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Is Arab Youth the Problem (or the Solution)? Assessing the Arab Human Development Report 2016: Assessment: The Arab Human Development Report 2016
... The youth of Egypt played a vital role in the AS uprisings (LaGraffe, 2012; United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2016; Paciello and Pioppi, 2018). The AS is often described as a youth rebellion against the political status quo, low economic opportunities and unemployment (Campante and Chor, 2012;Hoffman and Jamal, 2012). ...
Purpose
Egyptian youth played a central role in the Arab Spring (AS) uprisings, demanding bread, justice and opportunities. This paper examines the perceptions of young Egyptians about the AS through their responses on the economic, institutional and sociopolitical conditions in the pre-AS and post-AS periods.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical analysis relies on a micro-level dataset extracted from the SAHWA Youth Survey. The estimations are carried out through the bivariate ordered probit model.
Findings
The results reveal that the perceptions about the AS-related outcomes are not uniform, and that social values and ideological characteristics matter more than the standard socioeconomic attributes in comprehending the responses. They indicate that individuals with secularist, non-traditionalist and gender equality inclinations have generally formed more favorable perceptions about the AS-related changes. Also, the results suggest that the AS has generated propitious perceived conditions for further global connection, relative to the Arab and Islamic ties. They show that the perceptions of individuals who place credence in entrepreneurial attitude have been relatively unfavorable vis-à-vis the post-AS conditions.
Originality/value
The findings underscore the importance of comprehending the perceptions about the AS-related outcomes. They imply that the AS has produced “winners” and “losers,” and has laid down the basis for social transformations in Egypt.
In the last decades, ‘youth’ has increasingly become a fashionable category in academic and development literature and a key development (or security) priority. However, beyond its biological attributes, youth is a socially constructed category and also one that tends to be featured in times of drastic social change. As the history of the category shows in both Morocco and Tunisia, youth can represent the wished-for model of future citizenry and a symbol of renovation, or its ‘not-yet-adult’ status which still requires guidance and protection can be used as a justification for increased social control and repression of broader social mobilisation. Furthermore, when used as a homogeneous and undifferentiated category, the reference to youth can divert attention away from other social divides such as class in highly unequal societies.
In his recent work, Guy Standing has identified a new class which has emerged from neo-liberal restructuring with, he argues, the revolutionary potential to change the world: the precariat. This is‘a class-in-the-making, internally divided into angry and bitter factions’ consisting of ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life,millions being categorised as“disabled”and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural,political and economic rights than citizens around them’ (Standing2011b). Like multitude before it, precariat has reached the popular consciousness both because of timely salience and comprehensible articulation. In essence, Precariat taps into increasing discontent and dissatisfaction among a range of groups and stokes in people–particularly educated younger people in Western countries–the hope of connection and collaboration with radically different cohorts from radically different backgrounds–a hope which significantly pre-dates the activities of 1968. Succinctly placing the possibility of praxis within dispiriting global circumstances, Standing has produced a foundation upon which, potentially, a host of academic and political programmes may emerge.This issue of Global Discourse seeks to explore the nature, shape and context of precariat, evaluating the internal consistency and application of the concept, particularly with regard to: changes in the sociology of class; democracy, participation and representation; the relationship between precariat and multitude; the means by which precariat might become a‘class-for-itself’; place, migration and globalization; poverty and precarity; the subjective experience of precarity, and forms of resistance. The articles published reflect the extent, both with regard to paradigmatic engagement and site of study, to which the concept has permeated the consciousness of academics and those subject to precariousness (indeed, the former appear increasingly to be included in the latter).
This article aims to demonstrate how countries with a relative low performance in higher education like Egypt and Morocco, are informed and worked by the forces of internationalization in this domain. It compares the path of university reforms in both countries over the last decade, from their emergence on the agenda to their implementation. Through the lenses of a public policy approach it illustrates how higher education is subject to a complex negotiation process between international organizations and domestic policy-makers. The transfer of international models like grant-based funding and the Bologna process has become the driving force of these reforms. But when imposed through a top-down approach these models do not necessarily bring about the outcome they might have promised. They rather illustrate an example of distorted internationalization.
The term ‘precariat’—a precarious proletariat—has achieved considerable prominence in recent years and is probably now ripe for critical deconstruction. It also needs to be situated in terms of a genealogy that includes the marginality debates of the 1960s, the later informal sector problematic and the ‘social exclusion’ optic that became dominant in the 1980s. I will argue that the concept is highly questionable both as an adequate sociology of work in the North and insofar as it elides the experience of the South in an openly Eurocentric manner. In terms of political discourse I think we should avoid the language of ‘dangerous class’, as deployed by Guy Standing to situate workers politically in the policy world as though frightening the ruling classes was a strategy for transformation.
In this article we argue that Morocco has experienced fundamental political change over the past decades. This transition however cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narratives linking economic liberalisation to democratisation. Rather, transition reflects a shift towards authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government. We focus on how political power has been reconfigured into new forms of ‘hybrid’ government where ‘state’, ‘market’ and ‘civil society’ interact in novel ways, by discussing the political dynamics of high-end urban development and the rationales underpinning social development policies to explain how ‘poor people’ are integrated into the realm of the market.
