Arab Youth: Social Mobilisation in Times of Risk

Introduction

On the Marginalization and Mobilization of Arab Youth

Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf

Upon submitting our manuscript in early April 2011, startling manifestations of the new Arab Spring were unfolding. The sudden mobilization of mass protest, though long overdue, took observers by surprise. Even seasoned and well-informed scholars had become resigned to treating the profound misgivings of the status quo as an inescapable reality in Arab society. This is not unusual given the seeming docility of disenfranchized groups alongside the power of despotic regimes to reproduce their tyranny.

Soon it became apparent that the uprisings could not be dismissed as merely the short-lived protests of embittered and marginalized groups venting their wrath. The days of autocratic regimes seemed to be coming to an end. Already, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, with limited bloodshed, succeeded in dismantling the aggrandizing and corrupt leadership of Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Though seemingly leaderless, protestors in both countries revealed remarkable technological savvy and creativity. More significant, the uprisings displayed this generation’s unprecedented level of political awareness and activism.

The great philosophers of the Enlightenment would hardly hesitate to endorse the moral consciousness expressed in the postings which flooded cyberspace during the uprisings. Inevitably amateurish and makeshift, they still displayed attributes of moral secularism and civil vibrancy. They were largely informed by the same universal values which have inspired other revolutions: dignity, autonomy, justice, accountability, transparency, tolerance, and solidarity with the weak. In some respects, the uprisings might well represent a nascent post-ideological generation.

Many of the young who took to the streets displayed at times admirable and contagious recalcitrance and outright defiance. The Iranian Revolt of 1979 and the Islamic movements of the 1980s and 1990s are history. The common concerns which sparked the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya were not ideological or religious. Nor did they evince any manifest interest in class consciousness or economic deprivation. Instead, their unifying ethos is the denouncement of poor governance, oppression, and the recklessness and impunity of tyrants. In short, the kleptocracy and graftocracy of their countries, despised elites and their families. Even regimes considered immune to the mass discontent which gripped the region – that is, Syria, Jordan, and Morocco – are currently witnessing some of the embryonic manifestations of mass unrest.

The case of Morocco stands out because it is markedly different from the experiences of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. It initiated serious reforms at least a decade earlier by a king (Mohammad VI) generally admired by his people and seen as irreplaceable. He was in support of the liberalization of the press, and women’s rights, and fairly open about the years of oppression by his predecessor (King Hassan II). Yet, marginalized youth were still discontented about widespread corruption and human rights violations. Hence, to many of the protesters on February 20, 2011, the problem does not lie with the monarchy but with the political and economic elite who benefit from the status quo and enjoy political impunity. Perhaps this explains why the protest lacked the outburst of rage and anarchy visible elsewhere in the region.

In sharp contrast, the Egyptian and Libyan protestors were explicitly calling for the removal of Mubarak and Gaddafi, lifting the emergency laws, curbing state torture, and holding fair and free elections. Underlying their demands were expectations of the higher order in support of dignity, freedom, and justice. The social media may have helped in inciting the kernel of the protests, which ultimately succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak, yet what mobilized people in the streets were legitimate grievances intrinsic to the misbegotten neo-liberalisms rampant among the Egyptian elite.

It was not though, as sensationalized by the media, a Twitter or Facebook revolt. Most revealing in this regard are the changing perspectives of once-radicalized Islamists. For example, movements like Libya’s Islamic Fighting Group or Egypt’s Jamaat Islamiya are now expressing a new-found keenness for peaceful politics; they are keeping their distance from al-Qa‘ida and expressing outright opposition to militant and radical strategies.

In Yemen as well, the bloody tug-of-war between civilian protestors and government forces is also exacerbating the pressures on Ali Saleh. The violence beleaguering the country is clearly an expression of the several explosive fault lines deeply entrenched in its tribal structure, along with North-South rivalry. So far, Ali Saleh has refused to step down, vowing to remain in power until January 2012 when parliamentary elections are scheduled.

The case of Syria is very telling and may well disclose the harbingers of more foreboding transformations. The fact that many Syrians bear no personal grudge or animosity towards their president now seems irrelevant. Unfortunately, Bashar al-Assad appears disinclined to heed demands emanating from the uprisings that, after all, reveal one inescapable reality. Once the threshold of popular discontent is reached, regimes become incapable of holding back the tide of outrage. What begins as an expression of ordinary grievances – in the case of Syria, the Baath’s monopoly of power, lifting the country’s emergency law of 1963, high levels of corruption, and the pervasive climate of fear and intimidation consecrated by its draconic secret agencies – are bound to grow into irrepressible demands for freedom, dignity, and justice. Alas, in his long-awaited speech (March 31, 2011), Assad made only vague promises to introduce reform. Instead, he heaped blame and culpability on foreign conspiracy and meddling.

It is too early to speculate on the ultimate outcome of the revolutionary uprisings; one auspicious feature, however, stands out. In varying degrees, they all reveal the genesis of a new generation sparked by the desire for civil liberties, advocacy for human rights, and participatory democracy. The chapters in this volume, the outcome of a three-day (April 2009) gathering of involved scholars, intellectuals, and activists in the region, explore some of the antecedents of the upheavals. As well, they anticipate alternative, softer venues of resistance that marginalized youth can mobilize to realize their emancipatory expectations.

Long before the current interest, aroused by the surging manifestations of youthful problems associated with the growing disaffection, exclusion and indignation of young adults in the Arab World have recently sparked considerable debate. The concern is both compelling and timely. After all, the region is characterized by a striking and persisting youthful population. This so-called youthful demographic bulge is not only markedly higher than patterns observed elsewhere, it is occurring at an impressionable and vulnerable interlude in the lives of the young. It is also taking place in a setting marked by growing risk and uncertainty; a time when the young are grappling with other existential dilemmas, anguishing private angst, and moral turpitude.

