Rethinking Youth and Political Organization in Post Uprising Transformations in the Middle East

The role of social sciences and sociology in understanding contemporary social changes in the Middle East particularly since the great Arab uprisings of 2011 is fundamental. In context of the Arab uprisings and the return of mass movements to the streets, sociological investigation has focused on the extraordinary role of youth in taking to the streets in 2011 analyzing cultural changes and changes to their subjectivities. My ethnographic research on youth and two leftist political organizations in Egypt, the Bread and Freedom Party and the Revolutionary Socialists, fills an important gap in understanding the importance of organizing revolutionary efforts using the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach. I define youth not simply as a new generation coming of age contesting and submitting to cultural traditions, but rather as an important economic and political category defined through their position in society as the future workforce and its critical role for industrial production.

During revolutionary uprisings new socio-political changes are opened which temporarily attracts new political actors and a variety of initiatives. Socio-political change however requires the hard work of political organization to impact long lasting social changes. Using the CPE approach, at the conference, my aims is to show the impact of changed materialist conditions on the division of labor through neoliberal economic restructuring programs as well as advanced technologies which generated a new generation of youth making them 1) more suspicious of the exploitative nature of capitalism with the retreat of the welfare state, rising unemployment rates, and difficulty to maintain acceptable living conditions thus desiring entrepreneurship 2) suspicious of traditional political organizations for example through heroic leadership, liberal ideology and political parties creating new challenges and opportunities for the leftist political organizations of the BFP and the RevSoc in addressing and organizing this generation of young politicized youth.