Why the Study of Middle Eastern and North African Children and Youth Matters

The study of young people across the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf is an emerging area that warrants recognition as a subdiscipline in its own right.

This emerging subdiscipline is critical for rethinking and reshaping the broader fields of global and area studies, including Middle Eastern and African studies, and for engaging in meaningful comparative work across other world regions.

Moreover, the study of young people in these regions does not merely draw from other disciplines such as history, anthropology, communication, and international relations; it actively contributes to and enriches them. By centering the experiences, agency, and cultural production of young people, this field introduces new frameworks, methods, and questions that expand and deepen our understanding of local, regional, and global dynamics, and academic inquiry more broadly.

Below, you can explore how AMECYS emerging areas contribute to global, comparative and area studies understandings about the world and range of other disciplines.

Contributions to Global, Comparative and Area Studies

Their study "provides microscopic insights into how global forces, including colonization, migration, education, and conflict, are experienced and contested in everyday life. These localized perspectives can then be integrated into wider narratives and offer telescopic insights into global processes of social change, nation-building, and cultural transformation. Comparative studies of childhood reveal that categories like 'youth' or 'childhood' are not universal but historically and culturally situated. By tracing differences and commonalities across world regions, we gain insight into how global ideas travel, are adapted, and/or resisted."

Board Member, Atacan Atakan, 2025

"Common perceptions of children are based on their age as minors and on them lacking experience and a sense of responsibility. These characteristics are often employed as a rationale for excluding them from the adult world. Being underage tends to place children at the bottom of the social scale, as legally incompetent citizens and deprived of the right to responsibility for their own lives. This situation causes discrimination against them and allows adults to establish a social order to the detriment of very young people’s participation in society. On the contrary, children and young people in the Middle East and North Africa region prove that they are political, cultural and economic agents through their political and citizen activism, collective and individual artistic actions, and extensive participation in the (in)formal labor market (i.e., about fifteen percent of children in the region are child laborers). That is to say that children and youth matter and Middle East studies academics cannot continue to ignore this important group. They deserve specialized attention from scholars working on the region in order to make them more visible and to recognise their agency in past as well as in present Middle Eastern and North African societies."

Board Member and Secretary Chiara Diana, Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), 2019

"Young people matter in Middle East Studies because they have been invisible for so long. While they are participants in all types of social change, ranging from revolutions to reading practices, children and youth in the Middle East have often been at the fringes of scholarship and public media and framed as susceptible to cooption and manipulation. And, finally, when young protestors were in the limelight during the 2011 Arab Uprisings, they were depicted as dormant under authoritarian governments until recently and unknowing of what they truly want. The reality is much more complex, where young people across the region, since at least the nineteenth century, have been both sites of empowerment and control. By putting young people and their material evidence--from diaries to clothing choices--at the center, researchers can work to contextualize this paradox and assess its impacts. The results are not always uplifting, but they render a most significant group in Middle East society" more visible.

Board Member and Program Officer Dylan Baun, University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2019

"Children and youth account for sixty to seventy-five percent of the population of most Middle Eastern countries. There has been an on-going “youth bulge” in the region for a number of years. If for no other reason, the study of children and youth in the Middle East is critical because they are the majority of the population–and indeed, its future."

Board Member Suad Joseph, Board Member, UC Davis, 2019

"When we open ourselves up to a world that is not centered around adults, we open ourselves up to a conversation about the Middle East that accounts for the majority of the actual lived inhabitants: children and youth. Giving up an adult-centric perspective can be as uncomfortable, yet equally meaningful, as giving up other normative vantage points, such as that of a white, upper-class male. Try to view the world—past, present, and future—through the eyes of a seven year old! What do you see differently?"

President Heidi Morrison, University of Wisconsin (La Crosse), 2019

"This age group is numerically important. For example, according to the results of the 2008 population census, nearly half of the Algerian population is between the ages of ten and fifteen (50.94 percent female and 49.06 percent male). The number of Algerians between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five is 3,573,027, of which 18,187,77 are adolescent girls and 175,480 are adolescent boys. Young people are the spine of human development."

Board Member Khedidja Mokeddem, CRASC (Algeria), 2019

"Children are too often either forgotten or instrumentalized in historical analysis. As they were rarely able or permitted to speak for themselves, their particular experiences tend to be homogenized into those of a broader population. When they do appear in historical accounts it is often because the writer needs innocent victims to earn the sympathies of their readers.

But children aren't easily homogenized. Childhood gives them unique risks and unique social identities. They may be dependents, but they are also historical actors who bring different vantages on life than the older people who speak for them. The historical record is incomplete without their experiences and their perspectives. "

Board Member, Tylor Brand, 2025

Their study "provides a powerful lens for understanding how global ideologies, such as nationalism and humanitarianism, are internalized and enacted at the most intimate levels of society. In the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf, childhood becomes a critical site where colonial legacies, state-building agendas, and transnational norms converge. Institutions like schools, orphanages, and public health campaigns are not only mechanisms of care but also instruments of governance, shaping future citizens and managing populations. Comparative analysis of these dynamics across regions reveals how childhood serves as a crucial category for theorizing modern statecraft and the global circulation of political, moral, and scientific norms."

Board Member, Melis Solus, 2025

Contributions to Other Disciplines (Scroll through by clicking on the whites dots or arrows below)

For Communication and Media Studies?

Yael Warshel

"Their study has compelled scholars to grapple with unexplored contexts of children, adolescent and youth media production, uses, play, reception, and influence, leading to development and examination of alternative media types across electronic games, news industries and formats, and a range of platforms and genres. They have illuminated the emergence of global media systems, stateless national media systems, and associated children’s TV channels and programs and revealed how media serve context-specific functions far beyond North American American and European debates about content and screen time. Related research reveals how oral poetry is used to transport so-called tradition into modern modes of dissent; how modernity varies across contexts; how low-tech, alternative media have served as vehicles for transmitting culturally resonant and mobilizing messages; how global and local media have helped imagine alternative futures; and even how young people acquire sign language and languages themselves form."

If you would like to contribute to future entries about contributions to other areas like psychology and child development, sociology and sociology of childhood, philosophy and ethics, or performance studies, please email us about your interest at amecystudies at gmail.com