Youth politics in urban Asia: an introduction

KEYWORDS:

• Youth politics
• urban politics
• urban Asia

Introduction

This introduction explores the changing relationship between ‘youth’ and ‘politics’, and the entanglements between youth politics and urban space in Asia. This is a timely inquiry, given the recent eruption of youth-led movements across Asia, which will impact upon the future development of the region’s urban landscapes. Using ethnographic methods, this Special Issue suggest that the socio-political and economic conditions of Asia offer opportunities/constrictions for youth citizenship, and that youth experiences of their urban realities shaped the ways they practice politics. The papers further show that youth politics have a generative potential, affecting future envisionings of the city and self.

Since the 2000s, the eruption of youth-led mobilisations across different parts of the world caught the attention of the media, governments, and scholars. Prominent examples include the indignados in Madrid, Spain; the Arab Spring across Middle-Eastern cities such as Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, Cairo in Egypt and Manama in Bahrain; and the Occupy movement in New York that eventually spread to major cities such as Athens and London. Youth movements have also been observed in Asia, as seen during the South Korean student protests in 2008 regarding government attitudes towards food safety, in 2011 to oppose government emphasis on corporate growth at the expense of education investment, and in the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution against allegations of corruption by then-President Park Geun-hye; the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taipei, Taiwan against a government trade deal with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was perceived to jeopardize Taiwanese sovereignty (see Hsieh & Skelton, 2018); the 2014 Umbrella Movement and 2019 Anti-Extradition Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement in Hong Kong that began in opposition to specific government policies, but became protests demanding for democratic reforms in the city (see Ortmann, 2015); the 2018 student protests lambasting government ineptitude in enforcing road safety measures in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and the 2019 student protests against government corruption in Jakarta, Indonesia. And more recently, the 2019 Global Climate Strike prompted youths to launch protest actions across a range of locales, ranging from Kabul in Afghanistan, Melbourne in Sydney, Tokyo in Japan, to Hanoi in Vietnam. These mobilisations evince the pivotal role of young people in contemporary politics; and it is this sense of vibrancy and urgency that young people are bringing to the political life of cities that fuels this special issue.

Existing scholarship on contemporary youth mobilisations points to a myriad of forms and processes, which precludes reductionist descriptions and analyses towards notions of ‘youth politics’. At an organizational level, youth actions can emerge spontaneously or be premeditated, and can have centralized leadership or emphasise multiplicity and horizontality amongst individuals (Funke, 2012; Graber, 2013; Hardt & Negri, 2004). On a temporal level, youth actions can be enduring, lasting over the course of weeks and months, or fleeting, dissipating after a matter of hours. And on a spatial level, youth actions range from the spectacular street demonstrations and occupations in public squares (Alexander, 2017; Brown & Yaffe, 2017; Korany, 2014), to the quotidian displays of resistance in the realm of everyday life (Fahmy, 2006; Harris, Wyn, & Younes, 2010), to the intangible activist spaces and networks sustained by digital technologies (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2015). Seeking to make sense of this amorphous notion of ‘youth politics’, scholars have sought to reassess the current relationship between the conceptual categories of ‘youth’ and ‘politics’ arising from changing socio-political and economic conditions (Honwana, 2012; Jeffrey, 2010; Jeffrey & Young, 2012), and to articulate the ramifications the emergent spatialities and temporalities that contemporary youth political engagements have on prefigurative imaginings and enactments of citizenship (Juris & Pleyers, 2009) and of everyday realities (Challand, 2011; Jeffrey & Dyson, 2016).

However, although the relationship between ‘youth’ and ‘politics’ has received careful examination by scholars, cities and the role of the urban condition remain framed as backdrops for young people’s contestations. Conversely, young people’s political aspirations and actions occupy the peripheries of much urban scholarship, though this is gradually rectified by a growing body of research on urban movements examining how citizens vie to reclaim urban space and their ‘right to the city’ (see Petropoulou, 2010). For example, the interplay between youth politics and urban space has been examined by a handful of studies based in Europe and the Americas (see Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010; Magaña, 2016; Taylor & Hall, 2013), and in the Middle-East (see Bayat, 2010; Honwana, 2012). Yet the presence of youth voices and practices in the Asian urban context has yet to be extensively investigated, which is an oversight that needs to be redressed, considering that the region is now home to 60 percent of the world’s youth population (United Nations, 2013).

