For most of the last century, within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region youth have been addressed and engaged as a particular category of citizens. In this vein youth were viewed as important targets of nationalist projects and as critical national resources in an era of national development. In more recent years, however, the concern with youth has taken on a new tenor both within and outside the region. What had previously been a preoccupation about youth as the region's promise and progress has increasingly become one about youth as crisis and potential threat.

How has Middle East studies figured into this equation? Generally speaking, a significant portion of the scholarship on youth has fallen into two spheres. The first has been concerned with the “youth bulge,” or demographic explosion, and has been preoccupied with youth as a development challenge. The work of economists and other affiliated scholars at the Middle East Youth Initiative at the Brookings Institution is a prime example of this approach. A number of papers commissioned under the auspices of this initiative address economic losses associated with “exclusion” of youth as well as related social concerns pertaining to delayed marriage and the cost of housing and education. A particularly interesting working paper from this group is Dianne Singerman's piece on delayed marriage.Footnote ¹ Singerman argues that marriage, specifically the “marriage imperative,” provides a critical prism through which to analyze both the political economy of MENA youth and some of the attendant cultural changes precipitated by the delay in marriage for young people today. The more that scholarship in this genre seeks holistic and interdisciplinary perspectives, the more illuminating work in this development vein will be.

A second major Middle East studies approach to youth is concerned with what I characterize as youth counterculture, or the popular culture of select youth in the region. For example, there have been a number of interesting studies on the production and circulation of new musical styles and trends. Much of this has focused on alternative or oppositional forms of music such as rap, hip-hop, and heavy metal. One also finds a considerable literature on rai music.Footnote ²

Paul Silverstein has argued that the literature on MENA youth has been dominated by a focus on the “spectacular.”Footnote ³ Mary Bucholtz has pointed to the same trend in anthropological literature on youth more broadly.Footnote ⁴ Both make a plea for ethnographic research that engages with the everyday lives of youths and illuminates youth as active agents in their worlds.

My own research interests have been motivated by the significant gap in the anthropological research on schooling and education in the Middle East. The study of educational institutions in the region has been dominated by technical and policy-oriented research, leaving a major arena in the lives of contemporary young people unexplored. In recent years, research on the politics of education and the political contests surrounding appropriate knowledge for young people has been more prevalent.Footnote ⁵ However, given the centrality of educational spaces—schools, universities, community colleges, trade schools, and so forth—in the everyday lives of young people, the dearth of research in these spaces is surprising.

Educational institutions are important for at least three reasons. First, most young people spend a significant amount of their time there. These institutions are important social spaces for youth. Second, schools as local institutions provide an important window onto how both national and regional forces take shape locally. Third and finally, education as a contemporary development project has been instrumental in the construction of new expectations and new ways of being in the world. Education is central to understanding what choices and dilemmas youth face today—and this needs to go beyond the reference to educated unemployment, which dominates how education is typically inserted into studies of youth in the region. Exploring education in all its aspects is a critical means by which Middle East studies can address youth in new and distinctive ways.