Between Statutory Invisibility and Active Recognition: Youth as a Relational Challenge

Abstract

Youth is neither a circumscribed biological stage nor a stabilized homogeneous category; it designates a transitional and unstable space, marked by the gradual erosion of sequential regulations, the intensification of structural vulnerabilities, and the fragmentation of biographical horizons. This statutory blurring cannot be reduced to a crisis of insertion but refers to a deeper and more enduring transformation of the conditions of access to social, economic, and institutional recognition. From this perspective, this article proposes a critical and transversal mapping of contemporary theoretical contributions, articulating the sociology of life courses, work psychology, and the engineering of dispositifs. The aim is less to produce a descriptive synthesis than to construct an operational and heuristic conceptual framework, allowing youth to be understood as a zone of statutory conflictuality, where prescribed autonomy collides with persistent asymmetries in access to conversion resources. The challenge is to move beyond prescriptive logics centered on individualized activation, in order to outline a renewed capacitary governance founded on the recognition of singular aspirations, relational adjustment, and the sustainability of life trajectories. The approach developed is thus based on a pluralist and open conception of biographical possibilities, where the norm does not precede experience but is progressively constructed in situated interaction. Mobilized as a structural revealer, the Moroccan case makes it possible to problematize the universalist blind spots of dominant models, by rendering visible the multiple forms of institutional invisibilization and the persistent shortcomings of relational capillarity. This analytical shift ultimately invites us to reconfigure public action not as top-down prescription but as a processual architecture, inclusive and open to the diversity of bifurcations and to the contextual actualization of capabilities.

Classification JEL : O29

Paper type : Theoretical Research