Ali Altiok

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Peace Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. As a comparative political scientist, I study how digitalization is reshaping youth political behavior and youth–state relations in Africa and the Middle East. My research combines original surveys, field experiments, and long-term fieldwork in Kenya and Türkiye, examining how young people interact with government-sponsored programs and how they act politically on social media.

Dissertation

Digital Hustlers: Youth Political Agency in Kenya

Young people are commonly flattened into reductive binaries, viewed either as threats to democratic stability due to their disengagement from conventional politics, or romanticized as drivers of democratic renewal through direct action against corruption and authoritarianism. Both portrayals rest on the assumption that youth harbor deep cynicism toward public institutions. My dissertation shows that most young people neither passively submit nor simply revolt. Under conditions of everyday economic precarity, they develop political tactics to navigate, negotiate, and contest political power.

In Kenya, the government invests in digital infrastructure and skills programs intended to connect young people to the online gig economy in a labor market unable to absorb a rapidly growing youth population. These programs shift responsibility for securing livelihoods onto young people themselves. Youth, in turn, appropriate them on their own terms, treating government-sponsored digitalization as a channel for accessing and extracting public resources while withholding or selectively extending political trust. I argue that digitalization has become a means through which states manage youth politics without resolving the structural precarity that produces prolonged transitions into adulthood, or “waithood.” Taking Türkiye as a shadow case, I examine whether this tactical engagement persists in an authoritarian setting where government-sponsored digitalization is embedded in militaristic and techno-nationalist development strategies.

I am developing the dissertation into a book manuscript that theorizes “digital hustling” as a broader form of youth political agency emerging at the intersection of economic precarity and digitalization.

The project draws on ongoing fieldwork in Kenya (2024 to 2026) across Western, Coastal, and Central regions, pairing broad empirical scale with contextual depth. Working with local digital skills trainers, who opened access to remote rural vocational ICT hubs, I administered an original survey (N=1,072) that gathered rich qualitative responses through audio prompts, alongside 60 semi-structured interviews and 55 focus group discussions. To examine digital youth political behavior, I conducted an in-person smartphone field experiment (N=320) uncovering how youth tactically engage with political deepfakes, pairing behavioral social media data and discernment judgments with 48 of these focus groups. For a cross-case comparison on government-sponsored initiatives, I am extending the project with qualitative interviews in Türkiye, examining youth participation in the government's flagship program, Teknofest.

Under review and in progress

Drafts are available on request.

My next project examines how the expansion of generative artificial intelligence is reshaping youth political behavior and livelihood prospects, both as a new repertoire for contesting political authority online and as an emerging political economy that creates short-term work for young people while threatening the digital labor governments have encouraged them to pursue.

Selected Publications

Altiok, A. and Ilhanli, M. “Subverting the ‘Adult Gaze’ in the Kurdish–Turkish Conflict: The Case of ‘Kuro’.” International Political Sociology, 2026. Collective discussion.

Parrin, A., Simpson, G., Altiok, A. and Wamai, N. “Youth and Transitional Justice.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 16, no. 1 (2022): 1–18. Editorial introducing the special issue, which I co-edited.

Book chapters

Altiok, A. “What Makes Youth Participation Meaningful? The Pitfalls of Merging Counter-Terrorism with the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda.” In H. Berents, C. Bolten and S. McEvoy-Levy (eds.), Building Sustainable Peace with and for Young People. Manchester University Press, 2024.

Altiok, A. “Barış Süreçlerinde Gençlerin Rolleri: 2011–2014 Yemen Devrimi ve Ulusal Diyalog Konferansı” [Youth Roles in Peace Processes: The 2011–2014 Yemeni Revolution and National Dialogue Conference]. In E. Dilek and C. Dizdaroğlu (eds.), Eleştirel Barış Çalışmaları: Kavramlar, Aktörler ve Pratikler [Critical Peace Studies: Concepts, Actors and Practices]. Imge, 2024.

Altiok, A. “Squeezed Agency: Youth Resistance to the Securitization of Peacebuilding.” In M. O. Ensor (ed.), Securitizing Youth: Young People’s Role in the Global Peace and Security Agenda. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Altiok, A., Berents, H., Grizelj, I. and McEvoy-Levy, S. “Youth, Peace and Security.” In F. Hampson, J. Kent and A. Özerdem (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Peace, Security and Development. Routledge, 2020.

Teaching

My teaching spans comparative politics and international relations. I offer courses on political behavior, the politics of digital transformation, youth politics, Middle East and African politics, international organizations, and peace and conflict studies, together with research methods, including field methods, survey design, and experimental design in low-resource settings.

At the University of Notre Dame, I have taught as a teaching assistant for Middle East Politics and Introduction to Peace Studies, leading lectures on youth politics and counterterrorism. I regularly guest lecture on youth politics at universities in the United States and Europe, and for over ten years I have mentored young people from the Global South through collaborative research that treats youth as active partners.

I pair analytical research papers with policy briefs and position papers so that students learn to move between scholarly, policy, and public audiences without sacrificing analytical rigor. I also bring advanced students into my ongoing research on youth politics and digitalization, which can form the basis for independent projects and senior theses.

Teaching statement and sample syllabi available on request.

Selected policy reports

My scholarship maintains a direct connection to policy and practice. I have written policy research for the United Nations, the United States Institute of Peace, Saferworld, and Interpeace, particularly on the UN Security Council's Youth, Peace and Security Agenda and UN multilateral counter-terrorism frameworks.

Altiok, A. and Street, J. The Voice of the Fourth Pillar: How Security Council Discourse Drove Counter-Terrorism Expansion at the UN. Saferworld, 2025.

Altiok, A., Porras, P. and Lee, P. Fostering Youth Participation in International Peacebuilding. United States Institute of Peace, 2023.

Altiok, A. and Street, J. A Fourth Pillar of the United Nations? The Rise of Counter-Terrorism. Saferworld, 2020.

Altiok, A. and Grizelj, I. We Are Here: An Integrated Approach to Youth Inclusive Peace Processes. UN Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, 2019.

Curriculum vitae (PDF) aaltiok@nd.edu Google Scholar ORCID

Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
University of Notre Dame · Notre Dame, IN 46556