The Violent Organisation of Political Youth

THE PROJECT IS COMPLETED

The programme was co-financed by The Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT) .

This research program ethnographically investigates the mobilisation of youth into non-state violent, political organisations. Through a comparative qualitative study, it examined the motives and means that lead young people to turn to violence. In doing so, the research programme uncoverd one of the major shadows of the current state of globalisation, namely the radicalisation and fundamentalisation of young men into ethnic, religious and immigrant militant organisations, granting us insight into important sources of local and global formations of violence.

The programme uncoverd mobilisation and radicalisation processes by analysing how organisations invited youth to participate in politics in particular ways, and how youth seeked to navigate organisations and events in order to enhance their life-chances and secure their well-being (Vigh 2006, and Jensen 2006). The overall aim of the programme was to clarify the relationship between collective violence, ideational structures and praxis, by illuminating:

  1. how and why non-state violent political organisations seek to mobilise youth and 
  2. what motives and situated rationalities youth have for mobilising.

This constituted a dynamic dialectic relationship and we examined such processes with an eye to both violent agency and structure, i.e., to both agent’s and organisation’s motives for turning to violence.

The program consisted of two senior (Steffen Jensen, Senior Researcher at RCT and Henrik Vigh, Department. of Anthropology) and three PhD researchers undertaking five case studies focussed on the mobilisation and radicalisation of youth in Lisbon, South Africa, Kenya, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Antropological PhD project by Dan Hirslund

Political Activism in the Context of Nepal's Democratic Transtion: Mobilisation, Hope and Survival Amongh Youth in Kathmandu.

About the project

Project name: The Violent Organisation of Political Youth

Contact
Professor Henrik Vigh
Department of Anthropology