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This chapter considers some of the divergent outcomes of youth mobilization and participation in offline spaces, particularly in the youth nonprofit. Critics of youth online political participation detail several shortcomings of online activism as compared to offline activism, but in so doing, these critics venerate offline activism as a utopic alternative. Based on qualitative research in three organizations that mobilize youth around issues of education reform, this chapter demonstrates that the offline youth activist nonprofit fosters political power among some youth while burning out other youth. For teenage activists, these nonprofit organizations offer political education, institutional leverage, and foster political efficacy. At the same time, older youth organizers who are paid staff in these same organizations struggle with having to reign in the radicalism of the youth they mentor, while performing invisible labor around the demands of their organizational funders. These organizational pressures work to burn out youth organizers and steer them away from politics. Online forms of youth activism bring about outcomes that both enhance the political capacities of youth as well as hinder their potential to transform social injustices. Far from utopic, offline movement contexts also foster these contradictory outcomes and should be considered more critically in the debates over the merits of offline versus online activism.

Youth political engagement is often ignored and downplayed by adults, who often embrace a youth deficit model. The youth deficit model downplays the voices and unique experiences of youth in favor of adult-led and adult-centered experiences. Like other historical deficit models, the youth deficit model also provides permission to adults to speak for or about youth, even when not asked to speak for them. We refer to this powerful construction of youth interests by adults as mediation. Fortunately, online advocacy could offer an unmediated route to political engagement for youth as digital natives. Using a unique dataset, we investigate whether online protest spaces offer an unmediated experience for youth to learn about and engage in political protest. However, we find that youth engagement, and especially unmediated youth engagement, is rare among advocacy digital spaces, though it varies by movement, SMO-affiliation, and age groups. Based on our findings, we argue that, rather than youth being primarily responsible for any alleged disengagement, the lack of online spaces offering opportunities for youth to take ownership of their own engagement likely discourages youth from participating in traditional political advocacy and renders the level of youth engagement an admirable accomplishment of young people.

The majority of research on intersectionality and social movements has focused on agenda-setting or internal identity processes. However, little research has focused on the ways in which social movements present themselves as intersectional, particularly in recruitment, which is important for building inclusive movements. In this chapter, we begin to outline a theory of movement recruitment based around intersectional identities that draws on work on coalitional recruitment and concepts from framing. In particular, we argue that “identity bridging,” which occurs when two or more identities are linked during recruitment attempts, is a potential tool for inclusive and intersectional recruitment. We evaluate the extent to which movements engage in this style of recruitment using data on intersectional youth identities acknowledged on web-addressable advocacy spaces. Youth are at a critical moment in their identity development, and so it is especially important to engage them in ways that respect their developing intersectional identities. We find that, overall, most movement sites do not engage in identity bridging, and those that do rarely move beyond bridging the youth identities with one other aspect of identity. Based on our theory, this would help to explain why so many movements struggle with issues of inclusivity.

Social movement scholars conventionally neglect high school students and settings. This elision stems in part from the fallacious assumption that high schools constitute a segment of society traditionally immune to conflict and in equal part from a failure to appreciate the political agency of high school-aged youth. When scholars do concern themselves with youth social movements, they tend to privilege large-scale, epochal protests on college campuses. In this study, however, we document a significant level of “social movement behavior” among actors who rarely see the light of scholarly print: suburban high school students.

A spate of nonviolent youth movements has recently demanded political change in the postcommunist region. Though these challenger organizations shared similar characteristics, some of them were more successful than others in mobilizing citizens against nondemocratic regimes. This chapter argues that analysis of tactical interactions between social movements and incumbent governments provides a partial explanation for cross-country variations in youth mobilization. The empirical analysis focuses on youth movements in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine. The study traces how movement strategies and state countermoves affected the level of youth mobilization. This research contributes to social movement literature by analyzing tactical interactions in hybrid regimes, falling somewhere between democracy and dictatorship, and adds to civil resistance scholarship by comparing cases of successful and failed mobilization.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the regime–youth relationship in Macao. It will use the framework by Weiss and Aspinall (2012) to explain the rise of Macao youth activism and the de-harmonization of their relationship with the authorities.

According to Weiss and Aspinall, the emergence of youth movements in Asia after the Second World War was based on four factors: the development higher education systems, youth’s collective identities, youth’s trust in the ruling regime and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations. This paper analyzes the rise of Macao youth through the four dimensions by Weiss and Aspinall.

The rise of Macao youth movement is attributable to the development of tertiary education, youth’s collective identities, lowered trust in the regime and international inspiration. Better-educated Macao youth have been increasing their demands for political participation while their distrust in the MSAR government pushes their mobilization. The rise of youth movements around the world after the millennium inspires Macao youth activists’ political mobilization. Interestingly, Macao’s youth movement has been gradually integrated into the opposition forces instead of campaigning by youth organizations. In response to youth activism, the MSAR government, however, could not alleviate the youth’s hostility against the authorities, but its repressive approach intensified the regime-youth tension.

The paper includes interviews with leaders of young activists for their understanding of youth movement in Macao. It can serve the purpose for comparative study of youth movement among Asian societies.

This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

Prior social movement research has focused on the role that axes of inequality – particularly race, class, gender, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) status – play for who participates and how they do so. Age is another important axis of inequality. The pervasiveness of a youth deficit model, which casts young people as deficient and requiring benevolent adult tutelage, is of particular concern for youth. This chapter assesses whether the internalization of the deficit model influences young people's activism and how they perceive their engagement. Drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a southwestern US city, we find that many young people have internalized deficit-model assumptions, affecting when and how they participated. This was most evident among high school students, who limited their participation because they were “not old enough” or gravitated toward more “age-appropriate” forms of activism. Interestingly, we found college students were more willing to engage in online activism but also felt compelled to do significant research on issues before participating, thereby distancing themselves from the deficit model's assumptions of their political naivety. Finally, some participants felt discouraged by the perceived ineffectiveness of protest, which resonated with deficit model narratives of the futility of youth engagement. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the impacts of an internalized deficit model as well as considering age as an axis of inequality in activism. Youth engagement is best supported by seeing young people as capable actors with unique interests, capacities, and points of view.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the cause and nature of the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the role of the youth in the movement.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the serious social and economic problems in Hong Kong, of which the youth often feel the greatest impact, and the demands for a real democratic system made by the Umbrella Movement. It examines the structural roots of the Movement and the role of youths in it.

The Umbrella Movement is not simply a movement of anger and frustration, but also a movement reflecting some of the serious and legitimate concerns of the people of Hong Kong, especially the youth, who have a high and growing sense of local identity and citizenship. The movement links the major policy and social problems of the post-Handover era to its root cause, which is an undemocratic political system combined with crony capitalism. Unfortunately, the approach taken by the government toward the Movement has been to emphasize its illegal nature and to attempt to divide the opposition by adopting “united front” strategies that pay no serious attention to the problems the Movement has raised. Eventually, this approach will only lead to an outcome of “strong government, weak society” where strong government action in opposition to reformers will weaken the cohesion of society and expose the actual weakness of the state that has no popular legitimacy, going on to create more chaos as a result of its weak governance.

This paper will help both scholars and policymakers to understand the structural and root causes of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and explain why Hong Kong is suffering from a serious problem of weak governance.