POMEPS Studies 36: Youth Politics in the Middle East and North Africa
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POMEPS STUDIES 36 Youth Politics in the Middle East and North Africa November 2019 Contents Youth Politics in the Middle East and North Africa ................................................3 Sean Yom, Marc Lynch, and Wael al-Khatib Informality and Organization Youth Politics in Contemporary Turkey: Political Hegemony, Hybrid Incorporation, and Youth (De-)Mobilization (2010-2016) ................7 Begum Uzun, University of Toronto Youth Politics in Tunisia: Comparing Land/Labor, Leftist Movements, and NGO-ized Elites ...........14 Matt Gordner, University of Toronto Missing Youth in Tunisia? Implications of Regional Disparities and Center-Periphery Divide ..........20 Giulia Cimini, Università L’Orientale of Naples Youth Political Participation and Attitudes in Contemporary Morocco ..............................26 Yousra Kadi, Mohammed First University Oujda Revolutionary Youth Politics: From Seizing to Sharing Power .......................................31 Dina El-Sharnouby, American University of Cairo Expanding the Political Agenda Young Women, Sexual Violence, and the Pursuit of Justice Amid Weakening State Institutions: Te Case of Turkey’s Campus Witches ................................37 Sarah Fischer, Marymount University ‘Waging a war not only on coal but much more’: Types of Youth Activism among Egyptians against the Coal Movement ..............................41 Aziza Moneer, Te Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden Youth, Activism, and Protest: Jordan’s Movement Against Israeli Gas ................................49 Curtis R. Ryan, Appalachian State University Te Struggle to Re-Politicize the Political: Te Discourse on Economic Rights in the Jordanian Popular Movement 2011-2012 ...................54 Sara Ababneh, University of Jordan Te Reckoning of History: Young Activists, Tribal Elders, and the Uses of the Past in Jordan ...........60 Yazan Doughan, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University Evolving and Adaptive Informal Education and Youth Culturing in Post-Gülenist Turkey ...................................64 Aydin Ozipek, Northwestern University Heroism and Adulthood among Arrested Youth in East Jerusalem ..................................69 Makiko Nambu, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Te New Lost Boys of Sudan ....................................................................73 Sarah A Tobin, CMI A Revolutionary Generation? Assessing Standards of Political Efficacy among MENA Youth using Anchoring Vignettes ..........................................79 Justin Gengler, Social and Economic Survey Research Institute, Qatar University Beyond Mass Protests: Rethinking What Constitutes Arab Youth Political Activism ..................86 Sarah Anne Rennick, Sciences Po Te Project on Middle East Political Science Te Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) is a collaborative network that aims to increase the impact of political scientists specializing in the study of the Middle East in the public sphere and in the academic community. POMEPS, directed by Marc Lynch, is based at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University and is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Henry Luce Foundation. For more information, see http://www.pomeps.org. 2 INTRODUCTION Youth Politics in the Middle East and North Africa Sean Yom, Marc Lynch, and Wael al-Khatib Youth political activism has been challenging Middle East mobilization with revolutionary alarmism. Many popular and North African political systems frequently and forcefully uprisings were led by young protesters, organizers, and over the last decade. Tis is not a new phenomenon, advocates who belonged to no extant opposition party or of course. Young people have historically stood at the political faction – and thus seemed to come out of nowhere. forefront of popular uprisings and cultural movements. Te result, as one scholar observed, was the tendency Demographic realities in the Middle East have increased to view the region through a “generational narrative” the latent potential for disruptive youth activism. Nearly 60 that portrayed young people as rebellious automatons: percent of people in the region fall under the age of 30, half marginalized by economic downturns and brutalized by of whom are aged between 15 and 29, and in almost every repressive dictatorships, youth were framed as impulsive country, unemployment for working-age youth exceeds the revolutionaries inevitably bound to shake their societies.1 overall jobless rate. Te failures of the 2011 Arab uprisings to achieve lasting democratic change revealed the limits Yet by reducing youth to emotional and demographic of street protests, but the underlying problems remain