Making neoliberal subjects: ‘idle’ youth, precarity, and development intervention in Sierra Leone
| Autor: | Zubairu Wai |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
International relations
education.field_of_study media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Geography Planning and Development Population Development Global governance 050601 international relations 0506 political science Sierra leone Precarity Development studies Political science Political economy Political Science and International Relations 050602 political science & public administration International security Ideology education media_common |
| Zdroj: | Journal of International Relations and Development. 24:509-532 |
| ISSN: | 1581-1980 1408-6980 |
| DOI: | 10.1057/s41268-020-00200-0 |
| Popis: | Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war, successive governments have designated youth as a priority area of policy intervention and proposed numerous programmes to deal with the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem in the country. This focus on youth as objects of policy concern partially owes to contemporary discourses about the relationships between youth and conflicts, and especially, the idea that the existence of a large youth population represents a threat to domestic and international security, and thus functions as part of a larger global governance mechanism that targets societies as part of a liberal interventionist and conflict containment strategy. This paper uses the Sierra Leonean example to stage a broader critique of these interventionist and conflict containment strategies and the ideological schemas that make them possible. It suggests that these programmes are circumscribed epistemically by evolutionist preconceptions that construct the targeted populations as objects of power to be reproduced as neoliberal cosmopolitan subjects as a way of transcending the purported threat they represent. However, that these policies are incapable of transforming the structures within which the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem is produced. Rather, they reproduce, in other guise, the very conditions of precarity that they aim to address. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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