“Introduction” in “A Global Idea”
INTRODUCTION
The central question this book explores is how a certain set of ideas, discourses, policies, and practices around youth and youth development came to be globally dominant toward the end of the twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. More specifically, the book investigates how such ideas about youth made their way from the west—and, in particular, the United States—where they have a relatively long provenance, to the Arab region of the Middle East and North Africa. In this region, youth was not historically a central social category or identity or political concern (Abdelrahman 2005; Bishara 2012), whereas, today, it has become an increasingly important social category, identity, and political concern.
The growing importance of youth as a social category in the Arab world in the early twenty-first century was seen most clearly in the eruption of widespread social protests in the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012, when, for a brief time, the Arab region was widely portrayed as a global center of youth—of youth activism, youth participation, youth protest, youth revolution, and youth leadership (Mason 2013; Gould-Wartofsky 2015). I argue that we can understand the nature and significance of youth in relation to the Arab Spring uprisings only if we first have a clear and detailed analysis of how ideas, policies, and practices about youth were spread throughout the region in the years preceding these uprisings. Such an analysis will help make sense of how and why the rhetoric of youth was so prominent, not just during these uprisings but in the aftermath of the uprisings, as well. It also will suggest that, counter to many initial popular, media, and academic accounts, youth was important in relation to the Arab Spring not so much as a social category and identity responsible for fomenting revolution and revolt but as a discourse for representing and making sense of the Arab Spring uprisings and, later, as a technique of social containment and control. The widespread embrace of discourses of youth in the region in the early twenty-first century played a key role, in particular, in shaping many of the most common policy responses to the Arab Spring protests, responses that often worked to limit the protests’ long-term effectiveness and impact.
The importance of youth as a social category in the Arab world did not begin with the Arab Spring uprisings. On the contrary, it could be seen almost a decade earlier, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States by a small group of young Arab men. This action led to a widespread security concern about the links between Arab youth, terrorism, extremism, religious fundamentalism, and the potential threats to regional and global security of a growing “youth bulge” throughout the Arab world, along with the failure to adequately integrate this burgeoning youth population into capitalist social, political, and economic structures.
It was seen, as well, in the regional fallout from the global financial crisis in 2008, which triggered further concerns among Arab governments of a growing problem with youth unemployment and underemployment in their countries. It has been seen in the virtually ubiquitous spread of youth organizations, youth programs, and youth policies throughout the region as the twenty-first century has progressed—again, in a part of the world where such things were largely unheard of when the parents of today’s youth generation themselves were young. In Egypt, for example, 60 percent of youth nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that exist today were created between 2003 and 2006. In 2015, the number of youth NGOs in Egypt was 122 of all the 303 NGOs registered in Egypt at the time. Added to this, there were forty-four groups counted as informal youth groups, as a UN study in cooperation with the Arab Network of NGOs showed (Abdelhay 2010; World Bank 2007).
The Arab League dedicated both its 2005 and 2006 reports to the subject of Arab youth (League of Arab States 2005; 2006; 2007). The Arab NGO Network for Development, likewise, dedicated its 2007 annual report to analyzing Arab youth and civil society (Arab NGOs Network for Development, 2007). Policymaking centers in the region have created new sections dedicated to youth—such as the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government (once known as the Dubai School of Government). Regional charities, such as the Makhtoum Foundation in Dubai, have identified youth as its central audience and dedicated much of its work to addressing youth and their development within the context of the global capitalist economy.
The basic contours of this story of the global and regional spread of ideas about youth and youth development are relatively simple to outline. Youth, as a social category and identity that characterizes part of the life stage between childhood and adulthood—usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, though the age limits to youth vary widely—is not a category or identity that has always been paid much attention to, or understood in the same way, in different time periods or different parts of the world, whether by researchers, policymakers, media commentators, the general public, or young people themselves. It also is a social category and identity that has generally not been seen as being particularly important for understanding or fostering healthy and strong social, economic, and political development (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Here, the social categories and identities of class, race and ethnicity, gender, faith, nationality, and so on have generally been assumed to be much more central; and if age or life stage was the focus of much attention, it would more likely be about infancy or childhood or old age instead.
