2023/11/09 by Jesper Bjarnesen · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #African history and culture studies #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #North African History and Literature
paper · doi:10.1177/00020397231211615
openalex publication_date 2023/11/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
African youth became a central research theme in anthropology and related disciplines in the early 2000s, drawing renewed attention to the lives and aspirations of a segment of the continent's population that, since the independence era, has become increasingly demographically dominant but socially and politically marginalised. Reflecting on an extended case study of male ex-combatants in urban Burkina Faso, this paper offers a critical reading of the anthropological scholarship on African youth, emphasising, first, that much of this literature is most usefully read as studies of diverse (West) African masculinities and, second, that the literature has underplayed the extent to which achievements of social progression tend to be acutely reversible in contexts of precarity or radical social change, throwing the unfortunate, as it were, back in youth.