Youth Peacebuilding

Music, Gender, and Change

Lesley J. Pruitt

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446561
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book highlights the important role youth can play in processes of peacebuilding by examining music as a tool for engaging youth in such activities. As Lesley J. Pruitt discusses throughout the book, music—as expression, as creation, as inspiration—can provide many unique insights into transforming conflicts, altering our understandings, and achieving change. She offers detailed empirical work on two youth peacebuilding programs in Australia and Northern Ireland, countries that appear overtly peaceful, but where youth still face structural violence and related direct violence at the community level. She also pays careful attention to the ways in which gender norms might influence young people's participation in music-based peacebuilding activities. Ultimately, the book defines a new research area linking youth cultures and music with peacebuilding practice and policy.

1

Youth in Peace and Conflict

Currently, nearly half the total world population is under 24 years old, and about 20 percent of these fall in the adolescent age bracket of 10–19 years. The generation of adolescents alive today is the largest in recorded history, and their proportion of the world population is growing quickly. Thus, numbers alone would lead one to conclude that young people merit attention in almost any field of social inquiry, including studies of peace and conflict.

Despite constituting a substantial proportion of the population, youth often see themselves as minority outsiders.¹ This is not surprising since, compared to older people, youth are less likely to be able to independently access essential services or resources and more likely to be marginalized from political institutions and processes. Most countries restrict access to universal suffrage to those over 18 years of age. Hence, young people are typically characterized as lacking a political voice.

The importance of this situation should not be lost in the peacebuilding field. In post-conflict societies young people are often marginalized from formal political processes even if they helped create these processes. This does not mean young people sit idly by, or that politics exists outside their world. When young people are excluded from mainstream political processes, they often continue to take part in political activities, although these may be violent and confrontational rather than framed by cooperation and dialogue. However, this is not the only way the involvement of young people living in societies experiencing or recovering from conflict can or should be conceptualized.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child formally recognizes that young people's involvement in peacebuilding is grounded in their right to active participation.² It suggests that across the globe young people are challenging their elders to address the root causes of conflict and engage in the peaceful resolution of differences in pursuing peace. While this indicates the need for better inclusion of young people in formal peace processes, it also suggests that young people may already be engaged in peacebuilding work. If we are to pursue peace, we might do well to follow Lederach's advice that we “[n]ever talk only to politicians and military leaders. Talk to taxi drivers. Talk to construction workers and housewives. Talk to elders, shamans, and for goodness' sake, talk to children.”³ Despite calls like this, what young people think about peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction has been given very little attention in the peacebuilding literature.

Some scholars, however, have recognized that youth participation in peacebuilding is important.⁴ For example, McEvoy-Levy argues that the omission of youth from existing peacebuilding literature is problematic.⁵ Noting that the limited scholarly research dealing with youth in peace and conflict has tended to focus more on the role of youth in instigating violence than on their peacebuilding activities, she says documenting the role of youth in advocating for human rights and against militarism is needed. Moreover, McEvoy-Levy says this will require reinterpreting understandings of peace activism, by looking not merely for youth peace campaigners, but more broadly to young people who are active in capacity building, social development, and political education for youth. Others agree that this important work needs further attention and argue that excluding youth and ignoring their concerns can impede reconciliation, since it may provoke recurring violent conflict, obscure knowledge regarding war and peace, and sustain exclusionary norms.⁶ Moreover, scholarship suggests that youth may be the driving force in creating societies that are more inclusive and open. Hein argues that opportunities exist for youth to potentially affect how diverse groups within a population relate to one another.⁷ Still, how such shifts might occur remains undertheorized. Further research about how youth are dealing with and interacting across diversity is crucial, particularly given the continued presence of interethnic conflict even in societies generally considered “peaceful.”