The socio-political and economic inequalities seen in Asian urban development are shared by many other cities across the world, yet the institutional and vernacular political responses to these problems in Asian cities departs from their global counterparts. This is due to the region’s distinctive socio-political structures and values, and due to Asian cities having to mediate processes of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Bharne, 2013; Kim, 1997; Ong, 2011; Reid, 2010). Such turbulent changes prompted a number of Asian states to prioritize national security and development, along with the rights of the state over that of the citizenry (see Howe, 2018). The region has consequently developed in a fragmentary manner, whereby liberal economic policies have been embraced to allow for market growth and competitiveness, whereas sociocultural and political rights amongst the populace remains limited. This has affected how political spaces and institutions in the region have taken shape, with a number of Asian nations assuming non-democratic or quasi-democratic forms of governance that closely monitors and regulates political space (Alagappa, 2004; Ogawa, 2018), curtailing overt displays of dissent and resistance movements against the state across their cities, yet also enabling the emergence of small-scale informal citizen networks seeking to resolve everyday urban problems (see Morris-Suzuki & Wei, 2017).

The strong presence of the state in the socio-political domains of Asia has impacted upon the development of youth political involvement in the region throughout the past decades. For example, studies on East Asian youth participation in electoral politics from the 1990s and 2000s (see Tambe, 2016), and polls exploring the political sentiments of contemporary Malaysian youths (Voon, 2018), reveal that young people feel alienated from political affairs, and are thus reluctant to engage with such matters. And where youth-led mobilisations have emerged, they cannot be assumed to espouse progressive and democratic ideals, but can instead champion right-wing and conservative ideologies; this is exemplified by the PRC’s Communist Youth League from the mid-twentieth century, and the Cyber Scouts in contemporary Thailand, which serve as an extension of their state’s governing apparatus to maintain control over the wider population. However, the recent spate of economic, environmental, and social problems—often arising from state mismanagement— have prompted young people to question their existing political realities, and to redress them by initiating political mobilisations (Moon, Park, & Whelan-Wuest, 2016).

This issue comprises six papers written by scholars working with diverse groups of youth in cities across East and South Asia. They examine closely the ways in which young people manoeuvre within and around such politically restrictive yet inventive spaces, drawing attention to contemporary youth practices that allow for re-imagining and re-mapping political expressions in Asian urban contexts. In doing so, this collection highlights further the substantive nature of the region’s fragmentary development with respect to how Asian societies negotiate the role and positioning of youths within their political domains (Broadbent, 2011). Governing bodies, wider society, and youths in Asia harbor different expectations regarding how the figure of the ‘citizen’ is to be defined and its relationship to the state, what it means for young people to be citizens-in-the-making, the rights and responsibilities ascribed to such youths, and how youth imaginings of their aspirational future selves and cities can be realized within current socio-political and economic status quo. Such persistent entanglements have created a diverse range of responses and actions from young people, depending on their personal histories that cut into experiences made in the present as well as imagined futures.

In order to capture the highly varied experiences of youth politics in the cities of Asia, the lens of ‘urban Asia’ is being deployed. As a material space, ‘urban Asia’ denotes a series of spatial contexts that are geographically and socio-culturally diverse, yet remain interconnected to one another at different scales, thereby moving beyond dominant conceptualisations of cities as discrete entities (see Luger and Ren, 2015). As a conceptual space, ‘urban Asia’ encapsulates the complex array of historical experiences that have shaped state-society collaborations and antagonisms within the confines of the region, which consequently present its young citizens with a distinctive labyrinthe landscape in which their political citizenship, and their politics, can manifest and manoeuvre. At the same time, while Asia is situated within a temporal field marked by shared experiences of colonial, postcolonial, and global encounters, the temporalities of ‘urban Asia’ are in fact simultaneously manifold; this is seen from how some Asian cities experience accelerated growth whereas others remain stagnant, giving certain urban landscapes greater socio-political and economic influence over others in the region. Each city is enmeshed in its own distinctive time-geometries, shaped by their respective temporalities regarding financial and industrial capitals, national past-times and futures, and the private and public spheres (see Anagnost, 1997; Sassen, 2000), which affects the lives of young people. For instance, with national governments across Asia adopting neoliberal policies, Asian cities (such as Hong Kong and Seoul) have come to prioritize ‘superfast and hypermobile financial capital’ (Jessop, 2002, p. 113), which consequently exacerbated urban inequality and precarity, disrupting youth transitions into adulthood and their ability to secure their futures. In response, young people refashion themselves as ‘time protagonists’ (Cheng, 2014; see also Smith, 2017), whereby they purposefully reposition themselves in their past, present, and future temporal horizons as a way to cope with or challenge dominant scripts of urban development, and also formulate strategies to create time for political acts and mobilisations. Analytically, this prompts us to come to grips with the variegated geographies and temporalities which shape young people’s urban politics in Asia. Such a perspective allows for an appreciation of the capacity of the real and imagined socio-political and economic structures of the ‘urban’ in shaping the aspirations, values, lifestyle practices, identities, along with the mobility and networking opportunities of youths living within and beyond cities.

