Youngsters and adolescents in troubled contexts: worldwide perspectives

ABSTRACT

A brief overview is presented of perspectives on current thinking on youth to contextualise the themed issue of Contemporary Social Science entitled ‘Investigating Youth in Challenging and Troubled Contexts’. This provides an overview of up-to-date interdisciplinary, international research that investigates the complex dynamics of youth in contemporary society, especially in troubled and crisis-ridden contexts. The studies are brought together from many countries and cultures, including Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana, Brazil, Hong Kong, Kuwait, India, Israel, Britain, Italy, Malta, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus. Taken together the 15 papers show that current youth research contributes significantly to understanding emergent dynamic transformations which are reshaping the social structure (including politics and democracy), taking place at both local and global levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• crisis
• violence
• activism
• politics
• democracy

Introduction

There is a special value in considering youth and adolescents in troubled contexts. This throws light on their particular experiences at a formative stage in their lives. Such research, recent years, has considered such matters as social exclusion, marginalisation, unemployment, poverty, disempowerment and disenchantment, as well as promoting effective frameworks, interventions, strategies and innovations through a variety of policies. The latter have often taken account of interdependent issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, inequality, migration, faith, activism, violence, extremism and political radicalisation. As Standing (2011) has pointed out, this has led to the recognition of the growth of a precariat, especially among youths in difficult or threatening environments.

As a contribution to this emerging field of research empirical studies that investigate the complex dynamics of youth in troubled or crisis-ridden contexts are brought together in this current issue of Contemporary Social Science, drawing on a wide range of countries and cultures, including, Botswana, Brazil, Britain, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Malta, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Zambia. Taken together the 15 papers show that current youth research contributes significantly to understanding emergent dynamic transformations which are reshaping the social structure (including politics and democracy), taking place at both local and global levels. What these studies demonstrate is the need to tackle youth-relevant issues from many different social science perspectives that mutually and substantially complement each other.

Ambivalences in youth research

The concept of crisis includes the nonlinear dynamics of conflict, change and transition. When a community goes through a transitory period, as ongoing fieldwork since 2008 (Stylianoudi, 2010, 2017)¹ in a remote mountainous area of central Greece shows, the community often suffers from a disintegration of its social structure, resulting into the gradual emergence of a disintegrating self, especially for the young (and most vulnerable) individuals. Young individuals in transitory contexts thus see an uncertain future and environment, not knowing how to invest in their community or what to aspire to. They feel ‘lost’, with few hopes regarding their career paths. Under precarious working conditions, young adults in crisis-ridden countries, such as Greece, are now obliged to cope with various limitations which affect them at multiple levels, indicating different aspects of social and psychological complexities. They feel helpless and express feelings of disappointment, uncertainty, pessimism, fear, anger, negativism, anxiety and depression (Chalari, 2014; Tsekeris, Kaberis, & Pinguli, 2015).

In addition, crisis disrupts youngsters’ life trajectories and their existential need for self-development and re-orientation, as expressed within subjective living-with-parent’s experiences (Tsekeris, Ntali, Koutrias, & Chatzoulis, 2017). Nevertheless, contemporary youth is characterised by strong ambivalences. For instance, many young people seem to make genuine efforts to defend collective values and civil society, to explore new alternative paths, strategies, solutions and ideas, and to create new small enterprises, start-ups and co-working habitats (Tsekeris, Pinguli, & Georga, 2015). In some cases, this is strongly reinforced by the huge opportunities provided by the internet and its facilities. Therefore, the unemployed and unemployable young people in today’s reality are not necessarily a ‘lost generation’ (Asmussen, 2014; Santos, 2017); they are reflexive, knowledgeable and critical citizens, who energetically embrace risk and exploit chaos.

Of course, the degenerating – and almost pessimistic – situation for the youth began many years ago, through the (neoliberal) individualising processes associated with the logic of reflexive modernisation (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994). It reached its peak with the current (global) financial crisis – or at least it has made itself apparent within (and because of) the crisis. As a result, the proportion of younger citizens who trust established political parties (or representative institutions) and believe ‘it is essential to live in a democracy’ is surprisingly, falling to a minority at the international level (Foa & Mounk, 2017, p. 6) – that is, a disengagement process which potentially gives rise to negative narratives and authoritarian or populist interpretations of democracy.