From the late twentieth century on, however, youth has become increasingly central, as there has been a proliferation of youth policies, youth programs, youth NGOs, youth think tanks, youth councils, youth ministries, youth discourses, youth research, and so on. This increasing importance of youth has been centered in the wealthy parts of the global economy, particularly the United States, and, from there, has gradually spread to other regions of the world, as well. From a marginal position in national social and economic policy and international development concerns, youth has come to be seen as pivotal and central. “Young people are at the heart of today’s great strategic opportunities and challenges,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a youth conference in Tunisia called Youth Rising: Aspirations and Expectations in early 2012: “From rebuilding the global economy to combating violent extremism to building sustainable democracies,” youth matter (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). In previous work, I have argued, along with others, that this spread of youth over the last few decades can be linked, in particular, to the emergence of neoliberal forms of global capitalism:
Above all else, it is the rise and spread of global neoliberalism that has led to youth becoming an increasingly popular and productive social category and concept.… Three factors, in particular, have driven this … embrace of youth. First, youth is widely used to promote the desirability of social change, and package and sell new ideologies, agendas, practices and products. While this use of youth may be found in any political context, it has become especially central in capitalist society, with its emphasis on the transformation of the old, and celebration of the new. Second, youth is often used as a substitute for other, more divisive social categories, such as class, race, religion and nationality, and regularly serves as a universalizing and depoliticizing euphemism that obscures real differences of political interest and ideology. Third, specific characteristics of youth as a social category make it particularly useful for the neoliberal project of renegotiating normative ideas about responsibilities and entitlements from the previous welfare and development state era. These include both its binary and “betwixt-and-between” nature, that combines elements of the child and adult in an ever-unstable mix; as well as its close association as a life stage with the individualizing ideas of personal development, growth and education, aspiration and mobility (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015, 5).
Global interest and concern with youth and young populations also has spread in clear and direct relationship to global security agendas, so that, by 2015, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon could claim at a United Nations Security Council session on the role of youth in countering violent extremism that “the role of youth lies at the heart of international peace and security” (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018, 854). This interest has been particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa region after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, where youth has been a key concern for the US-led “war on terror” and for global, regional, and national antiterrorism agendas ever since.
However, even if the overall contours of the global spread of ideas about youth are relatively easy to outline—and have been discussed previously in other works—this does not tell us exactly how these ideas of youth are spread, as they separate ideas from their materiality. To do this, we need to look more closely; and this is the focus of the present book, which analyses the ways in which ideas, discourses, and policies about youth spread from the West and the United States to the Middle East and North Africa over the last quarter-century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis conducted over a fifteen-year period, the book argues that the spread of these ideas needs to be linked to the operations of a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development and aid organizations working in both the West and the Middle East—a transnational network I call here the global youth development complex.
While the US government played a key role at the heart of this global youth development complex, the spread of ideas, policies, and practices about youth cannot be reduced solely or simply to an American state foreign policy agenda. Rather, other actors in this networked complex also played proactive roles in embracing, adapting, and disseminating ideas about youth according to their own interests and agendas, so that ideas about youth in the Middle East ended up spreading and developing well beyond the intentions and agency of the US government itself.
Furthermore, the book argues that certain key cities were central to the spread of these ideas about youth: Washington, DC, as a global ideas city where many of the currently dominant ideas, policies, and practices on youth and youth development were initially produced, assembled, and disseminated; Amman, Jordan, as a gateway city to the Middle East region, where many of these ideas, policies, and practices were first introduced, incubated, piloted, and adapted to the Arab context; and Dubai, as a different kind of gateway city that acted as a primary pivot or hub for scaling up and spreading these youth ideas, policies, and practices throughout the entire Middle East and North Africa region.
Without the networks of the global youth development complex, and without these singular city spaces, ideas and policies about youth would not have been able to spread through the Middle East region in the way they did over the last two decades and more. For example, youth programming in Amman—one of the most important centers for launching youth leadership, entrepreneurship, and participation programs that are then rolled out throughout the Middle East—is closely shaped by the particular social and physical geographies of Amman itself. These include the relationships between east and west Amman, the division of the city into pockets of high deprivation and gated communities of privilege, all of which impact who participates in different forms of youth programming at different levels, and the ways in which young people’s responses to and engagement with youth programming unfolds (Sukarieh 2016).
