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Abstract
The securitisation of youth as a social category has been well-documented. For the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries, moral panics over demographic youth bulges, Islamist radicalisation and protracted conflicts have placed youth centre-stage as a threat to the security of states and societies. Rejecting such assertions as themselves being what Foucault might have termed ‘technologies of power’ in a neoliberal order, and instead taking a critical approach to security, the spotlight is turned towards youth themselves as the referent object of study. This reveals the multidimensional hyper-precarity and insecuritisation of young peoples’ lives which derive from that same neoliberal economic order and the political structures that sustain it in the SEM countries. The finding resonates with other studies of new, insecure, formats for adulthood in Africa and suggests that we should look at the insecurity of young people today to understand global neoliberal futures in countries beyond the post-industrial ‘core’.
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Notes
1 Arguments over appropriate definitions of youth are well rehearsed and not especially helpful here (besides which, they could amount to an article in themselves). For the purposes of POWER2YOUTH, the limitations and inadequacies of biological boundaries for the category were recognised and a flexible and inclusive approach taken for the qualitative fieldwork. The survey component took youth as between the ages of 18 and 29 in order to exclude school-aged young people but include those accounted for in most INGO accounts.
2 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9.
3 The author wishes to acknowledge all the work done, and the spirit of collegiality and collective discovery in which it was undertaken, by the very many researchers engaged in the POWER2YOUTH project.
4 Although this crucial dimension of the findings of POWER2YOUTH is not explored further in this article, the reader should bear in mind throughout the following discussions that, while youth has been somewhat and instrumentally homogenised here, the social category is inclusive of a wide range of diversities which suggest that the insecurities being described are experienced equally differentially.
5 Nyman, “Securitization theory”.
6 Cooper, “Re-thinking the ‘Problem of Youth’”; Hall, Adolescence; Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie”; Sukarieh and Tannock, “The global securitisation of youth”.
7 Bennani-Chraïbi and Farag, “Constitution de la jeunesse”, 13.
8 The developmental costs of human resources include public and private investments in education, childhood health, family income support, etc., while the developmental returns refer to the individuals’ contributions to society through employment, taxation, and their private carrying of the costs of social reproduction.
9 Catusse and Destremau, Governing Youth, Managing Society, 23.
10 UNDP, Arab Human Development Report 2016, 5-15.
11 Sukarieh and Tannock, “The global securitization of youth”.
12 Sukarieh and Tannock, “The global securitization of youth”, 1. The list is not exclusive: one can similarly point to OSCE Ministerial declarations in 2014 and 2018 which “promote youth participation in areas like preventing and countering violent extremism and radicalization that lead to terrorism, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, education, tolerance and non-discrimination and political participation” (OSCE, Youth, the World Vision Youth, the Peace and Security Consultation in Europe and the December 2017 EU-Africa Summit on Youth, Security and Investment).
13 Williams, “Youth, Peace and Security”, 1.
14 McLean Hilker, “Violence, Peace and Stability, 2.
15 Coleman and Rosenow, “Security (studies) and the limits of critique”, 202.
16 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
17 Sukarieh and Tannock, Youth Rising?; Bessant and Watts, “‘Cruel Optimism’”; Murphy, “Problematizing Arab Youth”.
18 POWER2YOUTH: A Comprehensive Approach to the Understanding of Youth Exclusion and the Prospects for Youth-led Change in the South and East Mediterranean. This project received Euro 2.5 million funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework programme for research, development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 612782. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected from a range of sources, including public statistics, public documents and academic studies, focus groups and interviews with relevant stakeholders and key informants (including young people and youth-based CSOs) and large-n nation-wide surveys of 7,573 young people aged between 15 and 29. www.power2youth.eu. For survey results specifically, see Titnes et al., Young People in South East Mediterranean.
19 SAHWA Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract, Project Number 613174, included 15 member institutions and was led by CIDOB in Barcelona.
20 Calder et al.,Marginalization, Young People in the South.
21 A total of 73 young people were included in this last round of focus groups, including 2 in Nablus (November 2016), 5 in Tunis (November 2016) and 3 in Beirut (December 2016). Each group included 3-11 individuals, including male (34) and female (39) participants from both urban and rural localities. The author would like to thank the British Council and Carthaginia in Tunisia, and ALHR in Lebanon, for their assistance in arranging the focus groups. A standardised template was utilised across all focus groups, although moderators were allowed some discretion in enabling participants to address local specificities. The focus groups were moderated directly by members of the work package team, aided in some instances by local translators, and were conducted in Arabic/English as respondents felt comfortable. An effort was made to avoid duplicating respondents from the larger POWER2YOUTH data collection.
22 Wyn and White, Rethinking Youth, 7.
23 Coussée et al., “Empowering the Powerful”, 425.
24 Côté, “Towards a new political economy”.
25 ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth, 1-2.
26 For the purposes of the survey, and to address reservations regarding the appropriateness of biologically determined definitions of youth, youth was defined as being between the ages of 18 and 29 years. The countries were Palestine, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. Tiltnes et al. Young People in South East Mediterranean.
27 Tiltnes et al., Young People in South East Mediterranean.
28 Standing, The Precariat.
29 Gatti et al., Striving for Better Jobs.
30 ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth, 2.
31 Honwana, The Time of Youth, 57-9.
32 Focus Group Beirut, December 2016.
33 Meddeb, Smuggling in the Kasserine Region, 4.
34 Focus Group Nablus, November 2016; Focus Group Beirut, December 2016 and Focus Group Nablus, November 2016. respectively.
35 Langevang, “Are we managing?”.
36 Murphy, “A Political Economy of Youth”; Floris, Tunisia: Studies on Youth Policies.
37 Calder et al, Marginalization, Young People in the South, 19.
38 Focus Group Beirut, December 2016 and Focus Group Nablus, November 2016, respectively.
39 All quotes from Focus Group Beirut, December 2016.
40 Yurttagüleer, The Impact of Youth Policies; De Bel-Air, Youth and Family Policies.
41 Murphy, “Problematizing Arab Youth”, 12.
42 NEET, a person who is not in education, employment or training; harraga, an informal migrant who burns his/her identity papers as s/he leaves the country; hittiste, one who ‘holds up the wall’ – a reference to young Algerian men standing idle in the streets.
43 Catusse and Destremau, Governing Youth, Managing Society, 13-5.
44 Amnesty International’s “The Arab Spring: Five Years On”, states, “What’s more, few have been brought to justice for the violence, killings and torture which took place during and after the protests of 2011.” The report details how governments have failed to defend their own citizens from violence or have even endorsed it. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/01/arab-spring-five-years-on/
45 All from Focus Group Beirut, December 2016.
46 Focus Group Tunis, November 2016 and Focus Group Nablus, November 2016.
47 Focus Group Tunisia, November 2016 and Focus Group Nablus, November 2016, respectively.
48 Both Focus Group Tunisia, November 2016.
49 Belkaid and Pironet, “Palestine’s Pent-Up Young”.
50 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
51 Maïche et al., Breaking the triple marginalisation, 11.
52 Both Focus Group Tunis, November 2016.
53 Nowotny, Time, 58.
54 Focus Group Beirut, December 2016.
55 Honwana, The Time of Youth, 19-37.
56 France, Understanding Youth in Late Modernity, 59-77.
57 Bauman, Liquid Modernity; and Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity.
58 MacDonald, “Youth transitions, unemployment and underemployment, 1-2.
59 Metelits, Security in Africa.
60 Farrugia, Spaces of Youth.