A subset of youth respondents in the study express how disappointment, frustration, and anger color everyday citizenship. They report how unmet promises, corruption, repression, and exclusive politics undermine their sense of citizen belonging and amplify tensions with elders. Such frustration may lead youth to contest citizenship in alternative ways, though most do not choose these paths. A small number exit, as indicated in Afrobarometer data and by our respondents. Some actively contest citizenship through the exclusion of others along ethnic or religious lines – patterns manifest among Ghanaian and Ugandan respondents and evident in survey data. Although some could choose to follow leaders who claim to speak for the people, comparisons of youth support for such populism in Tanzania and Uganda, on the one hand, with their support for the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa, on the other, provide inconclusive evidence that youth embrace illiberal populism. A subset channels anger into local and national mobilization, illustrating youth citizens as agents.

This chapter begins the book’s comparative ethnographic enquiry. While the scholarship has advanced several explanations for the post-authoritarian deactivation of the underprivileged across Latin American cities, little is known about the trajectories by which mobilization survives in some neighborhoods and not in others. This chapter focuses on the case of Nuevo Amanecer to better grasp the mechanisms that led to the demise of collective action in post-dictatorial urban Chile. It describes how party activists belonging to the Alianza Democrática developed a managerial leadership style in many underprivileged neighborhoods when coordinating anti-dictatorial protests in the 1980s. The relationships these moderate political activists fostered with neighborhood dwellers throughout the decade often evolved into networks of political loyalty after the democratic transition. These networks are current and ongoing. To feed their political loyalty networks, community leaders learn to insistently monopolize political capital at the grassroots level. This dynamic has further prevented mobilizational citizenship from developing. It also fragments población spaces, deactivates local initiatives of governance, and depoliticizes the youth.

Chapter 2 starts with an overview of the modern phenomena of ethnicity, nationalism, and ethno-national conflicts, and about the probable causes and background conditions that provide fertile ground for their outbreak, as these understandings are essential for evaluating the prevailing theoretical assumptions about justice and democracy in places of ethno-national conflict. To deepen the understanding of the sociology of ethno-national conflicts, the chapter introduces the four conflicts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Israel–Palestine. This chapter singles out political exclusion, the struggle over public goods of the nation-state, and group inequalities along ethno-national lines as leading factors that explain the outbreak of violent conflicts.

This chapter reviews the argument in the book to understand the intersection between state capacity, political exclusion, and international assistance and how these conjoin to contribute to negative security outcomes. I discuss how to operationalize each of these parameters. I then diagram several causal pathways connecting these factors to negative security outcomes. I also develop predictions for likely outcomes when these factors have more favorable and mixed characteristics in terms of state capacity, exclusion, and assistance.

In this chapter, I introduce the question that animates the book and preview the argument. Under what conditions does climate change lead to negative security outcomes? I emphasize the combination of weak state capacity, exclusive political institutions, and absent or one-sided delivery of international assistance. I then summarize the contribution of the book and preview the chapters, including the case studies.

Political transitions in a multiethnic setting are often marred with violence between groups. Why does ethnocommunal violence during a country’s democratic transition erupt in some places, and not others? Why does it subsequently decline? Existing explanations typically focus on the weakness of state capacity, the power struggle between political candidates around elections, or the structural factors such as economic inequality between groups. However, in many countries in transition, administrative units with similar characteristics have varying levels of violence. In this book, I build on Albert O. Hirschman’s framework of exit, voice, and loyalty, and I argue that excluded local elites mobilize violence to leverage their demands for greater inclusion in local politics during democratic transition. When these demands are accommodated, violence will decline. This chapter provides an overview of my theory, contributions to related literature, methodological approaches, key findings, and plan of the book.