Looking South: What can Youth Studies in the Global North learn from research on youth and policy in the Middle East and North African countries?

ABSTRACT

Connell’s ‘Southern Theory’ calls for intellectuals in the ‘Global North’ ‘to start learning in new ways, and in new relationships’ with and from scholars in the ‘Global South’ in order to better understand the subjects of our research. This, exactly, is the motivation of this paper. In working with, and drawing, on a large, comparative research programme about young people and youth policy in some of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries (the POWER2YOUTH research project), we explore what can be learned for sociologically-oriented Youth Studies in the ‘Global North’ through collaborative research in the ‘Global South’. The paper brings together research and theory from different disciplines/fields as well as from different regions/states so as to consider how we might better research and theorize about ‘youth’ (as a socially constructed life-phase) and about the empirical realities of young people’s lives (as they play out in social, political, cultural and economic contexts). Consequently, the paper discusses five themes or issues that we see as important for Youth Studies in the ‘Global North’: the variation in dominant state/social constructions of ‘youth’; the plurality of social divisions amongst youth; the different meanings of insecurity for young people; the flaws in human capital-based youth policies; and the significance of informal and non-standard work for young people. In conclusion, we summarize our arguments and underscore the value of a political economy perspective in Youth Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• young people
• global south
• global north
• MENA region

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This programme of research is described in detail in the introduction to this Special Issue. Our paper draws heavily in its middle section on the work of Emma Murphy, Jo Phoenix, Mark Calder and Drew Mikhael for our POWER2YOUTH project (Calder et al., 2017).

2. Having acknowledged this, hereafter for stylistic reasons we will not place inverted commas around Global North or Global South.

3. And we are grateful to the editors and reviewers for their helpful, critical comments on our draft paper.

4. We are indebted to the research teams that undertook the various projects; see https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/185536/reporting/en.

5. Figures from the World Bank (n.d.). The equivalent figure for the UK is around US$34 k.

6. Turkey, one of our six sites, tends to be classified as Global North despite the historic significance of Istanbul as cross-road between Asia and Europe and its listing by the OECD as an ‘ODA country’.

7. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/18/why-south-african-students-have-turned-on-their-parents-generation.

8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/27/decolonize-elite-white-men-decolonizing-cambridge-university-english-curriculum-literature.

9. The list is not meant to be exhaustive.

10. We use ‘youth work’ to mean youth services and workers who engage with young people to support their personal and social development. This should not be confused with work (labour) undertaken by young people (youth).