Guest Author Posting: Alcinda Honwana

The Time of Youth
Alcinda Honwana

The research for this book began in 2008 in Mozambique and was later expanded to South Africa, Senegal, and Tunisia. In these four countries I met young people from a range of social and economic backgrounds. I conducted individual interviews and focus-group discussions with students, young professionals, musicians and other artists, activists from various fields, and unemployed young men and women carrying out the most diverse activities to try to make ends meet.

Young people were eager to tell their stories. In long individual interviews I listened to their life stories and their views about their peers, their elders, the economy, and politics. Focus-group discussions were undertaken with diverse groups of young people. Some were all female, some all male, and some mixed. Others involved people with common interests, such as musicians and performers. I also spoke with groups belonging to particular organizations, such as party youth leagues and civil society associations. Most focus groups considered specific topics, and participants debated and exchanged views among themselves.

I also took time to interact with young people in places where they normally hung out, such as youth clubs, restaurants, and bars. Occasionally I was invited for meals at their homes and had the opportunity to meet their parents, siblings, and other relatives. The fact that my research assistants were themselves quite young facilitated my access to their social networks; I met their friends and then the friends of those friends, creating a snowball effect. My research assistants mediated between my young informants and me, as they advised me about the “dos and don’ts” and explained what was considered “cool” and “uncool.” They provided useful insights regarding ways of broaching difficult subjects. Although I speak the major languages of all four countries, they also translated and helped interpret some of the discussions conducted with young people in their mother tongues, especially Wolof in Senegal and Arabic in Tunisia.

In addition, I interviewed government officials, religious leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals who are concerned about youth. These interviews provided information about the ways these societies look at young people, specific policies and programs designed for them, and youths’ place in the economy, society, and culture.

Most of the research was conducted in urban settings, although I occasionally visited rural areas. Many young people who grow up in the economically undeveloped countryside seek a solution to their pressing problems in the cities. African cities are teeming with young men and women trying to survive on the margins of formal socioeconomic structures. For many, the city becomes a place to forge new ways of living free from the constraints of rural society. In the countryside, youth have no platform for action not only because resources are limited but also because older people tend to monopolize power; indeed, some call rural communities gerontocracies. The city promises anonymity, a degree of chaos that allows for personal freedom. Here they find possibilities for improvisation, experimentation, and desenrascar—literally, to disentangle themselves from a situation, and metaphorically, to improvise a solution from almost nothing at the very last moment.

The young people I interviewed described their daily life struggles as well as their aspirations. They shared amazing stories of resilience and survival under dire circumstances. I tell the stories of the young men in Maputo who survive by scavenging in the city’s garbage dump; of the Mozambican mukheristas, young women who engage in small-scale, cross-border trading without paying import taxes; of the young South Africans whose only form of livelihood is sporadic overnight shelf-packing in supermarkets; of the Senegalese street vendors and those desperate enough to try to make the dangerous crossing to Europe in small pirogues (boats); of the Tunisian university graduates working in European-owned call centers; and of the many young women and men who hook up with “sugar daddies” and “sugar mamas” to be able to pay high school fees and buy fashionable goods. I also introduce readers to rappers who criticize the status quo, protesters who force governments to reverse unsound policies, and revolutionaries who topple dictatorships. Indeed, young men and women do not merely wait for their lives to change. They are proactive and wake up each day with the goal of making their own lives better despite their depressing circumstances.

I was amazed by their agency as they actively set out to live as fully as possible despite their circumstances. I was equally struck by their capacity to understand the broader structural forces that shape their everyday lives. I was most impressed by their creativity and the commitment to citizenship that they sustained amid such a chaotic and often improvised existence. Young people are involved in a myriad of associations and activist groups and deeply engaged with the issues that matter to them, often on the margins of formal political structures and ideologies.