Global City Networks and the Spread of Global Ideas
In analyzing the arrival, extension, and embedding of the global youth development complex in the Middle East and North Africa at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, the book seeks to address a broader, more general question that is of global and not just regional concern. This question is about how certain ideas are able to travel the globe so they are found in countries, regions, and cities all across the map, seeming to be virtually everywhere. The kinds of ideas of particular concern in this study are ideas central to the working and continued reproduction of global capitalism, as the dominant social, political, and economic system of our era. This does not concern just abstract or complex ideas having to do with contemporary political economy—for example, ideas such as subprime mortgages, derivatives, or credit default swaps—though there is certainly evidence that such ideas have travelled widely across the planet, as was seen in the worldwide fallout of the global financial crisis of 2008. On the contrary, the global ideas of concern here are the kinds of everyday ideas that not only shape global policy and media discourse but come to form part of our everyday common sense, to affect how we understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and the wider society around us: ideas, for example, of what it means to be a youth in today’s global society, or the importance of youth—youth culture, youth movements, youth unemployment, and so on—for broader projects of social, political, economic, and educational development. The existence of such globally dominant ideas, of course, is a widely recognized feature of global capitalism, or globalization; but the exact processes and pathways through which these ideas come to attain global dominance are not always clear.
Sometimes, how certain ideas are able to travel across the globe is a question that, especially in the wealthier and more powerful parts of the world, has not even been asked or thought to be particularly important. In a world that is still very often Eurocentric and US-centric, it can be taken for granted that, of course, it is to be expected that other people in far-flung parts of the world use the same concepts as we do in the West, or adopt the same policies, or create the same institutions. Why wouldn’t they? Writing of “the tendency of the American worldview … to impose itself as a universal point of view,” Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1999, 42, 46) observe how what they call the “commonplaces of the great new global vulgate” are transformed through “endless media repetition” into “universal common sense” that “manage in the end to make one forget that they have their roots in the complex and controversial realities of a particular historical society”—that being the United States. Sometimes, too, it may be assumed that it is some internal merit or inherent worth of ideas that lead them to be picked up widely by others in remote locations all across the globe. These ideas are, in and of themselves, so obviously right or virtuous or useful, and so forth, that people from Laos to Lesotho, and Belgium to Belize, will pick them up naturally, entirely of their own free will and accord. The truth will always prevail, as the saying goes.
This study is situated within a long literature that suggests that, in actual practice, the global spread of ideas is something that takes a lot of work—intellectual, political, and physical labor—and requires a considerable investment of resources: financial, social, and symbolic capital. “Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light,” is the quotation in full, originally from George Washington (emphasis added). Some of this literature—most notably that on cultural imperialism—has tended to assume a very top-down process of control from global centers of political and economic power: ideas spread around the world because of the power, influence, and agency of dominant states and multinational corporations, who see these ideas explicitly as being helpful for furthering their own interests and agendas. Another part of this literature—on policy diffusion and mobility, and cultural globalization, in particular—rejects the claims of cultural imperialism as being too simplistic, factually inaccurate, and, perhaps most damning of all, just outdated. Instead, this literature focuses on the central role of a diverse and dispersed assemblage of local settings, actors, and networks that are key to both enabling the travel and the adoption of key ideas across national borders, and also the transformation and adaptation of these ideas as they enter into new kinds of social, political, and economic contexts around the globe. While these literatures often are situated as being strongly opposed to each other, this study suggests that all these literatures have key insights vital for understanding how certain ideas are able to travel the world to end up becoming globally dominant.
But we also need something else, beyond these familiar theoretical frameworks for studying the global spread of dominant ideas; and in this book, I argue that it is the global cities literature, as developed by Saskia Sassen and others, that can be particularly useful for this task. Dominant ideas spread globally through networks, and these networks are not just any old kind of network but networks that have been set up within and between global cities and a second tier of gateway (or hub) cities that link global cities with national, regional, and local economies, societies, and political structures around the world. In the literature on global cities, there has been increasing recognition that certain cities serve as pivotal transnational spaces for the management and servicing of global capitalism. Scholars have studied the central role of cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo in supporting the construction of transnational business and financial networks that act to manage global flows of capital between these global cities, a larger set of gateway cities, and eventually, out into the regional hinterlands of the global capitalist economy (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 2001).
