 I want to welcome you to this important event this afternoon. We're glad that you could join us. My first task is to ask you to turn off your cell phones since they interfere with the sound system as well as being distracting. My name is David Smock. I'm Vice President in charge of the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution. And the author and I are colleagues in that center. I want to officially declare on my own authority that this is Stephanie Schwartz Day at the U.S. Institute of Peace. This is a first book we have published on youth. It's written by Stephanie who was only barely out of college when she finished work on this book. She's the youngest author we've ever published. The time the book was finished she was a program assistant the first time we've ever published a book by a program assistant. She's since been promoted. More important than anything else it's an excellent book on an important topic. In addition to being to her work in the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution Stephanie also heads up our task force on youth and has given remarkable leadership in that capacity. So again let me welcome you and I will turn it over to Kathleen Kunas to will moderate the day's event. Thank you David and I can only concur. This is Stephanie Schwartz Day at the United States Institute of Peace. We're very pleased to welcome you all here. For those of you who are new to our events may it suffice that the United States Institute of Peace is an independent nonpartisan national institution established 25 years ago and is funded by Congress. The goals of USIP include assisting the international community in preventing managing and resolving conflicts. Today's event is notable for many reasons as David has already listed several of them. The book Youth in Post-Conflict Reconstruction represents really a significantly forward in understanding and problematizing youth in the field of conflict and peace building. Youth as an age cohort is one of the least understood in the social sciences and is underestimated force in terms of economic impact. Much of the research to date has been done by the military. However the panelists here today represent the cutting edge of understanding this age cohort not only in conflict but also in post-conflict environments. The book acknowledges and documents how youth are powerful change agents for war or for peace. Schwartz outlines a policy agenda for positive peace as she argues that rights based and advocacy approaches are simply not enough to help young people navigate through post-conflict environments. She suggests instead that in addition to structural changes youth empowerment programs provide skills and community to youth that may otherwise have less opportunities. With these few framing remarks and before I introduce the panel this afternoon I want to emphasize that one of the important aspects of this type of an event is to engage in public discussion. I've asked each of the discussants to limit their remarks so that there's plenty of time for your comments and Q&A at the end of these presentations. Our discussion today will begin with Stephanie Schwartz author of the book. Stephanie as we've already noted is very much a part of the Institute of Peace a senior program assistant in the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution. I'm just going to kind of lay out how we're going to organize the discussion. We're going to look at the discussion around three main messages of the book. One, youth as agents of change. Youth are not simply a force of instability but they're also agents of peace. And Shaban McEvoy Levy who is an associate professor of political science and director of the peace studies program at Butler will be a part of this discussion as well as Wissam Samat who is studying biochemistry at the Lebanese University and is currently a fellowship at UNFPA headquarters. I'm going to let that part of the panel flow together and then I'll introduce our last two discussants at that point. Stephanie I want to welcome you to the podium and I think we could all give her a really warm hand for it. Thanks Kathleen for that great introduction and thanks for all the panelists for being here today and everyone here who's come out to hear about kids these days. I also want to thank David Smock who really opened the door for me for this project and without whom this book would not have come to fruition so thank you. I thought I'd start with sort of how I came to write about this book, how I came to be interested in these issues. I was actually studying in an intro to modern civil wars class at Wesleyan University that used turbulent peace, USIP's big tome of what is peace and conflict studies as its textbook and one of the issues that we were discussing was a series of articles on the youth bulge. This issue is often oversimplified saying that if you've got a large or an overly large population of young men in a country that country is more likely to fall into destabilization. It's more likely to become a failed state and there are various indexes that use this demographic indicator as such. In fact the youth bulge theory is much more complex and lays out a series of political, economic and social structures that when combined with a large population of youth such as institutional overcrowding at universities, unemployment, young men with no family or they're not married, they are in severe cases of poverty, amplifies these grievances and makes it rational for young people to engage through violence, to engage their national community through violence rather than peace. And given that today has one of the largest populations of youth the world has ever seen with almost 53% of the population in the world under 30, I thought well I wanted to examine a little bit more what are the nuances, what roles do youth actually play. And I thought that if we put this in a post-conflict