Young people were very clear about the ways they wanted me to portray them and the messages they hoped I would deliver on their behalf. They are keenly aware of the disapproving ways parents and elders, governments, and the media generally depict them. In this book I bring their own voices to the fore by using as many direct quotations as possible and providing information about who they are in order to allow the reader greater insight into their lives.

The Time of Youth focuses on the lives of many of these youths struggling with unemployment and sustainable livelihoods in the context of widespread social and economic crisis. Failed neo-liberal socio-economic policies, bad governance and political instability have caused stable jobs to disappear—without jobs young people cannot support themselves and their families. Most young Africans are living in a period of suspension between childhood and adulthood because they are unable to make the transition into adult independence -to build, buy, or rent a house for themselves, support their relatives, get married, establish families, and gain social recognition as adults. They live in a state of limbo that I call  “waithood” (a portmanteau term of “wait” and “-hood”, meaning ‘waiting for adulthood’). Unfortunately, in many of these social contexts waithood is becoming pervasive and is gradually replacing conventional adulthood. While the book focuses on four African case studies, it also argues that youth in Europe, North America and other parts of the world are facing the same crisis of joblessness and restricted futures. Thus the youth crisis, or waithood, is becoming global.

Order your copy of The Time of Youth today. To request review and/or exam copies, contact Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern at: Jennifer@styluspub.com.

Two KP Titles Release Next Week!

Kumarian Press is excited to welcome two titles into the family this October entitled Context-Sensitive Development and Foreign Aid Competition in Northeast Asia.

Context-Sensitive Development, By Anthony Ware, examines how to effect successful development interventions in Myanmar. Anthony Ware points out that while practitioners have questioned universal economic prescriptions for development, they have not been as consistent in questioning the normative foundations behind their work. Ware does not argue for a facile moral relativism; he sees Myanmar as an egregious violator of human rights, but he does call for “context sensitivity” to help organizations adapt their values to better meet the needs of client populations.

The book retails for $27.50 and is available for purchase, review and exam inspection.

High levels of economic growth have transformed the countries of Northeast Asia from aid recipients to aid donors. Foreign Aid Competition in Northeast Asia explores this transformation and its implications for economic development paradigms, policies, and practices. By being the first authors to look holistically at the countries in this region, Kim, Potter, and contributors address the dynamics, potential, and tensions of the aid programs of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The book retails for $27.50, as well, and is available for purchase, review and exam inspection.

Topurchase and/or request these copies, please contact Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern: Jennifer@styluspub.com.

Guest Authors Blog Post for New Peace Studies/NGO Title

By Max Stephenson and Laura Zanotti:

Our field research for Peacebuilding through Community-based NGOs: Paradoxes and Possibilities took us to three sites of long-lived conflict: Northern Ireland, Serbia and Haiti. Each left lasting impressions on us in different ways.

In Belfast, we undertook a series of interviews with representatives of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland as well as delegates of Foundations for Peace, a global network of philanthropies actively engaged in peacebuilding work in multiple nations. We learned much during our visit and interestingly, one central lesson of our interviews was strongly underpinned by our forays around the city. Our visit coincided with the 10^th anniversary of the Good Friday Accord that formally ended the decades of the “Troubles” whose violence had literally torn the province apart. We imagined that the city would evidence some healing due to persistent peacebuilding efforts at all scales in the decade that had elapsed since a formal peace had been negotiated. And this was so in some ways, but to our surprise, no one among our interviewees believed the city’s population was yet ready to see the so-called “peace walls” separating neighborhoods and parts of the city and originally aimed at controlling violence and protecting innocents, removed. And now nearly 15 years after the Accord, the city is more segregated than ever and its many walls remain a continuing and ubiquitous hulking presence whose borders and boundaries define the warp and woof of resident’s daily life and activities. If we needed an object lesson in how long it may take societies once rent asunder to begin to build trust across their previous divisions, despite the good efforts of many, we witnessed it first-hand in Belfast. Peacebuilding requires steadfastness, a vision that must be ready to encompass decades and courage to have any hope of success. We explored the work of an NGO in the province that has demonstrated the pluck to continue questioning discourses of conflict deeply ingrained in Northern Ireland society, while challenging standardized and “short cut” approaches to peacebuilding by fostering ongoing intra-communal engagement opportunities concerning peace and its distributive effects.

