How do young people engage today in a constantly changing world? Climate upheavals, conflicts, pandemics, migration crisis and the rise of extremes, the challenges are piling up, but young people do not remain inactive. To be convinced of this, you have to read the work of sociologist Claude Thoury To commit. How young people mobilize in the face of crises which focuses precisely on the evolution of forms of mobilization.
We learn that commitment has not always been in the same boat. As such, she identifies three pivotal periods. The first, already theorized in 1997 by the sociologist Jacques Ion in his book The end of the activists?, begins after the Second World War. It is the time of the collective with total adhesion to a movement or a political party. We then speak of a “stamp” commitment. The second period, called “Post-it” engagement, appeared in the 1970s with individual emancipation. We want to change things without sacrificing ourselves.
According to Claude Thoury, young people aged 16-25 are today taking commitment to a third level, that personified around the figure of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Here, he distinguished himself with the famous climate march held in Montreal in 2019 and considered the most important demonstration in the history of Quebec. The specialist in engagement issues and president of the Associative Movement – an organization representing French associations – goes so far as to speak of a new era of engagement, particularly among very young people, and which is characterized by this mobilization around causes important things like the fight against climate change or against social inequalities.
Because today, explains the essayist, for young people, getting involved often means demanding immediate answers to pressing problems. They are not hypothetical. On the contrary, they want a sort of real return of the big evening.
Partly based on interviews conducted with young people involved in political or associative action, the work sheds light on new aspirations. We learn, among other things, that the new generation is mobilizing collectively, but outside traditional spaces, in the hope of accelerating the desired changes, which, without political outlets, is far from ensuring results. convincing, warns the author.
The sociologist indicates that what she retains from her discussions and meetings with committed young people is the urgency to act, but above all the need to think about the problems globally in order to truly change the system at the root. , requiring a certain about-face with the old ways of doing things. “This way of getting involved reflects a desire to see the world change, profoundly and radically, and above all very quickly,” she analyzes.