Description
Increasing global attention to the value and necessity of including youth in responding to violence and building peace has been formalised through the establishment of the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda since 2015. For youth, a constituency that has long been characterised as apathetic at best, and dangerous at worst, claims to the benefit of including their voices have been often ignored. Centering youth as knowledge bearers, as having expertise about their own lives and contexts, poses a challenge to institutions that are often slow to recognise new sites of expertise and to change practices.
This paper conceptualises the notion of ‘expertise’ critically to ask which practices are allowed to be expertise, and whose expertise is seen as legitimate on YPS. To do this, I draw on in-depth interviews and more than 250 hours of participant observation with youth and adult advocates working on the YPS agenda to develop a notion of a ‘youth-oriented peacebuilding field’. This uses Bourdieu’s notions of field and habitus, and locates this work within the extensive existing feminist scholarship on what it means to pay attention to constituencies that are marginalised or excluded in global politics. A relational account, drawn from both feminist and Bourdieusian approaches, enables me to see not only what is seen as expertise, but how this comes to be. Revealing the tensions in the field as a site of struggle makes visible new relationships and new possibilities for global peace governance more broadly.