            Our fieldwork in Serbia took us not only to Belgrade, but also to Srebrenica. We visited the latter site on the day of commemoration of the tragic genocide that made that isolated beautiful valley with its now abandoned and dilapidated United Nations compound and row upon row of neatly tended gravesites, infamous. As we write, the international community continues to fund forensic efforts to identify the victims of the massacre near the site. One central feature on the commemoration day of our visit was the honoring and interment of the remains of several hundred newly identified individuals. It was at once an unforgettable and deeply moving spectacle underpinned by the knowledge that all sides in that conflict continue to construct warring narratives that implicate the “other” in genocidal actions. This tit-for-tat mentality and its accompanying partisan social constructions of the past conflict have marred efforts to secure progress to address still fresh enmities. We also could not fail to note that one avowed aim of this mass killing was to “ethnically cleanse” what was for decades a mixed religious and ethnic community. Srebrenica is today a single ethnic enclave.  This situation teaches that violent human fear and hatred of “the other” are likely to have enduring and deeply lamentable consequences, and those may not be safely predicted in advance. Most international organizations and NGOs, by focusing on the memorialization of war victims, end up reinforcing political dynamics rooted into war identities, rather than opening the way for new possibilities for intra-communal relations.     

            Our work in Haiti found us visiting not only that nation’s capital city, but also traveling to its mountainous and still relatively inaccessible plateau region. The long-lived conflict and associated regime changes that have beset the nation in recent decades, some born of native political conditions and movements and others imposed by the international community, have essentially eviscerated government capacity and left a population to fend largely for itself. This, it continues to do and with amazingly good grace and sheer determination, but the immiseration of the island’s people has left a nation in tatters and an international community, deeply complicit in that condition, seeking ways and means to address the population’s multivalent suffering. International strategies of peace building in Haiti have focused on “building institutions” while de facto diverting funds from that nation’s government to NGOs, thereby further eroding local economic capacity and social capital.  We were heartened therefore to study a nongovernmental organization that has taken as its aims not only the provision of necessary services, but also the development of accompanying government capacities in its areas of interest and a commitment to try to foster virtuous circles in the local economy.

            Taken together, our work for this book left us humbled by the complexities that social conflict occasions as well as by the need for sustained engagement among all relevant parties and for rethinking current international approaches to peacemaking, if an alternate social vision (or visions) that result in peaceable coexistence is to be constructed and broadly accepted in communities previously riven by conflict. Peace is not born of “an intervention,” but instead of the sustained efforts and commitment to learning of all involved (especially those in position to control resources and devise intervention strategies) to create fresh conditions for trust, economic sustainability and possibility amidst enduring fear and, often, acculturated hatred. These are not challenges either for the cocksure or the faint of heart. We came away with enormous respect for those engaged in peacebuilding efforts, even when we disagreed with their adopted strategies.

Peacebuilding Through Community-Based NGOs is available for purchase through Kumarian Press. To request review and/or exam copies, please contact Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern at: Jennifer@styluspub.com.

New September Release: Peace Studies

Peacebuilding Through Community-Based NGOs explores the contested but increasingly relevant role nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in processes aimed at bringing about international peace and security and in the invention of alternatives for resolving conflict.

Through case studies of Partners In Health (Haiti), Women in Black (Serbia), and the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland highlight the range of ways these organizations are involved in post-conflict social reconstruction efforts and with whom and for what purposes they interact as they do so. The authors argue for analyses that take into account the rich mosaic that is the civil society sector rather than treating all of these entities with one broad brush. At once a celebration and a critique, this book provides guidance for those seeking to understand the complexities and potential of the civil society sector for facilitating social justice and transformation.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
1) NGOs, International Governance, and the Neoliberal Peacebuilding Consensus
2) Providing Services and Building the State Amid a Cacophony of International Aid: Partners in Health, Haiti
3) Implementing the Liberal Peace, Hardening Conflict Identities: Women in Black, Serbia
4) Revealing Conflict Narratives in Pursuit of Peace: Exploring the Peacebuilding Efforts of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland
5) Conclusions
References
Index

This brief handbook is essential reading for NGO professionals and human rights activists.

