Conclusion

Abstract

In recent years, ethnic minority and Muslim young people have become increasingly visible in a variety of public debates that frequently rest upon hyperbolic claims concerning these groups’ political disaffection and — in the case of Muslims — their tendency to be drawn towards forms of political extremism. As we discussed in Chapter 1, however, neither of these claims are particularly substantiated by robust empirical data. What information there is on the interaction between age, ethnicity and religion as factors underlying differences in political participation is patchy at best, and certainly insufficiently robust to support the crisis narratives that currently prevail in relation to ethnic minority and Muslim young people. Moreover, available data are limited not only in their degree of detail and disaggregation but also in the underlying conception on which they rest. All too often, claims about the limited extent of ethnic minority young people’s political engagement rest upon an unduly narrow definition of ‘the political’, which is invariably restricted to participation in the political mainstream. Against this background, a key concern of this book has been to furnish insights that intervene empirically and theoretically in these debates by operationalising a much broader understanding of political participation and engagement.