Disproportionate levels of youth unemployment and economic marginalization in the Middle East have prompted many regional observers to conclude that Middle Eastern youth - especially those from the lower classes - are more prone to radicalization and thereby constitute a threat to national and international security. The general consensus in these accounts is that low levels of occupational opportunities and social exclusion leave poor youth who have little marketable skills more disposed to fatalism and insecurity, which in turn are strongly linked to radical politics. In response to this imputed irrationality, scholars in the language of rational choice have argued that these young people engage in a deliberate calculation of means and ends in order to attain the power and wealth necessary for upward mobility. These scholars posit the poor youth as a rational, autonomous agent whose goals are defined by his individual interests and preferences. Nevertheless, these respective theories are unable to account for a) the absence of political radicalism among the majority of youth from the lower classes in the Middle East and b) the presence of seemingly irrational acts among these youth that neither maximize self-interest nor necessarily reflect individual preferences. Given the shortcomings of each of these prevailing theories, this paper, instead, draws from observational and secondary source data to synthesize these two approaches and to assess the social conduct of poor youth in the Middle East from the perspective of aspirations-bounded rationality. From this vantage point, the behaviors of poor youth in the region are not determined solely by individual economic interests or by pure emotion, but by their aspirations, which in turn are influenced by social factors. This paper proposes that these youth struggle and devise calculated strategies to pursue ideas of the good life that are conditioned by experience and observation of near others who inform their normative world.

In the recent years Kurdish children and youth have become increasingly more visible in the Turkish media and public discourse, particularly due to their increasing presence at the forefront of mass demonstrations celebrating the PKK and its leader ?calan. The representation of the children in this context of Turkey's Kurdish Question is either as one of perpetrators (as "stone throwing kids" that support a terrorist organization and continuation of violence) or as one of victims (of police violence, state terror, structural problems, families and finally of justice mechanisms). What has been missing from these debates and discussions are the voices and perspectives of the children and young people themselves. This research is an attempt to give voice to the Kurdish children and young people. It is motivated by the assumption that peace in south eastern Turkey would have to involve not only willingness of the youth in the region, but also their ability to imagine peace and their empowerment as social actors to build peace. Accordingly, it will explore how children and young Kurds in Turkey imagine peace, particularly in the context of identity and citizenship debates in the country; what they think about the attainability of peace in the near future; and how they perceive their own roles as active agents in any attempts of peacebuilding and reconstruction in the region. Due to time and funding restraints, the article will focus on the young people in Diyarbakir, between the ages of 12 and 18 years, and particularly on the Kurdish youth. Influenced by the Participation Action Research (PAR) tradition, it will employ as its methodology the use of focus group as empowering forum. The focus groups will be conducted in DiyarbakDr during March 2010.

This paper explores social inequality and experiences of young adults in Turkey. It argues that the notion of 'respect' is central to their narratives of self and society and seeks to explore the political significance of the quest for respectability.

Our paper wants to assess the influence of shared ideas on the internal politics of Egypt. We will try to determine how the normalization of corrupt practices has unconsciously led some members of the Egyptian youth to internalize certain perceptions about what the democratic ideal means. More precisely, we will interrogate the concept of political life. If our first scientific purpose is to create conceptual bridges between corrupt practices and youth views on democratic principles, we will also examine how these particular perceptions might have converged to slow down the progress of the Egyptian "Infitah" reform. In depth, we have to specify that our major purpose aims to demonstrate the effect of an evolution of the Egyptian youth's perception of the national democratic praxis. It logically suggests a second research focus in order to clarify the limits of the internalization of such informal rules by the new generation of Egyptians (a new generation that is more connected to the western world than ever before). On one hand, our proposal will demonstrate to what extent social constructs (corruption practices) participated to sustain the power of an authoritarian regime despite the gradual decrease of the Egyptian livelihood. Additionally, this project represents an opportunity to study in more detail the emergence of new youth communities (bloggers, human right activists, student movements) who have rejected the former generations' widely accepted perceptions of the Egyptian political life. By analyzing these collective actions (mostly in the virtual realm but also through offline demonstrations like the 2005 "Kifaya" movement) as an example of a different implementation of political rights, we would like to emphasize the importance of a turning point in the collective consciousness of the current Egyptian youth, and more specifically to understand in what extent these claims may represent a real challenge to the authoritarian survival in Egypt.