To a large extent, this current themed issue deals with the fundamental concept of the youngsters’ self, subjectivity and identity, as well as with various facets of their deep precariousness, insecurity and anxiety, relating to everyday social and subjective experiences. Although significant differences can be discerned due to cultural particularities, quite astonishingly, many things are similar for youngsters and adolescents from different countries. This arguably signifies the dynamic relational possibility that young people nowadays have to interact, communicate, exchange ideas and collaborate with their peers around the rapidly digitalised, networked and interconnected globe (see e.g. Tsekeris & Katerelos, 2014). That is, the constant and ubiquitous use of new information and communication technologies effectively undoes the borders that previously tightly isolated young adults and children (de Almeida, Delicado, de Almeida Alves, & Carvalho, 2014). Today’s well-educated young generations obtain the tools and the capacity to freely express themselves and to access power outside of the old participatory structures and mechanisms (e.g. using the internet to gather information, express opinions, spread views or even influence decision-making processes).

Other new forms of participation to social life, political processes and democratic structures include peer-to-peer networks, discussion fora, signing petitions, participation in so-called new social movements, support groups, boycotting of products, demonstrations and international meetings (Goździk-Ormel, 2008, p. 26). These new meaningful forms move beyond the ‘old’ or ‘received’ youth paradigm depicting young people as apathetic, unengaged and uninterested in political processes.² It is now widely acknowledged that the youngsters can be highly political and civic minded, albeit in alternative ways, often being more active and innovative than a majority of adults. Political parties and elections alone do not amount to the ‘political’. All forms of participation are political and young people’s civic engagement is finding new forms of participation,

as traditional politics feels unrepresentative and unable to address the concerns associated with contemporary youth culture … [But] how much influence do young people really have through these new modes of participation? Are they truly at the decision-making table on issues that interest and affect them? Recognising something until recently overlooked, does not necessarily entail its augmentation. In other words, does decision-makers’ admitting that young people do have a voice, also make it stronger? (Nica, 2014)

Lessons from Africa

No doubt, contemporary youth confronts challenging and troubled contexts in different ways across the world. In the beginning, the themed issue attracts original contributions from countries (and deprived areas) that are usually under-represented in most academic media. Four interesting and informative accounts come from Africa. First, Sewasew, Braun-Lewensohn, and Kassa (2017) investigate the contributions of guardian care and peer support to psychological resilience among orphaned young adolescents in Ethiopia (Dessie town). There the unique sociocultural context in which children grow up places many pressing responsibilities on them, thus moving them forward to become adults at a very early age. The painful experience of orphanhood is an additional contributor to life experience, which also acts as a strong resilience factor for the older group of children.

Secondly, Roberts and Silwamba (2017) demonstrate the complex, meaningful links between ethnicity, youth and political participation, particularly voting behaviour and tribal identity, in the Zambia context. Within conditions of fragile democracy and economic turbulence, they find that Zambian youth consider ethnicity to be an important part of personal identities (albeit not a political factor) and overwhelmingly perceive politicians to be engaging in political tribalism, which they broadly reject. Lower voter turnouts, especially among Zambia’s largest tribe, and the risk of democratic disengagement are the results of youth’s widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived ethnic politics.

Thirdly, Jacobs (2017) did original ethnographic research in two desegregated schools in Johannesburg to explicate social processes of adolescent identity construction in post-apartheid South Africa, under conditions of de-racialisation of the school system. The research shows that the adolescents construct complex identity bricolages which represent not least answers to still existing discourses and practices of racialisation. Race and ethnic relations, as well as class and economic divisions, still structure social relations inside school. Nonetheless, South African teenagers seem to appropriate for themselves specific features from global popular culture in order to express or claim their particular symbolic identity, or to re-draw racial differentiations between social groups.