Such uncertainties are exacerbated not only by unresolved local, regional, and global transformation but by the changing character of moral entrepreneurs and societal role models. Again, more than other groups, the young have to face situations in which cultural scripts, messages, and codes of the various agencies of socialization are often inconsistent and irreconcilable. Consider some of the disparate and conflicting messages: religious authority, state, national or secular ideologies, family and kinship groups, peer subculture, popular and cyber culture, and, as of late, the seductive global allures of commodified consumerism, virtual images, and life styles.

The young are caught in a poignant and unsettling predicament: the undermining of traditional vectors of stability and loyalty (family and state) as opposed to the modern alternative sources of education, employment, security, public opinion that have proved unable to fill the void. Another dissonant reality intrudes. They are viewed as the hope of the future, yet stigmatized and feared as disruptive, parasitic forces.

To do comparative justice, both conceptually and empirically, the focus of the volume converges on six distinct but related themes. Part one is devoted to a broad consideration of the conceptual and methodological issues associated with youth as a social category. Here the nature of social exclusion, social rupture, delayed marriage, social movements, and other consequences generated by the skewed demographic bulge are explored. Part two examines how the young are forging meaningful collective identities in times of risk and uncertainty, ambivalence, and fear. Issues of deferred adulthood, agency, and resistance, becoming lost in transition, generational conflict, cognitive dissonance, and collective memory assume relevance. In part three, issues regarding the representation and self-perception of the young are examined in an effort to understand the shifting moral politics at home alongside the unsettling forces of globalization. Part four considers, largely through ethnographic and grounded exploration of youth militancy, neighborhood violence and youth gangs in distinct urban and suburban settings. Part five is devoted to the surge of youthful activism in political movements, advocacy groups, and welfare civic associations. Finally, part six explores how disaffected youth seek expressive outlets through popular arts, street music, and popular culture.

YOUTH AS A SOCIAL CATEGORY

Johanna Wyn’s particular interest, exploring the impact of education and work on their health and wellbeing, is of immense relevance to the problems and uncertainties currently besetting Arab Youth. Wyn’s contribution, taken from her recently published volume, Youth Health and Welfare: The Cultural Politics of Education and Wellbeing (2009) is compelling for its fresh empirical findings and conceptual extrapolations. Additionally, she is credited for initiating youth discourse as a social category or construct with different meanings over time and place. Much as gender and class are socially constructed, she sees individuals as linked and shaped by social, political, and economic processes.

Wyn focuses on a generation of Australians born after 1970 who left secondary school around 1990, to assess how policy discourses, interventions, and practices affect the lives of young adults. This particular interlude, marked by the collapse of the conventional labor market in the late 1980s alongside the sharp increase in tertiary and further education, is especially significant. Thus a generation of Australian youth, much like its cohorts in the Arab world, attempts to forge meaningful collective identities during times of rapid social change.

To substantiate how specific policies in three distinctive areas are affecting youth as a social category, she examines educational, health, and labor market policies, identifying their implications on youth as a social category. Wyn’s basic premise regarding the nature of human capital is of direct relevance to many subsequent discussions in this volume. The conception of human actor as entrepreneur renders individual choices efforts to maximize human capital, as investments for the purpose of capitalization of one’s own existence.

These entrepreneurial skills are essential when youth is regarded as a dangerous and risky social category, with immense vulnerability during a stage of transition to adulthood. They are, as it were, in double jeopardy: personal ambivalence, and anxiety at a time of economic decline, when the state is compelled to reduce public support for them. As such, they are prone to become victims, as Wyn puts it, of the exclusionary categories of deserving and undeserving youth. As the state withdrew support, a great share of responsibility for resourcing education and health fell on the young and their families. Additionally, the state tightened control through more repressive measures of surveillance and monitoring both the young and the places they frequented.

Another dismaying consequence of such restrictive policies is the increased cost of being young. This is further compounded when the state reduces funding to public and government education, supporting instead non-government schools. It also takes measures to align education more closely with the country’s economic goals. Hence, vocational training and technical education became the centerpiece of youth policies in most Western countries. Much of the same takes place in the area of public health. The universal provision of health is replaced by targeting young people at risk.

More interesting perhaps, is Wyn’s ability to place these seemingly disconcerting conditions within a positive context. Drawing on the ideas of Kelly (2006) and Foucault (1988), she suggests that the prevailing youth-at-risk discourse should apply to adults as well. The Entrepreneurial Self which emerges from such settings represents a desirable set of positive dispositions which should be extended and cultivated in other segments of society. Essentially, rather than berating and fearing the young as disruptive, parasitic forces, they should be seen as inventive agents for meaningful and plausible change.

The rest of Wyn’s chapter considers the specific policies, against this background of unsettling change that the Australian government has introduced in education, health, and the labor market to manage effective and equitable allocation of resources.

Much like Johanna Wyn, Asef Bayat also begins his chapter – Reclaiming Youthfulness – by arguing that most of the prevalent perspectives continue to treat youth as an incidental, analytical or displaced category. For example, when the issue of youth religious radicalism is addressed, the focus shifts to religion and the young become extraneous as if they just happen to be there. Others assume that youth, as a central category, can and should be the point of departure for any discourse on youth and its interplay with its habitus. Bayat takes a middle position: namely, that as a social category, youth can be subservient agents to repressive state authority or serve as radical agents in bringing about transformative change.

Either way, they are seen as political agents and social transformers, whether for or against Islam. In countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, one can witness their direct political mobilization as many of the young are involved in radical Islamist movements. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, however, they have served as recalcitrant agents by defying the moral and political authority of the doctrinal regime.

Bayat employs the concept of a social movement to elucidate the nature and outcomes of such youthful ventures. His work is informed by a basic premise: the experience and anxieties of Arab Youth can only be understood within the stringent social controls they are subjected to.

