A moment of reflection

A few observations on the future of YPS as my fellowship ends

Photo by Donna McL on Unsplash

This week marks my return to my teaching and research role after spending the last four years on an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship exploring youth leadership and the Youth, Peace and Security agenda. While the research and engagement will of course continue (there are so many plans in the works, stay tuned!), I thought it was timely to offer a brief reflection on both the work I’ve done, and some thoughts on the state of the YPS agenda and youth inclusive peacebuilding more broadly.

It has an enormous privilege to spend these past years with dedicated time to focus on research in this area and working with amazing academics, youth activists, and allies. Before anything else, thank you to all who supported this work and made it possible—across timezones and Zoom screens and Whatsapp messages and eventual in-person meetings with some—I am incredibly grateful for the openness and willingness people have expressed for this work and I hope I have/ can continue to do justice what has been shared with me.

So, what have I done?

While I have been researching and working in the space of young people and peace and conflict for almost fifteen years, it has been the last five years where I have been able to focus particularly on the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda.

An Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship allows the recipient to focus full time on a research project for three years. They are highly competitive and it continues to humble me that I received one. Disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, time off due to personal health challenges, and a move to a new university, meant in practical terms I spent four calendar years on the fellowship.

Very briefly, what have I done? Well, I have spent the last five years closely engaged with youth and non-youth practitioners in the ‘YPS community’ and beyond, globally.

In 2019 I was invited to Helsinki, Finland, for a high-level event on youth inclusion in peace processes organised by the UN and co-hosted by the governments of Finland, Qatar and Colombia. On the back of this event, I undertook interviews with individuals who had been involved in the advocacy towards the first UNSC resolution on YPS.

Since my DECRA commenced in 2020, due to the generosity of practitioners, who have invited me in and accepted my presence and participation with encouragement and even enthusiasm, I have been able to virtually attend numerous closed meetings, public events, webinars and High-Level events relating to the YPS agenda as a ‘participant-observer’.

When I say numerous, I mean it. I’ve spent over 250 hours in Zooms and other virtual forums. While I’m exceptionally grateful for the access virtual formats provided, let me tell you 9am in NY is approximately midnight in Australia, and I am not a night owl as this selection of screenshots from my extensive research notes over the years attests (I can assure readers that most of my notes are coherent and helpful!):

I’ve also undertaken about 50 virtual interviews with youth and adult practitioners, activists, bureaucrats, and policymakers working on and around the YPS agenda; conducted a virtual survey for youth peacebuilders; and created a database of over 200 documents relating to the agenda (in the process of trying to make this public and searchable).

As part of all of this, it has been a joy to engage with a community of like minded people who may not understand quite why I’ve got the first YPS resolution, the first WPS resolution, and the 2015 Amman Youth Declaration stuck on my office wall but definitely appreciated it when it came up in interviews! (if you want to know one specific reason, you can read my recent chapter in the book I co-edited, where I talk about how YPS has been institutionalised, here).

So, as I come to the formal conclusion of my DECRA, while the research and writing will go on (see here for a summary of fellowship outputs), as will the participation and engagement with the YPS community, I thought I would offer five observations about the YPS agenda, looking forward and looking back. I draw on my fellowship work in offering these, and any quotes shared here come from this research and have necessary approvals to be used. In sharing them via this newsletter, I’ve chosen to not use names or nationalities.

Five Observations about YPS

1.     Young people are the backbone of all success.

It is undeniable that the existence of the first YPS resolution, Resolution 2250 in 2015, was due to the careful advocacy of a coalition of youth and non-youth working across UN, civil society, and Member State boundaries (you can read about this process in my open-access piece, here).  

However, where we chose to start the story is a choice, and over the past few years I have become increasingly vocal about the need to recognise that none of the formal architecture, or even space to advocate for an agenda in the first place, would have been possible without the committed work and persistence of youth peacebuilders themselves, who for years before formal attention from the UN worked in their communities, regions and countries to build peace and respond to insecurity.

I can’t even begin to summarise the myriad stories and work that youth peacebuilders have shared with me through my interviews. So let me share two examples of young people talking about their political engagement in peace and responding to violence. Both these examples are talking about engagement that pre-dates the first YPS resolution and are just two of the many stories that were shared. This one:

I started years ago… going to protest and march and going against the State, going against the [government] or the regime or the – yeah, the regime and well I have to live repression, like a lot of my friends. I have to breathe the toxic gases that the police throw at us.  I remember that even one day I have to go to enter the house of a stranger, because if I didn’t do it they will catch me and I will end up in jail. This is my life. There is no other choice.

(interview 2022, 24-year-old young man)

Or this story:

I think I started without even realising that I’m already in peace work because of a personal experience, or when I was 15 years old, 13 years old, rather.  So, I come from [a country with a conflict and a peace process].  In 2008 [details redacted] … our community was attacked by [the armed group] and that personal experience was the start of my peace building work.

