New book: Youth and Sustainable Peacebuilding
Today is publication day for a new edited collection on youth and sustainable peacebuilding!
I’m very excited that today Youth and Sustainable Peacebuilding is now published through Manchester University Press. I had the joy of co-editing this volume with Professor Siobhan McEvoy-Levy and Professor Catherine Bolten over the past few years. We’ve had the privilege of working with our brilliant contributors, which include academics of all career stages and geographic diversity, and several chapters authored or co-authored with youth peacebuilders themselves.
You can currently get 30% off the book with the code EVENT30 (use at checkout).
Almost twenty years ago, Siobhan edited a pathbreaking volume called Troublemakers or Peacemakers?: Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building. This volume was one of the first consolidated efforts to bring together knowledge and scholarship on the role of youth in post-conflict contexts. Personally, as a postgraduate scholar at the time, it absolutely affected the path of my research by showing me that it was possible to do research that took young people’s experiences of war and peace seriously, and placed their knowledge at the centre of study.
In this way, it is a true privilege to work with Siobhan, along with the incredible Catherine Bolten also (honestly, read her amazing book Serious Youth), to ask colleagues to reflect on the state of the field in the present moment and the big questions that face this work—both as scholars and for practitioners.
What the book is about
The presence of an international agenda on ‘Youth, Peace and Security’ changes the landscape by formalising and in some ways legitimising the inclusion of youth in peacebuilding. But it also raises many questions, and presents a new articulation of the persistent issue of tokenism and the slippery concept of ‘meaningful’ participation.
Contributors to our volume, in many diverse ways, provided answers to and reflections on three key issues that emerge at this junction. Firstly, whose security does YPS promote? Security for youth or security from them? Secondly, does a UN agenda of including youth in peacebuilding resolve problems of securitisation and stereotyping of youth and/or does it create new problems? And thirdly, in what ways are youth conceptualising and building peace outside of both institutional discourses of inclusion and narratives of securitisation?
For peace to be sustainable—as we have framed it in this volume—it must be understood as interconnected in multi-scalar and multi-temporal ways. We must take seriously the local and global and links between them also. We must pay attention to how the conditions for violence and insecurity are fostered through problematic policy frameworks, historic and cultural framings of social worlds, and the complex landscapes of conflict and post conflict life. If we understand this as where peace happens, it follows that youth must be an integral part to understand what peace looks like.
You can read the introduction to the volume here [pdf].
Structure of the book
The volume is structured in three parts that broadly relate to these key questions; but we encourage readers to engage between and across sections and chapters also (as we all know, there are no easy answers).
In Part I, authors consider ‘States and their ‘youth problems’. This section critically unpacks how the securitisation and stereotyping of youth occurs and is naturalised.
This includes contributions from Netra Eng and Caroline Hughes on generational ordering in Cambodia, Obasesam Okoi on Nigeria’s oil region, and Anna Fett with a valuable historicising analysis on the US’s ‘youth bulge’ talk.
In Part II, authors push ‘beyond inclusion’ to consider ‘institutions and the challenges of (transformative) participation’. Here, authors interrogate where and why the blockages to youth participation in formal peacebuilding are exclusionary by design, and where this happens ‘accidentally’.
Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli examines inclusion of young people in transitional justice in Colombia, Catherine Bolten asks what ‘seriousness’ means for youth participation in peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, Ali Altiok questions the entanglement of YPS with counterterrorism, I consider how radical notions of youth participation are blunted in YPS policy, and Caitlin Mollica explores informal and formal engagement with youth in transitional justice.
Finally, in Part III, authors explore how sustainable peace requires “youth leading the way”. Contributors here respond to these securitising and exclusionary dynamics with insights and recommendations that are grounded in the active agency of youth as pluralistic peacebuilders in their own diverse phases, geographic locations and states of ‘conflict’.
