Youth, Globalization, and the Law
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Youth, Globalization, and the Law
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Overview
The essays in this book offer case studies and in-depth analyses, spanning diverse settings including courts and prisons, inner-city streets, international human rights initiatives, newspaper offices, local youth organizations, and the United Nations. Drawing on everyday social practices, each chapter adds clarity to our current understanding of the ways in which ideas and practices in different parts of the world can affect youth in one particular locale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804754743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Youth, Globalization, and the Law
By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Ronald Kassimir
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5474-3
CHAPTER 1
Youth and Legal Institutions: Thinking Globally and Comparatively
SUDHIR ALLADI VENKATESH AND RONALD KASSIMIR
PROLOGUE
On a wet December morning in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, a group of youth stand around a corner café, sipping espresso, sharing cigarettes, and discussing the aftermath of l'émote, their term for the autumn 2005 events that engrossed France and much of the world for nearly a month. There are only a few signs left of the disturbances in their immediate neighborhood. From the café, one can see a nearby school that has been set on fire and that is being repaired; the destroyed cars — also set on fire — have been removed, leaving only eerie black scars on the pavement. But the traces are enough to remind, and so the conversation turns back around to those two weeks, when the world was gripped by young Frenchmen — some immigrant, some native-born — who took to the streets in frustration and release.
These particular young Frenchmen are impatient. "Is there anything that has changed?" they ask rhetorically. "It's 11 AM," another one instructs. "Come back at 3 PM, I'll still be here. No work, you see. Nothing. Only for the French." The last statement is particularly curious because these young men are of Algerian background, but they are all born and raised in France. Indeed, from their clothes, musical tastes, sport, and passions, one cannot discern an immigrant's guise. But they share a feeling of being stuck in les banlieues, those swaths of land tracts on the outskirts of French cities most notable for their high-rise public housing developments and their entrenched poverty. (See the chapters in this volume by Bonelli and Terrio for rich detail and analysis of life for young people in these districts and their encounters with the police and justice system.)
Like the emotions and fires that spread quickly to fuel civil unrest and rebellion in the city suburbs — in Paris and beyond, discussions of their socioeconomic opportunities move abruptly and unforgivingly to the subject of their civic status. "Am I French?" one asks rhetorically, pointing to his clothes and then his skin. "I was born here! When will I count [as French]?!" For them, economic mobility, civic engagement, and the capacity to be a citizen are not separate; the conversation quickly and forcefully turns to the subject of French citizenship as they discuss the revolts. The opportunities to move into adulthood, provide for family and household, and realize dreams and aspirations seem blocked at every turn by the past and the present, by the branches of ethnicity, colonialism, and nationhood. The young man tugs at his olive skin, as if it is a prison from which he cannot escape while also a source of pride and meaning. Smiling, he turns and says, "Until we figure out who is French, the rest is bullshit."
These young French youth, and millions of others like them throughout Europe's urban centers, are part of a new wave of global citizens. Their ethnicity has no multicultural resting place, no melting pot ideal that promises an eventual embrace in the nation (we can, of course, debate whether, in practice in countries such as the United States, this cloak actually facilitates assimilation). They live in a Bantustan-like urban region set off socially and politically from the wider nation, but they also live in their skin, which places them closer to their country of origin than the heart of the city they inhabit. Finding a meaningful job in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and so on, may be geographically proximate, but it is remote in its likelihood.
The conflagrations that swept French cities — and that were rumored to have reached other parts of metropolitan Europe — were French in character, but they had perceptible regional and global dimensions. French banlieues are comprised of families, the majority of whom have arrived recently from, or trace their background to, North and West Africa — that is, from countries such as Senegal and Morocco that have had historic and historically troubled connections with France. These are also neighborhoods that are impoverished, where families face exclusion from the social mainstream and yet simultaneously are publicly portrayed and viewed as taking advantage of the social welfare arm of the French state.
The immediate events said to have precipitated the riots were, from one perspective, identifiably "local" in character. In response to the death of two youngsters outside Paris at the hands of the police, in a context in which many youths daily encounter police harassment, youths took to the streets, burning police cars, vandalizing schools, and destroying public property — that is, they targeted the symbols of the State.
Yet the extra-local aspects of this are all too clear, not least because of the transnational character of the migrants, whether they are French citizens or not. The conflagration spread widely across French cities, a feat that is popularly believed to have been facilitated by communication advances such as cell phones and the Internet — used by a population that other French view as not quite "modern." And, of course, for those who lived a few miles away or in other parts of the world, the revolts were broadcast by a global media industry that spread highly engrossing, often provocative images of brown and black bodies intent on destroying everything in their path. What these large media conglomerates rarely conveyed were the challenges for youth (and their families and communities) seeking to find a place and a voice in a society imbricated within global economic structures that increasingly shape long-term employment prospects in France, as they do elsewhere.
