Coming of Age in the War on Terror

‘One minute you’re a 15-year old girl who loves Netflix and music and the next minute you’re looked at as maybe ISIS.’

The generation born at the time of the 9/11 attacks are turning 18. What has our changed world meant for them? We now have a generation – Muslim and non-Muslim – who have grown up only knowing a world at war on terror. These young people have been socialised in a climate of widespread Islamophobia, surveillance and suspicion. An unparalleled security apparatus around terrorism has grown alongside fears over young people’s radicalisation and the introduction into schools and minority communities of various government-led initiatives to counter violent extremism.

In Coming of Age in the War on Terror Randa Abdel-Fattah, a leading scholar and popular writer, interrogates the impact of all this on young people’s trust towards adults and the societies they live in and their political consciousness. Drawing on local interviews but global in scope, this book is the first to examine the lives of a generation for whom the rise of the far-right, the discourse of Trump and Brexit and the growing polarisation of politics seems normal in the long aftermath of 9/11. It’s about time we hear what they have to say.