Egypt is at the axis of the Arab world. With the largest population, the largest industrial economy and the longest tradition of modern political activity it has profound influence across the region. But there have been few attempts to understand contemporary Egyptian society, in particular growing internal pressures for change and their implications for the Middle East and the wider world.This book is the first for over 20 years to offer and accessible examination of contemporary issues in Egypt. It offers the reader analyses of its politics, culture and society, including contributions by several Egyptian academics and activists. This unique new book addresses the turmoil created by imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, the increasingly fragile nature of an authoritarian regime, the influence of movements for democratic opening and popular participation, and the impacts of Islamism. The authors argue that Egypt has entered a period of instability during which the ‘low-intensity democracy’ embraced by the Mubarak regime faces multiple challenges, including demands for radical change. This unique new book assesses the ability of the state to resist the new movements and the latters’ capacity to fulfill their aims.
This article argues that attempts to understand the significance and implication of the Arab uprisings must not lose sight of the fact that the current pressures for change are rooted in the fundamental political transformations that took place during the previous three decades. These transformations were intimately related to neoliberal economic reforms. The article examines the impact of neoliberal reforms in two parts. First, it discusses the politics behind three decades of neoliberalism in the region. Second, it elaborates on the urban setting as a locale where we can theorize some of the agency at work in the complex process of neoliberal globalization. As such, we should understand Arab politics–and resistance–as a complexity that goes beyond the mere interaction between ‘the regime’ and ‘the Arab people’ and relate these politics to shifting power balances in contemporary globalization.
Neoliberalism, stemming from the musings of the Mont Pelerin Society after the Second World War, meant a model of liberalization, commodification, individualism, the privatization of social policy as well as production, and – least appreciated – the systematic dismantling of institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity. From the late 1970s onwards, it meant the painful construction of a global market system, in which the globalization era was the disembedded phase of the Global Transformation, analogous to a similar phase in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. In both cases, the disembedded phase was dominated by financial capital, generating chronic insecurities and inequalities. But whereas Polanyi was analysing the construction of national markets, the Global Transformation is about the painful construction of a global market system.
One consequence has been the emergence of a global class structure superimposed on national structures. In order to move towards a re-embedded phase, it is essential to understand the character of the class fragmentation, and to conceptualize the emerging mass class-in-the-making, the precariat. This is a controversial concept, largely because traditional Marxists dispute its class character. However, it is analytically valuable to differentiate it, since it has distinctive relations of production, relations of distribution and relations to the state. It is still a class-in-the-making rather than a class-for-itself. But it is the new dangerous class because it is a force for transformation, rejecting both labourist social democracy and neoliberalism. It has a distinctive consciousness, although it is this that holds it back from being sufficiently a class-for-itself. It is still divided, being at war with itself. However, it has moved out of its primitive rebel phase, and in the city squares around the world is setting a new progressive agenda based on its insecurities and aspirations.
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.
What is youth studies for? One answer to this question points to the valuable, possibly unique, position youth research has as a window on processes of social change and of social continuity. Based on the author’s long-term engagement in youth research, from the early 1980s to now, this article reflects on how youth transitions to the labour market – and the way that they are thought about in youth studies and youth policy – have changed and stayed the same over the past 30 years. While the main empirical focus is on the UK, the article notes the wider relevance of many of the trends that are discussed. As well as looking backward, the article considers possibilities and challenges for the future; for youth, for youth research and for youth policy. In terms of young adults’ lives, the spreading shadow of unemployment, economic marginality and precariousness is described. In terms of research, it argues that, in order to achieve greater theoretical significance and impact for youth studies – and to better understand processes of social change and continuity – further strides need to be taken to overcome the enduring divide between youth cultural and youth transitions studies. Finally, on the basis of these reflections from youth studies, the article raises important questions for current and coming social and economic policy. Here the local – and global – significance of underemployment and the ‘myth of the skills economy’ are discussed.
This paper begins from the understanding that women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability. A wide gap separates this processual understanding of empowerment from the more instrumentalist forms of advocacy which have required the measurement and quantification of empowerment. The ability to exercise choice incorporates three inter-related dimensions: resources (defined broadly to include not only access, but also future claims, to both material and human and social resources); agency (including processes of decision making, as well as less measurable manifestations of agency such as negotiation, deception and manipulation); and achievements (well-being outcomes). A number of studies of women's empowerment are analysed to make some important methodological points about the measurement of empowerment. The paper argues that these three dimensions of choice are indivisible in determining the meaning of an indicator and hence its validity as a measure of empowerment. The notion of choice is further qualified by referring to the conditions of choice, its content and consequences. These qualifications represent an attempt to incorporate the structural parameters of individual choice in the analysis of women's empowerment.
Since the 1980s, garment manufacturing has burgeoned in Morocco, and labor on the garment shop floor has become the domain of females. This article examines the history and development of the garment industry in Fez, Morocco, and the nature of women's experience as garment factory workers. In particular, the author explores the cultural assumptions that render the employment of young and unmarried females more acceptable than that of mature, married women.
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