Gertel / Kreuer / Stolleis The Dispossessed Generation

Youth in the Middle East and North Africa
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-86356-957-9
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 488 Seiten

The Arab uprisings of the early 2010s raised hopes for the development of more democratic structures and better living conditions for millions in the region. Instead, they were followed by authoritarian backlash, civil wars, economic collapse and food and energy insecurity. Young people are often the ones hit hardest by the conjunction of these problems. How do they cope with insecurities and growing uncertainties, and what drives them to pursue their own dreams in spite of being disenfranchised? The Dispossessed Generation is the most comprehensive, in-depth study of young people in the MENA region to date, providing invaluable insights into their self-perceptions and life chances. In this volume, an interdisciplinary team of researchers assess a survey of 12,000 sixteen- to thirty-year-olds from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. They illuminate the extent to which young people engage with their societies and mine new opportunities from a multiplicity of crises.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gertel, Jörg

Kreuer, David

Stolleis, Friederike

Leseproben

2
The Countries in the MENA Region

The acronym MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa and generally refers to the region from Morocco to Iran, including large parts of the Arabic-speaking world. The region has some 380 million inhabitants which corresponds to about 6 percent of the world’s population. The following countries are usually considered part of the MENA region: , Bahrain, , Iran, , , Kuwait, , , , Oman, , Saudi Arabia, , , the United Arab Emirates, and . , an important Arabic-speaking country in North Africa, is also included in the analysis. This study is based on interviews conducted in twelve countries (represented above in italics) – six of which are in North Africa and six in the Middle East (with the peculiarity that the young Syrians interviewed were living in Lebanon rather than their home country). The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) has an active presence in these twelve countries, whether in the form of a representative office on the ground or through their project work. Collaboration with local FES offices facilitated the implementation of the surveys and also enabled a more detailed analysis thanks to input from local researchers and staff from the foundation.

Characteristics of the MENA region

At the outset, a key question must be raised, namely whether individual countries can be meaningfully compared with each other at all. For several decades, there has been controversy about the extent to which it makes sense to measure and compare so-called levels of development of (national) states, as is the case for the countries examined here in Figure 2.1. One position assumes that non-comparable facts and often non-measurable characteristics are compulsively and falsely related to each other by an arbitrary selection of (numerical) indicators (Crush 1995; Esteva/Escobar 2017). In contrast to this, another position emphasises that phenomena that are not observable can only be recognised, named and investigated through aggregated statistical statements (Simon 2006). Finally, still others argue that, regardless of the method used to launch them, research topics are always influenced by discourse, for example by whether they are desirable in terms of power politics or how their setting is shaped by vested interests (Pieterse 2010). For postcolonial states such as those in the Arab world, one result of this approach is that the apparent inferiority of one country or another is established and perpetuated through such inadmissible comparisons (Sachs 1992; Ziai 2017). These arguments must be taken into account when we categorise countries according to statistical criteria, as is the case here.

Figure 2.1
COUNTRIES IN THE FES MENA YOUTH STUDIES (2016 AND 2021)

For several years the Human Development Index has measured levels of development (Figure 1.1). While in the current study no country with a ‘very high level of human development’ is included – such as any of the Arab Gulf states – two oil-exporting countries, Algeria and Libya (newcomers to the study), have, however, been added to the list of ‘high human development’ category. Two other countries, also newcomers, classify differently: Iraq ranks as ‘medium human development’ and Sudan is part of the lowest human development category. Moreover, certain countries have experienced profound changes since the last study, in some cases due to expanding uncertainties that impact on the level of development, as evident in the case of Lebanon, for example. In this respect, the countries analysed represent a snapshot of a group of countries ranging from prosperous to very poor, i.e. countries with variegated preconditions, that affect the life opportunities of young people in different ways.