Apart from being associated with surveillance, the Iranian regime sustains a more strenuous doctrinal animosity towards joy and carefree lifestyles, hence the periodic crackdowns on symptoms of degenerate behavior. The young respond by taking every opportunity to create open and clandestine sub-cultures. Often such defiant reactions assume seemingly benign manifestations like underground pop and rock bands, late night parties, popular fads (such as eccentric fashions, tattoos, smuggled videos) or more aberrant ones (drugs, running away from home, becoming victims of prostitution and other trafficking rings).

Egyptian youth, on the other hand, operate under the constraints of a passive revolution, opting for a strategy of accommodating innovation. They attempt to adjust their youthful claims within existing political, economic, and moral precepts. Not being under the same moral and political control as their Saudi Arabian or Iranian counterparts, many of the mainstream young continue prayer, partying, and pornography; faith and fun; the sacred and profane of authoritarian regimes. It is in this sense the political agency of youth movements, their transformative and democratizing potential, depends on the capacity of the adversaries, the moral and political authorities, to accommodate and contain youthful claims. As such, youth movements in these settings are prone to become efforts of claiming youthfulness.

Clearly the Egyptian regime, despite the repeated claims of Hosni Mubarak, failed to deliver on any of the legitimate demands of discontented youth and ordinary citizens. For over four decades, they have not only been deprived of economic opportunities, and adequate social and educational services, but also denied freedom and justice.

Not surprisingly, in this Iranian context – a regime of surveillance and draconian social controls – youth identity acquires a defiant posture.

What sustained this regime of surveillance for a decade were revolutionary fervor, preoccupation with war, and the repression of dissent. Young men were either on the war front or fleeing the country, preferring the humiliation of exile to heroic martyrdom in a meaningless battle. Although adolescents sought refuge in schools, often by deliberately failing exams to postpone graduation, they lived in anxiety, gloom, and depression. One out of every three high school students suffered from a behavioral disorder. Girls in particular were more susceptible to stress, fear, and depression.

This is not as contradictory as it may seem. It represents accommodation to realities they cannot totally depart from. The young naturally desire dancing and raving, and having illicit relations. They also need the comfort and solace of religious faith. As one of the law students interviewed by Bayat put it: I do both good and bad things, the good things erase the bad things. To Bayat this state of liminality, this creative inbetweenness, demonstrates how the young attempt to redefine and re-imagine their Islam in order to accommodate youthful desires for individuality, change, fun, and sin within the existing moral order.

The first two introductory essays view youth as a social category with varied meanings and manifestations in time and place. Both Wyn and Bayat advance another basic premise, one that frames and anticipates many of the substantive contributions: namely, that youth as a social category – much like gender, class, and ethnicity – is socially constructed. It is appropriate, by way of introduction, to consider a striking demographic feature – the so-called youthful bulge as another source of disruption and instability in the lives of Arab youth.

Youssef Courbage in The Demographic Youth Bulge and Social Rapture explores this phenomenon based on recent statistical evidence of the demographic transition in the Arab world. On the basis of projected evidence, he casts legitimate doubt on this assumed negative relationship between youthfulness of Arab population and sources of instability and political unrest. Indeed, he argues that despite the inevitable risks associated with the demographic transition (such as ageing), altogether its advantages outweigh its drawbacks. The demographic transition – as manifested in increasing literacy (both male and female), fertility decrease, access to contraception, and delayed marriage – is likely, initially, to be a source of social disruption and collective unease. But in the long run, the bulge is bound to diminish and the demographic transition is likely to yield more favorable realities. For example, the projected increase in adults to the ratio of young people will ultimately lead to a proportional increase in the ratio of producers to consumers. Also, the falling birthrate is prone to increase the age groups with a higher propensity to save, thereby narrowing the income distribution gap. More important, the reduction in wealth disparities will generate a fairer distribution of knowledge and provide further impetus for the emergence of a middle class with pluralistic and cosmopolitan predispositions. To Courbage, finally, these are all precursors to a transition towards democracy.

To substantiate his optimistic projections, Courbage focuses first on elucidating the connection between literacy, the darker side of cultural modernization, and the prospects for social rupture and civil violence. Rather than seeking answers in the essentialist qualities inherent in Islam, he persuasively examines changes in mindsets associated with the demographic transition.

His perspective, and the statistical evidence he supplies, depart from certain prevailing assertions, particularly those of Sammel Huntington who advances his contested and widely debated clash of civilization between Islam and the West. To Huntington, for example, population growth in Muslim countries, particularly because of the youthful bulge, provides a massive pool of unanchored and embittered masses easily drawn into fundamentalist and insurgency movements or rootless migration. Accordingly disenfranchised groups become a threat to both Muslim and non-Muslim societies alike. Huntington along with many of his disciples assumes that Islam is a static, uniform, and essentialist entity, that demographic behavior is built into their psyche and is unlikely to change. The graphic evidence and projections Courbage provides cast doubt on these premises.

Diane Singerman also views the youthful demographic bulge as a source of considerable social rupture in Arab society and focuses on a vital but largely unanticipated consequence of this socio-cultural reality; namely, delayed marriage. Marriage, virtually a universal reality in the Arab world, exacts on the family some immense financial pressures. Investment in marriage capital requires years to accumulate and has a direct impact on other venues associated with adolescent transitions such as schooling, education, employment, and, above all, identity formation.

The pressures involved in delaying marriage, clearly a byproduct of the growing number of young compelled to remain unmarried and economically dependent on their families, lead to waithood as opposed to adulthood. The implications of this ambivalent, uncertain, and liminal interlude in young lives during a time of hope, opportunity, and youthful exuberance, are grievous. The constraints of negotiating waithood become particularly acute, fraught with added feelings of alienation and exclusion.

Singerman’s essay falls in two parts: first, statistical analysis revealing the magnitude of the national cost of marriage in line with salient demographic trends. Second, she provides a graphic account of the social and political consequences of delayed marriage and social exclusion. The repercussions, made poignantly clear by her analysis, cannot be ignored. Not surprisingly, they are reflected in the rise of new discourses and debates concerning sexuality, morality, youth identity, generational conflict, and the rise of a ‘marriage black market’ as young people negotiate and attempt to reconcile contradictory public and private norms, values, and expectations.

