Therese O’Toole

Dual Book Review Symposium: Montserrat Guibernau, Belonging: Solidarity and Division in Modern Societies

radically challenge and replace old symbols by new ones, or to imbue old symbols with a different meaning akin to supporting the emerging status quo. Belonging to a group or community can only be represented through symbolism and ritual. In turn, symbols only have value, meaning and power for those who are able to recognize what they stand for. The richness and complexity of symbols tolerate a degree of ambiguity in their definition, one that allows for a certain measure of emotional creativity on behalf of individuals constructing their own sense of belonging. Symbols are powerful because they are able to prompt strong emotions and emotions stand as a powerful trigger for social action, including political mobilization. Among the most potent symbols are those that indicate belonging to a particular group, be it the nation, a faith, or any other group or community. The most original part of Nira Yuval-Davis’ book considers what she refers to as the ‘ethics of care’ as a specific feminist political project of belonging, which developed as an attempt to demonstrate and transcend gendered constructions of belonging. She examines feminist ethics of care and feminist transversal dialogical politics and argues that ‘a feminist political project of belonging should be based on transversal “rooting”, “shifting ”, mutual respect and mutual trust without neglecting to reflect upon the relevance of power. I find of particular interest the book’s study of the continuity and the changes taking place within contested political projects of belonging, reflecting both the continuity and the changes within these projects. In Yuval-Davis’ words: ‘it is not, or not just, ideological and emotional “consciousness-raising”, which homogenizes discourse, but specific relations of power’.

Politically (In)different? Political Engagement amongst Ethnic Minority Young People

When the political engagement of ethnic minority young people has featured in public debates in the UK, it has typically been connected with concerns about disengagement, disaffection or extremism. For instance, in the anxious debates about youth political apathy in the UK in recent years (Hay 2007), connected to the low levels of electoral participation among 18–24 year olds in elections since 2001 (Marsh et al. 2007), it is suggested that ethnic minority young people are even less likely to turn out to vote compared to young people in general or older ethnic minority groups (Purdam et al. 2002; Electoral Commission 2005), and that ethnic minority young people are less civically engaged (Janmaat 2008).

The Political Geography of Ethnicity and Religion in Young People’s Political Engagement

So far, many of the interventions this book has made into debates surrounding the political participation of ethnic minority young people have been set out according to a temporal frame of reference. This reflects the principal orientations of these debates towards concern with the apparent continuities, shifts and changes over time that can be identified in how young people politically engage. Hence in Chapter 1, we began by showing how much of the public concern expressed in relation to the political engagement of ethnic minority young people has intensified through crisis narratives on the secular decline in levels of electoral turnout. Whilst it will be apparent that we do not accede to the equivalence that is often established between falling electoral participation and ‘political apathy’, our critique rests upon an investigation of alternative forms of participation and how these relate to more conventional modes. Furthermore, an integral part of this critique rested upon the use of a ‘political biographical’ approach — set out and applied particularly in Chapter 4 — as a way of examining the diverse forms of political action in which activists engaged — including group based, institutional, networked, virtual and everyday forms activism. In Chapters 6 and 7, we developed our analysis of the significance of identities based on ethnicity, race, religion and gender in shaping activists’ engagement across these repertoires of action, relating this to the changing character of cultural theory as it relates to debates on black identity politics, from the beginning of the 1990s to the present.

Gendered Roles, Spaces and Political Activism

In this chapter, we consider the intersections between ethnicity, gender and political activism among ethnic minority young people, paying attention to the ways in which these shaped political consciousness and activism among the activists with whom we worked. We begin by considering briefly intersections between ethnicity, gender and the political, and how these have been discussed within debates on feminism and feminist politics in the work of black, Muslim and Islamic feminist and politics of recognition literatures. These literatures have focused particularly on distinctive political issues among ethnic minority women - drawing attention to distinctive, and sometimes autonomous, political struggles. We then reflect on the growing focus on gender within the study of race and ethnicity and how this has been traced through political and public discourses, particularly in discourses on raced bodies and sexualities and black, Asian and Muslim masculinities and femininities. We consider how these intersections between race, ethnicity and gender have featured in contemporary academic writings and public discourses on ethnic minority young people — including some of the distinctive ways these have played out in Birmingham and Bradford in recent times.

