Abstract
In Political socialization of youth: A Palestinian case study, Janette Habashi examines why adult-led, top-down models of youth agency are problematic, and why studies that provide an ecological framework in which to situate youth’s voices are crucial for understanding political development. She begins the story with youth voices, arguing that war-torn areas do not allow for parent political socialization in the ways that Western democratic countries may. Furthermore, she emphasizes that while global neoliberal forces do have effects, they may be quite different than the influences felt by children and youth in Western and democratic countries.
Habashi looks carefully across the interconnected impacts of peers, the media, and community in Palestine. As the author outlines in Chapter 1, this multi-phase study first looks at post-normative political socialization processes that began in 2004. The current phase of the study involved five years (2006–2011) of 15–30 Palestinian youth aged 12–15 years at onset journaling about their political socialization. The young men and women were recruited through snowball sampling, beginning from the first study and drawn from a representative range of locales. While originally the twice per week journal entries by the participants were semi-structured, Habashi saw the importance of open-ended writing about what their lives were like and changed the protocol. Unlike some other research that studies children and youth ethnographically or from an international perspective while removed from the setting, Habashi phoned the youth monthly from her home-base in the United States, and visited periodically. She also employed a local Palestinian liaison and thus articulates a solid global/local research perspective. Through this method, she highlighted the roles of the United States and Israel in youth’s everyday contexts, a crucial move, given her ecological framing and the situated nature of her research interests.
The book itself consists of 10 chapters, although it is not cumbersome primarily because of how Habashi intertwines theory and compelling data in her writing. However, as readers, we occasionally got “lost” in what the literature said, versus what were the findings from this study. The book begins and ends with youth’s data in the form of their diary entries, and each chapter is built around data. Chapter 2 richly describes the ecological, post-developmental framework that is employed in the book. This framework explains how the cultural and religious context and the context of war contribute to political socialization that is not top-down. For example, most frameworks of political socialization are rooted in Western conceptions that see it as stemming directly from parents to children. The situation in Palestine is different in that families and schools can be quite removed from youth’s decision-making, and peers, communities, and the media can have strong roles. Thus, her position counters typical Western views of how power flows and challenges interpretations by governments and the United Nations that see their roles as shaping citizens for a global world. In war-torn contexts, children are intrinsically political, not politically apathetic. They can and do provoke change in ways that are influenced by generational narratives, policy changes, and so on but that also yield to youth agency. Habashi provides examples for this premise through the eyes of youth. In-depth interviews with youth about their journals, layered interpretations of drawings from their journals, and/or youth focus-groups might have added more insight into their political thinking and agency, which would then diminish the need for juxtaposing literature to explain the context.
Chapter 3 tends to the roles of family and community in political socialization, in dialectical relation with youth agency. Habashi discusses the “reimagining” of socialization through low-income youth educating their families about politics through technology. Furthermore, the Israeli occupation and violence contribute to Palestinian youth political agency in which they engage with community resources and become organizers themselves. Youth spoke of using some of the “adult” methods of political agency, including using local streets as community centers and marketplaces (no longer a reality in many locales), but infused them with their own views, for example, imagining how to recreate streetscapes as places for their own collective games. Relatedly, Chapter 4 looks at unique intersections of social identities, coming to the conclusion that cultural and political environments, social class, gender, and geography play salient parts. Specifically, Habashi shows how the community and family historical narrative of Al-Nakhbah (the 1948 Zionist occupation of Palestinian territories and ethnic cleansing) factors into youth political discourses and agency, converging with contemporary contexts. One example that Habashi provides is a 14-year-old girl whose generational narrative of alienation reverberates and intensifies when she is not allowed to visit her brother, who is in jail, due to issues related to (former) US President Bush’s visit to Palestine. Gender plays a large role in intersectionality, as young women between traditional and modern roles have significant political agency, yet like young men, feel the force of the occupation; this intersection leads to gendered expressions of agency. For example, young women are often positioned as mediators between imprisoned brothers and the rest of their families, as was the case for the 14-year-old mentioned above.
Unlike most Western countries, religion has an extremely important role in political socialization in Palestine. Chapter 5 explores how Palestinian national movements, including Islamism evolved to respond simultaneously to Israeli and Western colonizers who framed them as terroristic, and how this influences youth political agency. The in-depth discussion situates religion both locally and globally, for example, in relation to Western discourses and alliances painting Israel as fighting terrorism rather than driving dispossession and as a strategy for Israel dividing the Palestinian community and gaining supporters.
Chapter 6 is a fascinating discussion of the school context, which is marked by lack of education access and unsafe schools but also spaces outside of the formal curriculum that encourage the Palestinian narrative to be told. Although school is often viewed by researchers as a conduit of political socialization through curriculum about politics and civic engagement, the reality in Palestine is that youth are competent de-constructors and re-articulators of what they are learning at school. In addition, non-formal education via peers and community agencies enhances youth knowledge and may afford spaces to practice that knowledge in a context where the formal channels available in Western and democratic places, such as elections, are unavailable. These points are especially crucial at the present time as the historical activist stance of Palestinian teachers has been replaced with the newer system of strict monitoring of teachers and curriculum after the Oslo Accord of 1993 and subsequent establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The unique impact on non-formal civic education programs is discussed, as is the role of intersectionality on educational effects. Habashi documents how teachers and principals were sometimes innovative in opening up times and spaces in which political protest with youth or by youth could occur.
Chapter 7 is about media and the neoliberal agenda within political socialization. The media, in addition to its function of disparaging Palestinians, is often seen as a commodity that speaks to and socializes the masses into a market-oriented viewpoint and replaces facts with ideologies such as fundamentalism and secularism, creating an “us vs. them” thought process. However, Habashi found that media engagement is an active area in which youth learn about neoliberal discourses in community groups that support kids’ councils, journalism teams, and workshops. This seems quite different than the non-formal media activities available for youth in Western and democratic nations. In these settings, they critique the media and in some cases participate in alternative media discourses such as creating magazines and newsletters; there is also movement toward leveraging digital sources, which is challenging because WiFi is not always readily available.
The final three chapters (8–10) show the evolution of national identity as it connects to history. Palestinian youth, as described in Chapter 8 on national identity, are seen as agents not only of the territory but also to global hegemony, and as it relates to local political work. Chapter 9 specifically interrogates how youth, through complex mechanisms, side-stepped structures of politics and engaged in acts of resistance, solidarity and activism toward a national movement for liberation and community betterment. There are many examples of this. One is youth boycotting the US and Israeli companies complicit in the project of pacifying Palestinians through the introduction of neoliberalism into Palestine under the PA. In addition to unique local strategies, youth have also borrowed and rearticulated global strategies such as hip-hop and theatrical protests, throwing stones, and rallying against globalization, war, and colonization. Finally, Chapter 10 emphasizes that while it might be more comforting to see youth as following along a road that supports the politics of their families, the media, and schools, instead youth are often taking a different turn and aligning with Hezbollah, a party that is in active opposition to Israeli oppression.
It is humbling to imagine the efforts the participants, as well as Habashi, have invested in this work over 7 years. The transgressive understanding of youth agency and post-developmental thinking will not be new for Global Studies of Childhood (GSC) readers; however, considering the intricacies of the framework that Habashi has wrought should contribute to future studies of youth’s political socialization. Moreover, the diaries and analyses are important to read in their own right because this book is in many ways a collaborative political act with the participants. Importantly, this book adds the voice of childhood studies to the contemporary literature on Palestine. Political socialization of youth is an important contribution on several levels and is highly recommended.