Silenced youth, engine of change in the Arab world
14 March 2015 | In the Media
Faced with the entrenchment of transitions, the temptation is to look back at the Arab world through a static prism. But Lurdes Vidal, head of the Arab and Mediterranean World at the IEMed, is convinced that young Arabs have embarked on a path of no return that will sooner or later nullify the validity of existing hierarchies.
As Lurdes Vidal explained today in an article in the newspaper Ara, they are part of the best-educated Arab generation in history. For now, they are orphans of a political project, given the failure of postcolonial policies and the decline of the great ideologies that seduced their parents. But thanks to the possibility of informing themselves outside the official channels, they have been able to develop their own languages and icons, which mix the modern canons of a globalized world with truly local cultural standards.
With these new weapons in hand, they shun postcolonial victim discourse, rebel against an agonizing social order, break old family patterns, and build a new collective imaginary from multiple ideologies and sensibilities. The IEMed analyst acknowledges that so far they have not achieved remarkable political representation, but “little by little.”