Similarly, the collection frames its understanding of youth politics in a broad manner with a commitment to recognising the capacity of contemporary youths in criticizing and redressing the socio-political inequalities and pernicious power dynamics across a variety of societies. More importantly, it acknowledges the agency of youth in asserting their citizenship rights to debate how the future of their cities—and more broadly, their futures—should manifest. Papers are united in their use of data derived from ethnographic methods, which offers an intimate glimpse at the ways in which young people perceive the socio-political landscapes of their respective cities, define and practice politics in their everyday environs, whilst taking into consideration that these youthful political lives are linked to wider urban discourses and macro-level developments.

This Special Issue contributes to the plethora of studies on Asian cities articulating the socio-political conditions and changes occurring at the structural scale, by using ethnographic data to account for the experiential dimension of urban realities. To elaborate, by observing and engaging with young people across a myriad of field sites, these papers bring young people to the forefront of scholarly attention, thereby providing insight into how youths perceive and engage with the city, their agentic potentials in how they choose to respond to their environs and why they opt for certain mobilization techniques, and their aspirations for their futures. It is through establishing such close knowledges that the authors in this Issue are able to discern ‘what counts as politics’ for the young people in their studies. By exploring the politics of youths unfolding vis-à-vis structural-level developments in their respective cities, this collection adopts a multi-scalar and temporal-sensitive approach that resonates with Kallio and Häkli’s (2013, p. 5) claim that young people are ‘enmeshed in their political worlds as situated agents involved in what unfolds presently, as well as active partisans in their own political formation’. Additionally, the papers share overlaps in addressing the following themes:

Cities as loci in production and contestation of youth citizenship

Cities are not mere backdrops where youth politics takes place, but actively participate in the making of youthful civic actions, activisms, and protests. As demonstrated by the authors, cities are the loci in which the boundaries of young people’s politics are produced, managed, and contested vis-à-vis urban and national visions of the youth citizen. This is best illustrated by the three papers from this collection exploring the role of urban universities in the production of citizenship and political life among youths, while also revealing the paradoxical nature of higher education spaces in empowering and constraining young people as agents of change in the city’s political life.

Observing two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Cheng and Jacobs (2019) demonstrate how students develop civic aspirations and actions contoured around institutionally-crafted ideas about the cosmopolitan and moral citizen. In a way, universities provide the ideational resources for students to ‘put into practice emergent urban sensibilities’ aimed at addressing urban concerns. Even though this can be construed as a form of citizenship governance based on narrowly defined versions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘politics’, the authors maintain that students’ non-contentious social actions work as a kind of generative politics in ‘protecting and making resources they imagine as vital to the city’.

But whether such educational interventions successfully actualize state visions of youth citizenship is debatable. For example, by looking at Seoul, Landgraf's (2020) paper provides a critique of how the South Korean education system, by placing excessive emphasis on degree qualification as a determinant of success, produced a form of neoliberal citizenship. Such measures have resulted with excessive emotional and mental stress for youths, causing a group of students at Yonsei University to critically question current education policies and speculate on alternative possibilities, ultimately raising students’ political awareness such that they learn about their rights and entitlements in society. In turn, Zahan’s (2020) paper exposes the gendered and sexualized construct of citizenship in Delhi, India, where young women’s bodily habits and movements are managed and controlled (by university administrations but also by societal norms) through an infantilizing discourse operating within patriarchal and paternalistic logics that deny women of their agency and autonomy. Yet, Delhi’s universities and colleges have also produced a collective of educated young women whom debate and act upon their experiences of everyday oppression. Their critical actions spread across Delhi’s streets and open spaces in a bid to reclaim themselves as legitimate users of public space.

