Description
In 2015 the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS), formalising an agenda for positive youth participation in peace and security. However, youth peace activists and their allies have been leading the building peace and addressing security risks long before this institutional recognition. In institutionalising youth issues the UNSC has positioned itself at the centre of long-ongoing debates about the role of youth in peace and security responses. For youth who have had their work and voice routinely dismissed and ignored, the presence of an institutional agenda provides opportunities, but it can also foreclose possibilities. For institutions, the inclusion of youth enables new activities, but also requires challenging long-established norms of youth exclusion.
While compromise is often invoked to explain and describe institutionalising processes of advocacy efforts, this paper asks what compromise actually looks like for advocates and institutions in global governance. It forwards the concepts of critique, complexity, and consolidation as constitutive components of compromise to examine these processes of institutionalisation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with youth and adult advocates working on the YPS agenda; a critical analysis of UN and civil society documents related to the agenda; and over 200 hours of participant observation at virtual advocacy meetings, high level forums and public events, the paper explores encounters between the (often) radical agendas of youth peace advocates/activists and the institutionalising processes of the UN. Without homogenising either ‘youth’ or ‘institutions’, it argues that a more nuanced understanding of compromise enables a clearer picture of the affordances and limitations of youth agency and institutional agendas for peacebuilding.
