Youth and biopolitics: the young power as an issue of political intervention

Abstract

This paper addresses, from the perspective of Social Psychology, the issue of how and why youth has up till recently been thought of as a strategic object for global political intervention since the 1980's. Through a Foucault-inspired genealogical analysis of some of the United Nations' official documents, as well as of specifically Brazilian data, we inquire into an intricate subject-matter: the youth-oriented practices, and particularly those discourses prescriptive of public policies. Through such practices and discourses, young people come to be referred to both as a sort of population group and a politically relevant one as far as social progress is concerned. The concept of young power emerges in the present inquiry as a significant analytic device fitting to work out a way of envisaging the force of youth – since, on the one hand, this force is often thought to be of a quite unworkable sort; on the other hand, though, it can undergo some focusing, thus serving as strategic resort to the interests of the developing countries. Our research so far points to an important shift in the youth issue, showing that youth's contestatory political force is no longer at stake, but rather its positive force aiming at political and social development. Consequently, this is the strategic goal of governmental efforts to the effect of increasing people's overall standard of living.