The engagement of the CISV Village’s participants with the international character and content of the camp presents novel implications for a pluralist understanding of the law, including international law. The lens of legal pluralism invites us to identify and reflect on the coexistence and interactions with state law of overlapping normative spheres. Those spheres exist along a spectrum of formality and breadth ; they include, for example, Indigenous worldviews, religious orders, workplace expectations, intra-family dispute resolution mechanisms, and customary international law. They could also encompass the normative spheres of a classroom, a sports team, or a summer camp. Understood to constitute a “semi-autonomous social field”[31], these many spheres are also internally plural, in the sense that they draw from a plurality of intertwined sources of normativity, resulting in a “plurality of pluralities”.[32] The CISV Village — a summer camp with governing structures that shape and organize the participation and interactions of young participants — is an obvious site for the legal pluralist to observe and describe a non-state-centric, normative, and internally plural legal order.[33]

Critical legal pluralism accepts the reality of co-existing normative or legal orders, but shifts the focus to individuals and the ways in which their choices and actions are shaped through engagement with the overlapping legal orders in their lives. It is the individual, rather than the normative order, that is understood to be the central site of creation for legal knowledge and meaning. In refusing an account of law as an “external force” to which individuals are subject[34], critical legal pluralism is premised on the notion that “knowledge”[35], as experienced by an individual, “maintains and creates realities”.[36] Within any given time and space, subjects construct their unique legal reality and legal subjectivity. The individual, according to critical legal pluralism as explained by Kleinhans and Macdonald, is thus primarily “law-inventing”, rather than “law-abiding”.[37]

This role of the individual in norm making is further developed in a paper by Macdonald and Sandomierski[38], who explicitly challenge the state’s monopoly over producing legal rules and the notion that additional or complementary layers of norms created by ordinary people are external to the state-sanctioned system. They assert that, on the contrary, law begins and ends with human recognition ; it is constantly renegotiated by individuals, all of whom negotiate law in their lives. While it is common to distinguish law, on the one hand, from norms, customs, or practices, on the other hand, that distinction is misleading, according to Macdonald and Sandomierski. Instead, all constitute legal rules, and all are born from human interactions. Rather than mere legal subjects, individuals are agents of choice who give meaning to legal rules through their unique relationships to and within their normative communities. On this account, all human beings have significant and concrete lawmaking capacity.

If we return to the CISV Village with the invitation provoked by critical legal pluralism to see individuals as creators rather than subjects of law, the camp becomes much more than a mere example of a non-state normative order. It becomes a place where children exercise their legal agency, and a site where young participants imagine, engage with, and implement rules to govern international coexistence. With few exceptions, however, children have not received attention as law creators in critical legal pluralist literature. The maker or creator of law typically imagined by critical legal pluralism is an adult[39], and the notion of children’s legal agency remains underdeveloped. This is where recent scholarship in childhood studies, a domain that views interactions and subsequent norm-making among children as manifestations of agency, can help us start to fill out the potential and power of young people as law creators.

In advocating for the recognition of children’s agency, scholars of childhood studies increasingly deviate from the field’s traditional preoccupations.[40] Childhood studies as a field of research originally focused on children as incompetent social actors whose development was seen as dependent on the guidance of adults[41]. This focus dramatically shifted early in the 21^st century towards the view of children as contributing to the “building of social structures”.[42] Underlying the more recent view is the notion that agency and participation are inextricably linked.[43] Indeed, the agency of children can be identified in their ability to transform and influence, through their active participation, the social structures in which they are embedded.[44] By participating and engaging with their surroundings, children exercise their influence over their environment. In this picture of children’s participation, it comes as no surprise that children’s agency is discussed in terms of interacting with, adjusting to, negotiating with, and subsequently influencing multiple social orders and communities in which children find themselves.[45]

