 13 Protecting their developmental trajectories throughout their childhood by provision of enabling environments that deal with the physical and mental health and wellbeing of both caregivers and children is essential to restore stability, security, and safety and mitigate the harmful effects that displacement and violence have on communities, families, and ultimately children's lives.
Child and adolescent potential must be realised through enabling environments across the life course. While few data are available on the long term impact of interventions delivered in the perinatal period, for example, it is possible to ensure that early gains from the provision of infant and young child survival and early child development interventions are bolstered and reinforced by subsequent interventions through childhood and adolescence. This may take a variety of forms such as quality early education centres and schools; programmes that create opportunities for children and adolescents who are not in school; and making communities safe for children, adolescents, and their families. It should also include policies that equip communities, families, and caregivers with

Box 1: Definitions
Ecological framework-Framework that considers the systems in which humans are embedded rather than in isolation from context Enabling environments-The systems, forces, and factors that create the conditions in which optimal child and adolescent development is possible Life course perspective-Acknowledgment that each stage of development builds on the last, focusing on the full continuum of development from preconception through adolescence and beyond Biological embedding-Early developmental contexts cause stable epigenetic modifications in the individual and these modifications endure, shaping how the individual responds to subsequent exposures over the life course Developmental cascade-Early functioning in one domain of behaviour or emotional functioning spills over to influence other domains time and resources to provide responsive childcare, and that ensure safe, clean, and secure environments for children to grow and develop.
Achieving the sustainable development goals will require an ecological life course approach to the provision of care and services for children and adolescents. The targets call for multisectoral engagement and sustained, supportive programmes and interventions. The focus on disease and tendency towards siloed models in the millennium development goals was understandable given the magnitude of the disease burden and the large numbers of children dying before the age of 5. However, the new sustainable development goals era necessitates an approach where protection, prevention, and treatment approaches work synergistically, ensuring that gains made in early childhood are reinforced at later ages. As all these are interlinked and interdependent, it requires that all sectors and groups working with particular age groups not only cooperate but also actively build on areas of common influence to create the conditions for children and adolescents to flourish across the life course. 14 Contributors and sources: MT, XH, and BD conceived the outline of this paper and drafted the first version. FO reviewed and revised a second draft of the paper. MT, XH, BD, NR, DR, and FO reviewed and revised drafts of the manuscript, and MT and XH created the final version. This paper is drawn from a background paper prepared in support of the WHO/UNICEF expert consultation Redesigning Child and Adolescent Health Programming for the SDG Era, WHO, Geneva, 23-25 January 2019.
Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and have no relevant interests to declare.
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I was Reader in Religion at the University of Stirling from 2001 to 2015. I referred to my project in general as Critical Religion, which shifts the viewpoint from data that is supposed to be religious data, to the deployments of the category ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ itself. How can we decide, for example, what is a religious practice or institution and what is a non-religious practice or institution? Critical religion can be more completely unpacked as ‘the critical study of ‘religion’ and related categories’ – the most obviously related category being the idea of the ‘non-religious secular’. The relation here is one of opposition and mutual exclusion. This immediately shines the light on the secular (non-religious) academic who is choosing the data, on the secular university as an institution and on its knowledge production. However, historically and conceptually the term ‘politics’ was deployed in the late 17th century to refer to government separated from religion, and ‘science’ was redeployed from its earlier uses to refer to knowledge separated from theology, and these are arguably the primary domains that represent the non-religious secular. Therefore the study of the category ‘religion’ is in my view inevitably also the study of categories such as ‘politics’ and ‘science’. Many other modern categories follow, including ‘modern’ itself, and the idea of ‘modernity’.
The term ‘critical religion’ also became a generic term for what we taught as a subject area at Stirling, and during that time my colleague Dr Michael Marten made and managed the Critical Religion webpage. In addition to this affiliation with Critical Religion, now edited by Dr Bashir Saade, I am also a research associate with Critical Research on Religion, edited by Dr Warren Goldstein, and both sites are generously offering me a space to publish my ideas.
I was fortunate to have studied for the BA degree in Religious Studies at King’s College, London (1977), which was a well-organised and well-taught introduction to a wide range of significant topics. Yet when I had completed it and had graduated, I did not know what ‘religion’ is, which seems an interesting paradox (I have discussed this paradox in more detail in my books, such as The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000) and Religion and Politics in International Relations (2011). We undergraduates took taught courses in philosophy of religion, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and two World Religions (my own choices were Hinduism and Buddhism).
In several of these informative, testing and intellectually stimulating courses we encountered arguments about the definition of religion, many of which were contradictory, and it became apparent that there is little or no agreement among academics on what religion is or is not, even within the discipline of ‘religious studies’. Yet despite there not being any agreed referent for the term ‘religion’, the ‘study of religion’ as a distinct academic discipline, and its various professional associations, journals, and conferences continues to thrive. But what is the topic? Definitions are concerned with boundary issues. For example, can we distinguish between the study of religion and the study of culture or society? Can we justify at the theoretical level distinct departments of religious studies, cultural studies or social studies? I would extend this further now. I have discussed this definitional issue exhaustively in many books, book chapters and articles.
While I was doing my PhD at King’s College, London (1977-1983), I was fortunate to get a job in 1980 in a college of higher education teaching Hinduism, Buddhism and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Writing and developing courses for my students, I became even more aware that World Religions are highly artificial and rather arbitrary constructs, and, in an attempt to unravel these arbitrary features, I introduced as much anthropology into my courses as possible. At that time I was very much influenced by Louis Dumont and the debates in Indian anthropology that he stimulated in Homo Hierarchicus (1979). At much the same time, the critique of Orientalism by Edward Said became relevant, not least because so-called world religions like Hinduism and Buddhism were invented by Orientalists. Unfortunately, neither of these authors fully deconstructs the religion-secular dichotomy, though Dumont comes close to it in his Essays on Individualism (1986), a book that has had a considerable influence on me. I think it is an open question whether or not Dumont’s own theoretical grounds in Homo Hierarchicus are themselves orientalist. Even more paradoxically, I do not think that Edward Said ever fully deconstructed the secular grounds of orientalist presuppositions. In one recent book chapter I have argued that his own failure to fully critique secularism is an orientalism itself, and a ‘postcolonial remains’. I would like to think that this approach is a contribution to Chakrabarti’s project in Provincialising Europe, though generally I think the ideological function of the religion-secular binary is not properly understood by the Subalternists.
This invention of ‘world religions’ such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Shintoism and other ‘isms’ was happening as India and other parts of Asia were becoming increasingly subjected to colonial domination throughout the 19th century. These apparently neutral descriptive terms increasingly looked like power categories to me and a few other academics, or acts of cognitive imperialism. Throughout my published work I have given reasons why these ideological categories have been useful in the colonial and neo-colonial projects of domination, while seeming to be merely neutral, scientific and descriptive categories. Liberal political economy appears as a factual science and the result of progress over the superstitious religious past. I would say it is a disguised hegemonic ideology for normalising or naturalising private property and its accumulation.
What is it that one is studying, teaching and researching when one claims to be studying, teaching and researching ‘religion’? Unlike a small minority of fellow academics who also raised such questions, it does not seem to stimulate most people in our profession. I can understand why