Her analysis begins by showing how preparing for marriage is so central to the economy and well-being of the Egyptian family.

These costs are negotiated and shared between four parties: the bride, the groom, the bride’s family, and the groom’s family. The distribution of the shares vary. For example, the bride pays very little of the cost of marriage, the groom pays 40 percent, his family pays slightly less than one-third and the bride’s side contributes about one-third. To convey the magnitude of marriage costs, Singerman reveals (based on a national survey she participated in), that for each household the cost amounted to eleven times the annual household expenditure and equal to the entire expenditures of all members of one household over two and a half years.

The second part of Singerman’s paper focuses on youthful anxieties alongside the moral and ethical derivatives of such pressures. Foremost is the persisting belief that unmarried men or women are problematic and potentially threatening to religious and normative codes of conduct. An unmarried woman continues to be perceived as a source of fitna (literally sedition or sexual chaos). Hence, early marriage allays the anxiety associated with women’s presumed promiscuity.

Delayed marriage and its alternative substitutes, the lack of employment opportunities, and continued financial dependence on families compound the frustration of Egyptian youth and force them to pay deference to their families even though they may no longer be relevant to the socio-cultural realities of their lived lives. In this sense, family dependence is both enabling and disabling, a source of gratitude and emotional support but also unease since it traps them in a double-bind. They no longer conform to accepted social norms, nor can they break away from them. When they do, behavioral departures must be concealed. Singerman makes reference to recent surveys of young unmarried women in Tunisia and Jordan which reveal that the incidence of pre-marital sex (including high-risk sexual practices) is increasing, while the age is decreasing. This surge in sexuality is occurring while young people are both ill-informed and misinformed about sexual diseases, contraception, and reproductive health.

Singerman closes with a probing query: how can young Egyptians, Moroccans, Syrians and Iranians reconcile this new geography of sex when parental norms confine sexuality to marriage, and when parents invest huge sums in the marriages and education of their children? The contortions experienced by young people negotiating the risky field of dating and mating puts them in a no win situation, living a don’t ask, don’t tell reality.

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN TIMES OF RISK

In Youth at Risk in Two Marginalized Urban Neighborhoods in Amman, Curtis N. Rhodes and his associates assert that increasing numbers of Jordanian youth face profound value conflicts, feelings of uncertainty and unease, largely because of the demographic and socio-cultural transformations in the region. With a fairly high rate of natural increase (about 3.6 percent), Jordan is characterized by a youthful and growing population. Over half of the entire population are under twenty years of age. Economic pressures and high unemployment exacerbate these problems, particularly in low-income urban neighborhoods. The data and extrapolations are extracted from a pilot program conducted by Questscope in Amman to study the impact of neighborhood intervention in two impoverished and marginalized neighborhoods. The intention is to create prosocial communities by providing youth with opportunities to develop their talents in a safe environment.

The character of social change in Jordan is first explored to provide background for the case studies. Next, the two neighborhoods are analyzed and finally, five major constraints, which become the basis for fostering strategies for implementing the envisaged program to build prosocial communities, are identified.

The most compelling changes in Jordan today are strikingly interrelated: the youthful demographic bulge, an acute rural exodus, undeveloped social institutions, and the shift away from an authoritarian and patriarchal social system. These, in turn, have sharpened the gap and conflict between generations, becoming a source of discontent among youth. Even more unsettling is the uncertainty of the transition. For although the kinship and communal ties of the young are shrinking, secular and rational city institutions do not, as yet, inspire their allegiance. As elsewhere, exposure to the new global media accentuates these anxieties alongside feelings of restlessness, hesitation, and uncertainty.

For the case studies, two sites were selected to represent different types of low-income communities: first, the typical poor neighborhood, akin to a ghetto, populated by refugees and rural migrants; second, a quasi-urban neighborhood near an urban village. In the former, children are not linked through kinship ties or supportive social relations, becoming parasitic sources of annoyance and trouble. Hence, they are alienated from their parents and marginalized from mainstream social institutions. It is little wonder that young boys in such settings seek shelter and comradeship in street gangs which lack autonomy and agency, often falling into violent, delinquent, and anti-social conduct.

In contrast, the urban village is composed of migrant families who maintain their close kin and family ties. They live in close proximity and the extended family networks act as safety nets. Unlike the boys of the ghetto, they replenish meager financial family resources by selling home-prepared food products. Altogether, and in comparative terms, the neighborhood has a relatively high level of social capital, yet traditional venues and communal supports are no longer adequate to accommodate the needs of the young.

The intervention program, designed by Questscope, used three complementary approaches when building pro-social communities. The first was local development which encourages community members to use their own visions, establish their own priorities and skills to enhance volunteer capabilities. The second entailed establishing collaborative networks with external experts. Finally, the third strategy employed social action to change the social context of the young.

The authors involved in the Questscope program drew some instructive lessons from their Jordanian experience. To begin with, the intervention in the two neighborhoods succeeded largely because a fairly high level of involvement, partnership, and role enrichment occurred.

Another concluding inference is also worth noting. The so-called prosocial approaches to the young at risk were most effective when adults took the time and effort to understand the views and circumstances of the young. After all, youth at risk remain perceptive and intuitive about the conditions and sources of the alienation and exclusion they endure. Finally, while the pilot program demonstrated the importance of fostering new and enriched roles for both youth and adults at the local level, sustaining such role development depended on institutional responses from actors outside the neighborhoods. Altogether though, issues of negotiating meaningful identities were seen largely as a byproduct of recreating such internal communal solidarities.

