Contested childhood: assessing the age of young refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War

Using the resettlement of young Holocaust survivors to Canada in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as its core case study, this article examines how state administrations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) competed and struggled to define childhood as a legal category, and how the young survivors themselves were impacted by and navigated these struggles. It foregrounds the necessity to write an history of age in modern migration regimes and, more generally, examine how power structures use chronological age as an “objective criteria” to grant some lives more legitimacy than others.