Complicating Youth in Contemporary Turkey: Cultural Activism and a New Muslim Youth Identity

Abstract

The topic of youth and being young in modern Turkey are frequently expressed in narratives that are either fragmented or totalizing, and frequently reductionist. In a time of resurgent youth politics globally, and in the Middle East-North Africa region and Turkey especially, the ways youth and being young has been talked about, and the youth groups which are forming and beginning to act today, deserve to be complicated. In this paper I engage in both a discussion of the ways youth has and has not talked about, and provide a case study, that of the young people of the Mavera Youth Movement, who defy and complicate traditional narratives about what being young and politically active in Turkey means.