Angie Lederach carefully reveals the relationships between environmental care, intergenerational relations, and peace in Colombia; Jaimarsin Lewis, Siobhan McEvoy-Levy, Karayjus Perry, Trinity Perry, and Julio Trujillo show what truly participatory action research can look like by examining what peacebuilding means for out-of-school BIPOC youth in the US; Katrina Lee-Koo and Lesley Pruitt explore the gendered dimensions of young women’s peacebuilding in Asia and the Pacific; South Sundanese youth peacebuilders, Emmily Koiti, Bush Buse Laki, and Chara Nyaura describe lessons from their own peace practice with insights for international community; Prashan de Visser writes about the work of Global Unites; and Justin De Leon and Jordan Bighorn consider what it means to ‘build a new lodge’ for Native youth and peacebuilding in North America.
I am so grateful to our authors who brought so much to this project, persisting through a pandemic, exchanging feedback and ideas in virtual workshops, and generously sharing their own work and thinking. Together, we hope the volume offers avenues for new thinking to overcome deeply rooted obstacles of hegemonic gerontocracy, taking youth seriously but without romanticising their roles in three key parts of sustainable peacebuilding: security, participation and peace leadership.
A book for scholars and practitioners
I always know it has been a good intellectual project when I am left with a notebook of new questions after working through the ones that prompted the work in the first place. I definitely have a notebook of questions still to answer. But I know, thanks to the careful work of our fabulous authors, and the wonderful support of my co-editors, that this volume helps lay out pathways and approaches I will pick up in my own work into the future. I hope it may offer similar opportunities to others who may read it. For those in academic environments, we’d love if you recommended it to your library for purchase.
We wanted the book to be of interest to both our incredible scholarly community as well as the lively and inquisitive practitioner community working on finding ways to build sustainable peace, with, for and by youth themselves. While the book is not open-access, it is available simultaneously in paperback (academic books are usually released in (very expensive) hardback first, and often a year later in paperback). We hope this might make it more accessible for practitioners.
You can currently get 30% off the book: EVENT30 (use at checkout).
Siobhan, Catherine and I are also exceedingly grateful for the very generous endorsements we’ve received for the book from leading academics and practitioners including Alpaslan Özerdem, Bina D'Costa, and Graeme Simpson.
'In focusing on youth-centered activism and approaches to peace, this volume challenges - and potentially contributes to changing - what 'experts' and policymakers believe they know about peacebuilding. This agenda-setting volume offers a rich contribution to the Youth and Peace and Security (YPS) agenda - at the intersection of policy, practice, and scholarship, as well as in the ways that local YPS practice can sophisticate and define global policy.'
Graeme Simpson, Principal Representative (NY) & Senior Peacebuilding Adviser, Interpeace. Lead Author of the Independent UN Progress Study on YPS: The Missing Peace
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‘The aspirations and lived experiences of young people are at the heart of this book. Rich in detail, the compelling and fresh interpretations unmask both tensions and possibilities of the YPS agenda. Contributors reveal underlying injustices, oppression, and co-optation of young lives. We learn how inherently securitised, environmental, and economic stresses marginalise young people. The empirical evidence persuasively tells us that collective sharing of knowledge and a radical vision of youth participation and inclusion are prerequisites in the transformative practices of peace. A must-read for academics and practitioners of youth, sustainable peace, and justice.’
Bina D'Costa, Professor of International Relations, Australian National University
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'With the participation of the youth in contemporary peacebuilding processes, we face two main challenges. First, young people are often seen as a problem or potential agent of conflict, and second, even if their potential as an agent of peace is recognized, the basis of their participation is often tokenism at best. This is why Youth and sustainable peacebuilding is a must-read for researchers and practitioners, as this volume tackles both challenges head-on with excellent contributions on a myriad of critical issues, processes, and cases.'
Alpaslan Özerdem, Dean of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, George Mason University
A reminder that the introduction to the volume can be read here [pdf].
Please do reach out to myself or any of our authors if you are interested in hosting an event about the book or particular themes within it. I am very happy to speak to academics or practitioners about these themes and the work within the volume.
[As always, just like with any academic work of mine, if you do not have means to access it, please reach out to me. I’m happy to help facilitate access to what you want to read]