This book presents a series of portraits of youth's involvement in community service and activism from various cultures and nations. One purpose of this global sampling is to gain an estimate of the political and moral development of contemporary youth insofar as it signifies what to expect from the next generation of citizens as we approach the twenty-first century. An equally important goal of this sampling is to learn more about the ways in which diverse governmental structures and formal socializing institutions affect youth's construction of political-moral identities.

Perhaps because we are approaching the end of the millennium, much hesitancy has been expressed about the present generation of youth and its ability to carry on and help reform our political and moral traditions. Some commentators have bemoaned the universal spread of the modern “youth culture” of MTV, jeans, and fast food around the globe. They also have criticized a rising interest in material possessions, coupling it with a fear that youth have placed hedonistic pleasure ahead of social obligation.

Without denying facts, many of us who study youth professionally believe that the evidence needs to be viewed carefully and that negative cases surely should not be generalized to youth at large. For example, in the United States, crimes against property, by far the largest category of juvenile crime, have held at a steady rate over the past 25 years (Siegel & Senna, 1994), and, although violent juvenile crime has increased in recent years, it still involves a small proportion of all youth (Siegel & Senna, 1994).