This paper takes as its analytic frame the recent amendment of Egypt’s Child Law (2008), Code 126 (or Qanun Al Tifl Al Muaddad) in line with international children’s rights guidelines. Drawing on over 27 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cairo with lawyers, child rights activists and doctors within several transnational NGOs, I will show how an international model of the child is translated and reconstituted into what Sally Engle Merry calls “vernacular politics” through the daily bureaucratic practices of these experts. By tracing the decriminalization of street children and inclusion of the category “children at risk” (children as universally vulnerable) into the law, I will demonstrate how children’s rights, which center on the bodily integrity and autonomy of children, precipitate a new set of logics and ethical struggles over personhood, the family and the state among NGO workers in Cairo.

In the last decade, cyberspace has been as central domain where? political and? social grievances over the Arab-Israeli conflict are publicly circulated? with limited censorship. Facebook and YouTube have, at least partially, helped rural? and urban Moroccan youth go beyond the regulated spaces of media traditionally controlled ? by the state and political parties. Based on ethnographic research? among Moroccan youth in different public and private university campuses, this paper looks at how? a new generation of Moroccan youth use cyberspace to express their attitudes? towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. For instance, recently, some Moroccan youth have? targeted Israeli and American official websites as a reaction to? the conflict. Moroccan? hackers deploy? hacktivism to generate publicity for their cause. Hacktivism includes? automated? email bombs, virtual sit-ins, sites blockades, and web hacks. By using? cyberspace, I argue that Moroccan youth have managed to escape the political? and cultural Panopticon that traditionally limited students' activism within? the confines of public universities. I claim that this recent movement is a sign of the emergence of a new political agency that challenges what Ted Swedenburg’s coins as the “Daddy State” and its old patriarchal system. Accordingly, I contend that youth? not only? react to their exclusion from the public sphere but also protest the? globalized? discourse of the conflict in which their leaders are active participants. Finally, I maintain that these networks of? cyber-resistance have allowed youth to create through blogs and hip-hop new? landscapes of contention and net-wars over the ownership of memory, the? politics of remembering and forgetting, and the interpretation of past? histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This paper explores popular cultural expressions in contemporary Syria as a site of contestation between public forms of youth participation shaped by governmental efforts and intimate practices performed among urban youth in diversely situated contexts. These discursive links between public forms and local practices can be historically traced to the emergence of youth as a category for social and cultural development according to Baathist strategies for self-determination. In particular, state-based practices of cultural nationalism have and continue to turn to dabke as a social dance in ways that not only signify forms of cultural intimacy but also depend on the ascription of symbolic resources to youth as a discursive category. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Damascus, Aleppo, Lattakia, and non-urban regions of Syria in 2008, this paper looks at the aspirations of youth within comparative, and at times overlapping, categories of students working towards professions in medicine, dentistry, and law, and those in pursuit of artistic success in the performing arts. In particular, I will compare the display of public intimacy through social dance in spaces of leisure and consumption among youth in everyday life. In what ways do expressions of popular culture suggest aesthetic choices that obey a particular logic of taste (Bourdieu 1984)? How is the production of taste guided by "body techniques" (Mauss 1979) and other tactics that appropriate style through appearance, consumption, and spectacular performances of dabke at social events? What discursive categories emerge in relation to differences of gender, class, and faith within these social contexts? These intimate practices are linked to the public display of popular culture that is changing in accordance with major shifts in cultural policy. Working in affiliation with President Bashar al-Asad, a new generation of cultural elite are expanding performing arts venues, transforming existing spaces, and implementing programs that attract youth as participants and audiences. What discourses are embedded in these institutional practices and how do these emerge in relation to broader contexts of social market reform, media consumption, and cultural tourism? I will argue that Syrian national identity is produced by popular culture expressions and representations in ways that at once hinge upon the aspirations and desires of young people and resignify youth as a discursive means towards developmental resources. By offering ethnographic insights into the ways in which Syrian youth and cultural administrators are negotiating change through popular culture, I hope to intimate ways of being a modern subject that brings closer particularly Syrian experiences of belonging.

