Palestinian and Kurdish Childhoods: Radical Habitus and Political Violence in the Middle East

How and why youth in the Middle East adapt radical ideas and actions? How can we understand contemporary phenomenon of youth radicalisation across secular and religious trajectories? How can we conceptualise childhood in cases when political violence shapes every aspect of daily life across generations? Radicalisation scholarship is often concerned with ideological factors and the immediate social circles of radicalised individuals while underplaying the macrolevel hegemonic forces that shape their lived reality and habitus. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, conducted between 2015 and 2018 in Turkish-Syrian border cities, in Istanbul, and in a refugee camp in Greece – as well as a desk-based research on political violence and conflict in Palestine and Kurdistan – this presentation offers an intervention in the study of radicalisation by investigating trajectories and sociopolitical drivers of youth radicalization across the Middle East, with a particular focus on Palestine and Kurdistan. I argue that we must examine power relations, structural inequalities, perceived injustices, and young people’s political subjectivities in order to better understand what propels radicalisation. I propose that radicalisation is a relational and gradual process triggered by a set of complex power relations between state and substate actors across religious, sectarian, ethnonational, and class lines, the interactions of which shape what I call a radical habitus.