National incomes, represented as numerical averages, indicate trends, but often conceal serious differences within countries. In the region they have converged compared to the previous study (Gertel/Hexel 2018), but remain unequal: Libyans earn more than four times the per capita income of the Sudanese and around ten times the average income of the Yemenis. In demographic terms, Egypt is the largest country with over 113 million inhabitants and Palestine the smallest with five million. Jordan, like Lebanon, is highly urbanised, while rural areas are particularly pronounced in Sudan and Yemen, where agriculture plays an important role. The countries of the MENA region are also dependent to varying degrees on migrant worker remittances, tourism revenues and foreign investment. In recent years, however, the economic situation has deteriorated throughout the region and youth unemployment is high. War, armed conflicts and terrorist attacks also mark the everyday lives of many people. Yemen faces a multi-front war, dramatic hunger crises and the spread of disease. In Syria, hundreds of thousands have been killed in the hostilities and millions of people have fled their homes. Syrian refugees live as internally displaced persons in their own country or in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon. This fits into the larger picture: the region accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s population, but in 2018 it was home to about 45 percent of all internally displaced persons and 58 percent of the world’s refugees. Syrian refugees in Lebanon were therefore interviewed as the twelfth reference group of the study, who, as an extremely vulnerable group, represent a further section of everyday reality in the MENA region. While the conflicts in Libya have calmed down somewhat, the situation in Sudan escalated militarily in the spring of 2023. In Palestine, where the everyday situation is shaped by the Israeli occupation, the spiral of violence dramatically intensified from October 2023, triggered by attacks from the Gaza Strip. In many other countries, the security situation is tense.

The twelve countries are briefly presented below in alphabetical order. They all look back on long, chequered histories and, in addition to a number of similarities, also display major differences in terms of natural resources, demographic composition, economy and political systems.

Algeria (ALG)

Algeria is the largest country in Africa and, with 46 million inhabitants, is one of the most populous in this study. In addition to Algerian Arabic, the mother tongue of about 30 percent of the population is a Berber language. Through an eight-year war with the colonial power France, which had been in Algeria since 1830 and had brought around a million French settlers into the country, Algeria gained its political independence in 1962. After a period of Arab socialism, towards the end of the 1980s, Islamist movements gained strength in Algeria, initially at regional level and later in the 1991 parliamentary elections. The government’s contestation of the election results ultimately led to a civil war that lasted until 2002, leaving between 60,000 and 200,000 people dead and affecting many hundreds of thousands more. With the 1996 constitution, a semi-presidential system of government came into force. Algeria is one of the few countries in the region where the upheavals of 2010/2011 were barely felt initially. In 2014, President Abd al-Aziz Bouteflika, who was in poor health, was re-elected. However, when he announced his candidacy for a fifth term in 2019, a widespread peaceful resistance movement – the (Arabic for ‘movement’) – formed in society. The protests led to a presidential election, which was won by a representative of the old regime, Abdelmadjid Tebboune. Due to the corona pandemic, the concerns of the were pushed out of the public sphere.

Algeria’s economy is heavily dependent on revenues from the sale of oil and gas, which account for 98 percent of total exports. The country is the fourth largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth largest natural gas producer in the world. Around 90 percent of its crude oil and 69 percent of its gas is exported to Western Europe and the US. In July 2022, the state-owned oil company Sonatrach signed a new agreement with three international companies on joint gas extraction in the east of the country. The Chinese state is also present in Algeria, especially in the construction sector where it uses a predominantly Chinese labour force (around 50,000) for billion-dollar projects. Income inequality is rather high in Algeria. In 2022, the richest 1 percent of the population earned 10 percent of total income, while the entire bottom half of the population received 19 percent of total income. In 2021, the year of the survey, 1.8 million people were officially classed as poor.

Egypt (EGY)

With 113 million people, Egypt is the most populous country in the region, yet only has very limited agricultural areas (around 4 percent of the country’s surface area); these are located along the Nile and in its delta, where the highest population concentration can be found, with around twenty-two million people living in Greater Cairo alone. Historically, Great Britain occupied the country in 1882, turning it into a protectorate in 1914. In 1922, Egypt became a largely autonomous kingdom, regaining its sovereignty in 1936. In 1952, the ‘Free Officers’ overthrew King Farouk. For a long time, Gamal Abdel Nasser determined the fate of the young republic. His socialist regime maintained close ties with the Soviet Union and nationalised the Suez Canal Company in 1956, leading to the Suez...