We have seen already that legal pluralism is both enriched and challenged by critical legal pluralism. Here we see that the field of childhood studies is both enriched and challenged by the contemporary emphasis on agency. Barry Percy-Smith, a leading scholar in children’s active citizenship studies, coins the term “agency in context”[46] to explain how young people participate in everyday relationships and navigate through “complex social and environmental variables that shape their lives”.[47] Children do not merely accept the social contexts that they navigate, but rather exercise their agency “in the way they develop their response to that context”.[48]

Children are then active participants in the constant creation and direction of their worlds. As sociologist Claudio Baraldi emphasizes, the extent and shape of children’s contribution and autonomy varies considerably[49] ; indeed there is no explicit threshold at which participation turns into agency. Instead, as Baraldi notes, children actively construct society whenever they participate in contexts such as family and school life.[50] The agency of children becomes evident when their “actions [in these contexts] create alternatives to the normative standards […] proposed by adults and institutions”.[51] In a similar vein, sociologist William Corsaro explains children’s agency in terms of internalization and subsequent reproduction of the adult context.[52] As children reproduce information that they have internalized from the adult world, they are constructing their own unique worlds, referred to by Corsaro as “peer cultures”.[53]

As part of a research program called VOICE (Views On Interdisciplinary Childhood Ethics), a group of researchers across a spectrum of disciplines, led by Franco Carnevale, has developed a complementary understanding of agency within a general framework of childhood ethics.[54] According to this understanding, children’s moral experiences within their day-to-day contexts inform their choices and actions ; the exercise of their agency is thus intertwined with their unique aspirations and concerns. Children’s actions — shaped by ideas of right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust — reflect active engagement with the societal structures in their lives.[55] Paying attention to the moral agency of children sheds a different light on more traditional concerns about the vulnerability of children and their need for protection, without setting these concerns aside.[56]

The CISV Village provides a striking forum in which to explore the agency exercised by children. Participants leave their home communities and confront the new “status quo”[57] of the camp context. Here, they look for common forms of expression, often manifested in unpredictable action[58], and they find creative ways to interact and adjust to the cultures of their peers. In a kind of “world workshop”[59], they construct (and reconstruct) intercultural and interpersonal relationships that, in turn, contribute to the production of a camp meta-culture. This patchwork of individual contributions to the camp’s architecture evolves into a system of collectively constructed camp norms.[60] The CISV Camp meeting, described in detail below, brings to life the notions of agency as reproducing change and creating the alternative normative standards.

The CISV meeting takes place once at the beginning of the camp and once halfway through the camp. During the first meeting, the camp counsellors (also known as leaders) and staff members lay down the groundwork for the camp and its default rules. For example, leaders decide which groups will be responsible for cleaning which part of the premises every day by determining procedures for choosing the rotation of the cleaning committees. Leaders propose default mechanisms to the campers such as dividing the cleaning committees by country (e.g., group A shall be comprised of the delegation of country X and will be responsible for cleaning the dining hall on Thursdays). During the second meeting that takes place halfway through the camp, the children are invited to participate and engage in concrete administrative decision making. The children, in deliberating among themselves, may reject these default proposals and try to come up with solutions that suit their own needs and preferences (e.g., some of them want to be grouped with their friends, others want to get to know new groups).[61] Participants bring their own values and opinions on the mechanics of voting to the table, as there is no single “right” way of solving the situation.

As the children express grievances and disagreement while also sharing ideas and pitching proposals, their agency becomes evident in many dimensions. First, their “moral agency”[62] comes to life as their moral experiences — manifested in their aspirations and concerns — are made explicit. Second, in a manner that parallels the illustrations of Percy-Smith and Corsaro, we observe the agency of the participants as they compromise and recombine norms to establish rules among themselves, such as informal do’s and don’ts that become emblematic of the camp’s culture as a whole. As they share, question, articulate, and internalize their rules, the campers create a new normative sphere that serves as common ground for all. Third, the rules that the children create in turn affect the dynamics of the camp ; they guide not only the relationships among the children, but also the interactions between the adults and children. All of these aspects of the meeting support Baraldi’s argument that children’s agency influences the society in which children are embedded.

