Thank you very much for this opportunity, both to engage,
to make the terrible mistake as the old white guy in the room of representing the voice of young people.
But it's fantastic to see old friends again as well.
In truth, when I presented the progress study on youth peace and security, the missing piece to the Security Council,
my starting point was to say if young people who had participated in the consultation processes
that preceded that by two years over two years couldn't see and hear themselves in that process,
then we had failed entirely. I think it was more by accident than by design.
In some ways that the UN got a report which was based really on very expensive listening exercises to young people.
281 focus groups across 44 countries, 35 country specific studies.
Eight or nine regional consultation processes, consultations with member states, governments, as well as with all the UN entities and agencies.
I think at the beginning, when the study was commissioned by Security Council resolution,
the anticipation was that this would be a desk study, that this would take three or four months.
And I essentially said, I really don't understand how a project and an endeavour which is essentially about the marginalisation
and exclusion of 1.8 billion young people in the world can reproduce that pattern of exclusion.
And so the first six months was raising money to try and do a proper kind of consultation process.
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
hearing me and I'm hoping you will see and hear some of the extraordinary voices that we access from young people themselves.
And one of the reasons I think this is very helpful to this conversation is because in a way,
I suppose it's it's also quite challenging to the prevailing conversation about the geography of levels,
the kind of conversation about the individual and the community and the local and the national and international,
as if this is about geography and a very vertical kind of conversation.
Even in John Paul's sort of triangle pyramid,
there is a constant tension about how do you traverse this vertically up and down between policymakers and practitioners, et cetera, et cetera?
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,
is that I think if we start thinking about those strands that connect those concentric circles,
those the connective tissue that he spoke about, I think we may start thinking about peacebuilding endeavour very differently.
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.
Peacebuilding, human rights, gender studies, humanitarian action.
And I think and I think there's a really powerful way of thinking about peacebuilding,
not as a narrow field, but one which is smart at connecting all of these different sectors.
And in some ways, the youth focus, I think,
is perfect for illustrating this because I think what young people demonstrated in
everything we sort of heard from them was the transversal nature of their engagements,
the lack of respect for these boundaries, their their their assertiveness about what they described as the violence of their exclusion,
the intersectional lived experience of injustice, of being marginalised politically,
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.
They were saying our patterns of exclusion marginalisation actually connect all these things.
And so youth led and youth based peacebuilding in some ways, I think,
arguably provides us with an extraordinary connective tissue which forces us to think very differently about the
relationship between the local and the global and the ways in which peace builders can traverse this terrain.
I also think it's imperative for us to think about our own field because in some ways
there's been a fairly segmented conversation in the room about the practitioner world,
about the engagement with policymakers and about the role of scholarship.
And I think working with that pyramid as a triangle, rather,
which sees as one of its core missions, effective integration of policy practise and scholarship.
Not a segmentation of that, and one which is premised on the reciprocal learning between those three dimensions.
That policy is improved by reference to creative practise.
That scholarship as a way of distilling and understanding all of this can make an enormous contribution,
and inevitably scholars themselves will learn enormously from the Practises Act as the practitioner community as well policymakers.
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,
if we can connect those intelligently. And I think young people's peacebuilding neutral peacebuilding offers us another powerful illustration of that.
The last thing I want to say about this is that I think there's another dimension to this.
We heard a conversation earlier about simultaneity or sequencing.
And I think there's something really incredibly important about thinking about the temporal frame and
not calling it either simultaneity or sequencing the temporal frame the way we think about time.
My reference to youth, because I think it's an incredibly helpful thing to think about conflict and peace and trans generational terms.
And I think that that's really useful, not just as a matter of dealing with the past,
but because I think it opens up a conversation about these levels and who builds peace.
A very different conversation when we start talking about prevention.
We start talking about thinking not just about past conflict, but about the aspiration to prevent future conflict.
And I think that that changes this conversation in interesting ways.
And I think that young people's peace building forces us into the space in very creative and interesting ways.
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,
an experience in which young people had lost trust in their governments,
were increasingly losing trust in representative systems of democracy, which had not served them well.
