'Snippets' #1: on refusing a narrowing of what youth peacebuilding can be
Snippets are short, inherently incomplete, reflections offered for provocation and feedback! Here is the first of (hopefully) an irregular series.
This year sees me well within the messy, drawn out process of academic book writing. As some readers will know, out of my recently ended fellowship, I am writing what will hopefully be an accessible, academic, book, tentatively titled Peace Expertise, that will explore the opportunities and complexities of youth engagement with institutions and institutionalising youth-led peace work. As I work through the rich and generous interviews and other materials from the last five years of engaging with the YPS community, and as I grapple with being a human in this frankly often-scary world at the moment, some of my thinking is ‘spilling over’ or exceeding the bounds of the book itself.
And so I thought I would share these as snippets—little reflections, not edited beyond a brief read through, and inherently incomplete and reflective—in the hopes they might be of interest to the community who was so generous to me in this work, and perhaps seed conversations and directions that are both scholarly or practitioner. I named them snippets in the plural, so hopefully you will see future pieces like this!
As always, I value and appreciate feedback, thoughts, your own reflections, even strong disagreement! You’re welcome to use the ‘comment’ feature at the end of this post, reply via whatever social media, or email me. I hope these more frank reflections and workings-out are of interest.
20 Jan 2025
I read an article this morning about the awful cost of the ongoing, largely overlooked war in Sudan. The violence has seen half a million people displaced, now living in famine conditions in refugee camps, and 14,000+ people killed.
The article this morning was a BBC article, by Gladys Kigo, titled “Medics under siege: 'We took this photo, fearing it would be our last'“ focused particularly on the one last remaining hospital functioning in el-Fashar, the only city still under army control in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where the RSF has taken control, and where the violence has caused all other hospitals in the city to close.
This hospital has approximately 30 doctors and 60 nurses still remaining, and is doing absolutely vital work in the midst of a war zone. The article describes the doctors undertaking a life-saving caesarean while the operating theatre is bombed—the debris made the room not sterile, so they cleaned it best they could, changed their gowns, and continued the operation. They took a photo afterwards together to mark the moment, and because they thought that might be their final photo together.
I mention all of this because, in the middle of the article, the BBC quotes the hospital’s medical director: “28-year-old Mudathir Ibrahim Suleiman”. No further mention of his age is made. Dr Suleiman notes the hospital is facing ''a heart-breaking situation that violates all humanitarian and international laws and values''.
I was so struck by the fact that he was 28. So in this news article we are talking about a cost to the medical profession of that war, a cost to the population that depends on these doctors and nurses for medical care (and is entitled to, even in war!), but also we are talking about a young man, that’s what he is, a trained medical professional, running the last remaining hospital in the city.
This is not to say his age is the most noteworthy thing about him, or that we can or should only understand his work (and those of the other medical professionals in the hospital) as extraordinary because of his age.
What struck me as I read was that at 28-years-old, he falls within the age band of relevance to the YPS agenda (per Resolution 2250, its 18-29 in its most limited sense). It has become not uncommon to see with the YPS agenda a disingenuous—or if we are being sympathetic, an unknowing—conflation of the YPS agenda with an agenda for children’s rights. We aren’t talking about children when we talk about YPS. The Children and Armed Conflict agenda exists (since 1999, but owes it’s establishment to the Machel Report in 1996!), it is incredibly important but it is distinct from what YPS promises.
What we’re talking about with the YPS agenda is recognition of “the important and positive contribution of youth in efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security” and affirming the “important role youth can play” (language from the preamble of Res2250). It gives us a way of engaging with, supporting, and both learning from and with youth—in practice: young professionals working in incredibly insecurity, fragile, contexts with expert knowledge about their surroundings. We can learn from them. We can learn with them. We can support them. We can enable their work.
Dr Suleiman, and the other doctors (whose ages are not given in the BBC article), is not doing his work as a young person. But he is a young person doing this work. I think this is where the real potential and real danger lies for the YPS agenda.
Who appears as a YPS actor has had a tendency, in institutional contexts to narrow over the life of the agenda, or perhaps to become fixed. A focus on peace processes in the second resolution (Res2419, 2018) saw youth peace actors become those who were at the table/in the room/outside the room, but still youth wanting to engage formal processes. Successive UN SG reports identify YPS activity by youth at the UN via counting youth briefers in particular. We end up with a picture of what I’ve described previously as ‘the good youth’. This not only makes invisible the troublemakers, or those who don’t conform to institutional expectations; but it also means our imagination of what youth can and already do for peace and security is limited.
I’m not saying that the Sudanese doctors in the BBC piece are ‘youth peacebuilders’. There needs to be a more nuanced conversation about what peace work is and how we account for it which is beyond these messy thoughts. But what this accidental encounter with a passing fact in a random news article this morning prompted for me, is a reflection on who the ‘youth peacebuilder’ is that those who are working ‘on YPS’ want to work with and for.
