From 2011 until 2013 with the ouster of Mohamed Mursi, the first elected Islamist president, youth civic and political participation increased through various conventional means like participation in civil society organizations or political parties and through unconventional means like developing new protest movements or new youth led initiatives to change various aspects of their political, economic, social and political life. Nevertheless with the advent of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power, young people’s access to civic and political participation became largely constrained. The state’s crack down on youth activists increased and new policies and laws have been enacted to end activism and protest movements. Within this context, this paper seeks to understand why are young activists still active civically and politically and the ways in which they participate under new authoritarian rule. The paper will address the role of youth collective agency in adopting social change, and “the nature of youth as both an ideological symbol and political actor.” How do they frame and elaborate their status as “being young” and what is their transformative role in society? How and to what extent is civic and political engagement dependent on young people’s social, economic, political and gender identification? To understand these main questions, the following study will first analyze the structural factors, which favor or constrain young people’s civic and political participation. It will then analyze the way in which young people behave civically and politically within these circumstances. The analysis is based 34 semi structured interviews and five focus groups conducted with young people in Egypt, during the period from May until October 2015. The interviews were conducted with 21 young men and with 13 young women whose average age is 25. The majority of the interviewees (23) resides in Cairo, has a Bachelor degree (21), and attended public tertiary education (24). The analysis of the focus groups (FGs) is based on five focus groups, with a total of 36 participants, 26 males and 10 females.