Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium

6. Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State

105 6. anthroPology of the future: arab youth and the state of the state Suad Joseph The Arab Spring began in January 2011 in Tunisia, and moved quickly through Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria, with rousing applause from many corners of the world. It was a ringing indictment of authoritarian governments, corruption, unemployment, inadequate educational institutions, and the lack of political will on the part of Arab national leaders to address the real and urgent problems of their peoples. Throughout the Arab Spring countries, the majority of those engaged in the protests and in critical leadership positions were youth. The Arab Spring and its constituent elements should not have been surprising; yet it caught scholars and political commentators off guard. This chapter, originally presented as a paper in April 2010 at the University of California, Los Angeles conference from which this volume is drawn—a year before the Arab Spring—calls upon anthropologists to address the pressing problems of Arab youth. Quickly, after January 2011, a surfeit of papers, lectures, online discussions, and panels at professional conferences emerged analyzing the questions presented by the Arab Spring. Most of these drew on commentaries and the expertise of journalists, political scientists, and public intellectuals from different disciplines. Some of these projects, preliminary in their formulation and empirical depth, began to examine the conditions facing Arab youth. 106 Subjectivities Sociologist Samir Khalaf and English scholar Roseanne Khalaf quickly produced the insightful collection Arab Youth (2011). The volume included the works of five political scientists, five anthropologists, three journalists, and one each from the fields of demography, history, urban planning, creative writing, and Middle East studies. At the Middle East Studies Association (mesa) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in December 2011, twenty panels focused on the Arab Spring, with a number of them reflecting, to some degree, on Arab youth. At that same meeting, Marcia Inhorn and I, in our capacity as members of the mesa Board (I was president at the time), organized a mini-conference, “Anthropology of the Middle East: A New Millennium.” As the deadline for submission was after the launch of the Arab Spring in January 2011, the anthropologists we invited to organize panels had an opportunity to respond to the immediate situation by proposing panels on Arab youth or adding papers on youth to their panels. Eighteen panels, of the forty-six submitted for this mini-conference, were accepted by mesa—none of these were on Arab youth (the one specifically on Arab youth was rejected by the mesa Program Committee). The mesa meeting did feature two other panels on Arab youth, however, one organized by the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, of which I am General Editor. Anthropologists, reeling from the panorama of issues dizzily imploding before them with the Arab Spring that they largely missed, have much thinking and research to do to understand the on-the-ground experiences of youth in Arab countries.Why have Arab children and youth been so understudied by anthropologists? Arab children and youth constitute two-thirds of the populations of almost all Arab countries. In an area of the world that produces critical sources of world wealth, the rates of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and underemployment, and health problems among children and youth is staggering. Since World War II, when most of the states of that region gained independence, the story of statemaking and of nation-building has been a story of stunning failure. Nationalist and pan-Arab nationalist movements stalled,never started,or were unsuccessful. Wars and violence have wracked the region. Huge movements of populations fleeing wars,violence,and economic uncertainty have exited their states for other regional states or global destinations. Most of these movements have been of young people. For over the past half century, perhaps the majority of the children and youth of the Arab world have grown up at high risk, with a cloud (often foreboding violent storms) over their futures. The current adults themselves emerged Anthropology of the Future 107 from years of political instability. While the Arab world has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, it has one of the highest rates of wars and political violence. For in the Arab world, the state has offered no future, no national future . Some citizens cleave to possibilities available to them, often routed through kin and family systems—dually sites of security and/or sources of oppression. Many...