It's Time to Talk about Youth in the Middle East as The Precariat

Abstract

In 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing hit the bookstands. The concept precariat describes the condition of life and labour among educated urbanized youth in the twenty-first century more lucidly and persuasively than the key policy literature on the region, as exemplified in The Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality. This paper argues that any meaningful conceptualization of youth in North Africa and West Asia going forward should incorporate the notion of precariat and the condition of precariousness.