Youth real circuits of resistance

Over the last three decades, Peru has become a hyper-neoliberal, hollowed democracy (Barnechea & Vergara, 2023; Zavala, 2023), producing recurrent cycles of youth protest against corruption and precarity, most recently in Gen Z-led mobilizations in 2020 and 2025 that resulted in lethal state repression of youth activists. Scholarship on youth activism and social movement learning has documented how young people learn to resist in youth-friendly spaces such as non-profit activist programs (Cammarota 2002, 2007), intergenerational youth-adult collaborations (Taft, 2019), and the social interactions sustaining youth activist repertoires (Kirshner, 2007). In parallel, at the intersection of the literature on ecologies of learning and activism, this body of work shows how youth assemble learning resources as they move across school, home, community, and online settings (Bronkhorst et al., 2024). Yet, while these fields acknowledge cross-setting learning, they have paid less attention to how youth protesters learn resistance under conditions of stigma, institutional sanction, and necropolitical violence. This paper develops the concept of youth real circuits of resistance to explain how young people piece together resistance learning across what it calls “willing” and “forced” circuits. Willing circuits are youth-led, or youth-friendly constellations of spaces and relationships–street protests, youth collectives, youth digital channels–where learning is mediated by humorous sense-making, affective displays, and largely unsupervised political critique. Forced circuits are adult-dominated, surveilling and disciplining constellations–elite universities, workplaces, and some family and religious settings–that young people must inhabit to navigate neoliberal economies, and where their activism is explicitly or implicitly labelled and institutionally sanctioned. The concept of youth real circuits of resistance foregrounds how low-income youth with access to both circuits develop distinctive resistance-learning capabilities, echoing the historical roles and contradictions constitutive of the mestizo experience in colonial Peru: calibrating visibility and speech in neoliberal settings, decoding necropolitics through proximity to and distance from death, framing resistance through ironic humour, and coping in the crack between the guilt of opportunity and the indignation tied to their origins. This paper builds on youth activist learning (Kirshner, 2007), social movement learning (Choudry, 2015) and everyday resistance scholarship (Scott, 2016), refining learning-across-contexts frameworks by developing a resistance-centred typology of circuits in Peru. Empirically, it combines analysis of social media from 2020-2025 youth protests alongside reflexive insights from long-term work as a youth ally across Peru. The framework invites scholars and activists to redesign studies and interventions by centring the dyad of willing and forced circuits as an object of inquiry.