ABSTRACT
A concern for youth and generational change in the Maghreb and broader Middle East is not new. As early as 1976, I wrote about the factors that in Tunisia, as elsewhere, were giving the young men and women then reaching adulthood a character that distinguished them from previous generations (Tessler 1976). Prominent among these factors was the size of the new generation, giving rise to an increasingly important “youth bulge.” This spectacular population growth was driven by a birthrate that at the time approached 3 percent and meant, as a result, that within a few years the attitudes and values of young adults would begin to displace those of older Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians and to define the mainstream normative and behavioral orientations of these countries.
