1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:04,680 Thank you very much for this opportunity, both to engage, 2 00:00:04,680 --> 00:00:14,070 to make the terrible mistake as the old white guy in the room of representing the voice of young people. 3 00:00:14,070 --> 00:00:20,630 But it's fantastic to see old friends again as well. 4 00:00:20,630 --> 00:00:27,950 In truth, when I presented the progress study on youth peace and security, the missing piece to the Security Council, 5 00:00:27,950 --> 00:00:35,330 my starting point was to say if young people who had participated in the consultation processes 6 00:00:35,330 --> 00:00:41,810 that preceded that by two years over two years couldn't see and hear themselves in that process, 7 00:00:41,810 --> 00:00:47,870 then we had failed entirely. I think it was more by accident than by design. 8 00:00:47,870 --> 00:00:58,040 In some ways that the UN got a report which was based really on very expensive listening exercises to young people. 9 00:00:58,040 --> 00:01:06,380 281 focus groups across 44 countries, 35 country specific studies. 10 00:01:06,380 --> 00:01:17,420 Eight or nine regional consultation processes, consultations with member states, governments, as well as with all the UN entities and agencies. 11 00:01:17,420 --> 00:01:23,630 I think at the beginning, when the study was commissioned by Security Council resolution, 12 00:01:23,630 --> 00:01:29,600 the anticipation was that this would be a desk study, that this would take three or four months. 13 00:01:29,600 --> 00:01:38,870 And I essentially said, I really don't understand how a project and an endeavour which is essentially about the marginalisation 14 00:01:38,870 --> 00:01:45,500 and exclusion of 1.8 billion young people in the world can reproduce that pattern of exclusion. 15 00:01:45,500 --> 00:01:52,550 And so the first six months was raising money to try and do a proper kind of consultation process. 16 00:01:52,550 --> 00:02:01,400 I say this is a background because I really do want to discount the extent to which in what I say in the next 10 minutes that you're 17 00:02:01,400 --> 00:02:10,340 hearing me and I'm hoping you will see and hear some of the extraordinary voices that we access from young people themselves. 18 00:02:10,340 --> 00:02:14,900 And one of the reasons I think this is very helpful to this conversation is because in a way, 19 00:02:14,900 --> 00:02:23,270 I suppose it's it's also quite challenging to the prevailing conversation about the geography of levels, 20 00:02:23,270 --> 00:02:30,410 the kind of conversation about the individual and the community and the local and the national and international, 21 00:02:30,410 --> 00:02:36,000 as if this is about geography and a very vertical kind of conversation. 22 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:41,480 Even in John Paul's sort of triangle pyramid, 23 00:02:41,480 --> 00:02:51,380 there is a constant tension about how do you traverse this vertically up and down between policymakers and practitioners, et cetera, et cetera? 24 00:02:51,380 --> 00:03:00,260 And the first thing I'd like to say is that I think that we as a community in some ways and this goes to the spider's web, 25 00:03:00,260 --> 00:03:06,980 is that I think if we start thinking about those strands that connect those concentric circles, 26 00:03:06,980 --> 00:03:14,390 those the connective tissue that he spoke about, I think we may start thinking about peacebuilding endeavour very differently. 27 00:03:14,390 --> 00:03:23,450 And I think we may start thinking about what is the connective tissue, both between those levels and not just as geography, but sexually as well. 28 00:03:23,450 --> 00:03:30,800 Peacebuilding, human rights, gender studies, humanitarian action. 29 00:03:30,800 --> 00:03:35,810 And I think and I think there's a really powerful way of thinking about peacebuilding, 30 00:03:35,810 --> 00:03:43,930 not as a narrow field, but one which is smart at connecting all of these different sectors. 31 00:03:43,930 --> 00:03:47,350 And in some ways, the youth focus, I think, 32 00:03:47,350 --> 00:03:52,030 is perfect for illustrating this because I think what young people demonstrated in 33 00:03:52,030 --> 00:03:57,970 everything we sort of heard from them was the transversal nature of their engagements, 34 00:03:57,970 --> 00:04:08,170 the lack of respect for these boundaries, their their their assertiveness about what they described as the violence of their exclusion, 35 00:04:08,170 --> 00:04:13,690 the intersectional lived experience of injustice, of being marginalised politically, 36 00:04:13,690 --> 00:04:22,960 economically, educationally on the basis of gender because of a human rights or rights realisation gap in all these arenas of young people's lives. 