International Relations
While institutions and processes may be designed to bring young people in to ‘participate’, young people are leading and creating in peacebuilding on their own terms. Despite attention to young people’s activities for peace being relatively recent, youth have never been absent from conflict prevention, peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts. Yet many of their efforts are at best ignored or discounted by official organisations, and, at worst, stymied or co-opted. This chapter argues for attention to young people’s peacebuilding as a ‘world-building’ endeavour, grounded in identity, place and lived experience, shaped by the contestation of young people’s exclusion from formal spaces, and committed to visions of intersectional, intergenerational efforts and the creation of alternative understandings of peace work. Youth leadership in peacebuilding reframes what peace means and where it happens, it draws attention to a broader range of ways of doing peace.
The Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda encapsulates a significant and enduring tension between the persuasive and problematic narrative of young people’s potential for violence and delinquency, and the idealistic notion of ‘meaningful participation’ of youth. Arguing that youth participation is conditional in elite spaces of peacebuilding, this chapter unpacks the ways in which the YPS agenda was born within the contradictions of the promise of youth-inclusive peace and the pressures of global attention to countering violent extremism. In this we see a reproduction of securitised discourses of youth that serve to limit the spaces in which young people can participate, and a concomitant romanticisation of the notion of youth participation. The chapter points to the need for a more nuanced understanding of youth political participation that addresses the narrowing of focus of the YPS agenda as it continues to develop. It argues that it is deeply counter-productive to link youth inclusion and participation with counter-terrorism and recommends that the YPS agenda should resist being paired with and operating within international counter-terrorism policies and approaches. This chapter also raises the concern that YPS will be used by governments to suppress youth protest and participation in civic spaces and will increase ‘political alienation and exclusion of young people’.
Youth who are out-of-school, but not yet either in college or in a career, have important contributions to make to peacebuilding praxis. Too often, though, they are simply the subjects of peacebuilding or completely ignored. This chapter is a collaboration between three out-of-school Black and biracial teenagers, a Latino university undergraduate student, and a white college professor in the US Midwest. It highlights the racialised injustices of exclusion in the US with an emphasis on youth grappling with the challenges of violence and peace in their daily lives. Using Participant Action Research (PAR), sustained relationship-building and paid educational opportunities, the authors of the chapter and their collaborators develop an approach to surfacing the peacebuilding knowledge and experience of out-of-school youth and show that marginalised young people face a world of pressures that constrain their agency. The pressures are multiple and interlocking and lead to survival mode planning based on lack of money, family demands, conforming to gender stereotypes, guilt and self-blame, police and school discrimination and anticipated threats of crime and violence. Yet, as they are close witnesses to the causes and consequences of a lack of peace, marginalised youth are also often urgently involved in peace(building) on their own terms. By focusing on the lives of BIPOC youth in the United States, this chapter asks readers to critically reflect on what ‘peacebuilding’ is, who it is for and how more inclusive and sustainable approaches to peace can be imagined and enacted.
This chapter attends to the reciprocal, multi-species and intergenerational relations of care undertaken by campesino youth in Colombia. It draws on twenty-two months of ethnographic research with communities in the conflict-affected territory of Montes de María to explore the efforts undertaken to reweave the social and ecological fabrics of their communities after conflict. The continued stigmatisation and political, social and ecological insecurity facing campesino communities in the region is recognised by youth. The shared, underlying sense of urgency to create liveable conditions for youth in the campo (countryside) animates the collective struggle to ‘build peace from and for the territory’ across generations in Montes de María. The chapter pays careful attention to the ways in which youth establish roots (arraigarse) and establish young people as ‘generational successors’ (relevo generacional), highlighting the ways in which youth peacebuilding in situations of ongoing insecurity and dispossession is engaged and understood as situated, relational and reciprocal.
This chapter draws connections between the contemporary global Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda and framings of youth in US Cold War foreign policy. Official discourse in both periods demonstrates concern about the strategic or security implications of a ‘too large’ global youth population. The chapter investigates the ‘emphasis on youth’ that emerged during the John F. Kennedy administration in its establishment of the Inter-Agency Youth Commission. It argues that this programme revealed a discourse of youth as bifurcated, where young leaders in developing countries were identified simultaneously as a threat to the expansion of ‘democracy’ and US domination, and as the best hope for peace, as their ability to influence the next generation could also support US interests abroad. The chapter argues that the Agency was designed to surveil, co-opt and influence young leaders to support American democracy, on the basis of the assumption that, without this influence, they would actively oppose the United States. Thus the narrative generated youth as a problem to be solved before they became the ‘leaders’ who would endanger US supremacy abroad. The chapter is concerned that the contemporary YPS agenda is likely to be implemented by powerful states following similar patterns of focusing on strategic foreign youth to be moulded in their own images.
