pillars of the Nation, Kristen Cheney rightly calls attention to the ways that children's rights discourse and mobilization crisscross this debate in complex ways. Cheney is not neutral here. She clearly comes down on the side of those who view children as active agents—“child citizens,” as she calls them. But she sees the rights approach to children as having unintended consequences because, in its emphasis on legal protections, it inadvertently reinforces children's dependence on parents and the state agents who do the protecting. While the CRC and other international instruments also call for more participation by children in the decisions that affect them, Cheney sees these aspects of rights discourse as inevitably losing out to portrayals of children as existing or potential victims. Vigorously, but less convincingly, she also argues that children are taking it upon themselves to engage politically, claim their rights, and have their voices heard. Not content to be only “the future,” as adult bromides often proclaim them to be, children have the capacity to shape the present. Or at least this is how the author wants it to be. Pillars veers between assertions of children's political power and powerlessness, without ever quite reconciling the two.

Cheney explores the question of child citizenship in contemporary Uganda, a country associated in the international media and humanitarian world with child soldiers as well as large numbers of young people orphaned due to the AIDS pandemic. While a rehabilitation program for former child soldiers constitutes the subject of one chapter, and AIDS lurks in the backdrop of the lives of the children she comes to know, Cheney smartly focuses her attention on less dramatic, everyday features of Ugandan life. The bulk of the book is a careful ethnography of an ethnically mixed primary school in Kampala, Uganda's capital. The author describes and analyzes how political knowledge and values are communicated and received in the classroom (including discussions of the Ugandan flag and national anthem) and through children's participation in performance competitions in which music and dance are used to address sociopolitical issues (in this case, Uganda's relatively new constitution). In learning about their rights in the constitution and the CRC, children are exposed to a new language that, Cheney argues, presents an ideal child's life that parents, schools, and the state are unable to provide in practice. Life histories of several students are woven throughout the chapters, connecting the school to home (both in the city and ancestral homes in the village), to international agencies like UNICEF and World Visions, and to government ministries.

The book is strongest in capturing the school experience at a key moment in Ugandan history, in which public commitment to provide universal primary education is being rolled out by the government and when curricula include not just general civics but an emphasis on children's rights themselves. Cheney's account of how the latter is delivered in an old-fashioned and largely authoritarian pedagogical style will ring true to anyone who has witnessed the contradictions of locally practiced liberal internationalism. More poignantly, she captures the difficult material conditions in which children and their families pursue education, even when it is ostensibly free—at least at the primary level. The children she works with in particular attach themselves to the “right to education” even though it is clear that in Uganda's political economy, education is far from a guarantee of steady employment, and social class and networks greatly influence access to the “right” schools. Elsewhere, she eloquently traces how children's rights discourse feeds into and often amplifies generational tensions within households.

Where Pillars gets confusing is in the attempt to connect these micro-level and institutional dynamics to larger social and political processes. Even the phrase “Ugandan National Development,” which appears in the book's subtitle, is not well defined. In the introduction, it seems to connote both “nation-building/national identity” and “development” in the socioeconomic sense. Here, the author often uses rights discourse and development discourse interchangeably, even though the place of children and education in development discourse is typically addressed through human capital approaches, rather than through the lens of rights.

Once the empirical sections of the book begin, it becomes clear that nation building, and the constitution of children as key subjects and symbols of the nation, is where Cheney's interests lie. She furnishes an interesting discussion of how national identity, both from the top-down and through children's own appropriation of political messages, can be built from a base of ethnic diversity—a pluralistic vision at odds with what is often perceived as a zero-sum relationship between ethnic identity and national loyalty and pride. The book's most lively chapter, which focuses on the Ugandan Primary School Music, Dance, and Drama Festival, highlights how student performers, choirmasters, and judges negotiate the demand of presenting “traditional culture,” inevitably identified with specific ethnic groups, in ways that resonate with the festival theme of constitutionalism and national unity. With good reason, Cheney worries about how children's imagined plural nation will play out in their lived experiences, given Uganda's past and present ethnic tensions. But she also seems to take for granted that the students themselves have internalized this vision, without presenting much evidence for it.

This takes us back to the being–becoming debate. Much recent work on children and youth emphasizes their agency as a corrective to the prior dominance of political socialization approaches. But there is no obvious reason why social scientists must choose between viewing children as present citizens or as future citizens. Young people are both capable of effective social action and seriously constrained in their ability to shape their futures. Perhaps the most important contribution of Pillars is its account of the institutional and cultural roadblocks to children's actualizing their rights and exercising effective citizenship—either as youth or as (future) adults. This has a tragic dimension because the educational system, the government, and the international community all deliver to children expectations that cannot be realized. That in spite of this hard reality these children seem mostly smart, resourceful, good-humored and even hopeful is a tribute to them. But resilience in the face of long odds is different from the capacity to change the odds, whether in terms of individual lives or collective change.