For more information on purchasing, visit the book's web page.

Contact Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern at Jennifer@styluspub.com to receive review and/or exam copies.

2013: The Year of Crisis, Panic

We have already witnessed the violent surge of next year's crisis from political instabilities in the Middle East to economic blunders throughout the world.

Syria is in turmoil and the violence continues in Afghanistan, as Bin Laden's death has proved to be both an unsettling victory and a defeat. New leaders are being chosen in Afghanistan as they look for a new Intelligence Leader, as well as in the States - the presidential election is just around the corner.

Politics will not only dictate how 2013 will go down in the history, but also environmental changes, social and economic.

For starters, the U.S, as well as Australia and Russia, have experience droughts that have affected the crops. These droughts are ruining crops essentials for economic sustainability. Corn, alone, is expected to drop to an all-time low since 1995, and will inevitably raise grain and other food prices.

For us in the developed world, these higher prices are a burden, but are manageable; for others, in Africa, for example, these prices determine life and death, as most poorer countries spend at least half of their income on food - or, shall we say bread - which tops the list of essentials.

If food prices rise, China is vulnerable to food cost inflation.

"In just one month, July 2011, the cost of living jumped 6.5%. Inflation happily subsided over the course of 2012. Springtime hopes for a bumper U.S. grain crop in 2012 enabled the Chinese central bank to ease credit in the earlier part of the summer. Now the Chinese authorities will face some tough choices over what to do next." (CNN: Why 2013 Will Be a Year of Crisis)

Social changes will affect China and the rest of the world if we continue to follow the path of destruction that 2012 is causing. As 2013 is fast approaching, we must ask ourselves, what can be done? Can the youth generation help change the future by acting in the present?

Hurricane Isaac Kills 10 In-and-Around Haiti As It Continues to Move Into the U.S.

Since the storm reached the Caribbean on Saturday, at least eight Haitians have been killed and another two in the Dominican Republic.

Although the scale of impact from the storm was less than anticipated, many Haitians still dug themselves out of the mud with buckets - rising to the waist of an adult male. The island itself sufferred flooding, fallen poles and collapsed tents - where more than 400,000 residents still live in since the 2010 7.0 magnitude earthquake (See Kumarian Press's Tectonic Shifts to learn more about the conditions of Haiti since the earthquake). Dozens of homes were destroyed and over 269 homes damaged.

Those that died included a 51-year-old and a 10-year old. Most left dead due to flooding.

In Haiti, more than 14,000 people evacuated their homes and temporary tents over the weekend. The World Food Program had issued out two days worth of food to over 8300 individuals.

More information about this story can be found through CNN.

Pakistani Girl, 11, Held in Prison on Blasphemy Charges

An 11-year-old girl in Pakistan, named Ramsha, has been arrested on charges of blasphemy, as witnesses noted that she had burned pages of the Mulslim holy text. She used the pages as fuel for cooking. The girl has medical complications including down-syndrome. She stated that she had no idea pages of the Quran were used in the fire.

"Niazi said that 150 people had gathered on Friday where the neighborhood's Christian population lived and threatened to burn down their houses." (CNN Story: Girl held on Pakistan blasphemy charge)

The mob of angry protested wanted to burn the girl to teach her a lesson. Christians in the area fled their homes to aviod backlash. (See KP's Living Our Religions to get a sense of what minority religious followers deal with in other countries)

In Pakistan, it is a crime to insult the Quran, Islam or the Prophet Mohammed and is punishable by death.