Youth Rising?

The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy

Mayssoun Sukarieh, Stuart Tannock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134650880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the last decade, "youth" has become increasingly central to policy, development, media and public debates and conflicts across the world – whether as an ideological symbol, social category or political actor. Set against a backdrop of contemporary political economy, Youth Rising? seeks to understand exactly how and why youth has become such a popular and productive social category and concept. The book provocatively argues that the rise and spread of global neoliberalism has not only led youth to become more politically and symbolically salient, but also to expand to encompass a growing range of ages and individuals of different class, race, ethnic, national and religious backgrounds.

Employing both theoretical and historical analysis, authors Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock trace the development of youth within the context of capitalism, where it has long functioned as a category for social control. The book's chapters critically analyze the growing fears of mass youth unemployment and a "lost generation" that spread around the world in the wake of the global financial crisis. They question as well the relentless focus on youth in the reporting and discussion of recent global protests and uprisings. By helping develop a better understanding of such phenomena and critically and reflexively investigating the very category and identity of youth, Youth Rising? offers a fresh and sobering challenge to the field of youth studies and to widespread claims about the relationship between youth and social change.

1 THE NEOLIBERAL EMBRACE OF YOUTH

DOI: 10.4324/9781315884660-1

The last two decades of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century saw a remarkable proliferation of youth policy, programming and research across the globe. In the Arab world, for example, new youth ministries have been formed and national youth strategies produced since the start of the millennium; there has been a surge in NGOs tailored to youth; and youth parliaments have been created to increase political participation among youth. In Egypt, 60 percent of the youth-oriented NGOs that currently exist in the country were created between 2003 and 2006 alone. Many reports about the state of Arab youth have been released: the Arab League dedicated its 2005 and 2006 reports to the subject of Arab youth; and the Arab Network of NGOs dedicated its 2007 annual report to analyzing Arab youth and civil society. Likewise, in Africa, the African Union adopted an African Youth Charter in 2006 and declared 2008 the “Year of African Youth;” and African Union member states—from Ghana to the Gambia to Kenya to Malawi to Lesotho—have adopted new national youth policies (Ansell, Hadju, Robson, van Blerk & Marandet, 2012; Gyimah-Brempong & Kimenyi, 2013). Across the continent, youth have become a new and “major beneficiary” of local, national and international NGO programming, as aid and development organizations have “shifted policy-orientations from the ‘rural,’ the ‘women’ or the ‘household’, to the ‘youth’ as the new developmental target and hope for the future” (van Dijk, de Bruijn, Cardoso & Butter, 2011, pp. 1–2). Similar developments can be found occurring across Asia, Europe and the Americas: the rise of youth-oriented NGOs, youth-focused development programs, and a wide range of institutions dedicated to increasing overall levels of youth participation and civic engagement, including youth councils, youth parliaments, youth forums, youth consultations, youth mayors and so on (Loncle, Cuconato, Muniglia & Walther, 2012; Luke, 2012; Nenga & Taft, 2013). According to YouthPolicy.org (2013b), since the year 2000, more than 70 nations from all regions of the world have created or are in the process of creating new national youth policies. While in some cases, these represent revisions of youth policy agendas that have been in existence for decades, in many countries, these constitute the first time there has ever been a national youth policy at all.

In the United States—which, in many ways, has served as the largest and earliest hub of the new global turn to youth—a new “youth philanthropy” movement arose during the mid-1980s, as foundations around the country became increasingly concerned with making youth issues a priority in their charitable giving. By the beginning of the millennium, there were more than 250 youth philanthropy initiatives in the United States, involving some of the country's largest foundations: Ford, Kellogg, Carnegie, Hewlett Packard, Irvine, Rockefeller, Lilly, Kauffman, Mott, Casey, Merck, Surdna and the Open Society. There were also regular summits, conferences and collaborative alliances established with the aim of developing this new philanthropic field (Falk & Nissan, 2007; FCYO, 2013). Largely through foundation support, the United States saw an extensive growth over the ensuing decades of new youth organizations of all stripes and sizes; and new arenas of youth service work that were dedicated to promoting youth organizing, youth activism, youth leadership, youth participation, youth civic engagement, youth empowerment and youth entrepreneurship emerged and expanded (Hosang, 2003; Kim & Sherman, 2006; Kwon, 2013; Mohammed & Wheeler, 2001; Taft, 2011; Watts & Flanagan, 2007). Foundation activity in promoting youth-oriented programming has been closely aligned with state initiatives as well, an alignment perhaps most clearly epitomized by the gathering of five living US presidents for the President's Summit on Youth in Philadelphia in April 1997. The President's Summit was an event that sought to “challenge America to make youth a national priority,” and it led to the formation of America's Promise—The Alliance for Youth, a public-private partnership led by former US General Colin Powell and dedicated to improving the lives of youth and children across America (America's Promise Alliance, 2013; Falk & Nissan, 2007; Pittman, Irby & Ferber, 2000).

