Why do contemporary Arab autocracies aim to shape youth into socially engaged citizens who volunteer and take responsibility for solving social problems? Traditionally, autocrats are hardly known for seeking more empowered citizens, typically preferring obedience and mass conformity. However, in the Arab World, regimes that have borne the brunt of the Arab uprisings have resorted to engaging youth in dialogue (e.g. Egypt’s World Youth Forum) and encourage youth to assume civic responsibility. In Jordan, King Abdullah has publically lauded “active citizenship.” The Ministry of Youth today works less with recreation and patriotic education and more with social entrepreneurship and “Innovation Camps.” A new national law, moreover, obliges all students in public Universities to volunteer. This paper addresses this puzzle by drawing on evidence from an ethnography of Jordan’s regime-led Youth Empowerment Sector, focusing primarily on the Crown Prince Foundation, a growing outfit that seeks to empower youth in various programs while breeding attachments to the successor to the throne. A secondary source of data comes from participant observations from volunteering that I conducted with local youth-run NGOs. Recently, Calvert Jones (2015) has argued that autocrats seek socially engaged youth because they carry personal preferences to shape citizens according to liberal ideals. Other scholars have understood Arab autocrats’ tendency to allow citizens to assume civic responsibility as a kind of safety valve (Yom 2005, Brumberg 2003), through which citizens vent grievances and frustrations while the state maintains strict political “limits to empowerment” (Wiktorowicz 2000). By contrast, this paper argues that it is precisely in actual forms of empowerment, by which youth acquire useful skills and confidence to volunteer and set up social enterprises, that a critical act of interpellation takes place that has far-reaching depoliticizing implications. The sector depoliticizes youth through atomization, whereby every individual is charged with being her own change-maker; it depoliticizes through problem framing, whereby sanctioned social problems, typically locally focused and politically de-contextualized, are always already given; and, finally, it de-politicizes by responsibilizing youth themselves, thereby shifting the will to change towards the individual and away from structural impediments emerging from authoritarianism in the form of corruption, nepotism, and neglect. Through such depoliticizing techniques, the state-led Youth Empowerment Sector, with its moral magnetism and incitement to positive engagement, may contain – or at least suspend – the spread among youth of the politically explosive combination of hopelessness, apathy and protracted “waithood” to enter socially accepted forms of adulthood.