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To Be or Not To Be Political: An Investigation of Active Youth Citizenship Among Young, Educated Syrians in Beirut to Question International Development Discourse
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
1. Introduction
The 2011 uprisings throughout the Arab world saw a considerable number of youth tak-
ing up leading roles in calling for social justice and substantive rights in their respective
countries, thus also in Syria (Khouri & Lopez, 2011; Abboud, 2016). These findings align
with a common topos in international development discourse
1
, which constructs young
people as agents of change (Drummond-Mundal & Cave, 2007; Dunne et al., 2014; Lopes
Cardozo et al., 2015; Staeheli & Nagel, 2012). Numerous governmental programmes and
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have adopted the mandate to ‘empower’ youth
so that they can and will embrace their responsibility and capacity to ‘change the world
towards the better’ on a local and global scale. Based on findings that the more highly
educated an individual is, the more likely it becomes that he or she will participate effec-
tively in all types of political activities, training programmes often combine the promotion
of ‘active citizenship’ with ‘social leadership’ to target elite groups – such as highly ed-
ucated people (Campante & Chor, 2012; Mitchell, 2010). The international community
hence places at least implicit hopes and expectations of ending the conflict and rebuild-
ing a stable, prosperous Syria upon the nation’s young, educated citizens – are they now
inside or outside of the country.
2
The affirmative vision of active youth citizenship as individual obligation described above
induces specific tensions in the context of forced displacement. The de facto capabilities
of the currently more than 5.2 million displaced Syrians to act politically – among them
many of the young activists mentioned above – are highly restrained, as their access to
participation is for the most part barred by persistent national and international govern-
ance along the lines of conventional ‘Westphalian’ citizenship.
3
Hannah Arendt (1968)
has famously stated that it is not the loss of territorial, but political space that deprives
refugees most gravely, since being a refugee entails the loss of citizenship status and as
such the “deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and ac-
tions effective” (296). The authority of the nation state as the superior political community,
that per se legitimates itself through the in- and exclusion of citizens and non-citizens,
does not match today’s realities, in which migrants, minorities and ‘aliens’ contest its
exclusionary effects (Isin, 2002; Mehta & Napier-Moore, 2010). There is little evidence
that the world will turn back to “an ideal of a state with a bounded and sedentary group
of citizens”, however the international governance of displacement is still guided by the
premise of restoring conventional citizenship rights (Mehta & Napier-Moore, 2010, 236).
1
This study’s understanding of discourse is grounded in Michel Foucault’s earlier structuralist writings and follows Knight
Abowitz’ and Harnish’s (2006) understanding of Foucault’s conception of discourse “as a body of rules and practices that
govern meanings in a particular area” (654; Foucault, 1966; 1969).
2
The term ‘citizen’ can be based on both formal citizenship and subjective identifications as a Syrian citizen here, while
the simple term ‘educated’ was preferred over ‘highly educated’ for reasons of readability.
3
Population figures stem from the online Inter-Agency Information Sharing Portal provided by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees and only refer to the region neighbouring Syria (UNHCR, 2017). Numbers are estimated to be
considerably higher due to the incomplete nature of formal UNHCR registrations.