These local, regional and national shifts to embrace youth as a primary subject of policy and programming have been both mirrored and driven forward by shifts at the international level as well. In 1985, the United Nations General Assembly declared the first International Year of Youth: since then, the United Nations has adopted a World Program of Action for Youth (in 1995), declared an annual International Youth Day (in 2000), launched a biennial World Youth Report (in 2003), established an Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development (in 2010), and created a United Nations Envoy for Youth (in 2013). The World Bank has followed suit, forming a worldwide Youth Employment Network with the United Nations and the International Labour Organization (in 2001), establishing a Children and Youth Team (in 2002), creating a network of national Youth Advisory Groups (also in 2002), creating a Y2Y (Youth to Youth Community) network of young World Bank staff members (in 2004), launching Youthink!, an interactive youth website (in 2006), dedicating an entire World Development Report to addressing the state of the world's youth (in 2007), and hosting its first Youth Summit in Washington, DC (in 2013) (YouthPolicy.org, 2013a). In 2011, the World Economic Forum created its Global Shapers Community, which it describes as a “network of Hubs developed and led by young people” who “represent the voice of youth at World Economic Forum events” (WEF, 2011). Similar programs have been launched by a wide range of other aid and development organizations around the world. Not only did the US State Department, for example, create its Office of Global Youth Issues and its global network of Youth Councils in 2012 in order to “empower” youth and “elevate” youth issues as a global policy priority, but in the same year, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) adopted its first ever Policy on Youth in Development (USAID, 2012a). According to USAID (2012b), its new policy aims to reinforce the principle “that young people must be a central focus when developing country strategies and recognizes the need to support, prepare, engage and protect youth today as well as harness the energy and creativity of young people for positive change.”

Research and writing on youth and youth issues have also expanded massively over the past few decades. In 1984, a new Society for Research in Adolescence was created in the United States; and over the next two decades, attendance at the Society's biennial conferences quadrupled (Lerner & Steinberg, 2004). A European Association for Research on Adolescence was created in 1988. New journals dedicated to youth and adolescence were launched—the Journal of Research on Adolescence in 1991, Young: The Nordic Journal of Youth Research in 1993, the Journal of Youth Studies in 1998, the Community Youth Development Journal in 2000, and New Directions for Youth Development in 2002—and the number of people working on and writing about matters of youth have continued to grow exponentially (Dubas, Miller & Petersen, 2003; Lerner & Steinberg, 2004). There has been a boom in book publishing on youth studies, with a growing numbers of handbooks and overviews of the field (e.g., Cieslik & Simpson, 2013; Furlong, 2009, 2012; Jones, 2009; Lesko & Talburt, 2012), and new book series dedicated to the study of youth: Routledge's Critical Youth Studies series, in which this book is published, was launched in 2006; Temple University Press's Global Youth series began publishing in 2011; and the European-based Youth Policy Press was opened in 2013.

What has led to this global turn to youth? Policy makers, practitioners, researchers and others often argue that they have simply been responding to changed social and economic realities that have made youth and youth issues more important and more widely relevant around the world than they have ever been before. Youth as a social category has expanded vertically, in terms of the chronological age range it is popularly understood to cover, and horizontally, in terms of the range of groups of people it encompasses. Children are said to be growing up earlier as a result of the spread of mass media, corporate advertising and consumer society; while adulthood is said to be increasingly delayed for many due to the growing need for post-secondary education and training, the disappearance (or continued absence) of stable career employment, and the corresponding rise in the age of marriage, parenthood, financial independence and moving out of familial homes (Arnett, 2000, 2007a). As secondary and post-secondary educational enrollment levels have expanded, labor market conditions for young workers have transformed, and global mass media and consumer culture have spread across the world, youth has increasingly become a relevant social category and identity not just for middle-class young people in the global North, but for young people across nations, social classes, and racial and ethnic groups in the global North and South alike. The spread of youth as a social category has by no means been uniform or universal: for young people growing up in poor families in some parts of the global South, in particular, who remain outside of formal education, the formal labor market and mass consumer society, the concept and identity of youth, as it is understood elsewhere, continue to have limited relevance. But youth is more widely recognized around the world than it has ever been, and it is a social category and identity that appear to be spreading rapidly.

