This chapter focuses on youth and its relationship with unconventional participation as it has been portrayed in literature. The chapter aims to highlight how sociological studies have, since the very beginning, conceived unconventionality as an intrinsic character of youth practices of political engagement. Referring to a life-course perspective, youth studies have frequently explained the youth preference for unconventional political behaviour as just a consequence of a series of characteristics distinguishing youth as a life phase, such as physical vigour and the need for experimentation. In line with the book’s general intention to actualise the existing understanding of unconventional political engagement, the chapter presents the choice to analyse youth unconventional political behaviours through a generational approach and clarifies the basic concepts of generational location, generational consciousness, and generational unit. In order to frame the analysis of the three case studies presented in the following chapter, an interpretation of young people’s contemporary conditions in terms of social peripheralisation is discussed.

1. Introduction --- 1 2. Unconventional political participation: an overview --- 7 3. Young people and unconventional political engagement --- 23 4. "What do we want? we want everything!": young swedish activists and the "union of citizens" --- 39 5. "If not now, when?": young Italian people and the occupied social centre --- 63 6. "We will never be what you want us to be": young football fans and the ultras centre --- 83 7. Unconventional is the new conventional? --- 111 Index --- 127