The negotiation of a common camp culture among the CISV camp participants results in a set of camp norms with personal, group, and societal implications. Sharing diverse perspectives enriches the campers’ understanding of how other children behave, allowing them to question personal habits and internalized norms. If other children were raised to act in a different way than I was, why do I behave this specific way ? Is one way better than another ? Is one of us correct and the other mistaken ? In the words of an alumna, “I remember realizing that there was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’... there was no ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ way to eat (which my mom had always said there was…), because everyone was eating differently, but that was just what they had been taught... there was no ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ way to see the world”.[63]

The agency of the children becomes evident as they collectively design and adopt camp norms, drawing on a spectrum of individual backgrounds, experiences, and communities. In a more formal (and adult) context, this exercise could be characterized as administrative rule making. In this context, we might say that the campers create the “law” of their camp and, in doing so, become active “legal agents”.

The general insight of contemporary childhood studies — that children not only interact with, but also directly influence their environment or social settings — resonates with the notion of the individual as lawmaker central to critical legal pluralism. By combining these two fields of study, we propose that the same factors that informed our discussion above on the agency of children at the CISV Village (adjusting to new contexts and creating alternative norms) feed into a novel discussion on youth and law creation. The CISV Village offers an extraordinary and fruitful opportunity to connect the exploration of children’s agency encompassed in childhood studies with the literature on critical legal pluralism. We recall that, in shifting attention from the law’s impact on an individual to the individual’s agency as the source of law, critical legal pluralism allows for closer scrutiny of the contexts and materialization of lawmaking.

The CISV Village invites us to reimagine critical legal pluralism’s law creator as a child, and, conversely, the child agent as a law creator. We suggest that the concept of children’s legal agency lies at this intersection of childhood studies and critical legal pluralism. Here, we briefly explore that intersection before returning to the CISV Village to illustrate the potential and power of children’s legal agency within specific camp activities grounded in international law.

Roderick Macdonald, a former scout leader and legal pluralism scholar, introduces the image of the child as a lawmaker in a camp context in his Lessons of Everyday Law, in which he focuses on the processes and rules governing scouting activities. In particular, he illustrates how seriously children regulate their games by completely inventing rules and procedures that are the product of trial and error, past practices, and experience.[64] What Macdonald characterizes as lawmaking[65] encompasses the same kinds of rule-making activities that childhood studies scholars would label manifestations of agency. In later work, co-authored with David Sandomierski, Macdonald returns to scouting to consider more explicitly the literal and symbolic meaning of youth lawmaking.[66] For these scholars, a scout camp constitutes a testing ground for pre-existing normative orders. Through varied activities and experiences, the scouts gradually position themselves vis-à-vis each camp rule, eventually creating their unique framework for accomplishing their aspirations and defining the group’s normative identity.[67]

In a similar vein, legal scholar and member of VOICE Shauna Van Praagh explores children’s lawmaking capacities within the risk-filled context of “adventure playgrounds”.[68] Filled with surprising and even dangerous objects, such as tires and crates, hammers and nails, adventure playgrounds are places for children to experiment, play, take risks, and meet challenges with limited interference from adults. Explicitly designed and maintained “to develop the resilience, self-confidence, independence, and social skills of the young people who play there”[69], they invite children to engage creatively with their surroundings and peers ; in doing so, the playgrounds become spaces for exploring the innovative capacities and autonomy of their users.

The CISV Village can be added to scouting activities and autonomy-encouraging playgrounds on the list of productive sites for exploring the exercise and development of children’s legal agency. In all three contexts, young people actively create and sustain the complex rules that shape their universes. They make and remake the law of scouting, the law of play, and the law of camp life.