‘Race’, Culture and Representation: The Changing Contours of Identity Politics

In the previous chapter, we considered the ways in which the state enshrines a variety of models of youth participation, and the implications this has for ethnic minority young people’s political engagement. In particular, we examined how Birmingham and Bradford have developed divergent models of participation for young people in the form of their respective youth parliaments. Left largely implicit in our discussion of these models was the issue of how institutions of the state, at both local and central levels, inscribe and enact particular constructions of the identities of the groups they target in their policies and initiatives. In this and the following chapter, we address the political connotations of changing ethnic and cultural identity categories, exploring how specific categories of identity become lodged in the political and operational machinery of the state, and the implications this had for young people’s political identity formation and mobilisation. Given their centrality to the emerging research literature, we position the chapter in relation to recent developments in the theorisation of black identity politics, focusing in particular on the overlapping notions of ‘new ethnicities’ (Hall 1996[1989], 1999; Gilroy 1993), ‘hybridity’ (Werbner and Modood 1997), and ‘intersectionality’ (Young 1990; Collins 1998, 2000).

Research Design and Methodology

In the preceding two chapters, we set out an extensive characterisation of public debates on the political and civic participation of ethnic minority young people. In evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies of the political engagement of black and minority ethnic groups, we noted both the absence of a youth dimension to much of the research on ethnic minorities’ political participation and the failure of studies of ethnic minority youth to pay heed to forms of political engagement in the contemporary period. In this respect, we argue that there is a mismatch between the extent of public concern over ethnic minority young people’s political and civic engagement on the one hand, and the paucity of data sufficient to uphold these concerns empirically on the other. These critical observations form the point of departure of our research, both conceptually and in terms of our research design. In this chapter, we outline how we designed our research to enable us to move beyond the confines of existing literature and debate. In particular, we specify the methodological implications of the theoretical perspective developed in Chapter 2, arguing for the need for research engagement across a range of spheres of participation, and for a qualitative approach that would allow deeper exploration of the forms of participation in which ethnic minority young people engage.

Changing Political Participation

In the last chapter, we pointed to gaps in the literature on political participation and electoral engagement in relation to ethnic minority young people. We referred to the often cited view that ethnic minority young people are less likely to be engaged in electoral politics than other young people or ethnic minority groups generally. We suggested, however, that the data on this are rather inconclusive — particularly in relation to the intersections between age and ethnicity and religion in analyses of electoral turnouts. We also noted that running alongside such perceptions, there has been a series of highly pathologising crisis narratives on ethnic minority young people focused on criminalisation, educational attainment, urban disorders, failed integration, generational conflicts or more recently political radicalisation. In this chapter, we argue that there is a need for more direct engagement with the political perspectives of ethnic minority young people themselves, that our view of political participation should extend beyond electoral turnouts, and look wider than conventional, or violent extremist, forms of politics to take account of the range of forms of activism in which young people engage and the issues and concerns that animate their political activism. We argue that these issues stand in particular need of empirical investigation.

Grammars of Political Action

Accounts of citizen disengagement from electoral and party politics in established democracies around the world are widespread (Hay 2007). Increasingly, these are informed by an emerging literature that contrasts falling levels of citizens’ engagement in elections and party activism with relatively high levels of civic, voluntary or other informal modes of political engagement (Dalton 2008). Seen from this view, political participation is not so much declining as changing, as we discussed in Chapter 2. Many locate these changes within broader social and political developments that have been taking place over the last few decades, such as the rise of new social movements since the 1960s, characterised by more informal forms of activism, that focus on questions of identity, and which are associated with the growth of ‘postmaterialist’ values and political concerns (Inglehart 1997; Norris 2002). Additionally, the end of the Cold War, it is suggested, has had profound implications for political ideologies, diminishing the mass-mobilising role of political parties (Beck 1997). The growth of the internet since the 1980s is credited with making state boundaries and scales of action more fluid, and diversifying the targets of political action beyond the nation-state (Norris 2002) and enabling more creative and personalised repertoires of action (Dahlgren 2005; Bennett 2008).