Not least, l'émote reveals the comparative and global dimensions of the law enforcement and governance of marginalized young populations across the world, especially although not exclusively in urban and peri-urban settings. Issues of relationships of these populations to the police and justice systems are not new, but models of policing and of juvenile justice are both changing in more punitive directions and spreading through old and new transnational institutions, networks, and media. At the same time, other global institutions, networks, and media promote ideas and instruments for supporting the rights of young people in unprecedented ways.
Our volume engages this dynamic. In doing so, it intends to bring fresh reflection on the structural aspects of marginalized youth's pathways, their deferred aspirations, that are occasionally revealed in rebellion — whether these outbursts take the form of protest, delinquency, or violent revolt. We also call attention to those daily interactions that take place in less dramatic institutional arenas — such as the courts, schools, social service facilities, churches, and public spaces — where a wide range of actors work in less noticed ways to shape youth, and sometimes help them make successful transitions to adulthood.
INTRODUCTION
This volume addresses the impact of globalization on young people by focusing on a critical but poorly understood dimension of global social processes: the role of legal institutions and discourses as they shape the life experiences of young people. The legal arena is a central sphere in which youths integrate into the social fabric and through which their possibilities for meaningful transitions to adulthood, active civic engagement, and self-expression arise. The use of the law as a vehicle to deal with youth integration has been a longstanding challenge in advanced industrialized nations. And, in developing and postcolonial societies, it is via new constitutions and national legislation that questions about the rights of young people are taken up. In these nation-building projects, the interests of young people are framed by drawing on local traditions and notions of universal rights and ideas of citizenship.
In recent years, this arena has been re-aligned as ideas and practices about justice, rights, and maintaining order travel the globe. The contemporary promotion and transmission of zero tolerance and redistributive justice programs across international boundaries, the near ubiquitous acceptance of United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the transnational migration of street gangs between industrialized and developing countries are some of the most prominent examples of socio-legal practices that reach across societies, cultures, and states. Although these global legal phenomena are typically based in the work of courts, police, and prison systems, they also directly involve international aid and advocacy organizations (that support practice and implementation), media actors (who disseminate information, create knowledge, and shape public opinion), and other institutions that have daily impact on young people's lives — families, schools, political organizations, and so on.
The global structures and flows that dominated the front pages of newspapers during the Paris riots, the youthfulness of the faces on the television screens, while always locally inflected, are consequential for young people in cities throughout the world. This includes the American ghetto, where highly localized social phenomena are part of wider systemic processes (see chapter 5 by Venkatesh and Murphy in this book). Among other things, the riots made it impossible to avoid United States – Europe comparisons on issues of socioeconomic exclusion, cultural difference, security, and the life chances of young people. Numerous European inner cities face challenges long associated with the United States, including entrenched urban poverty, inadequate integration of ethnic minorities into the labor force, and the fragile legitimacy of their respective criminal justice institutions.
Yet the similarities among and the connections across the Atlantic do not erase or make meaningless the distinctiveness of each locality in terms of their cultural, political, and historical landscapes — a point that recent research on global processes has made quite evident, and that complicates any simplistic notions of homogenization. Indeed, a central contribution of the chapters in this book is to provide an analysis of local patterns, to show that local specificities are not rendered entirely derivative or epi-phenomenal by virtue of their placement in encompassing social structures. Whatever utility remains in framing key social questions under the rubric of "globalization," calling attention to the structuring role of external influences (whether they enable or constrain local ideas and action) need not replicate the hubris of past systemic/ functionalist analyses in which the spirit and curiosity of life lived locally is reduced to the dictates of institutional logics operating here, there, and everywhere. What the authors in this volume emphasize are the overlaps, interminglings, and clashes of such logics in ways that matter for how young people are governed and protected.
The relationship between governing and protecting, between controlling and enabling the lives of the young is the central focus on this book. And it is here where globalization, as it affects youth, "happens" via legal discourses and institutions. Although the antecedents are clear, the 1990s accelerated two trends related to youth and the law, clearly in tension if not outright contradiction. At national levels, we have seen a punitive turn in juvenile justice and the treatment of young people in public space. So-called success stories and the ideologies behind them (e.g., the "broken windows" approach to policing) have been part of neoliberal trends in the global political economy. These trends include the ways in which urban security issues have become central to city governments starved for investment, and a general breakdown in social welfare policies within which juvenile justice issues have been embedded. John Muncie's chapter articulates this broad trend while rightly calling attention to local differences as well as to how older welfare approaches and more recent criminalizing ones can be juxtaposed within national legal and governance regimes.
