Zimbabwe: Youths in Zimbabwe Are Not Rejecting Politics – They Are Reshaping It

Youth political participation in Zimbabwe is often described in familiar terms: party membership, mobilisation through rallies, and the manipulation of unemployed young people into violence. Yet these frameworks increasingly fail to capture how urban youths actually engage with politics today. Drawing on ethnographic research in Highfield, a low-income suburb of Harare, this article argues that youth political engagement has undergone a quiet but significant transformation – away from formal party…