This paper focuses on the emergence of children as a legal category and the subject of human rights in Turkey. The rights bearing child is a product of Turkey’s accession into the European Union, which requires the rearrangement of the country’s political and governmental order according to “European standards.” In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research conducted between 2007-2009 alongside state officials and government workers who were being trained on children’s rights and the juvenile justice system. The training program was in line with Turkey’s National Program for Action, specifically the 2005 Child Protection Law, which oversees the establishment of a separate judicial and correctional system for “children who come in contact with the law.” It targeted a wide range of state officials (security forces, the judiciary, healthcare specialists and social workers) who would be working with children (in children’s courts, juvenile police centers, corrective facilities etc.) with an aim to train them on children’s rights and the new code of law. Based on an analysis of the data that I gathered through participant observation in the training seminars and interviews with trainers and trainees, I show that the emergence of the category of children as the subject of rights is embedded in controversial discussions and competing ideas about who qualifies as a child and what should be considered human rights. I argue that the specific portrayal of children in line with the UNICEF model of the child in need of compassion narrows the category of rights bearing children. This model—which resonates with the official Turkish ideology that indexes children as the guardians of the national future who are in need of protection and guidance—reinforces the power of the state over the children of the nation. As such, it contrasts strikingly with the rights framework that tries to limit the power of institutions of authority in order to protect vulnerable subjects. The result is that the children who qualify to have rights emerge as those that are the passive victims of either child abuse or sexual harassment, while children who are victimized due to their class or ethnicity and who actively engage in ways to overcome their situation are excluded from the category of rights bearing children. I elucidate this point by showing how stereotypes of “pick pocketing Gypsy children” and “terrorist Kurdish children” were recurrent themes of discussion during juvenile justice trainings.

Euphemistically, some say there are upwards of one million Syrians in Lebanon – the majority of them under 30. These Syrian “youth” (although rarely thought of in these terms) are almost exclusively male and make up 40% of the workforce in Lebanon (Chalcraft 2008). They come to construct, repair, and clean, but often learn the art of the “hustle” (Chernoff 2003). This paper will ethnographically explore the lives of Syrian youth in Lebanon from the standpoint of their sexual subjectivities while conceptualizing the negotiations of manhood while in Beirut. This paper, emerging from years of research, hopes to address the meanings surrounding “coming of age” in Beirut. Many boys arrive, as a rite of passage, when they are 15 or 16 years old spending a few months every year. Others arrive and spend nearly half of their youths in Lebanon, establishing more than a “migrant’s” life here. These migrations allow for the forging of new sexual boundaries, which vary from: paid sexual relationships, companionate “marriage”, male sexwork, and same-sex relationships. Yet an overshadowing theme remains, namely, these men come to Lebanon in order to garner wages to establish their lives back “home” in Syria. Through working they earn the trappings of an appropriate manhood, provide for their families, and save for their own marriages -- yet how does coming of age in Beirut affect the goals with which they arrive? Narratives of sexual corruption, drug addition, and prostitution abound among the men as they strive to forge their futures. What becomes compelling are how “presentations of self” (Goffman 1956) are managed and how they view their own lives changing having spent time in Lebanon as they reach maturity. How is their migration spurred by a desire for marriage, family, and the creation/attainment of what it means for each of these individuals to become a successful “man?” How do these conceptions change as they juggle jobs, spend years abroad, and negotiate living without family (or exclusively with extended male relatives)? The majority of the fieldwork has been carried out in Naba’a, Dowra and Bourj Hammoud over the last 4 years. This paper hopes, in short, to address an undertheorized, underdiscussed demographic that speaks to contemporary masculinity/sexual negotiations in the Middle East and also hopes to reconceptualize Syrian “youth” who serve this country.