Fourthly, Mac-Ikemenjima (2017) offers an analytic starting point for bridging the theoretical gap in understanding the role of violence in low youth turnout during elections in sub-Saharan Africa. There recent waves of heightened political awareness have seen increasing numbers of youth engaging in protests and some actively mobilising their peers to vote. Using a large set of data from 20 countries in Africa, it is particularly interesting to find a negative correlation between violence and voting for youth. This correlation, albeit statistically weak, implies that violence could deter voting in elections (thus seriously undermining youngsters’ capacity to determine the political futures of their respective countries), regardless the role of socioeconomic and political variables, such as level of education, employment status and association with a political party.

Activism and violence

Turning attention to Latin America, where diverse forms of routine violence are enduring problems, predominantly in the communities most affected by social inequalities, Cavalcanti (2017) examines youth perceptions of a managerial homicide reduction programme in Recife, the capital city of the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil. Original ethnographic data show a clear dissonance between what high-ranking officials, police and academics involved with public security interventions claimed (as a ‘success’) and what young people in poor and marginalised communities actually experienced. That is, increasing feelings of being trapped, isolated and criminalised as a result of increased policing. This intriguingly opens up the critique of the deficiencies and inadequacies of ‘Global North’ security strategies when applied to the South.

Furthermore, Ting (2017), in his original qualitative study, brings valuable lessons from the Far East about the complex links between youth, future orientations and embodied resistance. In particular, the author draws out the irreducible importance of future orientations, as they play out in youth activist strategies in Hong Kong. He argues that these orientations go beyond meta-narratives and social movement frames, and are embodied at the dynamic site of grassroots struggle. Hence, aspirations about the future both shape and are shaped by young people’s political activism.

In a different geographical and cultural setting (Middle East), Βuscemi (2017) presents a substantial account of the role of young people in contemporary Kuwait and their diverse – seemingly interdependent and possibly overlapping – resistant practices in the areas of political mobilisation (protests staged in Kuwait mainly in 2012), political radicalisation (political violence, Islamic extremism and terrorist episodes) and civic engagement (examples from an invigorated civil society) in the period 2009–2016. Such practices arguably tend to challenge (or transgress) dominant cultural and political paradigms, affecting symbolic identity construction and social patterns. They also signify the distance between the government and youth, as well as between conflicting local social requests and wider aspirations, instilled by modernity and its declinations.

Topical issues of political radicalisation are also critically discussed by Uboldi (2017) in his qualitative analysis of European jihadist terrorism ‘from a subcultural perspective’. The author introduces a visual method as an alternative sociological tool not widely exposed to significant empirical scrutiny in the youth literature, imaginatively focusing on how youth groups construct their jihadist identity. The Western foreign fighters or native-born terrorists, who are all young people, like other members of criminal or noncriminal subcultures, express this identity through visual forms, namely through (emotionally loaded) images of the self, which circulate the web platforms and social network sites.

Revisiting complex processes of youth identity and violence, Armstrong and Rosbrook-Thompson (2017) elaborate their findings from two years’ ethnographic fieldwork. They carefully investigate how gang activity in Newham (East London, UK) is combatted by a faith-based organisation, namely, Teaching Against Gangs. This organisation aims to radically reform the symbolic identities of young male gang members, advancing a new kind of masculinity that pertains to an awareness of the racial and racist (power) dynamics of criminal and wider society. It provides a focus on individuals thriving within fraternal networks, and the meaningful desire to canalise creative energies into legitimate entrepreneurial activities. Although this strategy poses only an indirect challenge to the racist societal structures it identified, it was effective in reducing levels of gang violence in East London. It thus shows that finding God could really work in gang intervention and the rehabilitation of gang members, ‘but only if the search had a certain worldly resonance’ (Armstrong & Rosbrook-Thompson, 2017).

