Childhoods intersect global political life in myriad ways, and children have always been important and effectual social agents. Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. Critical interventions of recent years have begun to work towards the recovery of children’s agency and to sketch the complex heterogeneity of childhoods. At the same time, there is an increasing global awareness of pressing issues of insecurity, rights, and exploitation affecting children in contexts such as conflict, migration, labour, and climate change. Building from these insights, contributors to Children, Childhoods, and Global Politics seek to recover children’s agency and to recognize the complex variety of childhoods and the global issues that affect them. Through its analysis, the book also demonstrates how disciplinary International Relations is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity. Written by an international list of contributors from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Australasia, the chapters present highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time and space across three thematic sections: imagined childhoods, governed childhoods, and lived childhoods.