The Politics Of non-belonging in the developing world

Abstract

Youth research (like most research) has long been dominated by approaches and concepts deriving from the Western/developed world. Unfortunately, it has meant that many of the primary concerns of youth researchers in Europe and America, in particular, have not spoken to the lived reality of the majority of young people in the developing world (and, to be precise about this chapter, South Africa), other than in the broadest terms, or as letting us know what we “should be like.” This is what dominant cultures do, and nowhere is this more evident than in the literature on life course and the transitions youth are seen to pass through, from school to higher education to work, backed up/supported by some form of nuclear family, in a stable society and (now perhaps less so) economy. This chapter draws on the concept of belonging to provide a critical lens on how youth from non-Western countries are conceptualized as other. It argues that in many developing countries, there is no “life course” available to youth that bears much, if any, resemblance to the tropes of current youth research. The natural searching for something to belong to occurs in a context where youth traditionally and culturally are literally to be seen but not heard, and thus structural social and economic barriers either stop or fail to provide sufficient support for belonging locally, which is replicated globally. A politics of non-belonging, as it were.