Children’s Literature and Social Sustainability: Ethical Citizenship and Coercive Modernization in Kamil Kilani’s al-Malik al-Najjār

Abstract

This article examines how Kamil Kilani’s al-Malik al-Najjār constructs civic virtue and how that ethical model is complicated by the narrative’s treatment of sovereign power and coercive reform. Using qualitative close reading, the study combines narrative ethics with social sustainability as a secondary interpretive framework. The analysis focuses on didactic framing, characterization, dialogue, dramatic staging, narrative evaluation, and closure. The findings show that the story promotes a productive model of citizenship grounded in labor, technical knowledge, personal discipline, national duty, and public service. Mikhail’s experience, however, introduces a competing concern with individual agency, dignity, and protection from coercive authority. This tension becomes most visible when Peter recognizes the injustice of the military law threatening Mikhail, but resolves the case through personal sovereign intervention rather than institutional reform. The historical postscript intensifies the contradiction by acknowledging Peter’s violence while partially legitimizing coercion and absolute authority as necessary for Russia’s modernization. The article argues that al-Malik al-Najjār constructs productive citizenship more convincingly than socially sustainable citizenship. Its civic ideals remain constrained by a political order in which justice depends on sovereign discretion and national progress can qualify objections to violence. The study demonstrates how children’s literature can contribute to sustainability research by revealing the cultural assumptions through which citizenship, authority, sacrifice, and development are made ethically intelligible.