The chapter demonstrates that, despite persistent marginalisation, young women lead for peace. Drawing on interviews with young women leaders in Asia and the Pacific, it explores the challenges young women face and their leadership in peacebuilding efforts. Young women’s leadership is pivotal to sustainable peacebuilding, including through enhancing gender equality and women’s human rights and ensuring young people’s contributions. Young women adopt creative ways to support each other and to build peace in ways that respond to, resist and challenge their exclusion from peacebuilding. Gendered forms of exclusion can be addressed, and young women’s leadership can be better recognised and supported to ensure sustainable peace in their broader communities.
This book examines the ways in which youth have been characterised by states, how they institutionally ‘participate’ in peacebuilding, and how they have generated peacebuilding processes outside of official systems of power. A comprehensive look at youth and peacebuilding is critical because this moment in world politics marks the institutionalisation of the United Nations’ Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda. The contributions to the volume explore the significance of YPS and analyse important issues of sustainable peacebuilding through a youth lens. They draw on a variety of case studies and examples, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, North America, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, South Africa, Timor-Leste and various countries in the Asia-Pacific. The volume bridges between attention to youth in the Global South and the Global North, challenging construction of the Other to be securitised and have peace built upon them. Concerns that are highlighted throughout the book include: Whose security and peace does YPS promote? Security for youth or security from them? Does an ‘inclusion’ agenda solve these problems of securitisation, or does it create new problems? In what ways are youth building peace outside of both institutional discourses of inclusion and narratives of securitisation? The volume assembles a unique cohort of leading scholars of youth and peacebuilding, the next generation of emerging field experts, young activists and those critical of and those intimately involved in shaping the YPS agenda. Throughout, our volume emphasises a critical approach to peacebuilding with, for and by youth.
This chapter draws attention to the political and politicised nature of youth participation in transitional justice while exploring ways in which formal and informal mechanisms may be bridged. Empowering young people in the design and implementation of transitional justice mechanisms can enable more responsive approaches to accountability and impunity. However, such mechanisms often reinscribe institutional processes that nurture a ‘politicised’ form of justice over transformative models that are more able to recognise young people’s contributions. Through exploration of examples from South Africa, Timor-Leste and Kenya, the chapter considers the enabling and constraining factors of transitional justice mechanisms for young people’s engagement, drawing attention to the importance of informal arts-based forms of participation in (ex)pressing claims for justice.
With a focus on Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising (2018), this chapter maps how a larger justice story develops around conflicting interpersonal relations, while at the same time attending to the larger geopolitical story and a darkness-based colonial imaginary. Attentive to the cartographic and subjective repositioning made possible by Kate Ashby’s locus of enunciation, we illustrate how the international criminal justice regime and humanitarian reason is entangled with violent shadow worlds that are revealed when she confronts the fraught exchanges within which values are occulted, institutions created, and personal relationships built. Ultimately, these violent shadow worlds are brought to the fore when one attends to the violence-laundering and implicit practices of exchange along with what we call “the burying, burrowing, and blinding” practices that Black Earth Rising depicts. Through an investigative montage, the series provides insights into shadow worlds behind and beneath the large geopolitical theater as well as the maps of justice, atrocity, and intimacy that connect Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Hague, France, London, and the U.S.
This chapter turns to consensual and dissensual modes of separation to illustrate how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned the present into a time of intense separation, one of which is between those bodies marked as essential versus non-essential, those that have ‘pre-existing conditions’ and those without, and those located in precarious zones of abandonment, congestion, and containment, and those that, owing to prevailing economic distancing and apartness, can practice a life of social distancing. These precarious lives are rendered in intimate portraits and scenarios in Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs (a media genre that sees the world more patiently and in a more socially contextualized way than most news media) and Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2002). With these aesthetic readings of precarious migrant lives in London, we look at moments of solidarity among exploitable “night people” who work illegally in the hospitality industry. Ultimately, our reflections on aesthetic separation/separation aesthetics in the wake of the pandemic help map the dynamics of visibility/invisibility, community/immunity, hospitality/hostility that the contemporary politics of the pandemic amplifies.