context it might be a little bit easier to evaluate whether young people, a large population of young people is really uniformly contributing to destabilization or whether there are other roles that youth play potentially for peace building. And specifically how do we change those structures outlined in the youth bulge theory such that we can make this opportunity cost structure lend itself to young people choosing to contribute to their communities rather than choosing violence. So I thought I'd talk today about basically the key finding of the book and also the key question that the book asks. So the key finding of the book, as one of them as Kathleen has pointed out, is youth as change agents, youth as agents of peace in their communities and youth as agents of violence in their communities. And what this means is that youth or a youth bulge is not simply a force for instability, it's not, we can't uniformly write them off as a large population of youth, that means instability. Youth roles can be positive and they can be negative and specifically they can be shaped by the structures and intervening factors in the reconstruction process. So some examples of youth roles. Youth are community peace builders. One example that I use in the book is an organization called Propos in the DRC trained about, trained former youth combatants as community leaders for reconciliation and community peace building workshops. These youth leaders, former combatants, former child soldiers, worked in over 100 different communities conducting payostras, this combination of lectures and workshops about how to resolve conflict. They worked with landmine victims and they, in many cases, had other young former soldiers come to their workshops and actually point out where arms caches were stored and build this support and community of reconciliation moving on, getting rid of the arms and moving past that. Another example of a youth role is as youth as a resource for the perpetuation of violence. Again, in the DRC, this is really evident with the forced and re-recruitment of child soldiers into rebel armies. Even after the peace treaty was finished, there were parties and elites that still wanted to perpetuate the conflict. Specifically, General Laurent Nekunda, who operated in Eastern DRC. And in 2007, he had between 300 to 500 children in his mixed brigades, brigades that were meant to be through the demobilization process with government armies and supposed to have been sort of de-operationalized from the war. There were at least 500 children in there and thousands more in danger of re-recruitment. And another example of youth as a resource for violence is again in the DRC, a group called the OPEC boys who were unemployed youth from the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, and the Allied Democratic Forces, the AFDL and the DRC, who made a profit smuggling oil and selling it to both rebel groups, in essence perpetuating the conflict, helping them to maintain their reserves. And in here, we have an intervening structure of a failed DDR program, one that never got to the reintegration part and barely got to the disarmament and demobilization. And you also combine that with absolutely no alternatives for young people, no opportunities for employment, no opportunities for education, and a real stigma associated with being a child soldier, especially for girls, very hard for them to move back into their communities and be accepted. And so it makes them very, very vulnerable for re-recruitment and to be a resource for violence. A third role would be as a coordinated political voice. This example I found is best showed in the Kosovo case where after the violence, you see youth sort of swelling in these refugee camps and spontaneously mobilizing on their own to provide help to their peers in need through health programs, education programs, cleaning up the camps. And this sort of energy was noticed by the international community who was able to help them organize, give them a structure. And this spontaneous mobilization was eventually turned into the Kosovo Youth Network and the Kosovo Youth Congress, which met annually in the years following the violence. And they gave voice to youth concerns, they met with politicians, and they maintained an updated youth action plan outlining youth priorities for policy in a new Kosovo. And here you have an intervening factor of recognizing the energy of youth in an organized way from the international community and really letting them drive the program in doing so, giving them a voice in politics and a voice in their future. And finally, another youth role I would point out is youth apathy, no real role, and coincidentally, the best example of this is also in Kosovo, where over half of the youth population when surveyed a few years after the conflict said they felt they needed to leave Kosovo, that the only option for them for a better life was leaving, was going to get an education elsewhere, was going to get a job elsewhere, and they weren't invested in the process. And so this sort of leads into the big question the book asks. One of my favorite things about the book is that it doesn't provide all the answers, it really asks a lot of questions and looks at these cases to find questions. And that question for me is how to bridge child advocacy programs that are much needed with long-term youth empowerment programs and policy. And let me break that down just a little bit. Child protection, there's a really extensive legal framework that exists since 1989 for the protection of children, especially children affected by conflict. The UN has the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was established in 1989, and there are further additions to that that protect the rights of children affected by conflict. But these provide a framework for places like UNIFSAF, places like Save the Children to protect children in conflict, but they