What's in Store in 2024?
A busy year ahead for institutions, advocates, and academics of YPS
It’s a new year and 2024 promises to be a busy one for those interested in the Youth, Peace and Security agenda, and in the potential of youth-led peacebuilding more broadly. It also brings a new way of sharing my reflections, commentary, and observations about the agenda and youth-inclusive peacebuilding; thanks for being here.
As 2024 began, youth in many parts of the world did not celebrate with fireworks and house parties, but rather with skies full of explosions and hiding in bomb shelters. 2023 saw continued fighting in Ukraine, an overlooked crisis in Sudan that has led to the world’s largest displacement crisis (a majority of whom are youth and children), genocidal acts against Gaza that have outstripped any recent conflicts and led to the UNICEF spokesman describing Gaza as a ‘graveyard for children’, as well as ongoing violence, rise of authoritarian parties and governments, growing journalistic repression and shrinking civic space.
It paints a grim picture of the challenges facing youth and their allies around the world. However, despite such significant and concerning challenges, youth continue to lead efforts to build more peaceful, secure and stable societies.
In 2024 youth peacebuilders and their allies across civil society, local, regional and national governments, regional organisations, and global institutions are planning and continuing their work.
What to watch for in 2024:
There is lots on the horizon this year, including some exciting in-progress work by youth peacebuilders and youth-serving CSOs. To start the year, here are three things to watch at institutional levels. This is not to imply attention should always start with the institutions; and as Rebecca Solnit reminds us in her wonderful book Hope in the Dark, that mushrooms give us a glorious metaphor for the work that is often less visible but which has the greatest impact (and I will talk (write?) your ear off about them later in the year).
1. UN Secretary-General’s 3rd Report on YPS
The SG’s third report on YPS is due to be published in the first half of this year. Mandated by Resolution 2419 (2018), this third report will focus on progress on the agenda and highlight key areas of focus for the next two years.
Why it matters?
The biennial SG’s report is an important accountability mechanism for the YPS agenda. For the first three years of the agenda there was no reporting requirement and the agenda relied on friendly Member States to place it on the UN Security Council agenda with mixed results. The SG reports enable accounting of actions and activities by UN Member States, as well as UN bodies, missions, and peacekeeping operations. Submissions and information is solicited widely by the penholders, and the opportunity to ‘take stock’ offers those working on the YPS agenda insights and direction for their work
What should we expect?
The first two SG reports (2020, 2022) both emphasised the consistent core messages of the agenda around the crucial importance of inclusion of youth and of the imperative of protection of youth peacebuilders and advocates in an increasingly insecure context. It is expected that this one will further develop and reflect on these.
In addition to these core messages, the first SG report pointed to the need to adequately fund youth peacebuilding work, and since 2020 funding/financing YPS has been a growing attention area, with a landmark background paper in 2022 co-led by UNICEF and civil society organisations, an ‘inception paper’ by the members of theFinancing Taskforce of the Global Coalition on YPS in 2023, and a report in 2023 co-led by the Dag Hammerskjold Foundation, OSGEY and UNOY which capture the precarious state of financing and make recommendations towards more secure funding for the agenda. This is reflected in the second report in 2022, which devoted a specific section to financing (the only thematic area not related to the five pillars of the YPS agenda given its own section). It can be assumed that the third report will pay close attention to the financing landscape for YPS.
The other growing conversation in the YPS space has been about monitoring and evaluation, implementation, and indicator mechanisms for the agenda. Attention to implementation and the responsibilities of Member States and other actors would be welcomed in the report. At the same time, care must be taken that evaluation and indicators do not became a counting game where number-of-youth equals claims to inclusion. Quality of inclusion and participation must be central in these discussions.
Caveats and cautions:
The SG Report is a political document that is generated through a process that is consultative but also highly bureaucratised and politicised. It also reflects the goals of the UN which may not always align with other stakeholders. Because it is a report ‘of’ the Secretary-General and the audience is the Security Council, it has a tendency to reflect Member State and institutional initiatives and successes, and previous reports have been criticised for not reflecting youth voices that contributed to the process. The Civil Society Working Group on YPS has been exploring how youth voices and non-institutionalised stories and measures of success might be amplified alongside the SG report’s release this year.
The other significant caution concerns the release of the third report. The second SG report was never discussed in an Open Debate at the UNSC, being deferred and put aside due to ‘more urgent’ geopolitical considerations, including escalating hostilities to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There was a more informal Arria-Formula meeting for the report not held until December. This lack of formal recognition of the report weakened its influence, and reflected a trend over the last two years of marginalisation of the agenda in the UNSC. As others have said, agendas like YPS and the Women, Peace and Security agenda are not afterthoughts in the UNSC’s role to maintain international peace and security, but must be integral to ensure meaningful and durable solutions.
With this in mind, it is important that the third report is discussed in an Open Debate, to reflect the UN’s commitment to the YPS agenda, and meaningful peace and security.
(My review of the first SG report once published in 2020 can be found here. I did not review the second report due to extended leave from work)
2. New UN Youth Office
In September 2022 the UNGA established a new Youth Office at the UN. The UNYO will be led by a new Assistant Secretary General (ASG) for Youth Affairs. Announced in October 2023. Filipe Paullier, a 32-year-old doctor and political organisers from Uruguay, gave his inaugural address on the 1 December last year, and the UNYO is operational as the year commences.