37 00:04:22,960 --> 00:04:27,400 They were saying our patterns of exclusion marginalisation actually connect all these things. 38 00:04:27,400 --> 00:04:31,660 And so youth led and youth based peacebuilding in some ways, I think, 39 00:04:31,660 --> 00:04:38,170 arguably provides us with an extraordinary connective tissue which forces us to think very differently about the 40 00:04:38,170 --> 00:04:45,730 relationship between the local and the global and the ways in which peace builders can traverse this terrain. 41 00:04:45,730 --> 00:04:50,770 I also think it's imperative for us to think about our own field because in some ways 42 00:04:50,770 --> 00:04:56,410 there's been a fairly segmented conversation in the room about the practitioner world, 43 00:04:56,410 --> 00:05:00,730 about the engagement with policymakers and about the role of scholarship. 44 00:05:00,730 --> 00:05:04,660 And I think working with that pyramid as a triangle, rather, 45 00:05:04,660 --> 00:05:11,170 which sees as one of its core missions, effective integration of policy practise and scholarship. 46 00:05:11,170 --> 00:05:19,300 Not a segmentation of that, and one which is premised on the reciprocal learning between those three dimensions. 47 00:05:19,300 --> 00:05:23,350 That policy is improved by reference to creative practise. 48 00:05:23,350 --> 00:05:30,280 That scholarship as a way of distilling and understanding all of this can make an enormous contribution, 49 00:05:30,280 --> 00:05:42,500 and inevitably scholars themselves will learn enormously from the Practises Act as the practitioner community as well policymakers. 50 00:05:42,500 --> 00:05:50,240 So I wanted to start there and say that I think that the this policy practise scholarship is one of those arenas of connective tissue, 51 00:05:50,240 --> 00:06:01,060 if we can connect those intelligently. And I think young people's peacebuilding neutral peacebuilding offers us another powerful illustration of that. 52 00:06:01,060 --> 00:06:05,650 The last thing I want to say about this is that I think there's another dimension to this. 53 00:06:05,650 --> 00:06:11,320 We heard a conversation earlier about simultaneity or sequencing. 54 00:06:11,320 --> 00:06:17,860 And I think there's something really incredibly important about thinking about the temporal frame and 55 00:06:17,860 --> 00:06:24,730 not calling it either simultaneity or sequencing the temporal frame the way we think about time. 56 00:06:24,730 --> 00:06:32,410 My reference to youth, because I think it's an incredibly helpful thing to think about conflict and peace and trans generational terms. 57 00:06:32,410 --> 00:06:36,640 And I think that that's really useful, not just as a matter of dealing with the past, 58 00:06:36,640 --> 00:06:42,130 but because I think it opens up a conversation about these levels and who builds peace. 59 00:06:42,130 --> 00:06:45,740 A very different conversation when we start talking about prevention. 60 00:06:45,740 --> 00:06:53,860 We start talking about thinking not just about past conflict, but about the aspiration to prevent future conflict. 61 00:06:53,860 --> 00:06:57,130 And I think that that changes this conversation in interesting ways. 62 00:06:57,130 --> 00:07:04,500 And I think that young people's peace building forces us into the space in very creative and interesting ways. 63 00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:13,770 The first thing I want to say is that at its heart, what we discovered when we were talking to young people was a fundamental trust deficit, 64 00:07:13,770 --> 00:07:18,480 an experience in which young people had lost trust in their governments, 65 00:07:18,480 --> 00:07:24,570 were increasingly losing trust in representative systems of democracy, which had not served them well. 66 00:07:24,570 --> 00:07:29,580 We're talking about trust deficits, not just about political participation, 67 00:07:29,580 --> 00:07:35,310 but a loss of trust in economic systems that excluded and marginalised them and restricted 68 00:07:35,310 --> 00:07:41,790 their opportunities and loss of trust in institutions that ruled their lives for young people. 