only apply to children under 18, and they really lend themselves to an adult-dominated process that doesn't recognize youth agency in their own right. An empowerment program would not only provide young people with something to do in their spare time, a way to contribute to their community, but it provides them skills with which to have their voice heard in the political dialogue of their country, and skills with which that they could go on to the future to be productive adult citizens in their community. And two quick examples here. Again, here, both from the DRC. In the DRC, Save the Children started a program called the Community Child Protection Networks, and here the goal was really to spread the word about how we can protect children affected by conflict, because there was such sort of rampant impunity for human rights for children and the horrible treatment of child soldiers. And so they organized these networks of local authorities, religious leaders, businessmen, and children, except there was basically no participation of children in these groups at all. It was really adult-dominated, adult-led, and it didn't address their potential to be agents in their own right, and it didn't address the underlying structures of the violence. On the flip side of that, in the DRC, again, Save the Children, Search for Common Ground, and UNICEF sponsored a radio program called Sissy Watoto, which was an award-winning program that trained young reporters to do their own entire program on how to access demobilization programs, how to get resources for health, where to find a demobilization center. They had personal accounts from other young people about demobilization success stories, and they interviewed people in their communities about what was going on in the conflict and things like this. So not only were the young people, did they have something to do that was productive with their time, they were giving important information to their peers about how to get out of the Army, how to find a demobilization center, how to access health care, and they were also being trained in a potential career that they could use and feel like they had a way to transition into adulthood and into their community. Now that is to say that while these empowerment programs can be really successful for the children and youth that they touch, they're aimed at the medium term. They take it away from the short-term emergency, let me give you health care and protection that really is child advocacy programs, and takes it into the medium term of really trying to find a sense of community reintegration and a sense of belonging, but they're not long-term and they're not really solving the long-term policy issues of unemployment, of access to land, of being able to marry and manage that dual transition from war to peace and from childhood to adulthood. And so the question that I think that the book asks is how do we find this bridge with all three needed programs in the short term from protection in the medium term to reintegration and empowerment in that context? And I think the missing link is how do we link that up with policy solutions that are long-term integrating youth into the reconstruction, the peace agenda. And I think that if we look at conflicts today and the model of reconstruction and state building we're seeing today, it's especially important to keep these youth issues in mind. I'm not here to say that youth issues are necessarily the linchpin of a reconstruction process and whether you pay attention to youth is going to be the defining point, function of the reconstruction process. It's not, but it's a significant part and youth can have a real impact on the grassroots level for peace in their communities and they can have a real impact as a resource for violence either being manipulated by elites or in their own right. And the young generation is especially important to keep in mind if we consider the implications for sustainable peace. If we think about it, this is the next generation of leaders for their country and how young people experience the process of reconstruction, how they feel they've benefited from a peace regime is going to affect their perception of what peace can achieve in the future and is going to affect their perception of how they can interact as a citizen in the future, whether that's productive through nonviolent means or whether violence is the only way to grab attention. So I think that one of the things that I really love about the book is that it really points to the need of continuing research. It points to how much we don't know about youth and that we need to continue this research on how to break the cycle of violence and recognizing that youth are agents of change in their community to tap into their potential as peace builders and really focus on changing those structures through programming and through policy so that we can move that short-term protection for children to a long-term dynamic focused on empowering young people. So the panelists will go into each of these issues more in depth. But that is, I think, the real basic arguments of the book. So thanks very much. Now I've asked Shabon Ivoi Levy to begin our discussion and really to pick up where Stephanie left off. How can youth be agents of peace and how can intervening policy and programs be more attentive? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor to be here to talk about Stephanie Schwartz's book. I told her just before I, the beginning that I planned to assign this book for my senior seminar and then I'm hoping that's going to inspire my students to follow in her footsteps. And it's a really good example, I think, of the kind of work that we need to see happening where young people themselves are writing the books that are going to set the agenda for academic work and policy. And unfortunately, it's all too rare because older people like to protect their territory. And so I'm really glad to see that USIP is promoting this. My role, as I understand it, is to answer this question and to bring in some other cases that are not in the book. My own fieldwork is in Northern Ireland and most recently in Israel and Palestine. So since it's about reconstruction after an agreement, I think I will focus on Northern Ireland, but say a little bit about those other cases as well. Stephanie really eloquently shows in the book young people are active participants in war and in organized violence after war. And they're also active participants in a variety of peace groups. And they participate in cultural production and reproduction that's very important for both promoting continued conflict of violence or preventing it. And youth agency in all of these spheres has multiple impacts. It has impacts not only on policy, on policy makers, and it does, and I'll hopefully give you some examples of that in a few minutes. But it also influences other youth, it influences family, it influences communities. So there are all these interwoven networks and I would argue youth are key connectors between a variety of different social spheres. As agents have changed, then they're shaping not only concrete facts on the ground, but also perceptions. And perceptions that help shape whether or not conflict is perceived to be necessary to continue or whether this agreement can hold. In the Israeli Palestinian context, for example, the young settlers who are young people who went to protest the Gaza disengagement, they had a concrete impact on elongating that conflict. And they also had an important symbolic effect and in interviews with their parents and with other adults. It's clear that they've had an important sort of rallying symbolic effect that has had some long-term traction. Now in Northern Ireland, I think that it may be better to compare with the Kosovo case, or possibly also more with the US contemporary case here where we have concerns about young people being recruited to a variety of armed groups from gangs to other militant organizations here and overseas. But at least we can say that it's a post-conflict reconstruction context where there's been 12 years or more of experience that we can look at. And while it's the success case, I guess, it's also, as you can probably notice from recent events today, yesterday, and the same last year, there's continuing instability around orange parades at particular times of the year. And these very much involve young people. So there's a small segment of the youth population in Northern Ireland that's a continuing force of this instability through public disorder and crime and potential recruitment into dissident groups. And Republican dissident groups are actively recruiting young people today. And I think it's possible to link these events with the structures of the peace process itself. For one thing, there is continued exclusion of working-class young people, particularly young men, their low educational achievement, particularly in the Protestant community, but also in the Catholic community, long-term unemployment. The unemployment rates in the areas that were most affected by the conflict where most of this ongoing violence is taking place, including the riots last night and the night before, have over 50 percent unemployment rates. And there's also a long social legacy of trauma associated with the conflict. And there has been very little in terms of trauma counseling or healing or transitional justice focused on young people or families, indeed, in general. So there are a lot of families who suffer from various forms of dysfunction, depression, addiction to tranquilizers that are ongoing from the conflict. And so there's a great deal of that social mix that's very important. There's been also been little progress on shared space and creating shared space where young people from both communities can meet and get to know each other. Not to mention there's not much individual space for young people themselves. And as one youth worker who was working in North Belfast pointed out to me, he said, at least when the Brits were coming down in their tanks, we knew what there's the physical manifestation of my misery. Today, we're not sure where the physical manifestation of my misery is, but since we have this history of taking to the streets, young people are continuing to take to the streets in generations that were born after the peace process. There are some eight and nine-year-olds, for example, out rioting who don't remember the original conflict. So recreational rioting, as we call it in Northern Ireland, is one piece of this or manifestation of youth exclusion from the peace process. The other is youth joining gangs. There's a youth group with quite young children called the Divis Hoods Liberation Army, the youth gang. And they're only involved in local level crime, but you can tell from the name, probably those of you who are familiar with the Northern Irish conflict, that they are mimicking the Irish Liberation Army and that the Irish National Liberation Army by calling themselves the Divis Hoods Liberation Army. Now, they don't have a political agenda, but this is a kind of mimicking of the past in a way that you can link with the lack of truth telling, the lack of storytelling about history that we can see, because there just hasn't been this fear or forum for young people to be part of that. Why are they important? Well, because they shape local people's perceptions of whether this peace process and Sinn Féin's involvement in it is worthwhile. And also because the dissident groups have been able to use them as a way of gaining status. One group, for example, Oglena Herron, issued death threats against these children because of their crime in a local newspaper as a way of building status because local people want something to be done by these young hooligans that they see to be out of control. So