We're talking about trust deficits, not just about political participation,
but a loss of trust in economic systems that excluded and marginalised them and restricted
their opportunities and loss of trust in institutions that ruled their lives for young people.
It was extraordinary to hear their primary description of the places where they met their states as
being criminal justice and the security system education and to some extent in relation to the economy.
But these were two critical areas in which young people saw their relationship to the to the state and like peace processes.
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,
youth centred approach to all the issues in criminal justice reform,
despite the fact that restorative justice has its origins in the juvenile justice systems.
Young people were constantly saying the system actually inadvertently is constantly talking about us.
Whenever we talk about former combatants 90 per cent of the time don't quote the statistic a huge amount of the time.
We are talking about young people who are seen as the foot soldiers of conflict, et cetera, et cetera.
Young people who have the most investment in future peace processes and yet young
people constantly talking about this as a pattern of exclusion and marginalisation.
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.
We are in women's organisations. We are in human rights organisations.
We are in civic organisations, we are economic actors, we are in the communities being policed and we are in the police.
And this is a really powerful way of thinking again about the sort of intersectionality,
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.
Young people said about the development conversation, I was fascinated by the sense of anxiety and offence that John Paul spoke about when he
saw the word reconciliation replaced with the word development to understand the concern.
But what young people were saying to us through a peacebuilding lens is, they said, every SDG is a youth SDG.
Don't consign us to the arenas of education or sport and culture.
We actually have a real interest in the whole world, right?
Young people are very powerful and articulate about saying, Please don't tell us young people are the future.
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,
as here as in the present, as active as agents of political change rather than as some deferred concern.
I think this is very helpful. I think what it does is it helps us think about peace responsive approaches to humanitarian action,
to economic and development practise, to food security, to health and human rights issues.
Because actually,
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.
Right. This is not just about the absence of violence, right?
And I think that's really helpful because I also think it forces us past into the space that
Tanya referred to the complex area arena where we aren't just talking about the end of violence,
the negative peace issue. We talk about the discourse of positive peace and how we get there.
I think young people are actually very articulate at describing the occupation
of the space between these two things and the connectivity between them.
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.
They use the language of violence of exclusion because they were talking about structural violence.
They were talking about an understanding of violence, not just a physical threat, but a structural in their lives.
They said until you deal with the the the violence of our exclusion, you will never prevent the violence of extremism.
And that was very powerful because the dominant discourse that young people are experience,
and I saw this when 75 member states stood up to affirm the report.
I'd just written a suspect having read nothing of it or maybe having done the
word search for their country name to see if there was anything truly offensive. What they all did was,
they said they supported and then probably half of that that member states sort of step public
statement was oriented around youth inclusion and participation and empowerment and affirmation,
whether you like these words or not. But the other half was saying, actually, this is a backdoor route to counter-terrorism.
This is because actually there is a dominant discourse force,
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.
And these dominant discourses that associate young people with violence have also produced a series.
These stereotypes have produced a series of policy panics driven by the perception that all young people are going to join extremist armed groups.
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.
And yet we invest massive amounts of resources in securitised approaches to young people in lieu of saying,
Where do we find the innovative practise, the creative contribution to peace building and not all young people are peaceful.
That's they're just getting on with their lives, smoking some weed, doing a whole lot of other things.
But the fact is, there's a massive opportunity to invest in the upside and instead all of the
resources the channelled into securitised views of young people as a threat.
And I would say there's a strategic value here in the focus on investing in
youth resilience rather than investing in youth purely on the basis of risk.
But I say this mindful of the fact the notion of resilience is also one that needs to
be contested and recognised because young people were very consciously saying to us,
Don't romanticise our ability to survive the terrible things that happen to us,
as if there is no responsibility for states and multilateral and international NGOs to work with us and work for us.
This notion of survivalist resilience is deeply problematic.
It's part of a humanitarian and disaster recovery discourse that young people themselves were critical of,
but they were also very mindful of a language of resilience, which was transformative.
Young woman who is saying As economic actors, when men go to war,
we are claiming a new space out of the gender stereotypes that we typically typically occupy.
That is resourceful. It is resilience and it changes our lives.
It's transformative about gender identities and the boundaries of our lives and the horizons of them.