Mai Yamani, arguably one of the most noted Saudi scholars when it comes to addressing issues of societal development and the interplay between local and global forces, focuses her analysis on the impact of new technologies of globalization. In her view, Saudi youth today are caught between a vulnerable traditional system of governance struggling to maintain paternalistic and primordial loyalties, alongside the temptations of the new global world order, information technologies, and mass commodification. While the community participation program in Amman, inspired by Questscope, sought to reinforce Jordanian and communal solidarity, the alienated and excluded Saudi youth, by contrast, are seeking a sense of transnational identity, autonomy and freedom outside the Kingdom’s borders. Increasingly, it seems, they are finding redemption in global role models, particularly the allures of the internet and cyber space.

The bulk of Yamani’s essay explores the circumstances which, she believes, account for the persisting and growing sense of alienation and exclusion of Saudi Youth. The demands of young Saudis are not unusual. They aspire for a more equitable measure of economic and political space, more democratic participation, and freedom to access uncensored transnational sources of popular culture. Five major sources of alienation and exclusion of the young are singled out: fragmentation of state policy, secretive paternalism, Wahhabi inertia, stifling American policies, and the oil temptation.

Despite successive efforts by the regime to establish national integration, Saudi Arabia today remains a distinct and heterogeneous collection of regions, tribes, and sects. The internal pressure for reform and the search for a more coherent and meaningful socio-cultural identity, as articulated by the young and new middle class, remain unrealized. The emergence of this new middle class continues to be mediated by ethnic and culturally based cleavages that serve only to reinforce the prevailing political hierarchy and socio-economic privileges.

Equally disheartening is the proverbial adeptness of the regime to carefully monitor, through divide-and-rule strategies, the struggle between groups. Between the security forces, the mukhabarat (intelligence service) and the mutaw’a (patrols entrusted with the task of safeguarding virtue and preventing vice on the streets), the Al-Saud have easily enforced the politics of fear, marginalization, and exclusion among the young; specifically those harboring hopes of freedom and transparency.

Another source of alienation is what Yamani labels secretive paternalism; the furtive maneuverings of Al-Saud to retain their powers. Since Al-Saud derive their legitimacy from Wahhabi precepts, prospects for democratic reform remain remote, leaving the young more embittered by thwarting legitimate claims to modernize the system of education or limit gender segregation and access to venues of popular culture.

Through oil revenues the royal family maintains a benevolent welfare system that enforces loyalty and subservience. Yet the allure of petro-dollars, as the young are acutely aware, cannot compensate for genuine reform, and the regime’s seemingly inflexible alliance with the policies of the United States only compounds their discontent. At the popular level, the resentment of US hard power (i.e. security arms and intelligence) is now compounded by the seductive proliferation of soft power (i.e. fast food, fashion, and popular entertainment). In closing, Yamani demonstrates how globalization is expanding the space and transnational consciousness of Saudi youth. The advent of satellite television, particularly Al-Jazeera in 1996, played a significant role in revolutionizing Arab media and mobilizing public opinion. Along with the internet, it created unprecedented opportunities for the expression of diverse views and multiple lifestyles, accentuating the dilemmas of ordinary youth.

No wonder that more developed and accessible social media (Facebook and Twitter) played a crucial role in mobilizing upheavals in the early spring of 2011 which dismantled three of the most despotic and tyrannical Arab regimes.

Craig Larkin in Between Silences and Screams concentrates on the postwar generation of Lebanese youth caught between the poignant and inconsistent forces of collective memory and collective amnesia. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, Larkin explores how Lebanon’s postmemory generation reproduce, re-imagine or erase memory traces to identify and locate themselves within contemporary Lebanese society. This is a generation shaped and informed not by direct traumatic events but by the mediated narrative accounts of events preceding their birth. Larkin begins by briefly elucidating the perspective of postmemory before considering how this postmemory generation is situating itself within Lebanon’s ambivalent and uncertain future and how emergent identities are shaped by distinct socio-cultural and political settings.

The bulk of his data and inferences are based on extensive field research and qualitative interviews he conducted in 2005–6 with 100 high school and university students. The sample reflected the diversity of educational institutions (i.e., public/private, rural/urban and religious composition). Young people are gripped by a simultaneous attachment and dislocation to the past, an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture. Rami, a village student enrolled at AUB, typifies this new postwar generation: Those with no lived experience or personal memory of the country’s protracted civil war (1975–92), yet with a keen awareness of the lingering pain, suffering and collective loss.For young people like Rami, this dialectical discourse of remembering and forgetting has left his generation out of time, out of place and bereft of a unifying national narrative or a coherent sense of self.

Lebanon’s postmemory generation are faced with the task of negotiating relevant and coherent identities through the oral, spatial, and visual relics of the past. Larkin substantiates how memory scapes (ruins, scarred and derelict houses, demolished buildings, spatial voids, posters, and memorials to fallen fighters) remain the most vivid and graphic reminders of the country’s violent past. War-torn buildings become the unintentional monuments of war. Likewise, decaying edifices, pockmarked apartment blocks with fire-charred windows and graffiti-strewn walls, and, above all, empty buildings and abandoned neighborhoods evoke and reawaken latent memories and stories. In doing so, they reinforce the sense of estrangement and confusion. Interestingly, Larkin argues that such recollections do not only demarcate earlier battle zones and situate war stories, they also serve to validate themes of continuing crises and contested issues: dispossession, Palestinian presence, Syria’s intervention, and the struggle for Christian political leadership.

Dislocated youth become adept storytellers who weave intricate tales to affirm their social identities. One recurrent theme is their overwhelming sense of being helpless victims of circumstances beyond their control. Victimhood is often attributed to a set of recurring causes that converge on the following: Western connivance, Israeli aggression, Palestinian terrorism, Arab backwardness, Maronite expansionism, Sunni greed, Shi‘a fanaticism, the rule of warlords, economic injustice, and political corruption.