there is a way, that's an example of a concrete way in which young people who have been excluded in numerous ways, to numerous to really talk about here, have a concrete impact on the peace process by invigorating dissidents. I've mentioned that there's a lack of trauma support and a lack of transitional justice for young people. There are existing rights-based consultation mechanisms. We have a children's minister and so on. But there, many people would say that they don't really adequately consult with the young people who should be consulted with. They usually go with people who are easy to access and easy to consult with. And some of the organizations that are doing good work include the ex-prisoners organizations who are just now realizing that with 15,000 ex-prisoners, all with maybe three children or more, that there's a massive population of young people who have been affected by the conflict. Other groups like Public Achievement and Include Youth have been doing very important work that unfortunately I don't have time to talk about now, between young people and the police and young people and politicians and really connecting them with those police and politicians in ways that haven't been done before and provide good models, I think. Because the key issue that I won't be able to conclude with is that in the peace process very much in Northern Ireland, and I can see it elsewhere, did not take into consideration young people as both victim survivors and activists in an ongoing way. And young people haven't been included, haven't been connected with politicians, and when they have been consulted, nothing has been done. So they will say, we're giving all this information, where's the policy change? And as one youth worker said, the lease of politicians can do is say, we didn't make, this change is recommended, but they never even get that response. And along with genuine participation, a transitional justice mechanism and a development mechanism that links these pieces. So that there are skills to develop and build through participating in transitional justice and participating in political activity that are helpful for future job career prospects. Lastly, the importance of having training and nonviolent mechanisms of protest. We can see how that was a failure or a problem with this most recent, the recent events in Northern Ireland. And we can also see how it has such tremendous potential in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if adequately supported. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Siobhan. We're going to move on in a similar vein to Lebanon, though, and ask with some sum up to talk about some of these processes going on there, and from a very youthful perspective. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. At first, I'd like to say something like a joke once I have a presentation in my university, and my professor was introducing me as a peace activist, and here they introduced me as a biochemist, so it's funny. So the people in the room were like, what are you doing here? Okay. Well, yeah. I'm studying biochemistry, but at the same time, I started my own peace movement with my friends and live on after war 2006. So let me tell you my experience from 2006 until today what happened. In 2006, I'm living in south Lebanon, and I was caught in the war, and after one week of the war, I became a refugee because we lost our house, and we have to move to Beirut city. I found myself, I cannot fit in the cycle of violence. I'm not there. I didn't find myself in that place. Although a lot of youths were there, and they were fighting and they want to fight more. I couldn't stay in that status. And I decided with my friends that I met them in Beirut, and we decided to start supporting the refugees that are not having the chance to be living in houses, because what happened is that when we were displaced, we were living in people's houses, but some people were just like simply living in the parks and the streets. So what we did is that we started supporting the refugees and we were a small group, and the refugees were like more than 800,000, like some around million after 20 days of the war. And what we tried to do is to start integrating young refugees that are living in the streets, started asking them to volunteer with us, and to start helping their parents and helping their children to do some work, to do something that they feel they are not able, that they have like other choices than being in violence. And at that time, we were doing a lot of activities for young people, psychosocial support for activities like theater, poetry, conducting with trainings, even during the war in a very hot situation, and very stressful. But what worked in that time is that a lot of young people were telling us that thank you for being with us in this very hard situation, because we were going to fight, and we were going to be integrated in violence if we didn't have the chance to be in such activities, in such like between two brackets projects, although it wasn't a real project, it was something that was born randomly, and without any preparation, without having like an agenda or like design project, it was just like doing activities. And people, as you start implementing some activities, people will be guiding you more than you are guiding them. And this was really a turning point for me and my friends, because after the war, we decided to keep this group on growing. And we decided to start working on the real issue, on the real factors that are making the conflict more and more complicated is the violence that people are integrated in, and especially young people are convinced that this violence is giving their lives a meaning. So we started to raise awareness on nonviolence, on peace. We have the other choice, you have the right to choose. And we noticed something on these young people as we were in contact with them more, that