Abstract EN:

The relations between politics and Senegal's youth have gone through a dramatic change since the late eighties. This phenomenon is due to the processes of individualisation and the reassessment of collective identities and it combines the structuring of generational ideal of emancipation embodied by the slogan " Bul faale " and the increasingly assertive " wolof-murid " identity model. The general questioning of a policy whose key-principles were deeply rooted in the " Senegalese social contract " - which itself had been reasserted in the wake of independence – Then made it possible for urban youth to develop a generational political consciousness and forms of mobilisation which were to play a decisive role during the political alternation in 2000. The " bul faale " generation was then to become a " political generation ". Nevertheless, these processes are also part and parcel of the unravelling of a harmonious pattern based on ethnic groups or brotherhoods, a system long regarded as an example