In recent weeks, student encampments in solidarity with Palestine have sprung up on campuses around the world. Starting in the United States, they spread to Europe, South America, Asia, South Africa and Australia. As well as seeking to draw attention to the situation in Gaza, students have called for their universities to divest from companies that they say are complicit in human rights abuses in Israel. In some cases, these protests have been met with police responses that have included rubber bullets, baton charges and arrests.

Reactions to the student encampments from the media and politicians have largely taken one of two contrasting lines. Some have described them as dangerous, evidence of the ‘wokeness’ that is rife on university campuses, as well as the purported tendency of young people to be drawn to extremist politics through their ‘naive idealism’. Others have valorised the protests, drawing comparisons between the encampments and young people’s role within the Occupy movement’s ‘sit-ins’, the ‘los indignados’ movement, and anti-austerity protests – as well as even further back to student mobilisation in the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements.

In our recent book, Young People in the Global South: Voice, agency and citizenship, we draw attention to, and affirm the significance of, young people’s political and civic engagement and expression as being key to equitable and sustainable development. Yet we caution against the simplification embedded in the discourse that young people are an unequivocal moral conscience and force for social justice by virtue of their age.

Suggesting that age is the most important determinant of young people’s political orientations overlooks the intersections of identity within experiences of citizenship. In our book, we document how gender, religion, disability, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and other social identities shape both individual perspectives on political issues and opportunities to engage in politics in both informal and formal spaces. It is no coincidence that it is students who have been able to coherently express their demands to universities who are held up as proof of young people’s capacity to engage in political discourse, while those who ‘damage property’ are quickly dismissed as not representative of student politics. It is therefore important to think about how social inequalities shape the value and credence assigned to certain forms of political expression over others.

It is also worth observing that allegations of sexual violence committed both by Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have not been at the forefront of student protests, despite feminist groups drawing attention to the clear weighting of media outrage to allegations of rape by Hamas in the 7 October attack. As documented in the book, this underlines how gendered concerns are often sidelined within wider movements.

We argue that an intersectional analysis must also locate compounded inequalities within their temporal, spatial and geographic contexts. Young people’s actions, unfolding on campuses and beyond, are inextricably linked with their lived experiences of austerity, inequality, and the repeated failures of political elites to engage with issues that matter to young people. The present situation in Palestine has further undermined trust in institutional political processes, which appear to have not only repeatedly failed to prevent historic and now current atrocities, but in the eyes of many young people have enabled those atrocities to occur through Western allyship and the supply of weapons to the Israeli state. The distance between young people and their governments will have consequences for what adolescents and youth feel it means to ‘belong’, at what scale, and in what space.

A key objective of our book is to interrogate what it means to be a citizen under the current socio-political realities facing adolescents and young people. To do this, we draw on work within political geographies and childhood studies that has challenged the traditional binary distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’, instead emphasising citizenship as a way of ‘being political’ that incorporates both informal and formal activities. Citizenship, we affirm, is characterised by forms of connectedness and belonging that transcend the state.

Seeing citizenship as something that is experienced through multiple spaces and encounters also enables us to move beyond the idea that citizenship is merely a legal status obtained only at age 18, with young people incapable of meaningful participation before they reach that age. Though politicians and the media focus on student movements, being under the age of 18 clearly does not prevent young people from ‘being political’ by joining protests or engaging in online activism.

This approach, we suggest, can also offer insights into what enables and constrains linkages and connections between voice and agency at a more localised or informal level – for example, within student protest movements – and in more formalised expressions of politics and participation. When young people’s age is used to dismiss or valorise their demands for change, as we see happening with the student encampments, it becomes easy for states to ignore young people’s political expressions. And creating these connections then becomes even more difficult.

Opportunities such as the upcoming Summit of the Future, with its emphasis on youth participation, must avoid tokenising youth voices by ensuring that systems and structures for the political engagement of a wide range of young people are properly resourced – and that states are kept accountable for listening to and acting on what young people have to say.

Photo attribution: rajatonvimma /// VJ Group Random Doctors, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons