Inequalities in Young People’s Civic Engagement in the Global South

• In Event: Youth Civic Engagement

Abstract

Young people’s civic engagement is increasingly framed as a driving force for development in the global South, with connections made between the building of young people’s human and social capital, their swift transitions into work, and their constructive participation in public life (UNDESA 2016). It is now widely recognised that civic engagement takes many forms beyond formal political channels, with the internet playing a significant role in broadening young people’s opportunities for engaging with politics. However, the research on youth civic engagement that drives global policy agendas is still largely undertaken in the global North - despite recognition of the importance of context for understanding young people’s political identities and practices (Sherrod et al 2010).

Responding to this, the ‘youth studies of the global South’ literature draws attention to the ways that growing global inequalities and economic precarity shape young people’s identities, cultures and in turn their political practices (Ugor and Mawuko-Yevugah, 2015; Swartz et al. 2021). Yet research on young people’s social movements and collective action in the global South, especially in its consideration of online spaces, tends to present an uncritical and often romanticized view of youth civic engagement that fails to address how it may reflect and reproduce inequalities. The intersections of online political participation and offline civic engagement in middle- and especially low-income country contexts are also underexamined. In middle-income contexts such as South Asia and the Middle East, around two-thirds of people use the internet, though there are marked gender and rural-urban inequalities in connectivity; while in lower-income settings such as sub-Saharan Africa, rates, although rapidly growing, are around 37% (ITU 2023). Existing research suggests that online spaces have become increasingly important in shaping – and polarising — political debates in contexts from the Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan, but the specific role of youth in such activism has received little attention.

Political geographies of childhood and youth, and particularly work on ‘everyday politics’ and lived citizenship, recognises citizenship as a form of connectedness and belonging that transcends formal politics, encompassing relational, affective, temporal and spatial dimensions (Isin 2002; Wood, 2022). Through this framing, civic engagement includes a broad range of practices, including online participation and mobilisation, which must be analytically situated in relation to sociohistorical dynamics, cultural norms and economic and political realities in a given context (Pincock et al 2024). This lens can offer useful insights into young people’s online and offline civic and political engagement in the global South, and how structural social inequalities shape the relationship between these realms.

In this paper, we present evidence on adolescent and young people’s online and offline civic engagement from Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Lebanon: three countries involved in the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) study (a longitudinal mixed methods research programme following 20,000 adolescents in the global South over the second decade of life) which have seen significant youth involvement in recent political change processes. Adolescent and young people’s individual exercise of voice, agency and participation is analysed in relation to contextual factors including spatial and temporal locations, structural economic conditions, the impact of shocks such as conflict or pandemics, and the historical and cultural contexts in which these play out. We find that these dynamics intersect to shape opportunities for civic engagement; the forms that civic engagement takes; and the different ways that heterogeneous young people combine online and offline political practices.


References

UNDESA (2016) World Report on Youth Civic Engagement. Geneva: UNDESA.

Isin, E. (2002) Being political: genealogies of citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) (2023) Measuring digital development: Facts and figures 2023. Geneva: ITU.

Pincock, K., Jones, N., van Blerk, L. and Gumbonzvanda, N. (2024) Young people in the Global South: Voice, agency and citizenship. London: Routledge.

Sherrod, L. R., J. Torney-Purta, & C. A. Flanagan (2010) Handbook of research on civic engagement in youth. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Swartz, S., Cooper, A., Batan, C. and Kropff Causa, L. (2021) The Oxford handbook of
Global South youth studies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ugor, P. and Mawuko-Yevugah, L. (2015) African youth cultures in a globalising world. London,
UK: Routledge.

Wood, B.E. (2022) ‘Youth citizenship: Expanding conceptions of the young citizen, Geography
Compass, 16(12): e12669.

Authors

• Khadija Mitu, University of Chittagong

• Workneh Abebe Yadete, ODI

• Nicola Jones

• Kate Pincock, ODI

• Sally Youssef, ODI