These papers demonstrate the potential for university spaces to foster and enable social actions that are generative of new political ideologies and practices amongst youths. Nonetheless, campuses operating within non-democratic and authoritarian regimes in Asia are subject to suppressive – and possibly militaristic – forms of control. This was witnessed in Hong Kong in November 2019, when multiple university campuses were placed under siege by the police, leading to clashes between the police and students (along with university alumni and pro-democracy protesters that came to their aide). In the aftermath of these university sieges, the Hong Kong government announced that they will be withdrawing funding for two large university projects, which may have a significant impact on these institutions. There remains a tension between the role of the university in fostering the politics of youths, and the power of the state in stymieing the ability of students to mobilize through the use of physical force, and in constricting university operations through ‘soft’ tactics such as revising funding allocations.

Youth political actions and sensibilities in the city

Asides from focussing on how citizenship is produced and contested by young people across Asian cities, the papers point also to the significance of young people actively responding to changes in urban conditions, understanding themselves as political actors and mediators, and engaging in multiple kinds of actions that produce new urban subjectivities and relationships. As discussed, Cheng and Jacobs (2019) hint at how students in liberal arts universities are engaging with civic actions and social projects to rehearse their envisioned urban futures, as seen amongst the Hong Kong students who see themselves as urban repairers and innovators taking on custodianship of a city to address urban concerns. Likewise, Zahan (2020) and Landgraf (2020) each demonstrate how youths in Delhi and Seoul are taking initiatives to reject existing embodiments of (respectively gendered and neoliberal) citizenship, instead positing alternative roles and spaces for themselves within and beyond the university for the future.

The other three papers in this collection further explores youth efforts in asserting agency over how they are to be seen as citizens, how politics is to be enacted, and how their cities are to manifest. Advani’s (2019) paper examines a novel form of politics that lower-middle class young men in Pune, India devise to navigate the city in ways that circumvent their existing experiences of alienation in the city. Making use of Pune’s ‘proliferation of digital technologies’, these young men employ social media to resist the valorized image of the competitive entrepreneurial citizen-subject as embodied within middle-class narratives about ‘aspiration, individual achievement and education as social opportunity’. At the same time, digital technologies provide Pune youths with a means of presenting themselves as local cosmopolitans endowed with mobility and a sophisticated knowledge of the city, therefore enabling them to engage in political performances towards reclaiming authorship over their self-image and self-worth.

Much like the young men of Pune facing marginalization, Gergan and Smith (2020) find that Himalayan youths, whom are compelled by ‘development narratives about the necessity of a well-educated and technologically savvy workforce’ to migrate from rural communities into Indian cities for education, are deemed as ‘foreign others’ upon their arrival, prompting them to protest against their discrimination. Despite struggling to negotiate their feelings of national belonging as religious and linguistic minorities in India, and despite their difficulties in rectifying their uneasy encounters with the city, youths return to rural communities bringing back urban sensibilities that invigorate and re-script their political imaginations and actions towards transforming their villages into cosmopolitan, liberal, and forward-looking spaces. This portrayal of political ideologies travelling between cities and mountain villages reveals the spatial porosity that haunts the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’, and shows the city as a potential site of political learning to inform the aspirations of rural youth. Yet in actuality, these youths struggle with mediating their visions of urbanity being transposed to their hometowns, with their desire to preserve their nostalgic imaginings of village identity and values, in their prefigurative endeavours.

Similarly informed by a nostalgic bent, Lam-Knott (2019) examines how youths in Hong Kong respond to a constrictive citizenship model where ‘youth voices are dismissed by both the government and the older generations of activists’, which has led to a situation whereby young people find themselves ‘doubly disempowered and marginalized’ even as they continue to assert their citizenship rights. Excluded from processes of political decision-making and matters of governance, youths have sought to reclaim their ‘right to the city’ by reconfiguring dominant meanings and perceptions attached to the landscape. Drawing upon community-based stories from the past, youths evoke nostalgic sentiments of loss regarding the dissipation of romanticized urban communities caused by government control over the city. By doing so, youths are not only challenging government discourses portraying urban space as an economic resource, but are also invigorating grassroots imaginings of alternative ways of living in the city, ultimately giving youths the ability to assert authorship over how the city is (and is to be) perceived.