The beginning of Pardis Mahdavi’s compelling chapter on the Politics of Fun in the Islamic Republic of Iran is worth paraphrasing:

Perhaps there is no place in the world where the stakes of having fun are higher than in present-day Iran. Drinking (alcohol) and dancing can lead to arrest by the morality police accompanied by up to 70 lashings. Consequences for sex outside of marriage can be even more severe – up to 84 lashes. But even under the threat of such harsh punishment, a youth movement encompassing changing sexual and social behaviors is taking palace. Sex and sexuality have become both a source of freedom and an act of political rebellion for urban young Iranians who are frustrated with the theocratic regime that restricts their sociality. Young people in Iran say, in their own words, that they are enacting a sexual revolution (or enqelab-i-jensi in Persian) to speak back to what they view as an overly repressive regime. This sexual revolution, as I observed during fieldwork from 2000–7, is about more than sexuality, it is about changing social mores, carving out new recreational opportunities, and at its very core, bringing back joy, fun, and youth habitus.

This is not a glib or passing assertion but the outcome of extensive qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork Mahdavi conducted for seven years for her recently published book – Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution (2008). Her basic thesis is persuasive and lucidly elaborated; namely that what she perceives as recreation of recreation is a fairly novel form of having fun that stands out as a direct challenge to the moral paradigm of the Islamic republic. It demonstrates that the young, despite the regime’s strenuous restrictions, mobilize themselves as an agency to challenge strictures. Getting away with transgressions (e.g. make-up, colorful headscarves, heterosexual encounters), which previously were strictly punished, indicates that the youth movement has already made a dent in the system. Even wearing lipstick becomes a defiant expression. As one of Mahdavi’s respondents put it, it’s about pissing off them, the morality police, and about me getting satisfaction. Having fun, Mahdavi argues, is a direct challenge to the moral paradigm of the regime, and a way the young are asserting their agency.

In an Islamic republic, Shari‘a law, as interpreted by the clerics in power, stipulates explicit rules on comportment, leisure, sociability, and above all, sexual conduct. For example, unmarried men and women cannot be seen together without a chaperon. With regard to veiling, women are expected to be covered in proper Islamic dress, typically from head to toe, hiding any body shape. Even in school, they cannot be seen alone and their interactions are limited to conversations.

Over the span of seven years, Mahdavi documented some significant transformations. In her words, young people have succeeded in carving out new ways and spaces to have fun and engage in behavior which previously would have been punished ... literally, they are re-creating recreational places in order to engage in ‘subversive’ pleasures, and simultaneously changing sexual and social discourses. The bulk of her chapter explores the character of sexual encounters in a variety of spaces: parks, forests, mountainous areas in the North, semi-private spaces in automobiles, underground parties in private homes, and popular coffee shops.

In short, more young Iranian adults have opportunities today to challenge and depart from the stringent norms of an Islamic republic that has an aversion to fun. These new realities, Mahdavi suggests, are the outcome of certain circumstances: first, increasing difficulty of monitoring large numbers of subversive young groups. Second, since their behavioral departures are often unobtrusive and subtle, authorities cannot always ascertain the need to police conduct. Third, the tone of reforms established by Khatami’s presidency occurred just as this young generation was coming of age. Hence, the spirit of openness he championed remained with them despite the election of a conservative president like Ahmadinejad. Finally, the growing number of young recruits to the morality police and other positions of power have increased sympathy for the young and for change.

In Idealistic and Indignant Young Lebanese, Roseanne Saad Khalaf provides a partly autobiographical account of her own experiences as a returnee to postwar Lebanon (after an absence of eleven years), alongside the views of her students who also experienced dislocating encounters upon re-entry to the country. She uses student narratives in creative writing workshops to shed light on how students struggle to forge meaningful identities in a troubled and uncertain political setting. Because workshops allow free and uncensored discussions, ordinary classes are transformed into intense enabling sessions, akin to charged happenings or third spaces away from the strictures of mainstream gazes.

As a writing-intensive zone, her seminars become a safe house where students are encouraged to speak up and out. Hence texts and discourse move beyond narcissistic and restrictive private concerns to address broader socio-cultural and political transformations in society. More than simply defining the views of a new generation, texts insightfully highlight significant youth experiences in a fast-changing postwar society. Since student narratives exist outside the hegemonic influence of public transcripts, something other than the dominant story or accepted biography of a country is being told.

Khalaf collates these views and concerns under the rubric of eight recurring and salient themes. Most striking is the feeling of being trapped and abandoned in a country characterized by a violent past, anxious present, and uncertain future. The bewilderment and anguish of students are all the more acute as they are protracted and reawakened by renewed feelings of fear and helplessness against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Equally demoralizing in this regard is the way the Cedar Revolution, which inspired massive mobilization, was derailed by self-serving politicians. The young continue to feel threatened by the ever-increasing exodus of their gifted cohorts and disillusioned by pervasive symptoms of vacuous nostalgia that complicate attempts at formulating strategies to transcend the rigidities of confessional politics. Consequently, hopeful future prospects of a more tolerant, plural, and diverse political culture appear to be quickly evaporating. Altogether, these collective youthful voices, disparate as they may seem, are symptomatic of a longing to participate in efforts to restore trust and dialogue in a country plagued by unresolved conflict and unappeased hostility.

Nicolien Kegels focuses on one seemingly dissonant feature of Lebanon’s Janus-like character – nightlife in times of war – to disclose a more probing discourse on national identity. Beirut’s national image, particularly in the global and popular media, has perpetually hovered between a battleground and a playground; between a barricaded and hedonistic urban site. Her fieldwork and ethnographic data, supplemented by close interviews and participant observation, are based on the nightlife of a group of upper-class young adults before and during the Israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006.

The Israeli air assault on Lebanon allowed her to explore the interplay between the uncertainties and horrors of war and the way this rather exclusive and unrepresentative group of young adults, transformed the war experience into feelings of belonging and the reassertion of national identity.