they are raised on the idea that are passive and they can't make a change for what's happening around them. And we are trying to tell them, no, what's happening around you is because of you, it's because of what you are accepting. So if you just become more coordinating in the politics that's happening, and become more organized, and let your voice be heard in a very strong movement, you can make the change. And you are not the leaders of tomorrow, as they always tell you, the other is of today, of now, you have to go and move. And we started the movement based on these principles that we believe that are really effective. And we started integrating a lot of youth people and going to villages, driving my car every day from village to another, stopping by organizations, stopping in clubs, in schools, addressing the issues, telling people that nonviolence is the solution. It's not violence. If it was violence, the solution, it should be ended from years ago. But since we didn't end the conflict yet because of the violence that we are going through it all the time. And we try to address more. Is it your life worth fighting for it in this way? I don't know. So what happened until today, the peace movement is growing and growing faster. But we have a lot of challenges. And the challenges are not only from the external politics, especially from the internal politics. The political parties in my country are not liking us at all. They are not supporting me. I'm not that welcome to be on board whenever there's a conference or a meeting. So whenever they see me, they will like looking at me as if I'm the intruder here. And I was looking for the safe space. I started looking for a safe space for the movement. How can we put this movement in a safe space so more youth will be feeling secure and can join us because I heard and I knew a lot of people that I met. They were talking about, yeah, we like to be with you. We support you, but we cannot say it out loud. Oh, maybe if someday you will be like after a few years having some people for the elections from the movement and starting becoming integrated in the parliament, in the government. But we cannot vote for you because we are scared simply. So we started looking for a safe space. I started meeting UN. I found the United Nations in my country will be the safe space. And I started meeting people from the United Nations and talking about how can we start integrating youth in the movement in a way that makes it safe space for them and through the UN. So now we're designing micro projects. I will not say a big project micro projects to be implemented in different villages and different regions where we can start integrating them in interactive way like theater, conducting poetry workshops, filmmaking, documenting researchers. So anyway, they will start working in the movement and having a job to do in this movement. So they will be finding themselves that this is what we are doing is correct and is making our lives more effective and more meaningful. So why we don't stay in it? To end, I just like to address three different points I've experienced that I've learned through my experience in the war and after the war especially is that youth participation is mandatory in peace and more in conflict. The more you let the youth people participate in what you are doing, the more you are breaking the cycle of violence and ending it. And because of what I heard a lot of the young people were telling me during the war, you are making us active. That word was really really too much big word for me, making us active. Just imagine some people are feeling passive all the time and suddenly just because they are integrated in activity they are feeling active. The other point I'd like to address is in post-conflict. After the war what made us to keep this movement ongoing is that we believe that in post-conflict is the work that should happen more than during the war. In post-conflict it's very important, it's very important to find the channels for young people to keep on working and to keep them ongoing on, pushing them forward to do what they are doing and to develop it more and more. And this is what we are doing now with the UN. This is what we are trying to find now that the safe space that I talked about before as post-conflict reconstruction and shaping youth in a well-organized and coordinated structure where they can become a power of mass which we believe in it, that they can make the change that we want to see. They can be simply. Third, youth policies. Youth policies here I'm addressing government. The government we don't have any youth policy. At all different levels health, education, we don't have any youth policy. So we are trying now with the UNESCO. We are working on one of the UN agencies also. We are working on, we worked actually and we've reached a very good result. We founded like a, we went all to the political parties and we selected young people that have leadership characters and we asked them to set and all of us to have an open dialogue for more than four years working on starting a, sorry I forgot the word in English. Okay, they were working like on policy and constructing a policy from the scratch and then they started reforming it in a way that could match with the constitution of the country and the agenda of the government because unless it will fell from the agenda if it's not matching with it and the good news that I received weeks ago from my friends that they had their first meeting with the prime minister and it passed the first signature so it was now it's like moving in a bureaucracy forum but which is, which means like after a year it should be integrated in the policy and we have a youth policy that will talk, that address the young people health issues and education in conflicts and in post conflict zones. Okay, in the end I just like to thank you all for your attention and I just want to