Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa

Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with the majority of its population under the age of 24. Although during the past decade the continent has experienced considerable economic growth, this has not translated into job creation and greater equity. Soaring unemployment rates have severely affected the younger generation especially; young people find it difficult to carve out a decent future. Most young Africans are living in a period of suspension between childhood and adulthood that I call ‘waithood’. Youth in Africa, like their counterparts in Europe, North America, and other parts of the world, face similar crises of joblessness and restricted futures. Their struggles have driven many young Africans into the streets in protest movements that challenge the status quo and contest socioeconomic policies and governance strategies that exacerbate poverty, heighten social inequalities, and deny them basic freedoms. Young people have emerged as active social agents in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, in the ‘Y’en a Marre’ (Enough is enough!) movement in Senegal, and in the food riots in Mozambique, counteracting the notion that youth are apathetic. What will be the result of these youth movements? Will young people be able to sustain them beyond streets protests and hold onto the promise for more equitable societies? This lecture examines the broad challenges facing young Africans today, particularly those relating to their socioeconomic position, citizenship, and political activism

Excluded youth are becoming angrier

Huge student demonstrations in South Africa in October 2015 were officially about university tuition fees, but were actually about the failure of post-apartheid South Africa to create jobs, writes Alcinda Honwana. This is part of growing youth unrest across Africa, ranging from demonstrations last month in the Republic of Congo to support for Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram

Children in War: Reintegrating Child Soldiers

This article discusses the issue of child soldiers by weaving together the threads of experiences of violence, terror and survival narrated by children directly involved in armed conflicts. Despite the fact that the majority of them have been forced to enter the military, they are not just empty vessels into whom violence is poured. Having started as victims, many are converted into perpetrators of the most violent and atrocious deeds. The article suggests that former child soldiers exercise a ‘tactical agency’ to deal with the immediate circumstances of their situation. The interstitial position of child soldiers, as both victims and perpetrators of violence, places them in a unique position vis?à?vis their communities and society in general. The article examines the role of local community strategies for healing, rehabilitation and social reintegration of former child soldiers. But beyond social healing in the immediate aftermath of war, these children and their families need to be given access to education, training and employment to rebuild their lives

'Dreamers’, (un)deserving immigrants and generational interdependence

Undocumented young people known as the ‘Dreamers’ have become the embodiment of the ‘deserving immigrant’ in US public debates on immigration. Through exploring the narratives of undocumented young organisers in California, this article examines how they came to be framed in this way and the limitations of this as a pathway to social justice. It explores their accounts of organising in the undocumented youth movement to examine how their relationships with their families have influenced their engagement with the Dreamer narrative and its contestation. It was found that the figure of the deserving Dreamer represented an overly individualised account of migrant youth experiences and trajectories. Drawing on a relational understanding of migration and life course pathways, it is argued that undocumented youth are embedded in interdependent intergenerational relationships which affect their experiences and outcomes and therefore need to be recognised in any pathway to social justice

From the Singular to the Plural: Exploring Diversities in Contemporary Childhoods in sub-Saharan Africa

The challenges that sub-Saharan Africa has faced in the post-colonial period have come to characterise the way the region is perceived. These narratives are especially evident in the various ways children’s lives are discussed, leading to a particular focus on childhoods in difficult circumstances or at the margins. This has eclipsed the mundanities of everyday life for many children whose lives are not characterised by ‘lacks’. This article seeks to move beyond an overwhelming focus on childhoods defined by what they lack by illustrating the multitude of childhoods which exist in the continent

Playing the victim? Human trafficking, African youth, and geographies of structural inequality

This article explores the role of agency in determining who is and is not considered to be a legitimate victim of human trafficking. It draws on critical human trafficking scholarship and research on the life chances of West African youth. This is complemented by qualitative data from youth embroiled in football-related human trafficking. The insights from these analyses are brought into conversation with theoretical work on the geographies of commodities. This results in the concept of ‘unveiling the football trafficking fetish’, which is used to theorise how and why the agency of mobile youthful African male bodies undermines their claims of being trafficked human beings. The findings that emerge are significant in two ways. First, they generate theoretical insights on the coexistence of agency and exploitation in young lives, and how young people’s aspirations and agency can be (mis)read and work against them. Second, they provide a unique illustration of how human trafficking is a product of capitalism yet can be presented as a form of behaviour that lies outside of capitalist social relations. To centre these social relations and foster new forms of critical dialogue within and beyond population geography, the article concludes by recommending we consider the implications of conceptualising people as susceptible to rather than vulnerable to human trafficking

Social representations and the politics of participation

Recent work has called for the integration of different perspectives into the field of political psychology (Haste, 2012). This chapter suggests that one possible direction that such efforts can take is studying the role that social representations theory (SRT) can play in understanding political participation and social change. Social representations are systems of common-sense knowledge and social practice; they provide the lens through which to view and create social and political realities, mediate people's relations with these sociopolitical worlds and defend cultural and political identities. Social representations are therefore key for conceptualising participation as the activity that locates individuals and social groups in their sociopolitical world. Political participation is generally seen as conditional to membership of sociopolitical groups and therefore is often linked to citizenship. To be a citizen of a society or a member of any social group one has to participate as such. Often political participation is defined as the ability to communicate one's views to the political elite or to the political establishment (Uhlaner, 2001), or simply explicit involvement in politics and electoral processes (Milbrath, 1965). However, following scholars on ideology (Eagleton, 1991; Thompson, 1990) and social knowledge (Jovchelovitch, 2007), we extend our understanding of political participation to all social relations and also develop a more agentic model where individuals and groups construct, develop and resist their own views, ideas and beliefs. We thus adopt a broader approach to participation in comparison to other political-psychological approaches, such as personality approaches (e.g. Mondak and Halperin, 2008) and cognitive approaches or, more recently, neuropsychological approaches (Hatemi and McDermott, 2012). We move away from a focus on the individual's political behaviour and its antecedents and outline an approach that focuses on the interaction between psychological and political phenomena (Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002) through examining the politics of social knowledge

Closing Information Gaps in Kakuma Refugee Camp: A Youth Participatory Action Research Study

This study explores the role of academic and social support on young people’s educational pursuits in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. Pairing ethnographic methods with youth participatory action research, we find that support often manifests as abstract, decontextualized encouragement with little grounding in the educational opportunity structure. We argue that this motivational discourse generates information gaps, fueling aspirations that neither prepare youth for understanding, nor navigating the constraints they will encounter. In response, we designed a social media platform orienting Kakuma youth to the opportunity structure, while encouraging them to set realistic goals and plan accordingly. Designing a resource by, for, and with Kakuma youth, we illustrate that refugees have the rights and means to access information on which their everyday well‐being and futures depend. This study illustrates that critical understanding of local and global opportunities can empower, rather than demoralize, young people as they shape their futures in exile.HighlightsEducational support has limited value when decontextualized from opportunity structures.Critical understanding of opportunity constraints can empower, rather than demoralize, youth.Balancing hope and critical awareness is a central challenge in participatory action research, and in settings of forced displacement.Refugee youth advocate for their right to information on which their well‐being and futures depend.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147082/1/ajcp12277_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147082/2/ajcp12277.pd