Meta-Analysis on Youth Political Engagement in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon and Algeria - and Beyond

This paper focuses on the findings of the 15 partners broad EU-funded project (FP7, 2014-2016) titled SAHWA: Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract (www.sahwa.eu) that focuses qualitatively and quantitatively on young people living in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon. More precisely, the paper focuses on the findings under the theme ‘youth political engagement’, theme coordinated by the Finnish Youth Research Network. The expression ‘political engagement’ allows to see forms of political interventions also under non-conventional forms of action and organizations. It involves examining the forms, content, and origins of the stakes young actors have and act upon in a given setting. Current literature emphasises the need to study young actors’ political engagements on several inter-linked levels, but there is little empirical research dealing with a multi-layered approach involving several countries in one project, like Sahwa. Here the multi-layered approach refers both to survey and qualitative research local national researchers are conducting in different geographical locations, and to several different interlinked themes of the study. Meta-analysing the Sahwa data (i.e. 15 ethnographies and survey of 10,000 respondents) on youth political engagement, my aim of this paper is to answer following questions: What are the underlying conditions of youth engagement and mobilization in Arab Mediterranean countries? What are the forms, factors, causes and means of youth participation? Who are the politically active youth and whom do they represent? What kind of actors of social and political change these Arab Mediterranean youth are today and in the future?