Some scholars have referred to young people's work in building cultures of peace, but most of this is brief and anecdotal; it is used to support points about peacebuilding more broadly, rather than offering an in-depth critical engagement of work by and/or for youth. Other scholars have focused on youth peacebuilding but do not provide in-depth considerations that include youth perspectives. Several scholars in the field have suggested that more empirical studies including engagement with youth perspectives in peacebuilding are needed, but much of this crucial work remains to be done.⁸

Some steps have been made in this direction, most notably by Schwartz's work on young people in post-conflict reconstruction in Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kosovo. Based on these studies, she suggests that the impact of young people in post-conflict scenarios can be either negative or positive, and that this is dependent on the success of programmatic and policy interventions in addressing central issues. Overall, she proposes that success in appropriately integrating youth in the pursuit of peace requires attending to young people's needs for protection, education, reintegration, and empowerment, while accounting for cultural and environmental factors in implementing policies and programs.⁹ My work draws on her insights while analyzing music as a tool for use in related programs. Moreover, while she acknowledges that gender was a factor in the cases she presents, Schwartz also notes she has not discussed this factor at any length. Thus, the present work seeks to contribute to further understanding the role of gender in young people's experiences around peace and security.

Ardizzone's analysis of several New York City–based peace education programs for young people also makes an important contribution. She focuses on youth who sought out and joined overtly global, political, and action-oriented organizations, rather than those centered on “recreational” or social activities and examines why youth choose to become involved in such work.¹⁰ Ardizzone argues that incorporating youth voices may assist in transforming societies from cultures of violence to cultures of peace.¹¹ However, while she engages with youth peacebuilding, she does not discuss issues of gender or any particular methods that might be utilized to engage young people who are not already active. My research aims to bring something different to the field by engaging with young people who came to peacebuilding through “recreational” music-based activities. Moreover, this study lends diversity to the existing literature by broadening perspectives to include voices of young people from other cultures.

Dominant Representations of Youth and Politics

As research considering how young people are understood in peace and conflict is quite limited, it is worth looking more broadly at how young people are constructed in public discourse. Griffin suggests that in modern Western societies, the dominant image of young people is of being prone to trouble and facing disorders based on consumption and transition.¹² Much of the literature noting this trend comes from the United States, where young people are regularly publicly stereotyped and treated as scapegoats by psychologists, politicians, and the media.¹³ Youth violence is merely one aspect of the “youth problem” created by the media, but it has captured a great deal of public attention in the United States.¹⁴

Young people are often demonized in the media and blamed for a wide range of social problems. Media analyses in the United States have found that teens, particularly teens of color, are usually depicted negatively.¹⁵ This is not a new trend, though it is one that can have important policy effects, among other negative outcomes.¹⁶ Given these representations, youth have been assigned a double, contrasting identity as powerful consumers on the one hand and an oppressed, disenfranchised minority on the other.¹⁷ Moreover, Clay says, youth today are a generation who see themselves as a low priority in society, with the worst allocation of public goods from health care to education. It is not surprising then that many youth feel society views them as useless when it comes to performing as citizens, workers, students, and occasionally even as consumers.

While these examples are from the United States, similar representations of young people appear elsewhere, including in Northern Ireland and Australia, where I completed the research for this book. In Northern Ireland, a recent report by the National Youth Agency found that U.K. media depictions of young people tend to be negative. Three of the four most frequent topics when focusing on youth are crime, gangs, and social exclusion.¹⁸ Similarly, there are also negative portrayals of youth in the Australian media, including some media attention to youth violence and depictions that focus on youth being lazy, apathetic, or inactive.¹⁹ Such dominant images can marginalize recognition of the political work youth are doing, such as taking part in peacebuilding initiatives.

Those concerned about youth participation in politics raise the issue of disconnection from formal politics, citing a prevalent worry that youth are not taking part in formal social critique and are thereby losing out on a chance at having a voice in the public sphere.²⁰ In fact, youth are now scrutinized more than any previous generation for an apparent failure to articulate recognizable political narratives.²¹ Young people are not politically inactive, although they are active in ways that differ from the formal political involvement that many adults and political leaders expect or prefer for them. Indeed, there is a growing trend in the United States of youth programs using popular culture to creatively participate in political life.²² Stewart, for example, looks at music programs and suggests that many offer youth the chance to learn democratic practices, gain leadership skills, and develop political capital.

Harris confirms this trend for youth in Australia and the United Kingdom, proposing that new, less visible kinds of political movement and activism are occurring in locations that sit on the border of the public/private divide, resisting easy categorization.²³ For example, many youth are engaging in political action, in forums such as alternative music spheres, underground publications, and other subcultural activities. Harris views this development as an explicit reaction against being prodded to visible participation in public discourse while the traditional public sphere is becoming less accessible. In other words, the repeated expectation that young people ought to engage in more traditional political activities may very well be part of the reason many choose not to. However, this engagement tends to be overlooked by most adults who only see more traditional forms of political participation.