What I argue in this book is that, just as global and gateway cities are vital for organizing the expansion of financial capital and commodity production around the world, so, too, are they essential for organizing and managing the spread of dominant, key ideas around the world that are central to the workings and reproduction of global capitalism. In other words, when we ask about how ideas spread around the world, we are asking questions not just about the ideas themselves, and not just about structured patterns of global power and influence, but about space, as well. In this process, particular kinds of globally connected urban spaces are essential. Global and gateway cities are where the scales of the global and the local, that are the concerns of the competing literatures on cultural imperialism, policy diffusion, and cultural globalization, directly come together.
While it is likely that cities always have played a central role in the global spread of ideas for at least as long as cities have existed, there are reasons for expecting cities to play a particularly important role in this process in the contemporary era of global capitalism. At the most basic level, this is because the past century has been an era of mass urbanization, and more of us are living in cities than ever before. In 2007, for the first time ever, over half the world’s population lived in cities; by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities (Meredith 2018).
More than this, however, in the context of globally organized capitalism, cities have become increasingly important as key spatial nodes in the accumulation of capital—and the production, dissemination, and adoption of ideas is always an essential component in this process of city-centered capital accumulation. As will be seen in the three cities profiled in this book, the exact ways in which capital accumulation and the spread of ideas takes hold can vary widely from one city to another, as this is shaped to a considerable extent by the position of different cities within regional, national, and global social, economic, and political contexts and structures. But across all these cities, interest in capitalist economic development, organized both globally and locally, and interest in the spread of certain key ideas central to the production and reproduction of global and local capitalism, is a phenomenon that goes hand-in-hand.
In focusing on ideas, policies, and practices of youth in the Middle East during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there are, obviously, many particularities to this story of the global spread of ideas that will likely be different in other stories. However, there is nothing to suggest there is anything unique about the recent global spread of ideas about youth, either. Rather, there have been many other key, everyday concepts that also are central to the workings and reproduction of global capitalism that we also have seen spread around the world over the last few decades: for example, ideas about democracy promotion, human rights, women’s empowerment, children’s rights, good governance, the rule of law, intellectual property, civil society, poverty reduction, entrepreneurship, micro-finance, and many more.
The claim made here is that similar global city settings, actors, networks, and processes are likely to be found at the heart of the global spread of these various ideas as well. Further, the concern of this book is with the spread of ideas of central importance to global capitalism. Other kinds of ideas are likely to spread globally in slightly different ways, with different networks of actors at their core. However, the claim being made here is that to understand the spread of any set of ideas around the world, we will need to make the same basic set of investigations: about the geographically situated networks of actors; the mobilization of relationships and resources; the strategic utilization of key spaces within and between major cities; and the balancing of the central driving agendas of dominant and powerful actors with the influence of alternatively competing and congruent agendas of a wide range of other, less dominant, less powerful actors as well, from the large-scale institutional level right down to the level of the individual.
Note on Methodology
To closely analyze the global spread of dominant ideas, policies, and practices—whether these be the extension of the global youth development complex in the Middle East in the early twenty-first century or any other set of globally dominant discourses—necessarily requires the adoption of a research methodology that can attend to a range of geographic scales and spaces, and spread across an extended period of time. The study on which this book is based is thus multi-sited, tracing the movement of ideas, policies, and institutions across three different cities in ethnographic detail—Washington, DC; Amman; and Dubai—as well as multiple countries and continents.
It also is longitudinal, marking out how this movement has unfolded and shifted across a relatively extended period of time. The initial research consisted of a three-year ethnographic fieldwork project, from 2005 to 2008, based in the three cities that are the focus of this book; and this has been supplemented with a further twelve years of part-time research, from 2008 to 2020, during which I collected further fieldwork, as well as interview and textual data, based on repeat stays and return visits to the Middle East, and also desk-based research and investigation. Over this period, I was employed for a number of years as an academic working at the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo; and I returned often to Lebanon and Jordan and, less frequently, to Dubai and the other Gulf states.
The study is also multi-scalar, examining the movement of ideas from the level of national policy agendas to local classroom interactions, and back again. In a way, the study traces “the web of events” that made possible the rise of youth as a category and the expansion of the youth development complex in the Middle East at the turn of the century. Even though the spread of the idea around youth might seem “an outcome of human rationality and programming,” it is, in fact, a product of coordinated labor, capital and resources marshaled by specific social groups in pursuit of their own interests and agendas (Mitchell 2002, 29). In this sense, cities, organizations, and capital are analyzed at the center of human action, and not a space for these actions. They shape and are shaped by capital, political, and economic elites and the constellations of events that allowed the spread of ideas around youth (Mitchell 2005).
This methodological approach, which I argue is essential for enabling us to analyze and understand complex phenomena such as the movement of dominant discourses across global spaces, is based on the concept of “relational comparison” that has been developed by Gillian Hart and other scholars working in the fields of geography and political economy. Hart (2002, 297) argues that we need to conceptualize cities and other social spaces as “dense bundles of social relations and power-infused interactions that are always formed out of entanglements and connections with dynamics at work in other places, and in wider regional, national and transnational arenas.” “Instead of taking as given pre-existing objects, events, places and identities,” writes Hart (2002, 14), “I start with the question of how they are formed in relation to one another and to a larger whole.”
As Kevin Ward (2010, 480) observes, the advantage of such a “relational comparative approach” is that “stressing interconnected trajectories—how different cities are implicated in each other’s past, present and future—moves us away from searching for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts and instead towards relational comparisons that uses different cities to pose questions of one another.” In this approach, “social spaces” are seen “as part of broader processes through which they are connected to other social spaces,” and together, these “interconnected, particular social spaces help produce the relations and processes that, in turn, co-constitute them” (Ekers, Kipfer, and Loftus 2020, 6).
As Hart (2018, 374–375) writes in a more recent discussion of this model, “the focus of relational comparison is on how key processes are constituted in relation to one another through power-laden practices in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life.”
This is the task this book focuses on explicating, specifically in relation to the spread of youth and development discourse, as this took place through the cities of Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries.
The original fieldwork for this project began with a three-month pilot study of the work that US education and youth development NGOs were doing in the Gulf Region (in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates) and in Jordan. During this pilot study, I attended workshops being run by these US NGOS and conducted nearly forty interviews with workshop trainers, civil society and government leaders and officials, as well as young workshop participants. I then conducted a five-month ethnographic study in DC, where I mapped out the dense network of government, quasi- and nongovernmental organizations, private foundations and think tanks, and multinational corporations that make up the core of the global youth development complex.
Once again, this entailed regular attendance at workshops, seminars, and conferences that these different organizations sponsored in the Washington region, conducting interviews with about thirty-five individuals working for these organizations, from leadership to entry-level positions, and collecting and analyzing the vast amounts of published and online materials these organizations were busy producing.
I also spent seven months in Amman, Jordan, and six months in Dubai investigating how the ideas, policies, and programs being created and discussed in the abstract in Washington were actually being implemented on the ground. This also involved attending classrooms, workshops, conferences, and seminars in Amman and Dubai, conducting seventy interviews with government and business leaders, NGO directors, and staff, as well as young workshop participants, and, finally, collecting and analyzing a wide range of documents being generated by the organizations that were the focus of the study. These documents included both internal documents distributed among and used by organizational staff and different kinds of public documents produced for students, partners, and the public, including mission statements, annual reports, and workshop and school curriculum materials.
A second phase of fieldwork, interview, and desk-based research continued, on a part-time basis, from 2008 to 2020. This, again, involved attending workshops, conferences, and seminars run by the organizations involved in the global youth development complex, conducting interviews with twenty more organization leaders and staff as well as youth participants in organization workshops, and continuing to collect and analyze organizational documents. Although this phase of research has been less intensive than the initial period of fieldwork, it has been invaluable in allowing me to track the development of youth discourses, policies, and programs in the Middle East over time, both before and after two key crises that have had massive impacts on youth in Arab societies, namely the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Arab Spring uprisings in early 2011. Many of the interviews I conducted during this period were follow-up interviews with the same individuals—leaders, staff, and young students—who I had both observed and interviewed during the initial period of research in 2005 to 2008.
Finally, all this direct research with the organizations in the global youth development complex that have been operating in the Middle East over the last two decades has been supplemented with an extensive review and analysis of media reporting and academic research on youth, youth development, youth policy, and youth programming in this region over this entire period. As interest and concern with youth in the Middle East has spread, this body of media and academic reporting has grown exponentially, and in itself provides an essential mirror on the growing importance of youth in the region, as well as the lasting impacts of the work being done by the youth development complex over the past quarter-century and more. The organizations I followed were high profile, and press releases were available in English and Arabic. Moreover, the people I interviewed all spoke English, and all interviews were conducted in English.
