Custody

Custody

How States Compete to Govern the Making of Persons
By Dr Naim Tahir Baig 

States everywhere are claiming a new kind of authority: the right to act as guardian over how their citizens are formed. A South Korean subsidy to raise the birth rate, an Australian ban on social media for under-16s, a Brazilian court order against a platform and a Chinese rule for generative AI look like unrelated policies. Custody shows that they belong to one family of state claims, each justified as protection, each backed by law, and each reaching beyond the state's own providers.

Dr Naim Tahir Baig names this family and gives it a precise definition. A custodial claim is a state assertion of guardianship over the formation of a category of persons, with a protective justification, a binding instrument, a named mechanism of enforcement and reach beyond national borders. Using this test, the book follows four fronts together: who is born, who is raised, what a population may say and see, and what machines may tell it.

The argument is built for International Relations. It traces how protection, once a doctrine for endangered populations abroad, has turned inward on the developmental life of a state's own people. It treats age assurance, identity layers and model-access controls as chokepoints that create leverage and dependency. It shows how citizens' ability to leave, through fertility travel, VPNs and model-hopping, limits what states can enforce, and why policies that diffuse quickly so often fail on incompatible clocks.

The evidence combines process-traced case studies, three on each front across liberal, illiberal and swing states, with a coded dataset of about 45 jurisdictions. The analysis engages Foucault, Bradford, Farrell and Newman, Acharya, Krasner, Simmons and Elkins, and the sociology of childhood, and it reports plainly where the custody claim stops.

Across twelve chapters, Custody offers scholars, diplomats, regulators and technology policy teams a clear framework for a contest that is now reorganising alliances, regulatory power and the meaning of protection itself.