Conclusions

The papers in this special issue provide timely empirical insights into how urban Asia is now at a crossroads, where past understandings of being young citizens is being re-examined, challenged, and reconfigured. The collection asserts the importance of contextualizing youth politics within their urban realities, in order to appreciate how notions of ‘urban Asia’ have produced the youth political actors featured in the papers, and to simultaneously recognize that youths have the ability to reshape the present and future trajectories of ‘urban Asia’. They thus challenge the widespread perception that youth aspirations for democratic and progressive outcomes are products of political thought originating from the ‘west’ and/or are instigated by ‘western’ forces. This conflation with youth movements with seemingly ‘Western’ democratic and progressive ideals is also problematic on two levels. First, such notions are dispelled by the notable youth presence in contemporary populist movements across the US and in Western Europe (for example, with France’s Génération Identitaire and Germany’s Pegida). Second, youth-led mobilisations in Asia are not necessarily vying for democratic values, but can conversely contain conservative and right-wing overtones, as seen amongst the recent emergence of Hindu-nationalists in India, the Patriotic Youth Network in Myanmar, and the Localists in Hong Kong, along with the increasing advocacy of politicized Islam amongst students in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Rather than focus on either left- or right-wing politics, this Special Issue looks at the broader landscape that make and shape these movements. The papers recognize youth actions in Asian cities as being localized responses borne out of young people’s own experiences of growing up under non- and quasi- democratic regimes informed by paternalistic and hierarchical logics of governance. At the same time, what young people hope to achieve through the kinds of politics performed are also shaped by their realities, and can vary between pragmatism and idealism; some want to partake in existing systems on their own terms while others aim more ambitiously for a massive structural overhaul. The need to view Asian youth politics within its geographical context is best encapsulated by Kallio’s (2020) afterword, which triangulates the complex interplay of geoeconomic, geopolitical, and geosocial factors— across multiple scales ranging from the local, regional, national, and even global– involved in the constitution of contemporary urban life and youth politics in the region.

Across these papers, authors have shown that cities provide imaginative and practical resources for young people to reconfigure their citizen subjectivities, the power dynamics and their relationships with the city, as well as their imaginings and practices of political possibilities within dominant scripts of urban governance. This is even as cities play a central role in the multiple ways young people are delegitimized and disenfranchised as full citizens with respect to class, gender, and further forms of subject positionings. By bringing youth voices and practices to the forefront of scholarly attention, we respond to Kallio and Häkli’s (2013) earlier call for research on youth political agency to engage with the three main concepts of agent, action, and politics. We wish to emphasise further the affective dimension of youthful political agency, considering how young people’s politics in the region are oftentimes expressive articulations of their frustrations with, on the one hand, limited socio-economic and political opportunities and, on the other hand, their aspirations and hopes for better futures. As such, we argue that emotion and affect -and how these intersect with axes of difference and subjective positions- will serve as one more important conceptual area that would enliven research on youth politics in urban Asia.

As the analytic gaze is being directed at various still-ongoing political mobilisations and struggles in Asia, and against the wider regional and global geographies of change, we wonder how Asian cities will respond to pressures from local and global actors for governments to further democratise and liberalize in variety of ways, whereby urban and national economies open their borders not only to capital, but also to novel and challenging cultural and political ideas? Given that these ideas may not always complement state-vaunted narratives or resonate with deep-seated sensibilities among different social groups, new modes of political governance and citizenship models are urgently required. And how will young people, who are ostensibly the bearers of change and of future societies, make sense of their own fates and fortunes as they are pulled into an ever more complex terrain of political constraints and affordances? These questions will remain paramount for critical conversations and new research on youth politics in urban Asia.

Acknowledgements

This Special Issue originates from the ‘Youth Politics in Urban Asia’ panel convened for the 2018 Royal Geographical Society - Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) Annual International Conference. The panel was jointly sponsored by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group and the Political Geographies Research Group. We would also like to thank the late Prof. Ronan Paddison for being receptive to this Special Issue during its initial conceptualization, and to the authors and reviewers whom contributed towards the papers in this collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Sonia Lam-Knott completed her doctoral studies in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Urbanisms cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research explores the interplay between politics, space, and history in Asian cities, and the impact this has on vernacular experiences of everyday urban life. Of particular interest are the existing and emergent state-society power dynamics, urban contestations and grassroots activism, along with the politics of remembrance and nostalgia in contemporary Hong Kong. Her works have been published in Asian Anthropology, Urban Studies, and in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Yi'En Cheng is Research Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His research lies at the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities in and across Asian cities. He is currently investigator on a project that examines how the Belt and Road Initiative is shifting higher education and student mobilities in the Asean region. His works are published in journals such as Annals of Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Society, and Social & Cultural Geography. He is co-editor of the special issues ‘Geographies of Citizenship in Higher Education’ in Area with Mark Holton and ‘Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies with Shanthi Robertson and Brenda Yeoh. Prior to joining ARI, Yi'En was Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

ORCID

Sonia Lam-Knott http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2256-9110

Yi’En Cheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8897-0372