Young people are essential in the construction and preservation of peace. Even though this central insight has gained considerable traction since the establishment of the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda through UN Security Council resolution 2250 (2015) reiterated and reinforced by young people themselves in the Missing Peace Report (2018), as well as successive resolutions UNSC 2419 (2018 and 2535 (2020), a lack of meaningful youth involvement beyond tokenistic consultation processes persists in many peace processes.

Drawing on existing programmatic insights on Youth, Peace and Security in various contexts, this panel is aimed at building awareness, sharing experiences as well as good-practices and evaluating concrete measures to achieve peacebuilding approaches that exceed paying mere lip service to youth participation.

Co-designed and co-implemented by youth actors themselves, the sessions’ premise revolves around the concept of ‘keynote listeners’. Changing the classical roles of high-level personalities and youth actors from a setup in which a keynote speech is being held with the subsequent opportunity for questions, to a distinctive setting in which policymakers first listen to youth voices and then engage with what they have just heard. Through this approach, relevant high-level guests will be directly addressed and engaged by youth actors from conflict-affected contexts and working on peace through different means, thereby bridging the gap between the lived experience, in-country work, and the policy level.

This workshop therefore highlights not only the necessity to purposely include young people in peacebuilding efforts but, by sharing and elevating perspectives from the field in a dialogue with policymakers and the wider international community, it actively aims to contribute to the integration of peace at the multilateral diplomacy and policy level.