ABSTRACT
Though under-researched, analysis of post-Tahrir youth political participation reveals a paradox. On the one hand, youth seems to be at the centre of government attention, as revealed by the designation of 2016 as Year of the Youth and the convening in the last two years of six “dialogue youth conferences” with presidential participation. On the other hand, the study of youth data shows alienation, marginalisation and withdrawal. This chapter demonstrates that youth in Egypt constitute many groups that lack coordination and political machinery to rank youth priorities and coordinate behavioural strategies. Consequently, the analytical framework applied here is a revised contentious politics. The methodology is that of daily fieldwork or the anthropologist’s “participant observation”, supported by the SAHWA Youth Survey 2016 (2017) in nine figures and SAHWA Ethnographic Fieldwork 2015 in six interview sets of varied stakeholders. Youth groups and the trajectory of their political participation are traced and anatomised in three phases: the peak of the 2011 Tahrir mass protests that brought down Mubarak; present fragmentation/marginalisation; and resulting state control, dubbed here “statisation”, as youth organisations and activities are engineered from the top and after clearing by security services.
