Social Science Research Council

“Crafting a Better Future: Islam, Governmentality and the Gendered Politics of Youth in Contemporary Egypt”

In recent years, “youth” have emerged as a highly politicized social and political category in new ways in contemporary Egypt.  From the state apparatus to religious institutions, to a network of transnational and non-governmental organizations, youth is an ever-expanding domain for competing regimes of power aimed at the crafting of better future population.  In this project, I research the contemporary production and institutionalization of ‘youth’ in national and international policy for Egypt and explore the subtle and complex slippages between “youth at risk” and “youth as a risk” in demographic policy from a historical-anthropological perspective.  I ask how the governmentalization of youth in various domains is intimately associated with discourses of poverty, piety, the nation and notions of risk in an increasingly neo-liberalized society following Sadat’s historic infitah (open-door economic policies of the 1970s), which later transformed Egypt’s public and theo-political landscape in significant ways.  I’m particularly interested not just in the specific socio-economic dynamics but the imaginative processes through which specific kinds of youth are produced and conceptualized as an object of international and state policy, from past to present.  I ground my ethnography in several youth outreach programs (secular and Islamic, state and non-state) in order ask how the category of youth and the experts who practice youth-intervention and /or youth governance engage each other, and with what observable social effects.

In addition to ethnography, a crucial component of this research lies in its exploration of Egypt’s colonial and postcolonial history, whereby, for instance, various sectors of urban youth served as a major collective force in anti-colonial and nationalist projects.  Historians of Egypt have shown how strategic demography and the “youth threat” constituted an ineluctable concern for colonizing powers since, at the very least, the 19th century.  My research extends this line of inquiry to ask what a robust focus on youth at this moment enables, and for whom.  Thus by deploying a historical-anthropological methodology, I ask how current concerns and interventions into youth, situated at the conjuncture of globally circulating discourses (such as security, freedom, risk) and locally situated realities (Cairo’s recent Islamic trend), differ from those of the past. 

That ‘youth’ are becoming increasingly more visible as a politically-charged social category throughout cities of the Global South is evident; my research seeks to understand precisely how and why momentous political-economic shifts in Egypt’s past two decades have encouraged contemporaneous shifts in the politics of youth, and how neo-liberal economic restructuring is associated with the construction of youth as a paradigmatic form of what scholars of governmentality call ‘moral bio-citizenship.’  An ethnographic exploration into the social category and temporal dimensions of youth in Egypt at this time may broaden our understandings of the global expansion of capitalism, the relations between the secular and the religious, and nascent forms of governmentality in areas of Africa and the Middle East undergoing complex neo-liberal transformations.