Insights from south Europe

Moreover, this special issue offers a number of empirical contributions from Southern Europe. Uboldi (2017) explores the educational experiences of young pupils (aged between 16 and 21) from a disadvantaged social background, focusing on public and private secondary art schools (practical lyceums) in Milan, Italy. The author uses in-depth interviews with time line and focus groups to show how these pupils (perceived as incomplete neoliberal subjectivities), their choices and their educational representations, attitudes, and ambitions can possibly be interpreted in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘outcasts on the inside’ (Bourdieu & Accardo, 1993, p. 602). Her original sociological analysis arguably opens up a significant question about what can/should be done in the future, in order to deepen and continue to develop such a critical youth research paradigm.

A town near to Milan, and former economic and industrial centre, Turin, is the locus of Monticelli and Baglioni’s (2017) research on the subjective feelings and perceptions on social exclusion, joblessness and powerlessness among a group of young unemployed and precarious people. Due to Turin’s post-industrialisation dynamics, youngsters from blue-collars families have now a low sense of belonging to communities, limited income and scarce opportunities to plan for the future and foresee a passage into an adult, independent life. Yet, an analytic focus on deprived experiences of consumption (in particular, consumption of leisure goods) reveals that while work has not lost its conventional material and symbolic meaning, young people attribute great importance and value to experiences of consumption as a way for them to gain social status, as well as to socialise with peers, friends and acquaintances.

Visanich (2017) draws qualitative data (through the use of in-depth interviews) from another Southern European country, the small island state of Malta, a location that is still relatively traditional due to the strong influence of Catholic morality and kinship ties. The author focuses on tertiary education students (aged between 21 and 26) and examines the sociological implications and the contextual framework of structural conditions of their personal anxiety – that is, a framework characterised by the ambivalence (or cultural dualism) between modernity and tradition.³ On the one hand, the degree of youth’s anxiety is increased by changes in the educational system, employment prospects and personal debts. On the other hand, the familial support network, which offers both financial and emotional support, seems to reduce anxiety, as well as the uncertainty which is created by youth’s reflexive deliberations and ‘institutional individualisation’.

Using a similar sample (tertiary education students aged between 20 and 25), Morán and Fernández de Mosteyrín (2017) explore how Spanish young people imagine and represent their future through autobiographical narratives (collected in the form of ‘letters’), in a context characterised by high uncertainty and a far-reaching economic, social and political crisis. This multidimensional crisis disrupts and dysfunctionalises hitherto youth strategies, disarticulates students’ imagined futures and has adverse consequences on their transitions to adult life. In their narrative analysis, nevertheless, the authors show how, in the process of imagining their future, Spanish youth manage to reconsider their expectations and generate new solutions, linking individual experiences to the collective, generational dimension.

This individual-collective link is also discussed in Nico’s (2017) qualitative contribution, pertaining to a relational understanding of how the current financial crisis has been experienced by young people in Europe, particularly in Portugal. Here, an original methodological approach to life-histories, with the application of some co-constructed instruments, casts light on how Portuguese youth’s educational, residential, occupational and romantic lives were particularly pervaded and affected by the crisis. It also elucidates how a popular generational (neoliberal) discourse neglects the relational context in an individual’s own biography, thus bypassing its historical location and interpretation:

the appropriation of individualisation discourses by political agents may not be a one-way street, but part of a circular movement in which the dissemination of this individualised neo-liberal discourse is able to re-contaminate the individual’s discourses and ways of thinking. (Nico, 2017)

Finally, Christodoulou, Passias, Theocharides, and Davou (2017) use focus groups to study the dynamic processes that underlie the dramatic drop recorded in political interest of young Greek Cypriots, who, as most young people in Europe, feel extremely insecure and uncertain for their future, are quite pessimistic and cynical, and highly disillusioned with traditional politics. Interestingly, Cypriot youngsters’ increased abstention from political participation and collective action is linked to Euroscepticism and a high degree of emotional distance from important changes to come with the possible reunification of Cyprus. In the last instance, such findings signify an urgent need to get inspired and ‘rediscover passion for ideas’ (Christodoulou et al., 2017), which seemingly youth all over Europe and the world cannot find any more in traditional politics.