How Youth Are (Mis)Understood (or Ignored) in Peace Studies

In the peacebuilding literature young people tend to be viewed in one of two ways, as victims or perpetrators of violence. On one hand, the existing literature tends to categorize youth as innocent children, harmed by the effects of violent conflict while unable to do anything about it. At the same time, the literature has increasingly defined youth as potential perpetrators, likely to use violence when faced with conflict given their own direct experience as victims of violence. These dominant depictions are perpetuated despite the fact that all over the world young people living with conflict are also engaged in working for peace through actions such as conscious objection to conscription, nonviolent political activism, peace education programs, and organizing networks of young peacebuilders.

The tendency to stereotype youth as perpetrators or victims misses an important part of the story, as it obscures other ways young people may participate in conflict and in peace actions, including the role they may play as peace activists. There is thus a need for research that looks at why some young people decide to be peacebuilders as opposed to perpetrators of violence. Del Felice and Wisler argue that throughout their lives young people will often experience violence or conflict, participate in it, but also challenge its existence through peacebuilding work that proposes alternatives. They suggest that when it comes to youth peacebuilders, “[t]heir stories have yet to be told.”²⁴ Realizing this, in this study I aim to look at the circumstances under which young people get involved in peacebuilding and how they understand it, including recording both obvious and less visible work by youth peacebuilders across different cultural and geographic contexts.

Thankfully, there is some evidence that a new international norm of youth participation is developing in peace processes. The UN and many agencies advocating for children's rights have recognized that young people affected by war should be included in peace processes, including in the development of programs and policies for their own education, rehabilitation, and reintegration, and also in community development. Moreover, some aid agencies, most NGOs, and UNICEF have all integrated youth consultation as standard. However, these activities have not yet led to widespread inclusion of youth in peace processes. For instance, while Sierra Leone has been touted as an example of successful UN work in peacebuilding, even there issues affecting youth were not given sufficient attention throughout the peace process; youth remained marginalized in the peacebuilding period.²⁵ To date, there remain few, if any, instances in which young people have taken part in formal peace processes.

While addressing this exclusion from formal participation in peacebuilding is crucial, youth also deserve be acknowledged for the informal peacebuilding work they already are doing. Around the world young people are taking an active role in seeking political change, and this needs to be looked at in a broader context of peacebuilding in various locales. Yet informal peace education work, often done by or with inner-city youth, receives little notice from academia or the press in comparison to traditional government-run education efforts. Acknowledging the work youth are doing to build cultures of peace is important across a variety of contexts, in places experiencing ongoing intense conflict but also in societies generally seen as peaceful but which include some cultures of violence.

Inclusion of youth, their knowledge, culture, and ideas in peacebuilding is important. Lederach proposes that all people, their knowledge, and their perceptions are crucial resources for peacebuilding that ought to be trusted and validated. His research is then based on identifying and utilizing people's existing knowledge and understanding, even when they may not see it as a resource.²⁶ This viewpoint gives support for looking not just at how youth are expected to be involved in peacebuilding work, but taking into account how they might be engaged in peacebuilding through skills and interests they already possess. The peacebuilding work youth are doing in local settings may seem limited. However, it can be very important in a global context of conflict, given that young people and their commodities traverse national borders with ease. Moreover, in doing so, they shape and are shaped by a myriad of meanings and structures.

A number of scholars have begun to explore the links between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peacebuilding and the prospects for each in various contexts. For example, Aliyev, in his research in the North Caucasus region, concluded that bottom-up approaches have more potential for successfully addressing conflict and reducing violence, as credible counterparts on the insurgent side are not apparent and available for top-down negotiations.²⁷ Moreover, he argues, such approaches, when applied with diverse participants, including youth, may be useful in addressing root causes of violence. Civil society cannot bring peace in isolation, but it can play an important and integral role in the complex aim of engaging people for peaceful change using multidim...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Youth in Peace and Conflict
• Chapter 2: Music Makes the (Young) People Come Together?
• Chapter 3: The Beat on the Ground: Introducing the Case Studies
• Chapter 4: Building Peace Through a Musical Dialogue
• Chapter 5: Shifting Identities, Performing Peace
• Chapter 6: Making Space, Creating Common Ground
• Chapter 7: Gendering the Jam: Possibilities and Prohibitions
• Postlude
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography