A Farewell to Innocence? African Youth and Violence in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This is a broad examination of the issue of youth violence in twenty-first-century Africa, looking at the context within which a youth culture of violence has evolved and attempting to understand the underlining discourses of hegemony and power that drive it. The article focuses specifically on youth violence as a political response to the dynamics of (dis)empowerment, exclusion, and economic crisis and uses (post)conflict states like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria to explain not just the overall challenge of youth violence but also the nature of responses that it has elicited from established structures of authority. Youth violence is in many ways an expression of youth agency in the context of a social and economic system that provides little opportunity.