The post-1980 generation in Turkey (those born after 1980) have abstained from political activism. The statistical figures are telling: Only around four percent of youth are members of political parties (UNDP, 2008:79), only six percent have recently joined lawful demonstrations (World Values Survey, 2007), and only a small minority are activists in the NGOs (UNDP, 2008:80) or new social movements. The Republican and the 1968 generations who perceived themselves as the “guardians of the regime” and as those who were politically mobilized to “save the country” from illegitimate governments respectively, have berated the post-1980 generation for their political apathy (Neyzi, 2001). They argued that the current generation of young people are “apolitical” (Lukuslu, 2005:29), “selfish, and individualistic consumers” lacking a sense of collective responsibility (Neyzi, 2001: 424). “How and to what degree might the state be cultivating political apathy among youth?” is the major question of my research, which will aim to track the sources of disengagement from politics among the post-1980 generation in Turkey. I argue that the Turkish state in the post-1980 period has employed a range of means in order to regulate the domain of youth political activism. These means include direct forms of intervention through laws, rules and policing as well as more indirect forms of governance practiced through cultural and social policies, which have envisioned a particular youth identity. I hypothesize that the state displays a de-mobilizing agency through these interventions and sets both the concrete and symbolic limits for the politically possible among youth. My research objective is then to document how various forms of state activity in post-1980 Turkey should be interpreted as attempts to deter youth political activism. I believe that interpretivist methodology is most suitable for my research. Revealing how the post-1980 Turkish state has aimed to cultivate a politically compliant generation necessitates an immersion into the multiple meanings state elites attribute to the particular state activities targeted towards youth. Among methods of interpretivism, I will make use of discourse analysis. Specifically, I will engage in the discourse analysis of particular laws, which have been adopted in post-1980 Turkey to regulate youth activism, institutional rules and procedures targeted towards governing young peoples' lives, as well as youth-specific cultural and social policies.