At all three sites of activity, children find themselves in an environment outside of their usual spheres of interaction. They move from the norms of family to those of the scout troop, from the norms of the schoolyard to those of the adventure playground, from the norms of their home communities to those of their international summer camp. The new environments prompt children to re-evaluate their adherence to rules and encourage them to accommodate, modify, and create rules adapted to the circumstances. All three settings incentivize active engagement : each child’s wellbeing and position in the group depend to some extent on that individual’s ability to adapt to the situation and/or to participate in renegotiating collective rules of conduct. On the adventure playground, the presence of dangerous objects invites children to engage with risk as they interact with each other. Newcomers to the scouting environment discover a set of pre-existing rules and hierarchical structures ; at the same time, they participate in the ongoing creation and modification of those rules. Young CISV campers, arriving from all over the world with their own baggage, are encouraged to share and exchange the metaphorical contents of their duffel bags with their co-campers.

All three settings also share the striking absence of adults as principal rule makers and problem solvers. Like children free to play in adventure playgrounds and young participants involved in scouting, campers at the CISV Village confront and resolve problems without top-down solutions articulated and implemented by adults. Adults do not disappear from any of these sites, but they do retreat to the background. The lack of direct or dictated adult supervision and guidance brings to the forefront children’s capacity to express themselves and exercise their autonomy. Resolving conflicts among participants, reconciling play ideas, and building relationships all require the ability to engage with and distinguish between rules worth following and those better replaced or discarded.

Recognition of the distinctive transformative potential of shared experiences and relationships among young people is one of the foundation stones of the CISV Village. In responding to the experience of world wars in the first half of the 20^th century, CISV Village founders aspired to create a space where young people transcended the borders of states and regions to build friendships and learned to engage with other perspectives.[70] The constant exchange among “villagers” is meant to build bridges and to appreciate and reconcile substantially different experiences and worldviews. Tapping into children’s innate capabilities and developing them is thus an explicit part of the CISV philosophy.[71] The agency of young people is reflected in the existing academic literature describing and analyzing the CISV Village’s objectives, structure, and experience. However, the ability of young people to create “legal” norms or rules, or to participate in “legal communities”, remains relatively unexplored. We now turn to CISV camp activities grounded in international law issues as an illustration of legal agency on the part of children grappling with the complexities of conflict resolution and peace building.

“Cookies and Conflict” and “Peace-War-Peace” are two camp activities that invite us to revisit a traditionally limited appreciation of children’s potential as peacemakers and shapers of international law. As we recall, CISV is grounded in “global citizenship education”, whereby participants are empowered to engage with global issues through experiential learning activities. Conflict resolution stands in the centre of this approach, defined as a methodology that resolves disagreements through “finding a peaceful solution with the aim of restoring peace and cooperation”.[72] Further, the CISV Village’s approach recognizes that the diversity of cultures generates different understandings of what causes conflict and what response is appropriate.[73]

The Peace-War-Peace activity consists of several core elements.[74] All camp participants (children and adults) are divided into six teams. Each team is given art supplies and cardboard to create a country or a town complete with roads, houses, schools, and hospitals. After the teams have spent some time designing their towns, a staff member announces that it is now war time and directs all participants to destroy the towns of their neighbouring teams if they so choose. While some teams opt to attack the towns of the neighbouring groups, others choose not to engage in any destruction. Typically, the children become upset when they see their towns in ruins.[75] Once the war is over, the children are asked to rebuild their towns, this time with limited resources.

A classic simulation-style activity, Peace-War-Peace gives children room to reflect on war and the difficulty or even impossibility of recovering from it.[76] During the debriefing session that follows, children reflect on why they chose to wage war or, on the contrary, why they decided to resist the order to wage war and refrain from destroying the neighbours’ towns. Justifications offered by the children included not wanting to ruin their friends’ towns, that this destruction goes against the CISV culture that they created, and that it made more sense to speak to their friends in the neighbouring town first and come to an agreement not to destroy each other’s towns.[77] These justifications appear to emanate from the children’s collective decision making as they engage with and reflect on the overlapping normative spheres that guide their choices. Indeed, critical reflection on their choices, as well as tracing them back to (and contrasting them with) their outside communities’ cultures and histories, is one of the objectives of global citizenship education.[78]