While the research on which this book is based covers a wide range of organizations that were working as part of the youth development complex in the Middle East, in this book, I focus primarily on the work done by two US NGOs that constitute a core part of this complex: Junior Achievement (JA), which is known in the Middle East as Injaz Al-Arab, and the Education for Employment (EFE) Foundation. I do this to make the narrative of how ideas, policies, and practices about youth have spread in the Middle East more manageable, and hopefully, easier for readers to follow—as this story is already made complicated by needing to move across a number of very different locations, from Washington, DC, to Amman to Dubai and beyond. This does not mean other organizations that comprise the global youth development complex in the Middle East are absent from this text, only that they are left more in the background and not covered in the same amount of detail as are Junior Achievement/Injaz and EFE.
Injaz and EFE are highlighted here because they help show both some of the diversity and also the uniformity of the organizations in the global youth development complex. On the one hand, Injaz and EFE are quite different types of organizations. Junior Achievement is now over one hundred years old and has a broad domestic and global mandate that has only recently been adapted to US foreign policy concerns in the Middle East. It also has become one of the largest and most influential youth development NGOs currently working within the Middle East and North Africa region. By contrast, EFE is a new organization created directly in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, and in support of US foreign policy concerns in the Middle East. It works only with Arab and Muslim youth, initially in the Middle East and North Africa, and more recently in Europe, but has no operations within the United States itself. It remains a relatively smaller and more marginal youth development NGO in the Arab World, particularly when compared with Injaz Al-Arab.
On the other hand, Injaz and EFE both are remarkably similar to one another, beyond the fact that they are both American-based and -born organizations working with youth in the Arab world. Both these organizations focus on integrating Arab youth into the national, regional, and global capitalist economy at a general level, by seeking to shape these youth into dependable and productive neoliberal capitalist subjects and, more specifically, by spreading ideologies of entrepreneurship and the free market economy and teaching a range of skills-based employment, labor market, and financial education. Both organizations also have sought to develop and disseminate their work in the Middle East and North Africa in much the same ways, through engaging with the same networks, actors, and processes across the diverse settings of Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai.
The Story
The following chapters of the book begin by tracing the spread of ideas, policies, and institutions concerning youth and youth development, and the construction of the youth development complex and its extension to the Middle East and North Africa region, through the global city network of Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. Following this detailed analysis, it then steps back to consider the broader question illustrated by this case study, of how we should study and understand the ways in which dominant ideas important to the production and reproduction of capitalist economy and society become globally hegemonic.
The story begins in Washington, DC, which I describe in chapter one as a global ideas city. While the global cities literature has highlighted the ways in which cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo play a pivotal role in managing the spread of global capital, I argue that there is an overlapping set of global cities that play a parallel role in the production and global dissemination of ideas, discourses, and policies central to the reproduction and expansion of global capitalism. In this, the city of Washington plays what is, perhaps, a singularly unique role, dependent on the broader role the United States continues to play in the organization and management of global capitalism overall. The chapter focuses on the role DC has played in the construction of a youth development agenda for the Middle East region and highlights the vital interplay of a dense network of both global and intensely local spatial and institutional connections in this process. For, while it is the fact that Washington, DC, is the seat of the national US government that makes it pivotal in the production of ideas that are central to global capitalism, it is not just the state that is active in organizing and disseminating this global project. Within DC, we find a clustering of headquarters of international aid and development organizations, philanthropic foundations, corporate foundations, think tanks, universities, PR agencies, lobbying groups, and departments of the US government centered around the Massachusetts Avenue axis. It is the fact of physical proximity and everyday casual and personal interactions between individuals working in these organizations, as well as the broader ties of finance and institutional partnerships, which facilitates the assemblage, global dissemination and monitoring, and feedback mechanisms of key ideas and discourses such as those centering on youth and youth development in the Middle East and beyond.
