The Transnationality of Youth

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century the world witnessed an extraordinary spate of protests led by young people acting within and across transnational networks. More adept at manipulating social media and less invested in the status quo than older cohorts, youth emerged at the forefront of a series of attacks upon conventional paradigms, standard models and established political, economic, and social hierarchies. While their character and content defied easy description or analysis, these events appeared to some commentators to underline the significance of youth not only as a media-ready concept and political category but as a social group capable of giving expression to distinctively new, transnational ways of thinking and acting.1