 So, I lived near the centre of a very small town and when it happened I was second year at high school then, so my family needs to evacuate the place.  It was a horrible experience, I never thought that I’d be scared to go home…. In response to this I found others who were scared, and together we became part of the whole network, and I continued the work until today in different organisations.

(interview 2022, 27-year-old young woman)

Youth peacebuilders, in their own contexts around the world, and through their own networked efforts for peacebuilding, created the space for it to be possible to conceive of an agenda that took young people’s voices and contributions seriously. The attention of institutions like the UN is only the next step in a story that has a long history and will continue to have a long future, thanks to the tireless, often precarious and risky, work of youth peacebuilders themselves.

2.     An uphill battle to counter problematic stereotypes and assumptions about youth.  

In his 2018 Independent Progress Study on YPS, The Missing Peace, Graeme Simpson evocatively described the “contagious stereotypes” that link youth with violence:

The overarching consequence of these negative stereotypes is that they contribute to the marginalization and stigmatization of youth by framing young people as a problem to be solved and a threat to be contained. Moreover, these myths and assumptions have fuelled “policy panic”…[…]… ignoring the fact that most young people are in fact not involved in violence. (2018: x)

These stereotypes definitely persist, and present one of the biggest challenges to the success of the agenda. While we might expect certain actors to perpetuate these negative framings for their own self-interest (see, for example, my discussion of the Russian Federation’s and China’s persistent misrepresentations of youth in Security Council debates on YPS in chapter accessible here), we can also see allies sometimes reproducing problematic assumptions about youth capacity and capabilities.

I want to emphasise that overwhelmingly the YPS space, as I’ve encountered it, and as those who work within it shared with me over the past years, is an inclusive space where people work very hard to counter hierarchies and support collaborative relationships and work. However, it is also important to recognise that there is room for improvement, and how these kinds of encounters which I’ve seen in events and meetings over the past few years can undermine the work of advocates.

While youth might be ‘included’ they are still rarely ‘partners’. This is in part because of naturalised hierarchies and norms that structure ‘how things are done’, and exacerbated by allies reproducing expectations and practices that are at odds with young people’s own experiences and expertise. Allies need to confront and work out these discrepancies within their own practice, to enable the strongest critique to be made of those actors who deliberately reproduce these harmful stereotypes.

3.     The expertise of young people must be recognised for real progress to occur.

If one key challenge is the persistence of negative stereotypes about youth, a related challenge in terms of how youth are perceived centres on the many ways in which young people are only seen as able to share their ‘experiences’ and not their ‘expertise’.  A particularly good example of this was shared with me by one young woman, who described an encounter with an older man she met at a YPS event:

…he was just like, what is a young woman like you from [Latin American country] doing here? Like just very condescending…. I was not very happy with that attitude from his side and we just began talking and he asked me some questions … and after he heard my answers and that I have experience both in the field and research and that I even have language skills for many languages - but I had to prove myself. Afterwards he said, oh no, yeah, you have experience and we can work together on this, but it was just so frustrating to hear him being that way.

(interview 2021, 29-year-old young woman)

Like all agendas that work to expand inclusion, whether it be WPS or queering peace and security, or disability rights, (or many more) the YPS agenda itself is contested, characterised by inequality in power, and premised on logics and practices that can–deliberately or not–(re)inforce exclusions and circumscribe the nature of participation (see my co-authored introduction to our recent edited book for more on the challenges here).

Another example from my interviews comes from this discussion about a report that was requested, explicitly as a youth-led/ youth-written report by a youth-serving civil society organisation. This young women explains:

For the youth, peace and security report that we wrote, we wrote it three times and it was deleted three times. We told them, this is our opinion. This is how we see youth should be engaging. Then experts who are 40 and 50 years old fixed this report for us. Of course they would say, what is this? No, this should not happen.

Actually, that made us so demotivated. You [the adult-led org] are telling us “tell us your opinion as young people on youth, peace and security and their engagement”. Then you are telling me, no, an expert said it shouldn't happen this way. Okay, so I'm not an expert, I'm a young person [laughs]. There is a gap between both languages here.

(2021, 24-year-old young woman)

Participation of youth in institutionalised spaces is often contained and can be seen to be tokenistic. Young people are often invited into these spaces to legitimise decisions that have already been made, or which will not be substantively revised because of youth participation. Practices of expanding inclusion must be accompanied by recognition of not just the capacity, but the expertise of youth themselves (stay tuned for more on expertise, as I am currently writing my book that emerges from this research, tentatively titled Peace Expertise at present—I think this is called a ‘teaser’ ;)).

4.     It's the system, stupid.

YPS faces many challenges. But many of them are familiar to other activists working to crack open the door of traditional ways of doing things, to expand the range of actors whose contributions to peace and security can be recognised and supported.

