Generation Hope: Young People in a Changing World in a country or community. In simple terms, youth is a period of transition during which children and adolescents gradually come to be recognised as adults.10 Falling between childhood and adulthood, it is a period of semi-dependency during which young people try to achieve personal autonomy while still remaining dependent on their parents or the state. The length of periods of dependency varies hugely across socio-economic and political contexts. A young person may be regarded as an adult in one domain but a minor in others. Depending on national contexts, a young person may be regarded as old enough to marry or join the armed forces, but not mature enough to vote or be an elected representative of the people. Normative markers can be important as there are occasions where an individual may be regarded as an adult in the eyes of the law, but may be denied social recognition as an adult as they remain dependent financially on their parents.11 Indeed, in many societies economic independence is a prerequisite for family formation,12 and, in some, marriage is a necessary condition for living outside the parental home.13 To add to this complexity, legally a young person may be recognised as an adult at different ages in different policy domains: entitled to vote at 18, for example, but unable to claim ‘normal’ social security entitlements or entitled to adult wage rates until age 25. 1.2  Youth transitions The process of graduating from education to employment, and from dependent to independent living, is a crucial part of the life course, as young people become adults and are accepted as such by the state and society. Research shows that in many countries youth transitions have become much more complex and drawn out, with young people facing difficulty in moving from one phase to another. Processes of acquiring personal and social autonomy no longer develop in a linear fashion. Young people may attain legal or civic autonomy but still remain economically dependent on the family, the state, or both.14 Similarly, in what would once have been regarded as an anomaly, they may leave the parental home only to return there after living independently for a while. Moreover, transitions increasingly involve uncommon patterns: young people may return to full-time education after establishing a family,15 or may achieve economic independence but still remain dependent on families for cultural or emotional support. This complexity has led scholars to make distinctions between linear and non-linear transitions, as ‘accelerated’ or ‘delayed’, and even as ‘yo-yo’ movements.16 The forms youth transitions take vary across cultural, economic and political contexts. For example, in Western countries there is a marked difference between the slower route to adulthood through longer education and delayed assumption of adult roles, versus a faster track of leaving school at a very young age, then entering the labour market and forming a family relatively rapidly. Depending on the point of view, either route can be defined as ‘problematic’ or ‘optimal’.17 While young people following a protracted route involving extended educational participation may increase their earning potential in the long run, they may sacrifice economic independence and stability in the near term. In other contexts, such as the MENA region, transition routes can be completely different and even when young people have access to education it is still difficult to find jobs, with unemployment sometimes highest among those with medium and high-level qualifications.18 Similarly, in many developing countries, young people continue to live at the parental home even after achieving full economic independence. In the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia, the term ‘waithood’ has been used to describe the delay in achieving full adult rights and responsibilities, and in some countries in these regions the delay of ‘adulthood’ is thought to be both ‘a symptom and driver of armed conflict’,19 and in the MENA region was one of the triggers for the Arab Spring.20 In developed countries, there has been a focus on the psycho-social implications of the protracted youth phase with terms introduced (such as ‘young adulthood’21 and ‘emerging adulthood’22) to mark what is regarded as a new intermediate stage between youth and adulthood. For a number of commentators, the protraction of youth can be seen as a ‘destructive period’23 associated with an ‘identity moratorium’ whereby young people can get lost or become side-tracked. The speed, scale, shape and consequences of youth transitions vary across countries and contexts depending on a combination of structural constraints and opportunities, societal expectations and policy frameworks, as well as individual agency. Transitions, and even ‘adulthood’, can have different meanings and consequences for different young people. For instance, in most countries, young women leave the parental home earlier than their \7