Genevieve Ritchie – författare

The Political Economy of Youth and Migration examines lived experiences to critique how the youth-NGO sector (youth complex) manages the fault lines of global capitalism and limits young peoples’ activities.

Since the Arab uprisings and the migration crisis, young MENA refugees are portrayed as both threats to capitalism and valuable resilient workers, revealing mutually interdependent conditions that position them as both a political threat and a potential economic resource. This text considers how global conceptualizations of youth and adulthood define young people’s relationship to work, learning, and civic participation through the youth complex where NGOs offer mobility and civic participation opportunities while cementing neoliberal visions of society. Drawing on Marxist feminism and interview data alongside NGO reports, the book critiques capitalism and liberal democracy rather than blaming individual migrants. This book thinks through the global economic and local political conditions that have positioned young refugees as subjects in the (re)making. It challenges assumptions about civil society, showing how NGOs shape refugee identities and define their border-crossing experiences and reframe capitalism’s destruction as positive opportunities for displaced youth.

As an interdisciplinary study, this book will be useful to scholars of political economy, Marxist feminism, citizenship studies, and youth sociology.

The Political Economy of Youth and Migration examines lived experiences to critique how the youth-NGO sector (youth complex) manages the fault lines of global capitalism and limits young peoples’ activities.

Since the Arab uprisings and the migration crisis, young MENA refugees are portrayed as both threats to capitalism and valuable resilient workers, revealing mutually interdependent conditions that position them as both a political threat and a potential economic resource. This text considers how global conceptualizations of youth and adulthood define young people’s relationship to work, learning, and civic participation through the youth complex where NGOs offer mobility and civic participation opportunities while cementing neoliberal visions of society. Drawing on Marxist feminism and interview data alongside NGO reports, the book critiques capitalism and liberal democracy rather than blaming individual migrants. This book thinks through the global economic and local political conditions that have positioned young refugees as subjects in the (re)making. It challenges assumptions about civil society, showing how NGOs shape refugee identities and define their border-crossing experiences and reframe capitalism’s destruction as positive opportunities for displaced youth.

As an interdisciplinary study, this book will be useful to scholars of political economy, Marxist feminism, citizenship studies, and youth sociology.

This book approaches migration from Marxist feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial perspectives. The present conditions of transnational migration, best described as a kind of social expulsion, include migrant caravans and detained unaccompanied children in the United States, thousands of migrant deaths at sea, the razing of self-organized refugee camps in Greece, and the massive dispersal of populations within and between countries. Placing patriarchal capitalism, imperialism, racialization, and fundamentalisms at the center of the analysis, Marxism and Migration helps build a more coherent and historically-informed discussion of the conditions of migration, resettlement, and resistance. Drawing upon a range of academic disciplines and diverse geopolitical regions, the book rethinks migrations from the vantage point of class struggle and seeks to ignite a more robust discussion of critical consciousness, racialization, militarization, and solidarity.