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This paper reports on empirical research on youth as active citizens in Senegal with specific reference to their education and their sexual and reproductive health rights. In a context of postcoloniality which claims to have privileged secular, republican understandings of the constitution, the authors seek to illuminate how youth activists sustain patriarchal, metropolitan views of citizenship and reinforce ethnic and locational (urban/rural) hierarchies. Their analysis is based on a case study of active youth citizenship, as reflected in youth engagement in the recent presidential elections in Senegal. This included involvement in youth protests against pre-election constitutional abuse and in a project monitoring the subsequent elections using digital technologies. The authors compare how youth activists enacted different notions of citizenship, in some instances involving a vigorous defence of Senegal's democratic constitution, while in others dismissing this as being irrelevant to youth concerns. Here the authors make an analytic distinction between youth engagement in "politics," seen as the public sphere of constitutional democracy, and the "political," which they relate to the inherently conflictual and agonistic processes through which (youth) identities are policed, in ways which may legitimate or marginalise. Despite the frequent construction of youth as being agents of change, this analysis shows how potentially productive and open spaces for active citizenship were drawn towards conformity and the reproduction of existing hegemonies, in particular through patriarchal gender relations and sexual norms within which female youth remained particularly vulnerable.

Dominant understandings of global or cosmopolitanism citizenship align it with the 'modern' and the 'secular', in ways that construct religious belongings as irrational, or indeed 'pre-modern'. Assumptions of superiority embedded in claims to cosmopolitanism are all the more powerful for being constructed as a 'universal', in ways that erase and occlude the local social relations and particularities of the spaces and positions from which these very claims emanate. Resisting such understandings, this paper engages with research into Muslim youth identities with respect to nation, religion and gender in four nation-states of the Global South. It explores how Muslim youth's strong affective commitments to the religious community of the 'global Ummah' can be understood as a distinctive form of global, cosmopolitan citizenship, in ways that are similar to, but also sharply differentiated from modern (secular) understandings of cosmopolitanism. We suggest that appeals to any 'universal' cosmopolitan project can work to silence local social relations (such as ethnic, gender, religious or class differentiations), and how all claims to cosmopolitanism are intrinsically sutured to youth's struggles for positioning within their nation. We stress therefore the importance of attending to local social dynamics throughout our analysis of youth identity constructions and their constitutive others, and take this up throughout the following papers of this special edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as 'active citizens' and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods, we draw on post-structural theory to analyse the discourses youth deployed to talk about sex and their sexualities. Rather than a source of pleasure, youth's talk of sex and sexuality was dominated by discourses of morality and medicine, in ways that sustained a heteronormative gender regime permeated by entrenched hegemonic masculinities. We conclude that rather than the fertile possibilities identified in our opening review, the SRH lens re-inscribed a negative framing of sexuality which was compounded by both family and religious norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]