Political Socialization in South West Asia and North Africa. Observations through a Research Gap.

Before the 'Arab Spring', young people in Southwest Asia – North Africa (SWANA) were hardly taken into account as political subjects by the international public. Either they were assumed to be politically disinterested or they were discussed as a jihadist security risk. With the revolutions, uprisings and protests of 2011, the political agency of an 'awakening youth' suddenly seemed obvious, and even inspired other protest movements around the world. However, despite a plethora of publications on the ‘Arab Spring’ since 2011, as well as on the ongoing authoritarian backlash and civil wars, there has hardly been a discussion on the political socialization of the young in SWANA (Schwarz 2024). One reason might be that the research field itself has been in a crisis for decades (Haegel 2021); what is more, most of political socialization research has focused on the Global North and the key theoretical tenets and discussion seem to offer little for research on other regions of the world.

Against this backdrop, this paper recapitulates key discourses on youth, politics and citizenship in the region since the turn of the millennium and discusses their relevancy for political socialization in SWANA. Subsequently, based on the data set of the MENA Youth Study by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, biographical-narrative interviews with activists in Morocco, and working hypotheses developed within the ERC project LIVE-AR, current agents, spaces, and temporal dynamics of political socialization of young people under authoritarian rule are discussed and put in relation to results of youth research in countries of the Global North. One focus is on young people's understanding of ‘politics’ in SWANA, in particular on supposedly apolitical everyday practices that can be understood as struggles for participation under conditions of an ongoing crisis of citizenship (Meijer/Butenschøn 2017), the outcome of which is anything but predetermined.