engleski

Divided by Membership, United by Precarity: Reviewing Youth Status in South-East Europe under Marxian, Neo-Keynesian and Neoliberal Perspectives

Uncertainty of life prospects, especially in relation to the educational and employment outcomes, influences all aspects of young people’s lives, from health and wellbeing, to leisure time and political and cultural participation. For the youth in South East Europe, 2016 is marked by persistence of economic crisis and unstable prospects, which forces an increasing number of young people to leave the country in a search of better education and employment opportunities. In order to understand position of young people in South East Europe and a degree of their vulnerability, this paper will present a range of research data. Data were selected on the basis of comparability and can be divided into two groups: I) data from publicly available databases (the World Bank and Eurostat) and II) data from national surveys. The majority of quantitative analyses are based of the Shell Youth Studies, encompassing surveys conducted between 2012 and 2015 on the nationally representative samples of young people aged 18- 29. The reviewed non-Member States include Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia, and the Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. Shell Youth Study data include information on the respondents' socio- professional status, education of their parents, respondents’ employment trajectories, living arrangements, migrations, factors of finding a job, factors of accepting a job, and personal optimism, enabling a dynamic analysis of young peoples' status, aspirations and vulnerabilities. The analytical framework of this paper places the research data inside critical sociology of education and political economy. The paper develops a critique of neoliberal economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that neo-Keynesian analysis provide an important corrective to some aspects of neoliberal viewpoints, though missing the explanatory power of Marxian analysis in regard to the primacy of class relations in employment within crisis-driven capitalism.

Youth, South-East Europe, education, employment, precarity, political economy

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