The Political Economy of Youth and Migration: Precarity and Promise

The Political Economy of Youth and Migration examines lived experiences to critique how the youth-NGO sector (youth complex) manages the fault lines of global capitalism and limits young peoples’ activities. Since the Arab uprisings and the migration crisis, young MENA refugees are portrayed as both threats to capitalism and valuable resilient workers, revealing mutually interdependent conditions that position them as both a political threat and a potential economic resource. This text considers how global conceptualizations of youth and adulthood define young people’s relationship to work, learning, and civic participation through the youth complex where NGOs offer mobility and civic participation opportunities while cementing neoliberal visions of society. Drawing on Marxist feminism and interview data alongside NGO reports, the book critiques capitalism and liberal democracy rather than blaming individual migrants. This book thinks through the global economic and local political conditions that have positioned young refugees as subjects in the (re)making. It challenges assumptions about civil society, showing how NGOs shape refugee identities and define their border-crossing experiences and reframe capitalism’s destruction as positive opportunities for displaced youth. As an interdisciplinary study, this book will be useful to scholars of political economy, Marxist feminism, citizenship studies, and youth sociology.