This study focuses on the determinants of radicalization among university students in Turkey. It investigates how social and political context and the “radical milieus” affect the ethnic, ideological and religious radicalization among them. Radical milieus are defined as “the segment of a population which sympathizes with extremists/ terrorists and supports them morally and logistically by Peter Waldman. The study is based on field research conducted in 11 cities and 14 universities in Turkey in 2007 and 2008. The sample covers all geographical regions and universities located in these regions. The research team conducted more than 160 in-depth interviews with the students, university administrations, faculty members, student residence administrators and the members of civil society organization. Our analysis on social networks and organizational ties offer several contributions to scholarship on social mobilization, radicalization and identity literature. The findings suggest that the competition between radical groups and the diversification of their ethnic, religious and ideological has significantly increased in Turkey. Radicalized students refrain from violent political action, but sympathizes with the ideas that support violence against the state. The research also finds significant differences in having sympathy with radical ideas among students with ethnic, religious and ideological radicalism.

Eight years after the momentous events of 2011 and the rise of a new generation of activists, the promise of Arab youth assuming new roles as decisive political players seems to have gone largely unmet. In certain countries, such as Syria and Egypt, youth activists are being crushed by the weight of repression and exile; in others, such as Lebanon and Algeria, they remain sequestered in civil society groups with little direct relation to the formal political arena. Even in Tunisia, activist youth remain in the shadow of traditional elites. While this trend can in part be attributed to the structural dimensions of power arrangements and the closing of political space, the paper posits that the eclipsing of youth activists is also the result of deliberate efforts to self-isolate from traditional politics in favor of new forms of engagement in seemingly apolitical domains, such as social entrepreneurship, the cultural sector, or local community development initiatives. Crucially though, this shift in the spaces and forms of engagement in the post-2011 period is not a manifestation of de-politicization but rather a reflection of a generational understanding of politics and a prefiguration of their political ambitions in terms of governance and state-society relations. Key to this is their shared understanding of “youth” not as demographic category but rather bodily, cognitive, and discursive political practice that patterns their modalities of participation. Based on qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with youth activists in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria, the paper uses practice theory to reconceptualize the notion of “youth” and to assess their new forms of engagement as a transgressive practice of active citizenship that seeks to achieve the 2011 goals of social justice and equality outside the State’s imposed order. In so doing, the paper challenges the notion of Arab youth political marginalization in the post-2011 period by enlarging the notion of where political participation takes place and by extending the parameters of citizenship, thereby revealing how youth’s innovative, experimental, and even messy efforts at various types of collective action are in fact asserting new forms of participatory politics.

Whereas a plethora of scholarly works examines the political implications of the 2011 Egyptian revolution (for example, see Cavorta and Merone, 2015; Esposito, Sonn and Voll, 2016; Milton-Edwards, 2016), this paper seeks to illuminate shifts in perception and practice of Islam among Egyptian youth over the past seven years and argues that an unprecedented transformative understanding of religion is well underway as a result and in the wake of a watershed political moment in Egyptian history. I conducted 60 structured interviews with Muslim Egyptians (ages 20 to 35) between 2018 and 2019 and found that young people are beginning to question, and in many cases challenge, the Islamic precepts they were raised with. The 2011 revolution put factions that may have never otherwise met in conversation with one another, offering Egyptians unprecedented freedom to discuss ideas and ideologies, and seemingly unfettered access to the political arena for all. In the process, however, people with religious capital often used religious discourse to bolster one political position or another, leading many to question these people’s authority. This, coupled with the rise and perceived failure of the Islamist government of the Muslim Brotherhood and their subsequent demise, led many of the youth to reevaluate the role of religion in politics. Disillusioned by these groups, young people have since reexamined the role the religion they grew up learning plays in their own lives. This ultimately led to a reversal of religious trends that emerged since the 1970s (such as the “Islamic Awakening” and the rise of “televangelists") and caused many youth to reconsider their need for guidance from religious figures, how and whether to embody the tradition and its teachings (Asad 1993, 2003), and, in some cases, their faith. I term the trend that allowed these shifts to occur “revolutionary religion”: a transformative engagement with the tradition and the ones who preach it made possible by the turbulent yet liberating post-revolutionary climate in Egypt.

While few scholars question the importance of the public sphere to democracy and democratization, there is continued debate over how to best conceptualize it, where to locate it and who inhabits it. Much of the discourse on youth in general and youth in the MENA region in particular treat the public presence of young men, often the result of unemployment and precariousness, as a threat. In this paper I investigate the potentially productive ways that youth from marginalized regions negotiate their dispossession, and I treat their activities in cafés as important steps in developing a public sphere in postrevolutionary Tunisia. The study is the result of fourteen months of fieldwork in Tunisia. I have focused on the everyday practices of youth in the marginalized interior and southern regions of Tunisia. This has entailed in-depth interviews, both formal and informal, with a variety of actors as well as participant observation. This paper argues that cafés form important parts of an emerging public sphere in Tunisia. Coffeehouses can be conceived of both as marginal spaces where young men and their coffee drinking habits are expressions of their exclusion from employment and respectability as well as important part of the public sphere where the young meet, discuss issues of both public and private importance, develop networks and a common discourse. I argue that these should be understood as separate discursive spaces where marginalized groups can develop, express and communicate alternative, even oppositional, ideas and interests. The paper explores new kinds of spaces, what I term youth activist cafés, that are opening up in across interior Tunisia. These are spaces started by and for young activists, with both cultural and political dimensions. Above all they are spaces in which the waiting of the young is transformed into purposeful and meaningful activities. I argue that the youth come to perform a certain kind of sociability, a way of talking, a way of dressing, of ‘doing’ politics and culture in these spaces which is a rejection of the dominant discourses and formal politics even as it produces possibilities for certain forms of engagement with, and renegotiation of, the political. It is this tension between youth in cafés as expressions of passivity and marginality on the one hand and heightened activism of a growing public sphere on the other, and its implications for Tunisia’s fragile democratization, that will be explored and develop in this paper.