The concept of youth, defined as an intermediate stage between childhood and adulthood, became salient in Europe in the aftermath of the nineteenth-century industrialization and social upheavals of the early twentieth century, marked by the increasing pace of industrialization, shifting labor relations, and growing access to education. Over time and across space, the social construction of youth has evolved. Furthermore, the political significance of young people has been contested in the literature.

Youth in Regime Crisis provides a theoretically-informed and empirically-rich analysis of the multiple meanings of youth and the mobilization of young people during periods of regime crisis in Europe. The book argues that discursive and physical mobilization of youth affects regime survival. In particular, “an authoritarian consolidation can be effective by restructuring the discourse on youth, physically mobilizing young people, and isolating oppositional youth movements” (1). The study meticulously traces how “regimes lacking popular democratic support compensate for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilize youth symbolically and politically” (4).

The most impressive feature of this fine book is an examination of youth mobilization in four countries during pivotal moments in post-World War I European history: the decline of the Weimar Republic (1929–33), the 1968–69 crisis in France, perestroika in Soviet Russia (1984–91), and the entrenchment of authoritarianism in the Russian Federation (2004–11). Likewise notable is the use of original material in French, German, and Russian languages. Though the symbol of youth occupies a central place in all the four polities, they differ in terms of the country's initial political conditions and the outcome of regime crisis. Soviet Russia and Russia under Vladimir Putin's rule are cases of autocracies with divergent political outcomes: the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia. The late Weimar Republic is used as a control case in which a democratic regime collapsed in part under the strain of intense youth mobilization. France in the late 1960s is another control case, showing the survival of democracy despite a staggering level of youth mobilization. The book draws upon an original corpus of data derived from over 5,500 articles on youth, with four newspapers per country. A multi-level discourse analysis is used to analyze the content of newspaper articles and visualize relations between concepts.

The book is divided into eight chapters. The introductory chapter lays out theoretical foundations of the study. Chapter 2 develops a novel method for the examination of text data, combining the use of discourse and network analysis. Chapter 3 sketches a nuanced portrait of young people as political actors in twentieth-century Europe. The next four chapters delve into the analysis of the discourses on youth and the mobilization of young people in the selected four cases. The concluding chapter places the analysis of youth mobilization in comparative perspective and calls for further research on the multiple meanings of youth in contemporary Europe.

An insightful comparison of discursive formations—“specific clusters of meaning that constitute the overall discourse”—in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia reveals the continuity and rupture of the social construction of youth (34). The largest discursive formation in the late Soviet period portrays youth as a victim of western influence and a threat to the political system. Concurrently, the Soviet-Leninist discourse wanes over time, signifying “the Komsomol's loss of social and discursive legitimacy” (143). In contrast, the pro-Kremlin youth embodies the largest discursive formation in Putin's Russia between 2005 and 2011 (98). The case of contemporary Russia provides support for the hypothesis that “under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by dominating the discourses that surround and support the concept of ‘youth’” (27).

Youth in Regime Crisis makes an important contribution to comparative politics literature in several ways. First, the book enriches the growing scholarship on state-society relations by unraveling the role of youth during a regime crisis. A great deal of research on regime resilience and breakdown has focused on structural conditions or elites. In contrast, this book demonstrates how an in-depth analysis of physical and discursive mobilization of young people, representing a subset of ordinary citizens, deepens our understanding of regime crises. Methodologically, the book adopts an innovative approach, illustrating how discourse analysis and in particular discourse network analysis can be employed to unpack multiple meanings of a concept and intricate connections between concepts. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the research, the book will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, and sociologists.