Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2023
As a contested concept, “youth” is a chronological category and a socially constructed identity. African youth share socioeconomic and political constraints that delay adulthood markers and impact their views of citizenship. The meaning of “youth” is relational, set against assumptions about adulthood obligations, ties to elders, and youth’s own actions. Although youth is a liminal stage, youth are not passive; they improvise and engage their communities and countries through everyday citizenship. Recognizing how political life is abundant, everyday citizenship as a concept examines daily words and deeds of ordinary people who then shape identity and belonging in relation to others and the state. As a guiding principle distinguishable from nationalism (with its geographic component), civil society (with its organizational element), and social capital (with its roots in reciprocities), everyday citizenship pushes beyond rigid liberal and communal classifications to recognize how citizen identities and activities occur at multiple scales and sites, and through public and private practices. We examine various patterns of everyday citizenship in Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda – countries representative of anglophone Africa but distinct in their regime types. The book’s multi-method, inductive approach uses Afrobarometer survey data, focus group discussions, interviews, and case studies to undergird its findings.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.