Youth in (times of) crisis: Migration, precarity, and shifting identities in the Southern borders of Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces youth migration from Greece to Cyprus in the context of the ongoing economic crisis, and reveals the impact of labor conditions, precarity and mobility on the lives and aspirations of young migrants. I interrogate jointly the categories of “youth” and “migrant,” and argue that, far from being fixed, these are produced and redefined by the temporalizing and historicizing effects of the crisis, the former as a protracted state of being, and the latter as a phenomenon of contingency that needs to be addressed through policies of economic recovery and development. At the same time, the article documents the dynamic ways, in which young migrants engage in, reproduce and resist discourses and structures that shape their everyday life and hopes for the future. The intra-Southern European migration from Greece to Cyprus, offers a distinctive ethnographic context to document how new migratory routes develop, especially in a terrain of intersecting economic crises in the southern borders of Europe. Migration in this case is not, as often assumed, a linear, one-way direction, but an ongoing process of decision-making around new opportunities, destinations and mobilities.