Other social and economic changes are also said to have contributed to bringing youth to the foreground of global public and political attention. The World Bank's World Development Report 2007 on the state of the world's youth, for example, highlights five core reasons that it argues are driving the growing concern with youth, particularly in the countries of the global South: a demographic “bulge” that has made the global South's current generation of youth the largest in history; a natural progression from previous successes in addressing the developmental needs of children worldwide, especially in expanding access to primary education and reducing the incidence of childhood disease; an increased demand for higher level skills, which are usually acquired during youth, as countries around the world move from manufacturing and agricultural to knowledge-based economies; a growing threat to world productivity from the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is often transmitted through sexual encounters in adolescence and early adulthood; and a decline in birth rates, population growth and labor-force strength in the global North that has triggered renewed interest in recruiting and exploiting the massive, unemployed and underemployed youthful populations of the global South (World Bank, 2006, pp. 26–44). For the CIA, the US State Department and other core institutions of the US security establishment, it is claimed that it is the (alleged) propensity of youth to engage in violent, militarized activity, combined with the expanding populations of youth in the countries of the global South, that has propelled them to the forefront of national security and foreign policy attention (Hendrixson, 2012).

All of these reasons, however, though they each may contain an element of truth, provide at best only part of the fuller story. For youth as a social category never simply emerges as an automatic effect of social and economic change, but is actively constructed as a tool and technology for managing social and economic change as well. The expansion of youth as a social category, at least in part, is also something that has been driven and shaped by the intellectual, organizational, financial and practical work of policy makers, practitioners and academics themselves: research, policy-making and programming do not just respond to emerging social and economic realities, they help to produce these in the first place (Lesko & Talburt, 2012). If youth as a social category has grown and become increasingly central to contemporary social, political, intellectual and economic activity, this is partly because the social category of youth has become more useful, productive and sensible for a growing number of organizations, agendas and ideologies around the world. One striking example of how this process works over time can be seen in the changing significance of youth in policy and development work in contemporary Africa. Rijk van Dijk and his colleagues at Leiden University's African Studies Centre make the observation that “in a number of countries in Africa, such as Uganda and Kenya, national publics have been discussing whether citizens of age 50 or even 60 should be regarded as ‘youth’” (van Dijk et al., 2011, p. 1). The reason for this, they argue, is that:

the current dispensation of donor funding, relief programmes and international aid [has prioritized] youth-oriented programmes. If the donor-ideology prescribes youthfulness for societal and developmental relevance, it will then dictate practice. … Youth has become an ideological project because an arena of interests and scarce resources has been generated around it.

(van Dijk et al., 2011, pp. 1, 7)

Similar phenomena can be observed elsewhere. In the Arab world, NGOs that focus on human rights or story-telling or democracy promotion and so on have, over the past decade, often found themselves unable to get funding for their projects unless and until they reframe these projects as being about youth and tailored to youth. In the process, issues and practices that had previously been conceptualized as being relevant to the general population in the Arab world are reconstructed as being particular to youth instead. In order to understand this widening embrace of the social category and identity of youth across the world, we thus have to move beyond simple quantitative assessments of the growing importance of youth, and address more substantive questions: first, of how youth are being talked about within dominant organizations and discourses in the current period; and second, what is at stake in the shift to talking about ever expanding groups of individuals as being “youth” in the first place, as opposed to some other social category (e.g., as adults, or in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.).

In this chapter, we focus on the nature and significance of the neoliberal embrace of youth by examining precisely these substantive questions. We begin by tracing the emergence of a new set of practices for talking about and working with youth that stands at the heart of the explosion of youth policy, programming and research over the past few decades—a set of practices that are often referred to as “positive youth development.” We then address the question of why youth has become such an important social category in global neoliberal society, in particular, by focusing on the core characteristics that youth as a social category and identity has. We examine how the neoliberal model of youth that we describe in this chapter has spread across the world through the direct agency of a dense network of governmental, private sector and nongovernmental organizations, and how this model has become hegemonic, even as it is often contested locally by individual young people and others. Finally, we address the question of what has happened to this neoliberal model of youth in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, a crisis that many initially argued would lead to the collapse and eventual disappearance of neoliberalism as a dominant ideology, political agenda and set of social, cultural and economic practices around the world.

The Rise of Positive Youth Development

The shifts in youth policy, programming and research in the contemporary period have not just been quantitative, but have also involved a transformation in the principal ways in which youth as a social category and identity is constructed and represented. For, starting in the late 1980s and becoming dominant by the turn of the twenty-first century, a new “positive youth development movement” has arisen that claims to revolutionize the last hundred years of youth development theory, practice and research. This shift in youth work and adolescent study, which has tended to see itself explicitly as a movement and as being self-consciously new and inherently liberating and modern, first began in the United States and subsequently spread across the rest of the world. The positive youth development movement claims to draw on the latest advances in scientific knowledge and theory of what is required for healthy and normal youth development to shape not just youth and educational policy and programming, but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Neoliberal Embrace of Youth
• 2 Youth and Capitalism in History
• 3 The Specter of Youth Unemployment
• 4 Youth as a Revolutionary Subject?
• 5 Education, Protest, and the Continuing Extension of Youth
• Conclusion
• References
• Index