A Political Economy of Youth Policy in Tunisia

Murphy, Emma

doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1311848

A Political Economy of Youth Policy in Tunisia

Murphy, Emma

Authors

Professor Emma Murphy emma.murphy@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This paper seeks to add to debates over the contribution that a political economy approach can make to understanding the current condition of youth, specifically narrowing the focus to youth policy. The paper suggests an approach which locates youth not as a class in itself, but as being at the epicentre of the growing labour precariat. Youth policy, formulated and disseminated through the structures and hierarchies of global neo-liberal capital via the positive development approach, constructs narratives of youth as a social category which subordinate it to the changing needs of the labour market and disrupt the emergence of broad-based resistance or class consciousness. In Ben Ali’s Tunisia, youth policy had the added task of servicing the authoritarian reproduction of the regime, creating tensions and contradictions between the objectives of the various global and local structures and hierarchies of power at play.

Citation

Murphy, E. (2017). A Political Economy of Youth Policy in Tunisia. New Political Economy, 22(6), 676-691. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1311848

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 17, 2017
Online Publication Date	Apr 11, 2017
Publication Date	Nov 2, 2017
Deposit Date	May 16, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Oct 11, 2018
Journal	New Political Economy
Print ISSN	1356-3467
Electronic ISSN	1469-9923
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	22
Issue	6
Pages	676-691
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1311848

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Copyright Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in New Political Economy on 11/04/2017, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13563467.2017.1311848.