Description
This paper explores how action research with youth that incorporates capacity building and mentorship can serve as a practice of accountability to youth in ethnically divided post-conflict societies. Focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement entrenched a political system based on ethnic divisions, the project investigates how young people can catalyse political change and reimagine inclusive and peaceful futures. Using a peace process simulation as a pedagogical and research tool, the project engages Bosnian youth (aged 18–29) from different ethnic backgrounds in a collaborative exercise to revise the Dayton framework and reimagine and renegotiate a peace agreement. Pre- and post-simulation surveys and observations assess shifts in participants’ knowledge, attitudes, and capacities for inter-group dialogue and political engagement. This project foregrounds young people’s agency in shaping peace processes and holding power structures accountable. It conceptualises empowerment as participation and as co-production of knowledge and transformation of political imagination. In doing so, the project challenges adultist structures that continue to exclude youth from shaping post-conflict governance and peacebuilding and helps ensure unaccountability to them.