At the same time as these criminalizing approaches have increased, the 1990s also witnessed an explosion of new legal instruments, discourses, and organizations around the rights of children and young people. Emanating out from the Convention on the Rights of the Child that took shape within the international space of the United Nations, the protection — even the empowerment — of young people through legal means has been one of the more powerful sites for rights talk and rights mobilization.The chapters in the final section of the book address these developments, including the limits of law-based strategies to achieve the goals of protection and empowerment.
It is this moment, one in which the pushes and pulls of criminalizing youth and of enabling them are juxtaposed, that we attempt to capture in the book. It is intended to call attention to those social structures commonly identified with an interconnected world and, at the same time, to open up the possibilities for locally based research and analysis of the world's young people. Although the contributions vary in the degree to which they directly engage debates on globalization, as a whole we do argue that global social dynamics, in the form of background context or analytic constructs, must be incorporated into social analysis.
GLOBAL PROCESSES, INSTITUTIONAL SITES, EVERYDAY PRACTICES
Globalization and youth are overused terms that have taken on multiple connotations. Both have entered popular and academic discourse with ferocity and, in part as a result of their speedy integration into numerous fields of study, have lost much of their specificity. For example, two decades ago, in different circles, one might have found a working consensus on the conceptual reference point of globalization, whether this was viewed as an advanced stage of capitalism, the integration of financial and currency markets, supranational institutions threatening the jurisdiction of the nation state, or the exchange of aesthetic ideas and the rise of artistic collaborations across regions, states, and continents. Groups of scholars at least had a basis upon which to move forward with research and analysis — even if their own conceptualizations differed from one another. By the late 1990s, the pervasive and often inconsistent use of the term globalization has watered down its meaning, although there still appears widespread interest in analyzing the consequences of social life organized at larger and multiple scales.
The world's youth are now associated with global movements and institutions, although they are alternatively portrayed as both the prime movers of globalization and its victims: activists coordinating their political projects around the world; suicide bombers taking their own lives in the service of a cause; underpaid laborers at the behest of multinational corporations; hackers disrupting national security systems with technological viruses; musicians and artists exchanging verse and image via the Internet; and armed children carrying weapons instead of text books. These are some of the popular and youthful faces of globalization.
Although young people are at the heart of discourses on globalization, youth remains a complex social category that, depending on context, can signal chronological age, social status, political disposition, or relationship to family and community. Demographers use the term to identify a chronological period (typically 16 – 24 years of age). The stability of this definition may be seen in comparative research, cross-national surveys, and the many reports by the UN and other actors that monitor such patterns as shifting government expenditures and rates of educational achievement. But this stable definition butts up against the work of anthropologists and historians who see "youth" as a contingent stage in life that depends ultimately on local context. What one community, society, or group sees as the beginning and end of "youth" may differ markedly, thereby rendering universal comparative demographic categories an imposition. And, outside of the academy, radical and revolutionary social movements from South Africa to the U.S. inner city have incorporated "youth" as part of their rallying cry. Many have deployed the category to challenge nation-state projects that, in a self-congratulatory way, ask young people to take responsibility, reproduce cultural values and social institutions, obey the law, and buy into the social contract, while at the same time failing to provide for their material needs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Youth, Globalization, and the Law by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Ronald Kassimir. Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Preface and Acknowledgments,
I - Youth, Globalization, and the Law: Overviews,
1 - Youth and Legal Institutions: Thinking Globally and Comparatively,
2 - Youth Justice and the Governance of Young People: Global, International, National, and Local Contexts,
II - Criminalization and Urban Governance,
3 - Refugee Gang Youth: Zero Tolerance and the Security State in Contemporary U.S.-Salvadoran Relations,
4 - Policing the Youth: Toward a Redefinition of Discipline and Social Control in French Working-Class Neighborhoods,
5 - Policing Ourselves: Law and Order in the American Ghetto,
III - Institutional Regulation and Youth Response,
6 - Youth, (Im) migration, and Juvenile Law at the Paris Palace of Justice,
7 - Prison Walls Are Crumbling: The American Way of Punishment and Its Consequences,
8 - Public Spaces, Consumption, and the Social Regulation of Young People,
IV - Contradictions of Youth Empowerment: Rights and International Law,
9 - The Rise of the Child as an Individual in Global Society,
10 - The Law, Institutions, and the Struggle for Social Change: Brazil's Estatuto da Criança e Adolescente,
11 - Global Regulation and Local Political Struggles: Early Marriage in Northern Nigeria,
Contributors,
INDEX,