Conclusions

This current themed issue offers an international coverage of original empirical studies from many different countries, such as Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana, Brazil, Hong Kong, Kuwait India, Israel, Britain, Italy, Malta, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus. The extent of this coverage depicts a growing cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding of the huge complexity of youth identities and behaviours, including their emergent relational consequences on global transformation, politics and democracy. In addition, it demonstrates the value of combining various disciplinary perspectives, methods and tools within the wide and diverse field of social science, thus maximising the impact and significance of social research.

Interestingly, contemporary youth research shows the urgent and pressing need to build citizen dialogue mechanisms to debate, discover and solve the massive challenges of engagement and inclusion. This will arguably bring democratic institutions closer to younger citizens (especially those in ethnic minorities or in migration contexts), who desire to be heard, recognised and respected (Montgomery, 2015) and are often dangerously trapped in a vicious circle between socioeconomic barriers and political disengagement (Dezelan & Lisney, 2015).

In general, youth is nowadays more educated, networked and informed than ever before. It is thus an immense source for new ideas, perspectives and initiatives. Yet, they are more disadvantaged and marginalised than in the past, growing up poorer than their parents (Dobbs et al., 2016), with whom they are often inextricably bound up. Indisputably, further empirical social research is needed to inform youth policy domains against variegated and diffuse phenomena of social marginalisation, exclusion, injustice, inequality, subordination and suffering. But before elaborating on the appropriateness of any youth policy, one should reflect on the significant dissonance between policy and the actual realities of youth’s lives (Pechtelidis & Giannaki, 2014), as well as on the critical relational observation that

youth and policy are themselves mutually constitutive and that how either is understood at any time and in any location is conditional upon political circumstances … austerity (like policy) should be understood as discourse and, as such, is a social product. This means that austerity policy is, itself, socially shaped and its provisions and exclusions sanctioned in culturally and historically specific ways and through differing local and global practices. (Bradford & Cullen, 2014, p. 4)

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor David Canter and the staff from the Academy of Social Sciences for their valuable help during the whole course of doing this themed issue. We would also like to heartily acknowledge all CSS’s external reviewers for their valuable help in reviewing the submissions and bringing the manuscripts to their current form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Charalambos Tsekeris is currently a Research Associate at the Research Centre for Greek Society of the Academy of Athens, Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Athens, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Virtual Reality, Internet Research & E-Learning (Panteion University), Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, and Research Professor at Aegean College, Athens, Greece. His current academic interests involve relational approaches in youth research and the social science in general, reflexivity and the self, human complex systems and psychosocial networks. He is the coeditor of The Social Dynamics of Web 2.0 (Routledge 2014) and editor of Revisiting the Self: Social Science Perspectives (Routledge 2015).

Lily Stylianoudi is a social and legal anthropologist, Research Professor and Director of the Research Centre for Greek Society (RCGS) of the Academy of Athens, Athens, Greece. She has participated in many research projects and done extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia (Amhara), as well as in different regions in Greece. Professor Stylianoudi is the editor of Greek Society / Elliniki Koinonia, RCGS’s Year Book and of RCGS’s Publication Series. Her main research and academic interests include juvenile deviant behaviour, clinical anthropology, social problems, migration studies, epistemology, research methods and interpretative tools in the social sciences.

ORCID

Charalambos Tsekeris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3304-5331

Notes

1. This fieldwork study, titled as ‘Rural Crisis and Social Pathology’, is directed by Professor Lily Stylianoudi and funded by the Research Centre for Greek Society of the Academy of Athens (Athens, Greece).

2. Yet, in the diverse field of youth (policy) paradigms, a rough distinction is often made whether young people are seen as a problem or as a resource. In countries where young people are seen as a problem, there is a particular focus on issues such as homelessness, unemployment, marginalisation, social exclusion and so on. In countries where young people are seen as a resource, the central emphasis is on policies that help youngsters to develop themselves, mainly by focusing on education, training and political participation. The best example for the ‘resource approach’ is Denmark and Sweden; a good example of a mixture of resource and problem could include Germany, Greece and the Netherlands (Wallace & Bendit, 2009).

3. For an extensive study of this cultural dualism in the context of Greek society, see Diamandouros (1994).