Our member, Dr. Kate Pincock, along with her co-editors, Dr. Nicola Jones, Prof. Lorraine van Blerk, and Dr. Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, talk about their edited collection, Young People in the Global South: Voice, Agency and Citizenship (Routledge, 2024).
Young People in the Global South: Voice, Agency and Citizenship explores the spatial, relational, affective and material dimensions of adolescents’ and young people’s civic engagement and political participation in lower- and middle-income contexts. This textbook questions how the ‘everyday politics’ of exercising voice and agency is experienced at different scales, from the interpersonal to the global. It explores how structural inequalities and marginalisation, as well as social norms and attitudes, shape how voice, agency and participation are expressed by diverse young people in particular contexts with unique histories.
The principle of adolescents’ and young people’s right to be heard on issues that affect their lives is at the heart of Young People in the Global South: Voice, Agency and Citizenship. Alongside academic case study chapters, the book thus features sixteen contributions from young people themselves about their own experiences of participation in different spaces. These young contributors include a group of young people from Peru from a national network that advocates for young people’s active participation in public policy, who write about the ways social norms and poverty prevent the participation of young people from the most deprived communities. A street-connected young man in Ghana explores how street youth disrupt the norms of political engagement through the practice of ‘body-painting’ during elections. A young Jordanian woman reflects upon how stigma related to her disability has interacted with gender norms to constrain her mobility and participation. A Palestinian boy involved in the Fateh militia in Lebanon describes the political marginalisation of stateless youth.
Young people’s participation is increasingly seen in some arenas as key to the pursuit of equitable, peaceful and sustainable global futures. Yet much of the work around young people’s political and civic participation focuses on their engagement with formal politics through a normative and homogenising lens – disregarding both the everyday realities of growing up in the global South, and the way that young people’s opportunities for participation everywhere are shaped by gender, age, disability, ethnicity and other social inequalities.
Attending to these limitations, Young People in the Global South: Voice, Agency and Citizenship proposes an alternative framework to engage with the temporal, relational and material dimensions of adolescent and young people’s voice, agency and participation. Our approach draws on youth studies of the global South, literature on young people’s ‘everyday politics’, and an intersectional lens on inequality.
With this framing, the book explores how civic and political engagement is enacted and experienced at different scales, from the interpersonal to the global - as well as how structural inequalities, social norms and attitudes shape the expression of voice, agency and participation by diverse young people.
‘The whole concept of sustainable development is rooted in balancing the needs of the current and future generations in a way that protects the planet and enhances people’s quality of life, particularly the most marginalised people. Discussing our collective futures without young people around the table is a missed opportunity.’ – Pooja Singh, Youth Engagement Officer, Adolescent Girls Investment Plan.
Over the past three decades, a growing interest in youth politics within global development has instigated an evolving debate over the role of adolescents and young people in political processes. In the 1990s, young people were mostly viewed as a burden and risk to democratic futures; their political activity was largely framed in terms of anxiety over the consequences for future stability of the growing cohort of underemployed, frustrated young people – typically meaning young men – in the Global South. The term ‘youth bulge’ was popularised to describe the disproportionately large percentage of the population entering adulthood (Kaplan, 1994; Urdal, 2006). Research on the implications of being excluded from networks and opportunities for political participation emphasised the links between marginalisation and young people’s participation in violence (Boas, 2007). Within this framing, interventions that prioritise opportunities for young people – in terms of employment and political participation – are framed as essential for the youth bulge to transform into a ‘demographic dividend’ in developing countries (Bloom and Williamson, 1998; Drummond et al., 2014; Momani, 2015; Kayizzi-Mugwera, 2019).
In a move away from this negative framing, more recently young people’s participation has been increasingly seen as key to the pursuit of equitable and sustainable global futures, as observed in the quote from Pooja Singh . The African Union’s Youth Charter (2006) emphasises its conviction that Africa’s youth are its greatest resource and that ‘through their active and full participation, Africans can surmount the difficulties that lie ahead’. A report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs on the state of the world’s youth similarly drew attention to the instrumental role of young people in social change, despite their underrepresentation in formal political processes (UNDESA, 2016). Adolescents and young people are also increasingly being situated as vital actors in peace and sustainability efforts, as reflected in UN Security Council Resolution 2250, which asserts their ‘important and positive role in the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security’ (UNSC, 2015).
As a result of this shift, there has been growing interest in youth ‘civic engagement’. From a policy perspective, young people are now being framed more positively as capable of (and already engaging in) transformative political action, but needing more support to do so (Brennan et al., 2022). The civic engagement literature emphasises awareness of rights, skills-building and promotion of social justice. However, this work has a limited focus, emphasising the role of civic education in preparing young people to belong to a defined polity; it also focuses on formal modes of participation (such as being members of youth groups, participating in youth parliaments, or being actively involved in broader social movements). Despite greater policy attention to youth political engagement, some key aspects remain underexplored. These include connections between civic education and participation in the civic structures that adolescents and youth have more immediate access to, especially prior to reaching the age of majority (such as school authorities, the justice system or municipalities).
Not only is the focus on young people’s formal participation too narrow, but it risks romanticising the positive potential of youth. Caution about the representation of youth as a revolutionary force per se is essential; without a contextualised and nuanced understanding of youth movements, their connections with other social justice movements – and the collaborations that are essential for wider societal transformation – may be overlooked (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2014). Political agency may, for example, see young people taking advantage of opportunities provided through mainstream politics in order to seek power and opportunity in other areas of life even when those do not lead to just or egalitarian outcomes more widely – such as mobilisation into armed groups and factions (Abbink and van Kessel, 2005; Boeck and Honwana, 2005; Asante, 2012; Abebe, 2020). In particular, citizenship education as a tool for creating an idealised unified nation must be problematised in contexts where legacies of oppression and violence continue to structure young people’s everyday realities (Staeheli and Hammett, 2013). An exploratory lens – which transcends notions of formal citizenship and engages with lived citizenship practices – rather than a normative approach is thus needed. Young people enacting lived citizenship, across formal and informal spaces, as change agents can subvert and challenge politics (Buire and Staeheli, 2017; van Blerk et al., 2021).
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