The youths who were born from 1982 through 2004, referred to as millennials, will become more than 70% of the developed world’s labor force in 2025. Not all groups of adolescents and youths in their twenties create historical movements focusing on their identity as youths, but it appears as though Arab millennials have. Six years ago, an urban youth movement broke onto the scene, given momentum by social and economic malaise, for the discovery of new life experiences, in confrontation with a series of regimes whose only interest lay in perpetuating their own power. But how did they do this? Juan Cole will take a look at the cases of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

Presented by Pedro Villena, General Director of Casa Árabe.

Juan Cole is a public intellectual, a prominent blogger and an essayist, as well as a history professor at the University of Michigan. In his most recent work, Los nuevos árabes, juventud y activismo político (2010-2014) (The New Arabs: Youth and political activism, 2010-2014, Bellaterra, 2015), Cole, through his own direct experience, focuses on three countries, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, to show the public life of these youth networks, which developed more fully in the first two of these countries: how they came about, grew established and became tools of transformation; he tells the story of their struggles and how they strove to keep the powerful against whom they fought from returning to their prior status. He has also written a great deal about Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Southern Asia. He frequently works as an analyst in the US media about current affairs in the Arab and Islamic world.