Feminist theorist, Cynthia Enloe, reminds us in The Curious Feminist that “later’ is a patriarchal timezone” (2004, 215). Patriarchy as an organising principle harms and oppresses along gendered lines, but also as an ageist categorisation. I’m currently working with the wonderful Marshall Beier on a paper we presented at the International Studies Convention this March, on how we need to think/ theorise paternalism when we think/theorise patriarchy: that these are interconnected systems of oppression that both work to defer and devalue the work and expertise of both women and youth (again, stay tuned! I told you that all the work was continuing :)).

Very early in this YPS project, I had the pleasure of speaking to one of the youth advocates who was working specifically towards the first UNSC Resolution. In our conversation she noted this intersection, and the power politics at play in structures and society more broadly that are built on patriarchal assumptions:

Young person: I mean, YPS and WPS it’s also about patriarchy. It’s about understanding power and who has power and who doesn't have power, and how the current system of power is a system of patriarchy and how its screwing over old people and young—well its screwing over everyone. But that link between patriarchal ways of thinking and seeking power, and how young people are disenfranchised by it is a bit underexplored…

Helen: And yet that's at the heart of the challenges facing young people entering these spaces. Fundamentally. 

Young person: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because peace and security is the old men's field.

(interview 2019, young woman)

Stay tuned for more work on the intersections of gender and age and the WPS and YPS agendas that I’m working on with the fabulous Katrina Leclerc. But for now, let me reiterate that over and over again in interviews with youth peacebuilders and in virtual sessions to do with the agenda, youth and women are either (still) problematically homogenised, or are pitted against each other in competition for resources, time, attention. This is dangerous and unproductive for both agendas; especially if we want to change the fact that “peace and security [still!] is the old men’s field”.

5.     Put your money (and more) where your mouth is.

In many ways this is the most important point to make. But it also is the most straightforward. For the YPS agenda to succeed in institutional form/s it simply must be fully and sustainably resourced.

Crucially, it is important to note that young people will continue to engage in peacebuilding work, they will continue to be on the front line of communities and situations where violence is present, they will continue to not only engage but lead in developing and implementing responses to insecurity and support for those affected by violence.

However, their work will be easier, safer, and more successful, if they are appropriately resourced. We are still using the (at the time excellent!) survey from 2017 done by UNOY and Search (which really needs to be redone and updated (but again, resources are an issue!), but this report tells us that most youth-led organisations are 95%+ run on volunteer labour and majority run on less than US$5000 a year. I don’t think those numbers have changed much in the past 6 years. If anything, I suspect they have worsened.

This requires meaningful, sustainable, longer-term (not project-based) resourcing of youth-led initiatives. There is some excellent work being done by both academics (see Caitlin Mollica’s piece here) and practitioners (see the work by Dag Hammarskjöld and many others here and here), on how resourcing can be achieved. But it requires Member States and other institutions to commit to investing, and the landscape is dire at present.

This is not just a question of youth being able to ‘do peacebuilding work’, but an existential threat to youth peacebuilders themselves. Without appropriate resourcing and support, the work they do, particularly with the rhetorical commitments and exposure on international stages, dramatically heightens their insecurity and the risks they face in their own contexts. Meaningful protection is high on the agenda of YPS practitioners; it needs resourcing to ensure it is attainable. Lives literally depend on it.

Conclusions

I could go on and on here. But I’ll save it for the book and other publications that are still in progress ;). For now, I think the most important take-away from much of this work is something I’ve heard repeatedly over the past five years:

That is that YPS is not an agenda for youth. YPS is an agenda that will benefit everyone. Including youth as partners helps ensure most stable and secure societies for everyone.

Inclusion is not only meant to benefit the population being ‘included’. Youth peacebuilders have told me repeatedly that their goal is peace, is reduction in violence, is justice and human rights, is simply knowing their mother can get medicine reliably, or their sister will be able to finish high school.

It is a precarious time for inclusive peacebuilding agendas. The obstacles are immense, and the challenges are real. However, youth themselves are committed and there are plenty of other people working hard to support them. This is the hope that I take away from these last few years, and the energy I will continue to bring to this ongoing work as it continues after the fellowship formally ends.

If you want to know more about the specific outputs of the DECRA project you can find all those details collected at my website, here. If you’re not yet subscribed to the YPS Observer (this substack) then please do subscribe (and share with a friend if you are already subscribed!). This is the best way to receive updates about my own research, and about things I find interesting or important in the YPS space.

With thanks to all who have supported this work, supported me, and been patient and remained enthusiastic despite my necessary absences at times these past years. It has been a joy to get to know you and I look forward to continuing work in this space. I’m indebted to my scholarly community of friends and colleagues who share the same interest in young people and politics, and the same belief in the importance of research in this space. I’m incredibly grateful to the committed and supportive practitioner community of those working in and around ‘YPS’ and youth inclusive peacebuilding more broadly. You should also keep an eye out for the fabulous youth researcher-practitioners who are around, working on fabulous and fascinating doctorates—they are the future of youth and peace work, and it’s a privilege to learn from them constantly.

I look forward to continuing all these conversations. Thanks for reading and your interest in both my work and more importantly, the necessity of recognising young people’s leadership for peace and security.