Angela Steinen and Omar Alonso Uran Arenas (2019) Editorial for Youth Doing Politics

This article was written for the Youth Voice Journal’s 2019 Special Issue ‘Youth Doing Politics’ It’s available here as a standalone article. You can also purchase the full special issue here.

Over the past few months, the world has witnessed how citizens around the globe have taken to protest in cities. Protesters have staged their discontent on streets and squares. Connected through the internet, protesters in one city have been inspired from events in cities elsewhere. The second decade of the 21st century has been a decade of massive street protests heralded by the Arab Spring. The protagonists of these mobilisations have been cities and urban youth, among them a conspicuous number of young women. Analysts see in this civic unrest a “leaderless revolution” (Brannen, 2019) pushed by global threats such as failing political institutions, corrupt ruling elites,
economic inequality, social and spatial injustice, and the impacts of climate change (Brannen, 2019; BBC News, 2019; Eurotopic, 2019; Krummenacher 2019; Marris, 2019). These analysts applaud that the protesting youth left behind political apathy and disengagement repeatedly criticised during recent years by politicians, educators and scholars in many parts of the globe (Bousbah, 2014; Conpes, 2014; Rothenbühler et al., 2012; Farthing, 2010). Some analysts
demanded immediately to channel young people’s street energy into participation in voting and electoral politics to make them politically recognisable (Brannen, 2019).