In the process of the global dissemination of ideas and discourses, there is a key role played by cities we might describe as “incubator” or “pilot” cities, which serve as being an initial point of entry for rolling out, exploring, and testing ideas, policies, and practices on the ground, on a pilot basis, before being introduced to other cities and countries in the region. Chapter two analyses the way in which Amman, Jordan, played this incubator or pilot role in the spread of ideas about youth and youth development in the Middle East. It was in Amman that American, European, and international organizations first introduced their new youth development, leadership, participation, and entrepreneurship programs and policies with Jordanian youth—programs that were variously targeted at youth from elite, middle class, and low-income backgrounds. Individuals from around the Arab world would come to Amman to be trained in these projects, by observing and participating in classrooms and workshops, so they could copy and adapt these in their home countries. The chapter considers the particular confluence of factors that made Amman the perfect site to take on this role: the geopolitical strategic importance of Jordan for the United States in the region, the close ties of the Jordanian state to both the United States and Dubai, the dependency of the Jordanian economy on foreign aid and development assistance, the lack of any strong political or civil society opposition groups, and even the size and particular make-up of the metropolitan and national population.
While Amman has played a key role as an incubator for testing and adapting youth development discourses, policies, and practices to the Arab context, it is another city, Dubai, that has served as the principal pivot city for scaling up these ideas and programs about youth and youth development and helping disseminate them throughout the Middle East and North Africa region. Chapter three analyses this key role played by Dubai in taking what was initially a US led and designed youth development project and effectively translating this into becoming an increasingly Arab led and Arab identified project instead. It also considers the question of exactly how and why Dubai came to play this role and focuses on the distinctive place Dubai holds in relation to both the United States and other states across the Middle East and North African region. Dubai has long played a key role in integrating the Arab world with the global capitalist economy, acting as a center for transnational capital coming into and exiting the region. As such, it was already well integrated into global networks of finance and business and is the Arab region headquarters for multinational corporations and financial institutions. As in Washington, DC, we find in Dubai the combination of global, regional, and local institutional and spatial networks and financial and symbolic capital within the city state itself play an essential role in enabling the repackaging, Arabization, and regional reproduction and extension of a set of ideas about youth central to the reproduction and extension of global capitalism.
After tracing the spread of the youth development complex through the Middle East region, chapter four steps back to situate this study in the broader conceptual and theoretical literature. The chapter begins by considering the most important theories developed previously for talking about the global spread of dominant ideas in the context of global capitalist society. These include cultural imperialism; cultural and public diplomacy; policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility; and cultural globalization. The chapter argues that each of these theories offers valuable insights into the global spread of ideas, but also is strictly limited. Concepts such as globalization and policy diffusion, for example, often under-address the significance of power and inequality in the global capitalist economy, while the concept of cultural imperialism, on the other hand, tends to endorse a very crude, reductionist understanding of global power and domination. The chapter argues that all these concepts would benefit by being supplemented with a close attention to the spatiality and geography of ideas and knowledge.
More particularly, it suggests that the literature on global cities, though focused more on the global spread of capital than knowledge, provides a vital frame for understanding how ideologies and discourses central to the workings of global capitalist economy are disseminated throughout the world. When considering the global flows of such ideas, we find distinct roles are played by global cities, where global ideas are assembled and produced, and gateway cities, which translate global ideas into regional settings and introduce these ideas into everyday social practice on the ground. While the global city network addressed in this book links Washington, DC, with Dubai and Amman, Jordan, other parallel city networks and hierarchies may be seen in other regions around the world.
Finally, the conclusion to the book briefly considers some of the broader significance of this analysis of the spread of the youth development complex in the Middle East region in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes using this analysis to offer an interpretation of the immediate events and aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010, which argues that these uprisings offer important evidence both of some of the key limitations of the projects of the global youth development complex in the Middle East and North Africa—but also, of the global youth development complex’s continued success and spread throughout the region.
The conclusion also examines the wider relevance of this particular case study for understanding how certain ideas become globally and regionally dominant, both within the Arab world itself and more generally. In many respects, the Arab youth development project stands out for being a particularly focused and intentional project of spreading ideas globally, and for being undertaken in an especially geopolitically charged and conflictual environment, constantly under the shadow of military invasion, occupation, and violence in countries throughout the Middle East region. However, it is precisely these particular features that can help us see more clearly a much more general phenomenon of exactly how certain key sets of ideas are spread throughout the global capitalist economy. The conclusion reviews the key actors and stages of this process, including the differential roles played by global and gateway cities, and identifies the most important questions and considerations that need to be asked if we are to develop our understanding of the global geographies of ideological hegemony that continue to be constructed and contested as we head further into the twenty-first century.
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