say one thing that we really all the time say it in my country with my friends there is no path to peace, peace is the only path so thank you. Thank you both to Shaban and to Assam for really laying out this idea of youth as actors, the choices for peace, the choices for violence and really lending your own experiences to that part of our story here. We're going to shift to a second part of the book which really looked at clarifying that the needs that youth have are very distinct from children's needs and Stephanie foreshadowed this and we're going to turn to our own senior fellow here at the United States Institute of Peace Mark Summers who is a social cultural anthropologist and has really looked at youth as a cohort in war and in post conflict and Mark I'd ask you to take the podium. We definitely need clarification on how the youth experience is different and what are some of the things we need to shape, understand this transition to adulthood. This is going to be difficult, she gave me eight minutes and now I got more things to address. I wanted to just, I was just thinking and listening to all these, the first three presentations and I just made some notes before I share some remarks and that is one of the things that that Stephanie mentioned and I think it might be useful to think about in the discussion period is this issue of community and I think the question is what do we mean by a community and do most youth have the same definition, my argument would be no way and another question would be do they really want to join the communities that we define, my argument would be from my research is probably not most of them, particularly urban youth, it's not even possible. So their definition of community quite often is profoundly different than what we have and the other thing is that with reintegration it's very, it implies this idea of going back to something that existed before the war and I think every youth knows that's not possible and so these are big challenges and I think that Stephanie's terrific book and it really is a terrific book, raise some really important questions on these issues and I think I like the way she framed things in terms of the short immediate, medium and longer term. I'm also going to talk as with reference to this issue of alienation and exclusion that Siobhan was mentioning, emphasizing and they're often called the marginalized youth and that in most of these post-war countries would include just about all youth, certainly the overwhelming majority of youth and I think part of that is something that Wasam mentioned which is this idea of looking for a safe space and how hard that is to do, particularly if you're seen as bad or as dangerous, where is that safe space? I really thought that was a really powerful idea that you brought up. So I'm going to talk about policies and programs for youth and in these post-war sort of situations. What I wanted to do first is mention three ideas that sort of frame the discussion and I'm drawing on sort of the work I've done now for about 20 years on these issues of youth during and after wars and then I'm going to look at three findings from the two book projects I'm working on here, one on youth and Rwanda, the other on youth and war in Sierra Leone and then I'll end with two recommendations, one on policy and one on programs. So the three framing ideas, the first one is that post-war populations are youth dominated, which is something that Stephanie said so eloquently, but while the populations are youth dominated, but youth government policies in general are not youth-centered, it's not really about youth, even when youth comprise three-quarters of the population or more, like in Uganda which is the youngest population in the world. I think Rwanda's second and Afghanistan is third or fourth. These are very, very young populations in these post-war countries. A second issue is that although youth are a demographically dominant population, most act as if they're an outcast minority and this is a big problem when we're talking about ideas of community and reconstruction. If they feel that they don't belong in from the get-go, it's a big challenge. The third issue is that, and this has to do also with demographics, is that most youth will never, ever, ever get in a program. There are far too many youth. And so that what what that means is that in the longer term policies matter much more than programs. And I think when you're thinking about programs and so many people feel excluded, will a program exacerbate the sense of exclusion that youth already feel? I'll get back to that in a moment. So some lessons learned from recent research that I'm doing. The first two are from Rwanda. The first one is the need to find out through quality research what youth priorities are. Not youth values, but youth priorities. Not what they want to do, but what they have to do. What they're what they're going to setting out to do. There's a housing crisis in Rwanda. And what we found in debriefing donors is that none of them knew that. And yet it was absolutely, it was as plain as day for every Rwandan official, government official in sector, cell, and even in district levels. Very few male youth are able to build a house. Since male youth have to build a house before they can marry and become men, and female youth need to marry to become women, adulthood hinges on housing. If a young man can't build a house, nobody can get married. And if nobody can get married, nobody can be seen as an adult. And that's what's going on in Rwanda. Virtually, I mean very, very few youth in Rwanda right now are able to become adults. As a result, helping male youth build a house helps male and female youth become adults. So this is a kind of a finding which has a challenge to the notion of empowerment and particularly gender empowerment and how that's done. The reliance of femininity, of womanhood, becoming a woman on male