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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
firm when conventional citizenship is in a blurred or ambiguous state, as in the context
of displacement.
Overall, many theoretical features of active citizenship as civil commitment reappear
within the empirical data: Respondents emphasised that they placed great value on inter-
personal relations – like Maha who said, “I don’t like impersonal relationships basically,
and I don’t like people feeling that someone is better than them. So when I go, I don’t
just go and give them stuff and then leave. No, we have lunch, we talk, you know, I have
connections with these families.” The interviewees concentrated on tackling concrete
issues at the local level rather than advocating for abstract political claims. Moreover,
social cohesion rather than – possibly dividing – political struggle was targeted as vital in
the current situation. The diverse self-interested and altruistic forms of motivation further-
more coalesce on the accumulation of social capital, be they in the form of professional
networks or nets of solidarity that foster a sense of Syrian community. Leena reaffirmed
that it was seen as a matter of fortune to be spared from the hardship of those in need of
aid, and that this imposed a moral duty to help, “you know, it’s like by chance, someone
with a story they have. [...] So you have to help.” This echoes Monroe’s (2015) research
result that identification with fellow citizens evokes active citizenship because it estab-
lishes moral salience.
Having said this, the foregoing section already alludes to the observation that this mor-
al salience, this sense of civil commitment, is not exclusively reserved for fellow Syri-
an citizens, but also entails the notion of being committed to humanity in general. Two
‘imagined moral communities’ can thus be identified, illustrating the multilayered nature
of identification in the case of this study. As the research respondents navigate both
worlds – that of the educational elite in a globalised world as well as that of a currently
somehow uprooted Syrian population – they manage a balancing act between at times
incompatible subject positions. Engagement in this hybrid position requires the “dynamic
process of active negotiation in relation to context” Percy-Smith (2015) ascribed to active
citizenship (4).
The finding of ambiguous forms of identification is not negatively connoted, as it entails
the ‘gatekeeping role’ suggested by Kenny et al. (2015). The interviewees are capable
to accumulate different forms of bonding and bridging social capital, and established
horizontal as well as vertical networks (although horizontal ties prove to be more relevant
here, as bonds with fellow Syrian and global citizens). They would thus represent ideal
young, active citizens with whom the international development sector could cooperate,
as it aims to do according to mainstream discourse. Still, it emerged from the data that
political reluctance and sentiments of disappointment, discord, and distrust prevailed
with respect to the internationalised aid sector in Lebanon. The respondents’ general
reluctance towards positioning their engagements as political, needed to be explored in
light of the inherent political meaning of the concept of citizenship.
