Report from Expert Meeting: The role of young leaders in creating secure communities

On March 5th, 2015, an expert meeting was organized by UNOY, Human Security Collective and Cordaid. The goal of the meeting was to raise awareness on how young community leaders from conflict areas successfully contribute towards safety in their own communities. The event was part of a one week advocacy training on conflict transformation and human security. Four participants from this training, coming from Pakistan, Libya, Palestine and India, were central to the expert meeting. They presented what security means to them and how they contribute to security in their own community. Unfortunately the speaker from Palestine – Abedallah Alsayed – was not given travel documents to leave Gaza, so his story was read by Marwan Bakit. Eva Entenmann from the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), was ‘key-note listener’, and placed the stories of the participants in an international perspective.

The audience consisted of policy makers on a local and (inter)national level engaged in the field of development and security and people from civil society organizations active in this field. The meeting evolved in a lively discussion around youth, extremism and narratives of war.

The four participants talked about activities that they and their organizations carry out, ranging from countering extremism and working on dialogue to empowering women and youth. Eva Entenmann emphasized the importance of these stories and youth, because they know what happens on the ground; “you see results every day”, she said. These projects present ‘soft measures’ against conflict that are opposed to the ‘hard measures’ of military intervention. It’s important to bring these initiatives under the attention and to make the link between this local level and the international level.

The discussion with the audience evolved further around the causes of conflicts and narratives of war and extremism. War is an easy and attractive narrative with quick solutions. It is also to tag people as militants or extremists. Youth are victims of this and should actually be able to contribute to long-term solutions. To do this, it’s important to address structural inequalities and to work towards development to tackle the root causes of a conflict, it was emphasized by the speakers. “The world must invest in empowering young people, not in more guns”, Gulalai Ismail from Pakistan stated.  “we need anyone who wants to support us to be open, to come and see what’s needed for a solution”. The young female speaker from Libya said: “The solution for Libya is not an invasion, nor is it in the Security Council, it’s development, development, development”. The question is how these solutions and initiatives can be made more visible and these narratives more attractive. However, as emerged out of the discussion, there is also a need for solutions for immediate security concerns.

The expert session was an eye-opening meeting in which it became clear that young people can contribute to security and peace in a constructive way and the importance of looking further than quick solutions, stereotypes and simples narratives.