ABSTRACT
The youth of poor neighbourhoods, among them particularly the second- and third-generation youth of migrant descent, here take centre-stage. This chapter analyses the different periods of their citizenship that is their political participation since the 1980s, focusing on political, social and cultural forms of citizenship at the local, national and transnational level. These forms can be understood as the changing voices of poverty in the French banlieues. They reveal the failure and the persistence of the French republican integration or citizenship model in a transnational and global context. The poor neighbourhoods in contemporary French society are currently characterised by social exclusion, urban segregation, and great cultural diversity, the transformation of the local and the nation-state, and a deep crisis of political representation. As far as their political behaviour in representative democracy is concerned, they tend to reject political parties, and voter participation in their neighbourhoods is very low.
