Eight years after the momentous events of 2011 and the rise of a new generation of activists, the promise of Arab youth assuming new roles as decisive political players seems to have gone largely unmet. In certain countries, such as Syria and Egypt, youth activists are being crushed by the weight of repression and exile; in others, such as Lebanon and Algeria, they remain sequestered in civil society groups with little direct relation to the formal political arena. Even in Tunisia, activist youth remain in the shadow of traditional elites. While this trend can in part be attributed to the structural dimensions of power arrangements and the closing of political space, the paper posits that the eclipsing of youth activists is also the result of deliberate efforts to self-isolate from traditional politics in favor of new forms of engagement in seemingly apolitical domains, such as social entrepreneurship, the cultural sector, or local community development initiatives. Crucially though, this shift in the spaces and forms of engagement in the post-2011 period is not a manifestation of de-politicization but rather a reflection of a generational understanding of politics and a prefiguration of their political ambitions in terms of governance and state-society relations. Key to this is their shared understanding of “youth” not as demographic category but rather bodily, cognitive, and discursive political practice that patterns their modalities of participation. Based on qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with youth activists in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria, the paper uses practice theory to reconceptualize the notion of “youth” and to assess their new forms of engagement as a transgressive practice of active citizenship that seeks to achieve the 2011 goals of social justice and equality outside the State’s imposed order. In so doing, the paper challenges the notion of Arab youth political marginalization in the post-2011 period by enlarging the notion of where political participation takes place and by extending the parameters of citizenship, thereby revealing how youth’s innovative, experimental, and even messy efforts at various types of collective action are in fact asserting new forms of participatory politics.