Youth and Regime Breakdown Discourse Networks and Political Mobilisation during Perestroika and the Weimar Republic In March 1987, the 24-year old Aleksei Kovalyev along with hundreds of young people took

This paper offers a comparison of the public significance of youth during two episodes of regime breakdown. It draws on my thesis which explores the meaning of youth in key crisis moments in Europe and the political mobilisation of young people. I selected cases of hybrid regimes with significant mobilisation of young people and an intense struggle about the meaning of youth as part of regime change. I propose to analyse episodes of the Weimar Republic from 1929 to 1933, and of the Soviet Union’s perestroika from 1984 to 1991. I offer a new method of textual analysis for the historical comparison of the processes underlying discourse about youth and political mobilisation of young people. This method combines qualitative content analysis and network analysis which permits a novel perspective on the meanings of youth in these two cases. I develop the analysis based on a rich textual corpus of newspaper articles. This method brings to the fore the structural relations between different articles and represents them as a network which allows for a rigorous and comprehensible analysis of unstructured textual material without denying the subjective act of interpretation. The networks permit a study of H1: In moments of regime breakdown, disintegrating discourses about youth indicate the collapsing of the political regime. An analysis of youth encourages us to go beyond structural or elite-centred approaches which prevail for explaining regime breakdown. Indeed, youth mobilisation conditioned what elites could do and gave meaning to structural conditions such as unemployment, ideology, and the political system. Mobilisation underlines as how contradictory and manifold contemporaries understood their political realities, leading to H2: In moments of regime breakdown, political diversity characterises youth mobilisation which links to competing positions to overcome the regime crisis. Word Count: 9,869 (excluding bibliography) Félix Krawatzek Nuffield College University of Oxford OX1 1NF Oxford [email protected] Draft Paper: Comments Welcome!