 is the result of an interesting professional collaboration that resulted from a disagreement. During a validation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 20 to 50 on youth peace and security, I bought into a heated debate with one of the authors of the study on how youth in this sense should be framed in the progress report. I was one of the youth representatives for East and Southern Africa and being from a country that had just come out of the longest state of emergency in its history from 2016 to 2017, a state of emergency that was declared due to youth protests, I had a few things to say on the matter. My research partner, who's the author I spoke about, being originally from Turkey living in the United States, also had his own perspectives. The rest, as they say, is history. Now more than ever, in light of the current and very visible youth political activism in Ethiopia, it's fast becoming pertinent to study youth and peaceful dissent. With the multifaceted conflict patterns in Ethiopia, it's important to highlight and examine positive means that youth continue to express dissent and alternative spheres of civic engagement and political participation crafted by young people's resilience for peace. Honoa, in her book, The Time of Youth, conceptualized weighthood as a liminal space where young people are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults due to the main building blocks that elude them, including skills, jobs, housing and marriage. Honoa described young people in the States as, while not socially recognized as adults, young people in weighthood are nevertheless taking their roles as active citizens and are driving change in their societies. Here she makes a distinction between state citizenship and participation and participatory citizenship and participation and the avenues in which young people choose to engage, which is usually participatory citizenship and alternative spaces such as music and drama. In defining youth for the study, we looked at Iyo Balches and various other authors' work in defining youth. Iyo highlights the recognition of youthfulness as a social position which is a vital departure point to understand and enable youth agency. He also highlights that youth agency can be a double-aged and can be double-aged and the exercise of youth agency serving the youth versus powerful elites should be constantly in question. According to another author, Young, there are never universal, young people are never universally manipulated or passive actors in a world designed by others, but they are individuals who are trying to chart their own course. This definition is important because young people are neither universally progressive revolutionaries because they can be conservative and they're not universally victims or perpetrators of violence. We're well aware that while some are peace builders, framing all young people as peace builders would then romanticize their agency. Our study focuses on the positive resilience the indigenous agency, the endogenous agency, assets, attributes, qualities, capacities and leadership that young people in urban centers in Ethiopia have demonstrated for building peace and practicing peaceful descent. In the urban context, keeping in mind that complexities in Ethiopian politics in general and youth and political participation in particular, the research took a grounded approach. Here we were basically saying we don't know much about this and we're here to learn. We used reflexivity in our audiovisual production as well as in the interaction with participants using an inclusive participatory action research approach as a methodology with youth agency being the core of the analysis. While the research methodology makes this ideal, it was challenging as a large number of participants take part in the research. However, while our sample size may be limited, the researchers consider this project to be a starting point in further engagement, highlighting the lived experiences of young people that demonstrates resilience of youth to build peace. The research uses key informant interviews, focus group discussions, as well as observation and desk reviews to collect data. Here it's important to address the challenges in working collaboratively with my research partner, a US, as I said, a US resident who's originally from Turkey. While some of the main objectives of the research was to implement a youth led youth-centered research, identity and perception played a considerable role in successfully engaging in the sector in certain spaces within the current context. I don't think I should get too deep into that because it might deter from some of the points that we want to highlight, but it was an interesting part of our finding as well. Balsa and Herrera wrote the historical legacies of the 1974 student revolution in Ethiopia and the resulting legacy of continued systemic and ongoing repression of politically active youth and institutions set up to silence youth dissent. Accordingly, the learned collective stance for some young people was to avoid politics like you would avoid electric shock. Politica and Alcorrenti, I chepet them. Yet young people have continued to play an instrumental role in shaping and influencing politics in other ways beyond the mainstream political spaces. Critical of the Ethiopian political culture in the decade following to the 2005 contested election, Abenic refers to the deference as a survival strategy when analyzing Ethiopian political participation. After the closing up of the political space following the contested election in 2005, alternative online spaces opened up for political engagement such as social media. Social media remains still a space for dissent while the inherent nature of Ethiopian politics remains the same with limited tolerance of dissent. This is a quotation from Abenic's work on Ethiopian politics following the 2005 elections. Still, there is considerable dissent in silence itself. Even if we spoke remarked an interviewee, we would not be listened to. Here I would like to play a poem that we reported from an amateur young poet that we found in a youth space. Did I go? Richard, you? On. Speak softly, my dear. Too many folk are yelling in my ear. No sudden movements, that's