What We Talk About When We Talk About Youth

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relationship between past and present views of youth as political agents and dangers and how policy entrepreneurs, humanitarians, educators, and novelists have been influential in these discussions from the Victorian era up to and including the late War on Terror. Recognizing the power relations between the discusser and the discussed is an important reflexive framing for any academic analysis of young people. But further, the discursive construction of youth is tied up with the identity of states and with the maintenance of an unequal international system. The idea of instruction is central to the discourse of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ as an imperialist project (a discourse within which the child and youth are important figures).