ABSTRACT
Student movements and youth movements are especially prone to violent protests and extremist factions that pursue violent strategies. This chapter considers several influences in movements of the young, especially student movements, and the age composition of social movements more generally. To bring age cohorts and intergenerational relations back into social movement analysis, a good place to start is to consider seismic shifts in politics where age-cohort distribution played a key role. Might there be elements of behavior emanating from recent recognition of "emerging adulthood" as a distinct developmental stage. There is an emerging psychological literature on this cohort between late teens and early 20s that is naturally mostly removed from questions of collective violence and social movement militancy. The generational component was clearly apparent in these studies of long-term mobilization. Universities may be freer compared with other institutions in authoritarian regimes, but they are still relatively more controlled when compared with universities in open societies.