Kegel notes that religious identity and sectarian consciousness do not figure prominently in the lives of this group. Instead, they seem sparked by strong class identification most visible in their life-style, leisure, conspicuous consumption, and excessive display of privileges. Other peculiar features of this fairly small and tightly knit group are feelings of insecurity and status anxiety. Despite the ostentatious privileges and life styles they enjoy, their status is not static but an identity that depends largely on seeing and being seen.

Upper-class night clubs in Lebanon, Kegel argues, are regulated and controlled settings, an antidote to daily chaos. They become the best place to show off riches because the environment is designed in such a manner as to optimize flaunting wealth and confirming social status. This form of organized beauty allows the upper class to project an image of being secure and in control.

Bars and clubs become much more than entertainment spots, they become the stage on which the upper class performs its ideas about itself and the world around it and reinforces its boundaries. Since nightlife is the place where class boundaries are produced and re-produced, maintaining proper behavior at all times is of vital importance. Kegel suggests that this feature of serious fun, which allows privileged social groups to indulge but remain civilized, is what distinguishes party scenes in Lebanon from those elsewhere in the world.

MILITANCY AND STREET VIOLENCE

One of the basic premises in this volume is that Arab youth today are not only at risk but also confronting, during a vulnerable and unsettling interlude in their lives, disturbing uncertainties and socio-cultural inconsistencies. Local dislocations, unresolved regional conflicts, and global consumerist incursions have exacerbated the sources of uncertainty, latent trauma, and muffled hostilities. Such unsettling transformations become more problematic due to the peculiar pattern and direction of social change in the Arab world.

As traditional agencies of loyalty and solidarity (family, community, and state) are being undermined, the so-called modern alternative vectors of societal transformation (i.e. education, employment opportunities, new media, political mobilization, and agencies of civil society) have not, as yet, been effective in providing the needed sources of coherence and stability. By and large, different groups of young adults, in difference parts of the Arab world, seek one of three possible modes of resistance or adaptation: resorting to various forms of militancy and street violence, seeking venues of voluntarism and civil society, or finding outlets in popular culture, art, or music.

Julie Peteet’s article on the "Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada is based on field research carried out in the West Bank (1990), with an added epilogue to update her findings. From the beginning of the Intifada in December 1987 through December 1990, an estimated 106, 600 Palestinians were injured. Her central thesis is based on the premise that the attainment and enactment of manhood and masculinity among Palestinian male youths are largely a reflection of the beatings and detention they are constantly subjected to. She goes further to assert that the beatings (and detentions) are framed as rites of passage that become central in the construction of an adult, gendered (male) self with critical consequences for political consciousness and agency."

The rites of passage and the struggle of young Palestinians to resist the occupation occur in a setting where the military and political authority of an occupying foreign power is overwhelming when pitted against the powerlessness of the Palestinians. As Peteet poignantly reminds, the juxtaposition of technologies is striking. Offensively and defensively, Palestinians wield stones, one of the earliest forms of weaponry known to humankind. As part of the natural environment and landscape, the stone bears minimal, if any, appellation of human technological skills. Since 1967 successive generations of young Palestinians have known no life other than this discrepant and unequal form of resistance. Yet they have managed to prevent Israel from normalizing its power relations with those under its occupation.

The inability of Israel to subdue this form of primitive resistance leaves no recourse other than physical and structural violence to quell the uprisings: beatings, detentions, and the latent cruelties of interrogation, torture, and terror have become ordinary forms of the apparatus of domination. The resisting youth, humiliated, tortured, and bloodied, remain unbowed. This alone is testimony that their resistance has paid off. It has also become a way of life. As Peteet explains:

One quickly discerns that beatings are a common occurrence. The anticipation of an encounter with occupation authorities that might lead to a beating influences the daily mobility of young men. They decline evening social invitations that necessitate driving after dark. Military personnel at roadblocks stop cars and randomly pull out men for beating. Parents hesitate to allow adolescent boys to go downtown unaccompanied, or even on short errands, fearing they might be pulled over for an identity check and in the process roughed up. In the alleys of the camps, children now are more careful to stay close to home because, on their daily patrols, soldiers occasionally chase, manhandle, and detain them for several hours until their parents pay a stiff fine.

She addresses the social meaning of violence, particularly regarding the body, and how young Palestinians transform this treacherous reality into venues for validating their manhood and affirming their cultural and national selves. Arab masculinity (rujulah), Peteet tells us, is "acquired, verified, and played out in brave deeds, in risk-taking, and in expressions of fearlessness and assertiveness. It is attained by constant vigilance and willingness to defend honor (sharaf), face (wajh), kin, and community from external aggression."

Mohammad Abi Samra and Fidel Sbeity, both writers and journalists, are closely connected to the communities and neighborhoods they write about. Their vivid accounts, told from an insider perspective, are supplemented by interviews with gang leaders and members in Tripoli and the southern suburbs of Beirut. In Revenge of the Wretched, Mohammad Abi Samra provides a vivid narrative account of the social roots and changing character of youth violence in an urban neighborhood (Bab al Tabaneh) in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. While Julie Peteet demonstrates how the involvement of Palestinian youth in acts of resisting Israeli occupation were crucial in asserting their sense of manhood and masculine identity, the violence of the Bab al Tabaneh youth was more random and dislocated, largely a byproduct of the destitute, impoverished suburban settings the embittered young live in. Bereft of any stable family support, adequate schooling, re-creative outlets or stable occupational opportunities, pent-up anger and hostility found release in forms of social banditry. Such settings became breeding grounds for neighborhood organizations (Meshayakhat Shebab) led by local leaders. These organizations, which acquired the label of Munathamat al Ghadab (literally angry associations), served to channel anger and bitter resentment into forms of civil disobedience, tinged with Arab nationalist sentiments yet targeting the Lebanese state.

Like other forms of social mobilization and collective protest the association sought refuge in the Salafist Islamist movement and, in doing so, the mosque, with its congregation and religious rituals, became an accessible venue for political mobilization and proselytizing activity.

