ABSTRACT
Political alienation has been widespread among the youth of the Maghrib for some time and is the result of two distinct sets of factors that young people usually judge to be strongly interrelated. As with young professionals, a disproportionate number who had reached the upper echelons of the educational system came from major urban centers, or the Sahel in Tunisia, and from professional and middle-class family backgrounds. Less-educated young Tunisians, by contrast, did display significant levels of political alienation in the 1960s. Political alienation was much more evident among well-educated young Algerians during the 1980s, however, expressing itself both in terms of leftist ideologies and, as in Tunisia and Morocco, through the vehicle of Islamic militancy. Social mobility, both in general and as a function of education, was severely limited for the vast majority of Algeria’s young men and women. Important educational gains also followed independence in Algeria.