Peace-War-Peace casts children’s lawmaking capacities beyond the confines of the camp and shifts them to the international stage. It brings the concrete stakes of international law to the forefront and allows participants to make them their own. Peace-War-Peace thus empowers children to reflect upon core international law questions, even though they are not labelled as such. Children’s reflections — such as whether it is right to destroy their neighbouring towns, how they can convince other teams to come to an agreement not to destroy each other’s towns, and their expectations that other teams will retaliate as a reaction to their actions — shed light on children’s engagement with the rules of war, accountability, and peaceful conflict resolution.

Lessons learned in this activity, and memories of annoyance or sadness associated with destroyed towns, will transfer to real-life circumstances. The cost of different strategies and behaviours has a tangible weight once children have experienced these legal avenues. Not only are the participants trusted to develop and improve their understanding of conflicts, but it is hoped that they will go on to positively influence the response of their respective communities. Indeed, the potential impact of CISV campers on their peers back home is dubbed by CISV organizers as the “multiplier effect”.[79] These children are agents of change, promoters of peace.

In Cookies and Conflict, participants are divided into groups of eight. Each group of eight campers is tasked with baking eight cookies. What participants do not know is that each group is given a different set of ingredients or “resources”. There is only one copy of the recipe and only one group has access to the oven at a time. Across the groups, there are sufficient ingredients for every group to successfully bake eight cookies. However, while some groups are given more than they need to make their cookies, other groups don’t receive the full range or quantity of ingredients. The counsellors are instructed to take a back seat ; their role is limited to supervising the safety of campers and helping them put the cookies in the oven.[80]

As the children gradually notice that other teams have the ingredients they are lacking, they initiate negotiations with the neighbouring groups in order to exchange ingredients. Thus, they manifest their agency in communicating with each other and making decisions collectively within their group and with the other teams. With respect to communication, some children cannot understand each other and so they point or act out what it is they are looking for. With respect to collective decision making, intergroup negotiations may include a group sacrificing all of its chocolate chips just to have a basic ingredient such as flour, groups organizing a line to use the oven, and groups vehemently refusing to trade any of their ingredients, thus ending up with inadequate cookie batter or terrible tasting cookies. Within the groups, the decision to trade or not to trade is discussed at length ; participants bring their own values and ideas to the table, and the final collective approach reflects a unique composite of norms, cultures, languages, and beliefs. At the debrief session, children are asked to discuss the kinds of conflicts that arose and how they solved them. They are then asked to reflect on the allocation of global resources and the advantages and disadvantages of international cooperation.

The camp’s global citizenship education model “empower[s] learners to take responsibility in shaping the world”.[81] Camp participants, through active experiential engagement with social justice issues and global citizenship education, “debate amongst themselves, push boundaries and ultimately form their own views and opinions”.[82] Some of the newly formed opinions deviate from the young people’s pre-existing beliefs and customs. As CISV campers from many communities are exposed to a wide spectrum of values and opinions on war and global resource allocation, they experiment with the consequences of taking on responsibility and with a variety of approaches to conflict resolution. They discover there is no one single good approach. The ways in which children reflect on their actions and justify their decision making illustrate the potential of legal agency as a notion that combines the insights of critical legal pluralism and childhood studies.