By focusing on the armed organization headed by Khalil Akkawi (Abu Arabi), Abi Samra demonstrates how it became a breeding ground for political mobilization and the dawa (proselytizing) movement largely inspired by Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran. In no time, these meshayakat shebab acquired the rubric of populist resistance on behalf of the ummah. A group of mosque committees from different Tripoli neighborhoods became venues where runaway and derelict kids were recruited in the name of sanctity, honor, purity, and identity of the mosque. As a result, the young men and sheikhs of the neighborhoods were transformed into abadays or heroes embodying the spirit of gallantry, honor resistance, and helping the weak and poor.

The account Fidel Sbeity provides of the neighborhoods of Gandour and Masbagha in the southern suburbs of Chiah, the heart of the so-called Misery Belt, epitomizes all the disheartening symptoms of deprivation and destitution: young boys growing up in places which deprive them of all socio-psychological support, economic security, and political stability. A sheer inventory of such manifestations is menacing and sinister enough: crushing poverty, parental neglect, inadequate schooling, high drop-out rates, total absence of recreational facilities and other integrative outlets. These alone, however, would not have generated all the misbegotten symptoms of gang warfare and criminality had they not been reinforced by the factional and tribal feuds of displaced residents as well as exposure to armed Palestinian resistance groups. The bulk of Sbeity’s narrative account is devoted to a graphic elucidation of these circumstances.

Living conditions in both neighborhoods are deplorable. Informants knew not a single family with fewer than ten children, many of whom were not in school and roamed around barefooted and half naked. Bloody confrontations occurred in the empty sand lots adjoining the neighborhoods that served as makeshift playgrounds.

Gangs of street boys, not yet in their teens, were already present in the early 1960s. Yet the gangs of the two communities differed markedly. For example, the Sharaban gang of Masbagha, who came from Baalbeck and Hermel, were more belligerent and pugnacious, spreading hooliganism, terror, stealing, and murdering, often in cold blood, and brutality, extorting money from residents and shopkeepers. The Ghandour gang, on the other hand, drawn largely from displaced southern families, was better educated. They organized soccer teams and, ultimately, became more predisposed to joining political parties and other non-militant associations.

Sharp divisions between the two neighborhoods, both spatially and socially, increased tension and hostility between the gangs, often instigating blood feuds and turf wars. The growth of these gangs coincided with the early rounds of the 1975–6 Civil War. While members of the Ghandour gang were able to avoid being recruited as fighters, those of Sharaban could not resist the temptation. Already, the pre-war setting of Chiah and adjoining suburbs were notorious for their criminality. To many, being a gang member became a coveted status, one which enhanced their access to material goods and social standing, and validated their self-worth, dignity, and brash masculinity. The more boastful they were of their belligerency, particularly when it involved the elimination of other potential rivals in gang leadership, the more acclaimed they became in the eyes of their community. In this respect, the pattern and form of violence which entrapped these young fighters were largely a microcosm of the proxy victimization so salient throughout Lebanon’s encounters with collective strife.

VOLUNTARISM AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Lebanon’s comparative openness and receptivity to the novelties of foreign and global transformations, give it an advantage over other regional countries in the experimentation with new modes of behavior and institutional arrangements. Consequently, it has acquired the necessary attributes of modernity without breaking away from, or diluting, its traditional ties and loyalties. This is most visible in formal and informal groupings and associations created in times of crises and uncertainty, to cushion individuals and groups against unsettling circumstances. As early as 1860, in the wake of civil unrest in Mount Lebanon and the outflow of rural migrants into Beirut and other coastal cities, dislocated groups employed kinship and village affiliations to form voluntary associations that address welfare and benevolent needs (see Khalaf, 1987: 161-84; Khuri, 1975 for further details).

Reconciling communal sentiments with the secular and impersonal demands of urban life is not always feasible or ameliorative. Indeed, the interplay between such dissonant expectations has often led to some disquieting byproducts. Youth associations are particularly vulnerable to such disruptive forces. Two papers in this section explore how promising and idealistic youth activities, during two different historic interludes, were distorted or aborted. In Uniform and Salutes, Jennifer Dueck examines how the scout movement in Syria and Lebanon, during the French Mandate, normally an idealistic and consciousness-raising movement, was derailed by the factional rivalries and regional political struggles of the time. Christian Gahre focuses on the spectacle of events surrounding the so-called Cedar Revolution, the youth uprising of 2005, in the wake of Prime Minister Hariri’s assassination.

As early as 1937, groups of Syrian and Lebanese boys were already travelling to Europe to participate in International Scout Jamborees. More relevant, though, is their close association with military and armed forces. During one particular Jamboree, they were hosted by the Hitler Youth and, upon their return home, greeted by national political leaders and reminded that scouting was much like soldiers preparing for battle. In fact, the Prime Minister of Syria at the time, Mardam Bey, affirmed that scouts would become the hard core of any future national army.

Not only did national political leaders in Syria and Lebanon encourage and patronize the movements, but colonizing powers made direct efforts to capitalize on their potential by demonstrating enthusiasm to recruit young students into disciplined para-military associations. In fact, in all foreign schools and educational missions (French, German and Italian), the scouts and other quasi-scout associations became conspicuous hallmarks of success. As noted by Dueck, during the 1930s these youth associations suddenly emerged into political forces of their own, often beyond the control of Mandate authorities or local political elites.

To understand this quasi-military, fascist character of Levantine scout movements and their particular appeal to youth, Dueck focuses on three related dimensions: a brief historical sketch of scouting in its Middle East context; the influence of German and Italian models of youth associations; and the internal rivalries of the Syrian scout movement during the Second World War to substantiate the close association between scouting and fascism. The last part is a case study of scout rivalries in Syria. It illustrates the diversity of scouts and other youth groups and reveals how they were patronized by competing political groups. In the