Description
Following the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), there was a significant change in Colombia’s peacebuilding landscape. This new era enabled Colombian youth to forge new pathways, roles and spaces for participation. This paper explores the way youth participation in peacebuilding has developed in the post-2016 era. Drawing on interviews carried out in Colombia in 2019 and 2022, it presents an innovative framework for understanding the repertoire of peacebuilding actions undertaken by Colombian youth in this period. We propose to repurpose and expand Gready and Robin’s (2017) typology of civil society interactions with transitional justice mechanisms, to better understand the full range of ways that youth in Colombia seek to engage and influence efforts to build peace, directly, indirectly and within themselves. In doing so we ask to what extent this represents a ‘youthed’ approach to building peace, and whether the framework has wider resonance with other groups engaged in building peace in Colombia, and elsewhere.
