Problematizing Arab Youth: Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure

Abstract

Arab youth have proved to be an engine for long-awaited political change in the region, but who are they and how should we understand them as a phenomenon rather than simply a social category? This paper suggests that the various paradigms which exist for identifying and explaining Arab youth are individually in themselves insufficient. By combining their contributions, however, Arab youth becomes visible as a lived and shared generational narrative of the exclusion and marginalization which have resulted from post-independence state failures in the political, economic and social realms. Their subsequent informal and alternative formats for protest and action reveal the links between the local and the global of youth narratives.