If YPS becomes simply a way of performatively saying we care about the ‘next generation’, then we have already failed on the promise of what institutionalising an effort to pay attention to this cohort (of current youth) can give us in contributing to peace in the here and now. If we truly see young people like these Sudanese medics (or the thousands of other young people responding to crisis and violence in their professional capacities around the world), if we support their work and validate their contributions, then what we do is position youth not as a separate demographic existing over ‘there’, but rather an inherent and integral feature of a landscape, an environment, of peace and security work.
Last week I offered some perhaps-pessimistic opinions, as part of my contribution to a ‘What to Watch in 2025’ post (where clever colleagues had much more interesting things to say!). So these reflections in this ‘snippet’ continue or echo from that same place of concern. I think what that deeply concerns me about the way in which the agenda is being talked about in some spaces and by some actors is threefold: firstly, as a thing in isolation ‘for youth’, secondly as a thing that is only of and from and at the UN, and thirdly, as ‘managing’ young people rather than recognising what young people offer these incredibly pressing, urgent issues of our time.
These trends towards narrowing the agenda are both at their heart about constructions of youth, but also about constructions of peace. Youth are conceptualised and invoked into a box that is fixed in place and which a ‘youth problem’ is fixable. It is also about conceptions of peace and security that are predicated on states and militaries and defence and security and building bulwarks against a dangerous world; peace here is formal negotiations, it is ceasefire deals; it is not the work of young doctors, or young teachers, or young emergency responders, or young women technology experts, or young engineers that create and sustain community and secure lives.
And so I want to find a way for us as a community of people who care about young people’s contributions to peacebuilding, not just the agenda, but the meaningful contributions youth have long been making to peace and security in their homes, communities, regions and countries to continue to work with and for these youth and our world more broadly.
I don’t mean this in an abstract, fluffy, feel-good way. Instead, how do we take what we’ve been given in this institutional, bureaucratic, formal—whatever the adjective might be—form of having a quote unquote “agenda”, and make the most of this? How do we imagine an expansive and productive vision of youth leadership, youth expertise, youth practice on peace and security that sees it as foundational rather than an optional add on?
I worry that what we’ll see is backsliding and reneging on commitments, or just a quiet abnegation of responsibility and investment. I worry that actors will take the halting ‘progress’ of YPS as evidence that the agenda is unnecessary or that confirms their (limited, preconceived) opinions about the ‘appropriate’ place of youth and make it harder for young people to do their peace work. I worry that youth will see the games being played, the limited characterisations of youth in formal spaces, the (deliberate or not) overlooking of young people’s activities and contributions, and be disheartened and driven away. I think that is dangerous. Especially given the state of the world and what the next few years look like right now.
In the currently (very incomplete) draft of the final chapter of my in-progress book, I look at the activity and engagement ‘beyond’ the formal YPS agenda, and how people—particularly young people—navigate the limited institutional space as advocates and professionals.
One of the concerns with the ‘formal’ or institutional YPS space that was raised frequently in my interviews was that ‘there are simply no jobs’, it is a dead end for career advancement (or simply being able to pay rent). However, one interlocutor, while still being concerned about this, reframed it to say:
So, rather - if the impact is youth-specific peacebuilding work, or the impact is people who were raised or formed by the peacebuilding, the YPS space, moving into the middle and senior leadership in peacebuilding and doing it better than the generations before because we've been connected so much longer and built skills throughout this process. I think that itself would be a big win (young man, in his 20s)
I spend some time with this quote and its implications in the in-progress chapter. This idea that YPS is not just an institutional policy agenda, but a commitment to youth-specific, youth-inclusive peacebuilding, enables a view that people can take this commitment into other roles and spaces, can ‘seed’ the ground in new ways. This idea is one I return to often as I confront the frustration I feel around the lack of meaningful commitment to the tenets of the agenda by member states and UN bodies and international organisations that champion(ed) the agenda when convenient.
This little snippet post probably won’t get many views, because I’m writing on the eve of the inauguration of Trump, and it will be hawkish takes on what this means for global security that will dominate our scrolls and newsfeeds. But I would argue that the current moment makes it even more urgent, even more important, to refuse characterisations of youth that infantalise and reify them, and instead ask how in the absence of institutional interest and political will, do we sustain and build community?; how do we challenge narratives that limit peace to formal tables and besuited men and restrict security to armaments and defence policies?; how do we return to the root of what came before—to youth-led peacebuilding as a holistic, reciprocal, embedded practice that is the underpinnings of peaceful and security societies?…
I write this with frustration and hope, and end it with space for a pause, for an ellipses. Is this too heavy for the start of a week? This is just a snippet, a processing-out-loud as my thinking, writing, and work on the book itself continues. Thanks for coming along.
Very insightful and thought-provoking piece
Inspiring