So I think there is a creative space, in my view,
for thinking about resilience differently and listening to how people describe resilience and seeing it as a spectrum rather than one thing.
I'm not going to get through half of this. So let me pick the couple of last things I want to say.
The the the one is that having listened in to this, I think incredible youth voice.
The international community then kicks in with its usual industrial machinery to think about how do we implement this and how do we localise?
And immediately you have the sense of this template of a policy framework that has to be dropped down on country contexts.
And actually, the conversation about locally owned youth led youth centred approaches to peacebuilding
offer enormous opportunity that this approach really fails to to navigate.
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.
But the danger when we say this is actually only about youth participation in peace processes, how many bums on seats of young people.
The quota of young people not unimportant. But if it's only about that or the protection of young people from physical violation,
then I think we miss a whole lot of the things that in a in a textured,
nuanced way, the local youth peace builders are telling us what they want and what they need.
And in our view, we are hearing young people say.
There is an amazing way in which we can reshape the nature and orientation of forward looking transitional justice.
That's a key dimension of youth participation in peace processes.
Education for resilience is our terrain. It's all about us.
It has helped shape and define those curricula and those priorities that they're not just about vocational objectives and jobs,
but they connect us to meaning in our lives and participation our lives.
The climate justice conversation is for young people is not just the big picture issues.
It's also about drives urbanisation. These produce informal settlements.
Those are predominantly youth, the places in which young people are located.
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.
We are seeing this demography in place.
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.
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,
ironically, young people are consulted in this whole process.
And when it comes to designing national action plans or to a roadmap or a youth coalition, suddenly young people are completely ignored.
They're out of the picture and that this becomes government owned and government driven completely counterproductive.
So there are fascinating ways in thinking about this.
The last thing I'll say is that. In relation in relation to this.
And by the way, I think that one of the dimensions of this that is inherently treated as threatening
and yet is one of the most critical arenas in which young people play out
their roles as change agents is in the arenas of protest and dissent that are
often most threatening to governments and most worrying even to peace builders.
Yeah, they are the leaders in the movement around decolonisation of peacebuilding.
They are leaders in the demand for climate justice. They are driving the global conversations about systemic racism.
They are leaders in the gun control and weapons control movements,
and they are very often leaders in the in the peacebuilding discourse that gets so little attention in the midst of peace processes,
as Brandon mentioned around social justice around social and economic empowerment.
Two last points, I promise. The first the first is this there is an incredible dimension to this, which is about political imagination,
that change agency, that leadership in social movements, the change agency.
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.
It's all about us reintegration of former combatants.
Well, 90 percent of the time again, forgive the statistics, a turn of phrase a whole lot of the time.
Young people are being reintegrated into elder led communities in which they feel very marginalised, in which they feel, you know,
imagine young people said if it was youth organisation and youth centred approaches that provided
the new housing institutional integration places of belonging for young former combatants.
How would that change the way in which DDR works and whether it works?
The second issue and Brandon made reference to this earlier by reference to Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Bosnia in South Africa.
We referred to the generation who came after the constitutional democracy after the end of apartheid as the born frees,
whether it's the born frees in South in South Africa with its second generation youth survivors of the massacres in Srebrenica,
whether it's the young people in Northern Ireland, very often what they're doing is they're saying, you made this agreement.
You and sometimes a previous youth cohort sold us out on a whole lot of things.
Our lived experience entitles us to a right of review.
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.
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.
Let us engage in a reflective. I think that would be an unbelievable process, however scary it might be.
So I'm going to leave it there with the kind of youth sort of imagined political imagination.
But I do want to say the one thing that I that I left out is that I really think the conversation about prevention,
which starts to think about transgenerational memory and transgenerational implications of this, which starts to see civic trust,
the rebuilding of trust and recognises the legitimacy of youth,
mistrust of the governments that we need to associate the word trust with the words trustworthy and trustworthiness should
be the objective so that we don't insist on trust by communities at the expense of trustworthiness by their governments.
I think that these issues of civic trust and institutional reform are fundamental.
They're very rooted in the transitional justice faith.
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.
And I don't think we are doing that. I think we're talking mostly in retrospect about conflict and damage.
Sorry, I'm sorry.