The State of Israel’s control of the West Bank and their creation of settlements has led to feelings of frustration amongst the Palestinian population. The significance of the next generation in a conflict that has been ongoing for generations becomes crucial when aiming for peace, as the youth of today will be the adults of tomorrow. Therefore, this study researches how Palestinian university students perceives the Israeli settlements as well as examining whether if the Relative Deprivation Theory can explain these potential perceptions and the possible willingness amongst Palestinian students to participate in social movements. The methodology is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with ten Palestinian students from Bethlehem University, which then has been analysed. The results of this study indicate that the respondents feel deprived of seven different themes, namely (1) Demolition, (2) Economy, (3) Freedom of Movement, (4) Freedom of Speech, (5) Permits, (6) Resources and (7) Services. Furthermore, the result shows that nine out of ten respondents are, or have been, participating in activities to achieve social change. In addition to feeling deprived of the seven different themes, all the respondents also felt frustration and/or negative feelings towards the existence of Israeli settlements. The analysis focuses on how the respondents partake in social movements as well as what their opinions about the resistance activities are. It became clear that all the respondents feel, or have felt, a willingness to participate in activities to achieve social change. However, the respondents use different forms of activities, such as protesting in the streets, demonstrating, and/or raising awareness, but there is an overarching social movement which focuses on “the Palestinian cause”. Finally, this study supports the idea of Relative Deprivation Theory, as the willingness to partake in social movements seems to be high amongst the respondents due to them being deprived of essential services and resources.

The purpose of this study is to examine the opinions of the land reform by the young population in Stellenbosch, South Africa. So far, the land reform that was implemented already in 1994, has not proven to be effective on the country’s huge inequality of land ownership between the black and white population. The white minority still own the majority of the land, due to historical injustices that developed through colonisation of South Africa and during the apartheid rule.  Since 2014, the discussions of the land reform have got more attention, both nationally and internationally, due to a new policy proposal called land expropriation without compensation. The objective of the thesis were therefore to gain an understanding on the perception of the land reform by both black and white people. To accomplish this, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with seven people from black ethnicities and seven people from white ethnicities. The interviews were outlined to analyse how grievance would be affected by the land reform, as well as if the respondents answers differed due to homogeneous characteristics. The main results from this research was that there were no indication on that the level of relative deprivation would be affected by the land reform. Although, the majority of the respondents stressed the importance of the land reform to be given the right support and attention by the government in order to be successful. This could in turn be seen as problematic whereas most of them did not express much trust for the government. In addition, the perception by the land reform could generally not be interconnected to a certain background characteristics. The answers to both of the research questions could be explained by the uncertainty about the implementation of the land reform.