Within the sphere of international law, there are interesting implications that flow from acknowledgement of legal agency for children. Both Peace-War-Peace and Cookies and Conflict connect campers’ personal experiences with international law. In doing so, they challenge the notion, reflected in UNESCO’s efforts and the subsequent Declaration and Programme of Action, that peace creation lies in the hands of adults. We find that children have the capacity to bring their experience to bear in contributing to shaping norms and decisions ; they are also able to appreciate and confront the consequences of decision-making and practice. For example, many children in Peace-War-Peace did not want to go to war, even when adult counsellors suggested they do so. They offered reasons for avoiding conflict and refusing to destroy the towns of their peers by referring to the camp culture that they themselves had created — the very culture of peace for which the CISV Village strives.[83]

Article 8 of the 1995 Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace adopted by the General Assembly might envision a wide distribution of the responsibility to promote a culture of peace, but it fails to call upon children.[84] Further, while article 4 underlines the importance of “[e]ducation at all levels”, it implicitly casts children as the passive recipients of the teachings of their parents and teachers.[85] By engaging in the active creation of international rules and principles, albeit in camp space, CISV campers appear to challenge these assumptions of limited capacity and passive participation. Interestingly, article 1(d) calls for a commitment to a peaceful settlement of conflicts — an aspiration to which children adhere in the CISV activities described above.[86]

The notion of children’s legal agency imagined here incorporates the fact that children do need protection, whether by the State, by parents, by teachers, or even by international law. Indeed, protective concerns over children’s wellbeing and development could be understood as essential in fostering their legal agency : in this sense, children are importantly free to experiment with societal interactions precisely because there is someone to catch them if they fall. In the context of the CISV Village’s Cookies and Conflict activity, for example, the fact that a group fails to produce edible or tasty cookies does not mean that these children will go to bed hungry. This combination of meaningful space to experiment and grow, on the one hand, with a safety net attuned to vulnerability, on the other, is of course reflected in the formal context and structure of children’s international rights. Within the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), acknowledgement of active participation, in the form of the child’s right under article 12 to be heard in all matters affecting them, co-exists with responsiveness to children’s needs in the article 3 affirmation of the best interests of the child as “a primary consideration”.[87]

This reminder of children’s needs and vulnerability can be understood to enrich rather than limit the potential for children’s legal agency, i.e., young people can learn important lessons in taking on responsibility for the consequences of their actions, even as their wellbeing is supported. The Peace-War-Peace activity, for example, might seem to involve little risk for CISV campers ; after all, the destroyed towns were only made of cardboard. Yet, such activities allow children to test the strength of the relationships and bonds they have developed with each other ; they highlight both the value and the fragility of these relationships. The activities also afford a unique opportunity for participants to take stock of how their experience as campers has transformed their outlook on conflicts and solving disputes. The destruction carried out by some of the game’s participants and the subsequent challenge of rebuilding inspire young people to weigh the meaning and consequences of their choices and actions.

It is important to acknowledge that a turn to “children’s legal agency” does not mean that children do not need adults. Even if we question and reject an adult-centric approach that denies meaningful legal agency on the part of young people, we do not push adults out of the picture. The CISV experience itself would be impossible without the adults who designed the camps and the parents who organized their children’s presence at the camp. The activities undertaken throughout the summer would be equally unfeasible without the infrastructure of the camp, such as accommodation, transportation, food, and compliance with safety regulations. From a broader perspective, the support that children receive from adults sheds light on the economic and power disparity between children and adults. Children are not in a position to provide solely or fully for themselves, nor should they be. After all, dependence is a natural dimension of human relationships.[88] This inescapable aspect of the human condition might reveal itself differently in the case of (some) children who appear more vulnerable than (some) adults, but agency and vulnerability are intertwined in anyone’s position as a legal agent, no matter their age. As observed by Macdonald, law “implies relationships with other human symbolizers who themselves are both agents and patients of the agency of others”.[89]

The CISV Village, as demonstrated by the activities described above, is characterized by interaction and friction, vulnerability and risk taking, empowerment and responsibility. This combination of elements not only inspires but ends up being shared by the notion of children’s legal agency imagined here. Legal agency for young people comes alive through interaction with others, both young and not so young. It is crucially intertwined with the need for protection and responsiveness to child-specific needs, while recognizing the possibility for meaningful power and accountability on the part of children. While a definition or picture of legal agency for children does not emerge fully formed from this discussion, we can identify these principal characteristics through the international law and peacemaking creativity of the CISV Village’s campers.