stereotypes, observers miss what made this latest wave of profoundly unresolved. How are young people questioning, activism so momentous. As Asef Bayat has noted, terms subverting, and transforming the boundaries of politics in like “youth politics” or “youth activism” do not simply the post-uprising Middle East and North Africa? mean that young people are politicized; rather, they imply that youthfulness as a lived experience intersects with In June 2019, the Project on Middle East Political Science other identities like class, gender, occupation, and tribe convened a workshop on youth politics in Amman, Jordan, to produce new ideas, actions, and strategies to change in cooperation with the Phenix Center for Economic the status quo.2 In this way, being young is a distinctive and Informatics Studies. Te workshop’s papers and analytical category, and focusing on actors who identify deliberations sought to unpack the meaning of youth as youth allows researchers to trace how new voices are politics. What characterizes the latest wave of youth innovating, leading, and mobilizing within the realm of mobilization? How is youth activism, and youth politics, politics. All the scholars in this volume therefore treat the changing public attitudes and government policies? Can experience of being young as culturally, historically, and any generalizations be made about youthfulness, and the theoretically significant. experience of being young and political, in the Middle East today? Te essays contained in this volume attempt Tere is general agreement that beyond its obvious age to answer these questions. Tey come from scholars who, connotations – too old to be children, recent graduates of through intensive fieldwork in varying countries, study high school or college, but often not old enough to have the origins and processes of activism among young people settled families and children of their own – the label of through diverse methodologies and orientations. “youth” is fuzzy. It depends upon the context, because it intersects so heavily with other categories. Take, for Studying Youth Activism instance, the campus feminists and university students whom Sarah Fischer follows in Turkey, the tribal activists In the wake of the Arab Spring, many observers unfamiliar in Jordan whom Yazan Doughan and Sara Ababneh with the Middle East treated the sudden surge of youth interview, and the jobless graduates of rural Tunisia whom 1 Emma Murphy, “Problematizing Arab Youth: Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure,” Mediterranean Politics 17, 1 (2012): 5-22. 2 Asef Bayat, “Is Tere a Youth Politics?” Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 9 (2017): 16-24. 3 Giulia Cimini observes. Apart from being in their late Informality and Organization teens through late 20s, and attacking perceived structures of injustice and oppression, these disparate groupings of First, much youth activism today eschews the formalized young people have different affiliations or ideologies. Tey organization characterizing opposition parties and civil question the authority of older powerholders in different society, and multiplies instead through social networks that ways, and deploy particular strategies and incisive language must be carefully tracked and observed. To be sure, many that make sense only in their context. Tey are all young, youth actors work with, or through, formal institutions such but hardly identical. as NGOs. Begum Uzun’s work on political participation in Turkey examines how the dominant AK Party has Tus, every essay presented here shows a unique site of successfully incorporated youth by pressuring and capturing political action. For that reason, it is critical to underscore student groups and municipal organs, thereby turning that methodologically, studying youth activism today young Turkish voters into rank-and-file cadres in strategy requires serious fieldwork that puts scholars in close evocative of corporatism. However, it is more common contact with their subject. Such field-based research can to see youth political engagement occur through informal take different forms. For instance, Justin Gengler’s work spaces. For instance, Matt Gordner’s study of leftist and on youth attitudes in the Gulf kingdoms required highly land/labor protest groups in Tunisia highlights how new structured surveys, where stratified quantitative data activists in post-authoritarian Tunisia have spearheaded could be analyzed and surprising results uncovered. By movements for social and economic justice independent of contrast, Makiko Nambu’s exploration of heroism norms party politics and labor unions. Broadcast through online among Palestinian prisoners necessitated ethnography: venues like Facebook, and utilizing a horizontal structure there is simply no other way to understand the cultural of mobilization that makes identifying leadership