ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the production of youth within the global politics of mobility, and explores how young people are mobilised either as subjects of value, or as abject to the institutional and discursive frameworks that regulate human movement in the contemporary world. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first describes mobilities aimed at producing young people as subjects of cosmopolitan value in the global educational system and labour market. The chapter describes mobilities connected with higher educational migration or leisure tourism, which are taken up by young people in relatively privileged positions as part of projects of self-cultivation aimed at producing the self as a subject of global value. The second section describes how the regulation of mobility produces the experience of displacement as a form of abject youthfulness. Refugee flows created by political conflict take place within a biopolitical apparatus that has the regulation of childhood, youth and adulthood as critical to the allocation of legal refugee status, and excludes young people as irregular when their biographies and experiences of migration do not match universal developmental norms. Overall, the chapter positions youth as a product of the biopolitics of mobility within the territorial projects of national and supra-national political actors and institutions, shows how youth is produced through the dynamics of fixity and flow that are central to these institutional projects.
