Theoretical perspectives towards an understanding of the category citizen participation-youth politics in Colombia

This paper intends to be an approximation to a state of the art on the category citizen participation-youth politics; the latter is understood as the actions that impact social order in its relationship to power. The conceptual dyad citizen participation-politics points to the impossibility of conceiving the activity of subjects as citizens isolating it from political reflection. Both elements acquire meaning in as much as their relationship is dialogic. Thus, the paper is configured in two stages: the first one explores four categories associated with the notion of participation from the framework of some developments in political philosophy and political science, inside notions like citizenship, democracy, and civil society, showing that the debate to understand participation has been mediated by categories like conflict of interest, political action, and exercise of power. The second stage is centered around an attempt to go deeper in the reflection on the object citizen participation-youth politics, by means of clustering research projects that share findings, theoretical trends, and research interests, organized in study fields that coexist relating to one another, like youth participation from social movements and social identities; youth participation from the lens of public policy, understanding it as a right and as a configuring process, and finally, youth participation read from socio-historical ruptures and cultural mediations.