The UNYO will lead advocacy and engagement of youth issues across the UN, and joins other offices including UN Women as thematically focused offices, responsible for significant coordination and management. It replaces the UN SG’s Envoy on Youth, a position established in 2014, and filled since 2017 by Jayathma Wickramanayake. Big challenges ahead for a new office, including adequate resourcing, influence and impact, and how it prioritises YPS amongst its other demands.
A few good pieces on the new office:
Julian A Hettihewa writes thoughtfully for EJIL:Talk! on some of the structural limitations facing the office and paths forward.
Nudhara Yusuf and Saji Prelis write for Pass Blue on the risks and opportunities for the UNYO, calling for it to embrace its responsibilities to the youth constituency itself that it represents.
And for those interested in UN processes, there was some uncertainty and ‘perculiarities’ in the appointment process, which Blue Smoke covered here and here.
The fact that there was a gap between the end of Wikramanayake’s term, and the appointment of Paullier should be noted. Leaving aside the questions it raises about the institution taking the role and issues seriously, gaps create practical issues around ‘institutional memory’, loss of momentum on projects and plans, and potential loss of faith from youth advocates and their allies. A similar issue faced the African Union when the highly-successful two-year term of Aya Chebbi, the AU’s first regional Youth Envoy, ended in February 2021 and a new Envoy, Chido Cleopatra Mpemba, was not appointed until November that year.
3. YPS in ASEAN - 1st Regional Study
While the AU and regional organisations in MENA and Europe were relatively quick to pick up the YPS agenda after its inception in 2015, adoption in Southeast Asia has been slower. However 2024 promises to be exciting, with the impending release of the first Regional Study on YPS due in the first half of the year.
Why it matters?
Asia and the Pacific have been overlooked since the inception of the YPS agenda, with limited political will translating to limited attention from the global advocacy community. However, the region has one of the largest youth populations in the world, and the intersecting global crises (pandemic, employment, climate etc) have been felt in particularly challenging ways across the region. The first comprehensive regional report on YPS provides an opportunity to consolidate attention on youth inclusion in the region, and particularly through the institutional mechanisms of ASEAN, and its member countries.
This slower adoption of the agenda in Southeast Asia is not to imply that youth in the region are not facing the exact challenges outlined in Resolution 2250, nor to suggest that they are not active in leading for peace and security. The opposite is true in fact—from the highly visible resistance to the coup in Myanmar in 2021, the #MilkTeaAlliance, the Umbrella movement, youth inclusion in formal peace processes and transitions such as the Bangsamoro Youth Commission in the Philippines, as well as move invisible by foundational peace work of young men and women in their communities across the region.
Since 2022 there has been growing momentum within ASEAN for action on YPS. Yague and Gomez provide a comprehensive overview of YPS int the region in their UNDPPA report in 2022.
What to expect?
The report has a lot of ground to cover, as it will need to summarise momentum at the regional level, link this to global progress, as well as detail the state of YPS in each of its 10 (11 with Timor L’este) countries.
Caveats and Cautions:
This first regional report is an institutional document. It differs from the Missing Peace report in 2018, which was an independent progress study on YPS, mandated by the UNSC in its first YPS resolution.
ASEAN has not gone outside to an independent consultant to conduct this report, and there has not been extensive primary data collection. This is not a problem in and of itself—just like the UN SG biennial reports—an ASEAN regional report provides a snapshot of institutional and Member State activities and engagement, and a consolidation of otherwise dispersed information and facts.
It is also a highly politicised environment that the penholders must navigate, with questions of peace and security coming up again strong insistences on sovereignty and non-interference amongst ASEAN member states. Questions of how to manage the ongoing political situation in Myanmar, among other challenges, exemplify the issues facing the report.
Worth a read
When I I will include relevant practitioner/policy/academic pieces here that readers might like to engage with to inform their own work on YPS.
Connecting generations: a guidance note on inclusive intergenerational dialogue: The Folke Bernadotte Academy and Swedish Dialogue Initiative have published a guidance note on intergenerational dialogue, informed by extensive consultations last year. As the word ‘intergenerational’ gets thrown around more and more in the YPS community, this is a timely and highly valuable resource to start a conversation on what we really mean when we say ‘intergenerational’.
Young women and the Women, Peace and Security agenda [🔒]: This is an academic journal article by Prof Katrina Lee-Koo, published in the European Journal of Politics and Gender. The focus is on how young women appear in the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and draws links between the two agendas. As advocates working on intersectional approaches to peace have highlighted, the silos of agendas like YPS and WPS must be resisted, and this close, careful work is a valuable contribution to this space. [🔒 this is not open-access. If you don’t have access, please reach out to me and I’m happy to share]
Second issue of the Journal of Youth, Peace & Security: The Journal of YPS is a edited, peer-reviewed and published by the YPSRN; it is a youth-led journal, publishing work by youth themselves. With one of the core tenets of the YPS agenda, and meaningful inclusion more generally, being recognising the knowledge and expertise of youth themselves, the existence of the Journal of YPS is crucial. I’m very pleased to see a second issue and look forward to further work by the YPSRN.
There is lots ahead this year, and I’m excited to follow it. If you have suggestions for things I should read/watch/listen to, or information about events or public announcements relating to the YPS agenda, I’d love to hear them.