Dissent interrupted : settling refugee youth

The chapter draws from research that mapped the nongovernment (NGOs) working with refugee youth from the Middle East and North Africa and responded to the Arab uprisings. The analysis focuses on the ways in which NGOs build entrepreneurial forms of youth social participation. While youth social participation could mean any number of activities, it has come to represent a general corrective for social exclusion. Youth participation is said to quell the unrest that grows from high unemployment, precarity, and diminished hope for the future. Youth participation, however, works toward professionalizing dissent, thereby seeking to absorb young adult refugees into relations of neoliberal of development. The chapter, therefore, argues that creating spaces for youth participation has the paradoxical effect of interrupting protest and dissent. Interrupting dissent is not a simple thwarting or cutting short of social transformations initiated by social movements and community groups. Rather, the notion of interrupting dissent is intended to draw attention to the fact that youth dissent is historically and geopolitically contingent and as such the material grounds and possibilities of dissent are continually reshaped by the global forces and ideologies of capitalism and imperialism.