clear. I would want you to pay for my fear. The masses cry war. They bring those cries to our door. The people they scream. And I can't tell what they mean. For I am young, you say. They have just lost their way. What will your voice change? What could your heart portray? Sit in silence, ice and quiet. Is that what you want? As stones are thrown, and lies are stored. As stars fall down and rain weighs on the clouds. Should I stay and watch? Should I stay in my thoughts? Should I brace myself? Bite my tongue to ease for the health? Speak softly, my dear. Too many folk are yelling in my ear. What you ask is clear. But what is peace in a life? With that said, it's important to highlight some important preliminary observations that we've had during our fieldwork. The first one is, of course, on the perceptions of peace and politics, and here we would like to highlight the observations that we've had on everyday peace. We asked our focus group participants to visualize or describe or draw what they think of peace, what they think of when they think of peace. A visually impaired man that was taking part in the focus groups described what he thinks of when he thinks of peace, and he said that it was the shade of a big tree in the center of town where we used to take shelter on a hot day. He is describing the city of Wunder, where he's originally from, and the tree is a thick tree in the center of town called Jantakalwanka. It's a very popular space that young people go to to relax and take shelter from the heat. Another participant in our focus groups talked about an Ethiopian daisy, a yellow daisy set in the nozzle of an AK-47 that's resting upside against the wall. This participant is originally from Abaminch in the southern nation's nationalities and peoples represented region, and her uncle was part of the military, so resting the gun upside against the wall is a practice by the military during the time of peace. The flower is her very own touch. Even the experiences of safety and security which we explored during the focus groups within similar contexts can vary considerably due to the lived experience of violence. One participant from Daredawa told us, I did not know much about guns until recently. Now I can tell you the kind of bullet that's being shot in my neighborhood. I do not feel safe in the city. Even with all the police, I do not feel safe. She said, I feel safe in church, at least in church you're not alone. However, a girl from Gambela who lived in Gondar for her studies remarked that because of the shootings in the church, I will no longer run to church if there's conflict. My friends were shot in the church. This experience is from her experience of the shootings in the churches in Gondar a few years ago. The second point we want to highlight, of course, is that youth political participation is not a standalone issue. Other multiplicities of exclusion and marginalizations color youth political participation. When studying the lived experiences of young people, it's important to include an intersectional lens. Political inclusion and exclusion from the perspective of the young people of young people is always an interaction of the dynamics of economic and social exclusion compounded with culture and history. Furthermore, another point that we wish to highlight is on the gender dimension of exclusion, even within youth movements. The voices of young people are not just marginalized. They're actively excluded, overlooked and silenced and ignored. Add on the gender dynamics in which power is expressed, young women voices are relatively scarce and muted in comparison to their male counterparts. Young males are dominant in politics on the streets, in the job markets, in insurgents movements, as well as perpetrators of crime and violence. But the same social problems they're fighting against are most starkly faced by young women. One of the findings of our research is that young women have voice and they exercise their voice in tactical agency for peace. Furthermore, when speaking about the gender dimension of fear, it's important to highlight the feminization of fear and non-violence. You have a voice when you're violent in this country. In the context where controversy and violence speaks, non-violent youth are rendered voiceless. This is a quote from a former online youth activist that was imprisoned by the former administration in 2004. Young people's resilience, agency and leadership is another point to highlight. Indirectly here, there's a case that we would like to share about a youth led and youth founded civil society organization. I will not mention their name, but they talk about indirectly influencing policy and practice through strategic engagement since 2005. They work on youth issues and they're one of the few youth led organizations that survived the 2005 CSO law change, which was a challenge for funding and advocacy. And they attribute their resilience to quiet advocacy, working with and not confronting government bodies, a strategy that has come with experience and learning that has been passed down as one generation evolved out of the organization and was passed to another generation. They work to influence processes rather than outcomes. This is a case study of meaningful youth participation by a youth founded and youth led organization working on SRHR issues, sexual reproductive health issues on youth. Finally, I'd like to conclude by saying that with opening up of civic space since 2008 in Ethiopia and perhaps because of the continuous setbacks since, it's important to redefine young people's political engagement. While it may seem to be an immature recommendation, young people may be the most important social category for peaceful political transition processes. While there is an abundance of media attention on youth and violent action, we categorically dismiss the ways in which millions of Ethiopian youth remain peaceful and dedicate their lives to steer political change and serve their communities through peaceful means. In our field work, we observe that what we dubbed to be considerable civic appetite in universities and informal as well as formal settings and in youth-only spaces. Given safe spaces, young people in Ethiopia are ready to transform anew. Thank you.