69 00:07:41,790 --> 00:07:47,040 It was extraordinary to hear their primary description of the places where they met their states as 70 00:07:47,040 --> 00:07:54,600 being criminal justice and the security system education and to some extent in relation to the economy. 71 00:07:54,600 --> 00:08:01,620 But these were two critical areas in which young people saw their relationship to the to the state and like peace processes. 72 00:08:01,620 --> 00:08:10,560 They said This is all about us and entirely without us that a youth centred approach to DDR, a youth centred approach to security sector reform, 73 00:08:10,560 --> 00:08:14,490 youth centred approach to all the issues in criminal justice reform, 74 00:08:14,490 --> 00:08:20,220 despite the fact that restorative justice has its origins in the juvenile justice systems. 75 00:08:20,220 --> 00:08:26,490 Young people were constantly saying the system actually inadvertently is constantly talking about us. 76 00:08:26,490 --> 00:08:34,860 Whenever we talk about former combatants 90 per cent of the time don't quote the statistic a huge amount of the time. 77 00:08:34,860 --> 00:08:40,170 We are talking about young people who are seen as the foot soldiers of conflict, et cetera, et cetera. 78 00:08:40,170 --> 00:08:45,720 Young people who have the most investment in future peace processes and yet young 79 00:08:45,720 --> 00:08:51,960 people constantly talking about this as a pattern of exclusion and marginalisation. 80 00:08:51,960 --> 00:09:00,330 Young people were also very articulate in saying to us, Please don't get hold of us, don't just look for youth leadership in youth organisations. 81 00:09:00,330 --> 00:09:03,810 We are in women's organisations. We are in human rights organisations. 82 00:09:03,810 --> 00:09:12,420 We are in civic organisations, we are economic actors, we are in the communities being policed and we are in the police. 83 00:09:12,420 --> 00:09:18,180 And this is a really powerful way of thinking again about the sort of intersectionality, 84 00:09:18,180 --> 00:09:29,340 the sort of way of thinking about the connexion of these, these issues in young people's lived experience that I think was very important. 85 00:09:29,340 --> 00:09:41,130 Young people said about the development conversation, I was fascinated by the sense of anxiety and offence that John Paul spoke about when he 86 00:09:41,130 --> 00:09:46,680 saw the word reconciliation replaced with the word development to understand the concern. 87 00:09:46,680 --> 00:09:53,070 But what young people were saying to us through a peacebuilding lens is, they said, every SDG is a youth SDG. 88 00:09:53,070 --> 00:09:58,770 Don't consign us to the arenas of education or sport and culture. 89 00:09:58,770 --> 00:10:02,430 We actually have a real interest in the whole world, right? 90 00:10:02,430 --> 00:10:08,700 Young people are very powerful and articulate about saying, Please don't tell us young people are the future. 91 00:10:08,700 --> 00:10:17,250 We are astute. We understand how the future is made, and we know that it's our action now that makes us deal makes our future deal with us, 92 00:10:17,250 --> 00:10:29,760 as here as in the present, as active as agents of political change rather than as some deferred concern. 93 00:10:29,760 --> 00:10:36,390 I think this is very helpful. I think what it does is it helps us think about peace responsive approaches to humanitarian action, 94 00:10:36,390 --> 00:10:45,450 to economic and development practise, to food security, to health and human rights issues. 95 00:10:45,450 --> 00:10:46,050 Because actually, 96 00:10:46,050 --> 00:10:55,290 what young people are saying to us is all of these other dimensions of the coherent nature of the lives we want and the peace we we see as valid. 97 00:10:55,290 --> 00:11:00,180 Right. This is not just about the absence of violence, right? 98 00:11:00,180 --> 00:11:05,220 And I think that's really helpful because I also think it forces us past into the space that 99 00:11:05,220 --> 00:11:11,490 Tanya referred to the complex area arena where we aren't just talking about the end of violence, 100 00:11:11,490 --> 00:11:16,350 the negative peace issue. We talk about the discourse of positive peace and how we get there. 101 00:11:16,350 --> 00:11:21,060 I think young people are actually very articulate at describing the occupation 102 00:11:21,060 --> 00:11:27,220 of the space between these two things and the connectivity between them. 103 00:11:27,220 --> 00:11:38,470 And so in some ways, what young people also saying to us was until you deal with the violence of our exclusion and they use this language right. 104 00:11:38,470 --> 00:11:42,520 They use the language of violence of exclusion because they were talking about structural violence. 105 00:11:42,520 --> 00:11:48,640 They were talking about an understanding of violence, not just a physical threat, but a structural in their lives. 106 00:11:48,640 --> 00:11:55,900 They said until you deal with the the the violence of our exclusion, you will never prevent the violence of extremism. 107 00:11:55,900 --> 00:12:00,790 And that was very powerful because the dominant discourse that young people are experience, 108 00:12:00,790 --> 00:12:06,340 and I saw this when 75 member states stood up to affirm the report. 109 00:12:06,340 --> 00:12:11,890 I'd just written a suspect having read nothing of it or maybe having done the 110 00:12:11,890 --> 00:12:17,980 word search for their country name to see if there was anything truly offensive. What they all did was, 111 00:12:17,980 --> 00:12:24,010 they said they supported and then probably half of that that member states sort of step public 112 00:12:24,010 --> 00:12:31,720 statement was oriented around youth inclusion and participation and empowerment and affirmation, 113 00:12:31,720 --> 00:12:38,410 whether you like these words or not. But the other half was saying, actually, this is a backdoor route to counter-terrorism. 114 00:12:38,410 --> 00:12:42,040 This is because actually there is a dominant discourse force, 115 00:12:42,040 --> 00:12:50,620 which is that the prevailing vision of young people is a young man with a gun and a young woman consigned to the status of passive victimhood. 116 00:12:50,620 --> 00:12:57,010 And these dominant discourses that associate young people with violence have also produced a series. 117 00:12:57,010 --> 00:13:06,250 These stereotypes have produced a series of policy panics driven by the perception that all young people are going to join extremist armed groups. 118 00:13:06,250 --> 00:13:16,870 It's based on absolutely no evidence. It is a tiny sliver of young people who find their way into these political, criminal and violent underworld. 119 00:13:16,870 --> 00:13:24,250 And yet we invest massive amounts of resources in securitised approaches to young people in lieu of saying, 120 00:13:24,250 --> 00:13:31,150 Where do we find the innovative practise, the creative contribution to peace building and not all young people are peaceful. 121 00:13:31,150 --> 00:13:35,290 That's they're just getting on with their lives, smoking some weed, doing a whole lot of other things. 122 00:13:35,290 --> 00:13:40,690 But the fact is, there's a massive opportunity to invest in the upside and instead all of the 123 00:13:40,690 --> 00:13:45,610 resources the channelled into securitised views of young people as a threat. 124 00:13:45,610 --> 00:13:50,650 And I would say there's a strategic value here in the focus on investing in 125 00:13:50,650 --> 00:13:56,860 youth resilience rather than investing in youth purely on the basis of risk. 126 00:13:56,860 --> 00:14:01,330 But I say this mindful of the fact the notion of resilience is also one that needs to 127 00:14:01,330 --> 00:14:06,040 be contested and recognised because young people were very consciously saying to us, 128 00:14:06,040 --> 00:14:11,740 Don't romanticise our ability to survive the terrible things that happen to us, 129 00:14:11,740 --> 00:14:19,060 as if there is no responsibility for states and multilateral and international NGOs to work with us and work for us. 130 00:14:19,060 --> 00:14:22,870 This notion of survivalist resilience is deeply problematic. 131 00:14:22,870 --> 00:14:29,530 It's part of a humanitarian and disaster recovery discourse that young people themselves were critical of, 132 00:14:29,530 --> 00:14:34,510 but they were also very mindful of a language of resilience, which was transformative. 133 00:14:34,510 --> 00:14:38,170 Young woman who is saying As economic actors, when men go to war, 134 00:14:38,170 --> 00:14:43,300 we are claiming a new space out of the gender stereotypes that we typically typically occupy. 135 00:14:43,300 --> 00:14:46,630 That is resourceful. It is resilience and it changes our lives. 136 00:14:46,630 --> 00:14:51,460 It's transformative about gender identities and the boundaries of our lives and the horizons of them. 137 00:14:51,460 --> 00:14:54,760 So I think there is a creative space, in my view, 138 00:14:54,760 --> 00:15:01,120 for thinking about resilience differently and listening to how people describe resilience and seeing it as a spectrum rather than one thing. 139 00:15:01,120 --> 00:15:10,810 I'm not going to get through half of this. So let me pick the couple of last things I want to say. 140 00:15:10,810 --> 00:15:17,260 The the the one is that having listened in to this, I think incredible youth voice. 141 00:15:17,260 --> 00:15:27,550 The international community then kicks in with its usual industrial machinery to think about how do we implement this and how do we localise? 142 00:15:27,550 --> 00:15:34,900 And immediately you have the sense of this template of a policy framework that has to be dropped down on country contexts. 143 00:15:34,900 --> 00:15:42,040 And actually, the conversation about locally owned youth led youth centred approaches to peacebuilding 144 00:15:42,040 --> 00:15:48,280 offer enormous opportunity that this approach really fails to to navigate. 145 00:15:48,280 --> 00:15:56,140 It doesn't mean that a global policy agenda of the sort, if it's driven by the right, participatory and inclusive process isn't really important. 146 00:15:56,140 --> 00:16:03,670 But the danger when we say this is actually only about youth participation in peace processes, how many bums on seats of young people. 147 00:16:03,670 --> 00:16:10,900 The quota of young people not unimportant. But if it's only about that or the protection of young people from physical violation, 148 00:16:10,900 --> 00:16:15,340 then I think we miss a whole lot of the things that in a in a textured, 149 00:16:15,340 --> 00:16:21,640 nuanced way, the local youth peace builders are telling us what they want and what they need. 150 00:16:21,640 --> 00:16:25,740 And in our view, we are hearing young people say. 151 00:16:25,740 --> 00:16:32,970 There is an amazing way in which we can reshape the nature and orientation of forward looking transitional justice. 152 00:16:32,970 --> 00:16:37,680 That's a key dimension of youth participation in peace processes. 153 00:16:37,680 --> 00:16:41,430 Education for resilience is our terrain. It's all about us. 154 00:16:41,430 --> 00:16:48,420 It has helped shape and define those curricula and those priorities that they're not just about vocational objectives and jobs, 155 00:16:48,420 --> 00:16:52,710 but they connect us to meaning in our lives and participation our lives. 156 00:16:52,710 --> 00:16:58,410 The climate justice conversation is for young people is not just the big picture issues. 157 00:16:58,410 --> 00:17:03,060 It's also about drives urbanisation. These produce informal settlements. 158 00:17:03,060 --> 00:17:07,710 Those are predominantly youth, the places in which young people are located. 159 00:17:07,710 --> 00:17:15,390 We need to start thinking about city engineering and rethinking by reference to youth so that we're not just dealing implicitly with young people. 160 00:17:15,390 --> 00:17:19,260 We are seeing this demography in place. 161 00:17:19,260 --> 00:17:27,210 The securitisation issue and one of the most powerful things, which is the most ironic, is in one of the policy papers youth written and laid. 162 00:17:27,210 --> 00:17:35,040 That's on our website outside the box. It's amazing to hear the united network of young people is and someone from that organisation saying, 163 00:17:35,040 --> 00:17:38,100 ironically, young people are consulted in this whole process. 164 00:17:38,100 --> 00:17:46,720 And when it comes to designing national action plans or to a roadmap or a youth coalition, suddenly young people are completely ignored. 165 00:17:46,720 --> 00:17:52,020 They're out of the picture and that this becomes government owned and government driven completely counterproductive. 166 00:17:52,020 --> 00:17:56,250 So there are fascinating ways in thinking about this. 167 00:17:56,250 --> 00:18:03,130 The last thing I'll say is that. In relation in relation to this. 168 00:18:03,130 --> 00:18:08,740 And by the way, I think that one of the dimensions of this that is inherently treated as threatening 169 00:18:08,740 --> 00:18:13,210 and yet is one of the most critical arenas in which young people play out 170 00:18:13,210 --> 00:18:17,860 their roles as change agents is in the arenas of protest and dissent that are 171 00:18:17,860 --> 00:18:21,880 often most threatening to governments and most worrying even to peace builders. 172 00:18:21,880 --> 00:18:27,550 Yeah, they are the leaders in the movement around decolonisation of peacebuilding. 173 00:18:27,550 --> 00:18:34,960 They are leaders in the demand for climate justice. They are driving the global conversations about systemic racism. 174 00:18:34,960 --> 00:18:39,220 They are leaders in the gun control and weapons control movements, 175 00:18:39,220 --> 00:18:46,750 and they are very often leaders in the in the peacebuilding discourse that gets so little attention in the midst of peace processes, 176 00:18:46,750 --> 00:18:53,590 as Brandon mentioned around social justice around social and economic empowerment. 177 00:18:53,590 --> 00:19:03,250 Two last points, I promise. The first the first is this there is an incredible dimension to this, which is about political imagination, 178 00:19:03,250 --> 00:19:08,980 that change agency, that leadership in social movements, the change agency. 179 00:19:08,980 --> 00:19:16,990 And I just want to give you I want to just give you very concrete examples of the amazing way in which young people were talking about this DDR. 180 00:19:16,990 --> 00:19:20,110 It's all about us reintegration of former combatants. 181 00:19:20,110 --> 00:19:27,100 Well, 90 percent of the time again, forgive the statistics, a turn of phrase a whole lot of the time. 182 00:19:27,100 --> 00:19:36,040 Young people are being reintegrated into elder led communities in which they feel very marginalised, in which they feel, you know, 183 00:19:36,040 --> 00:19:42,730 imagine young people said if it was youth organisation and youth centred approaches that provided 184 00:19:42,730 --> 00:19:49,150 the new housing institutional integration places of belonging for young former combatants. 185 00:19:49,150 --> 00:19:53,920 How would that change the way in which DDR works and whether it works? 186 00:19:53,920 --> 00:20:01,990 The second issue and Brandon made reference to this earlier by reference to Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Bosnia in South Africa. 187 00:20:01,990 --> 00:20:09,790 We referred to the generation who came after the constitutional democracy after the end of apartheid as the born frees, 188 00:20:09,790 --> 00:20:19,160 whether it's the born frees in South in South Africa with its second generation youth survivors of the massacres in Srebrenica, 189 00:20:19,160 --> 00:20:25,960 whether it's the young people in Northern Ireland, very often what they're doing is they're saying, you made this agreement. 190 00:20:25,960 --> 00:20:31,420 You and sometimes a previous youth cohort sold us out on a whole lot of things. 191 00:20:31,420 --> 00:20:36,280 Our lived experience entitles us to a right of review. 192 00:20:36,280 --> 00:20:44,950 We want to look at these peace agreements. Imagine the political imagination of a youth sector today saying, Let's look at these peace settlements. 193 00:20:44,950 --> 00:20:52,390 And let us tell you what's working and what isn't. Let us tell you what we wouldn't have sacrificed in the political compromises. 194 00:20:52,390 --> 00:20:59,680 Let us engage in a reflective. I think that would be an unbelievable process, however scary it might be. 195 00:20:59,680 --> 00:21:05,290 So I'm going to leave it there with the kind of youth sort of imagined political imagination. 196 00:21:05,290 --> 00:21:11,620 But I do want to say the one thing that I that I left out is that I really think the conversation about prevention, 197 00:21:11,620 --> 00:21:19,390 which starts to think about transgenerational memory and transgenerational implications of this, which starts to see civic trust, 198 00:21:19,390 --> 00:21:24,550 the rebuilding of trust and recognises the legitimacy of youth, 199 00:21:24,550 --> 00:21:31,660 mistrust of the governments that we need to associate the word trust with the words trustworthy and trustworthiness should 200 00:21:31,660 --> 00:21:38,500 be the objective so that we don't insist on trust by communities at the expense of trustworthiness by their governments. 201 00:21:38,500 --> 00:21:42,970 I think that these issues of civic trust and institutional reform are fundamental. 202 00:21:42,970 --> 00:21:45,190 They're very rooted in the transitional justice faith. 203 00:21:45,190 --> 00:21:52,930 There is a whole lot in the conversation about prevention, which I think may will change the way we think about who builds peace and how. 204 00:21:52,930 --> 00:21:57,880 And I don't think we are doing that. I think we're talking mostly in retrospect about conflict and damage. 205 00:21:57,880 --> 00:22:00,228 Sorry, I'm sorry.