youth becoming men was something that was really powerful in the research done in Rwanda. A second issue is the importance of urban youth in the program and policy mix. Rwanda's rate of urbanization is the second highest in the world. Two-thirds of all residents of the capital city, it is estimated, in Kigali are youth. A significant proportion of Kigali's urban youth are socially isolated and desperately poor. Our research found that Rwanda's most at-risk youth population, the most at-risk youth population, are poor female youth, many of whom are prostitutes. A third of our sample female youth in the capital were prostitutes. That is the commonest occupation of poor female youth in the capital in Kigali. So I want to switch now to Sierra Leonean research from Sierra Leone and this has to do with the risk involving access to youth programming, which is something I mentioned at the beginning. For many Sierra Leonean youth, what matters much more than whether you're called a man or a woman becoming an adult is the hatred of being labeled an outcast. This idea of being called a dropout is very strong and apparently from my research, and we can ask Susan Shepler here in the third row about this as well, is that this goes back quite a ways. This hatred of being a call to dropout was something that adults talked about as well. They really hated that when they were younger. So is the sense that nepotism determines who gets into most youth programs. This is the point I wanted to make about this. It turns out that these two issues, nepotism and feeling like you don't belong, being an outcast, being a dropout, is potentially quite dangerous and are certainly volatile and it suggests the following conclusion that many youth programs may be making the overall youth situation, that is those not in the program, may be making the overall situation worse by unintentionally and I do emphasize unintentionally, demonstrating exclusive access to programs. Somebody's got to get into a program in Sierra Leone. There's no way that most youth are going to get in. The thing about Sierra Leone, which is very different from Rwanda, if you mentioned you know in talking about youth programs in Rwanda, most of them have no idea what you're talking about because there are no youth programs in most of Rwanda. But in Sierra Leone, they're very aware of them and something that was very interesting in Sierra Leone is that the DDR program for ex- combatants was thought of as a very good youth program. Too short but it was a youth, it was seen as a youth empowerment program. I have to wrap up so let me get to my recommendations. The first one on youth programming. A well known challenge that we have in this post-war world regarding youth is that most youth programs are either not evaluated or not well evaluated. Now this is an important weakness in this context of significant exclusion because evaluations, quality evaluations in my view, need to look at youth who are not in programs to see how they perceive of their own situation and how they see these what's going on in the programs. And you have to carefully examine the issue of who gets in. If most people feel excluded then the issue of inclusion into these precious programs becomes more and more important because people are so desperate, youth are so desperate to get access into these programs. So setting up a youth program for a handful of youth when a country teams with outcast youth runs the risk of stirring the pot and making alienated youth feel more desperate and fatalistic which is I think a serious danger that we don't that we need to pay attention to more. And finally on policy. I think the approach we used with Rwandan youth for the World Bank, this was a World Bank funded research, was surprisingly effective and I think it could easily be applied to other contexts. And the framework was very simple. You find out what the youth priorities are and then you shape policies that address youth priorities. That's really unusual. Usually you don't ask poor youth anything. They're stupid. They don't have education. It's not their fault. They lack development as they would say in Rwanda. And so you have to give them ideas because they don't have education. What we found is that if you do that you're going to do things like emphasize education and youth won't go. They can't go because they have to build this house. They have to focus on becoming adults. So there's a disjuncture if you start with what they should do as opposed to what youth priorities what they need to do. My son's now 20 and you know should just doesn't go with with youth is what one of the things I've learned as a dad. So I think what you can call this is sectorless research. Where you examine the situation of youth not from a set of a set sector or agenda but by starting by finding out what is most important to them. And I mean members of the marginalized youth majority in particular and what their priorities are. If you don't do this what you get I think in is Rwanda and today where you have a national youth a national housing crisis and a female youth crisis in Kiali in the urban areas. So I think a lesson that we learned from this research experience in Rwanda is that you can assume what youth need or make decisions on their behalf. And I think that this lesson aligns very well with the conclusions in Stephanie's terrific book. So thank you very much. And last but not least we have Joe DeBerry who is a social scientist at the World Bank in the Eastern Europe and Central Asian region. She's also an anthropologist by training and her work has taken her for extensive periods to post-conflict Uganda and Afghanistan. She's going to bring us into a discussion about best practices. Stephanie laid out this short term versus long term perspective and how we can go from emergency programs to really looking at empowerment programs. Thank you Joe. Thank you and once again congratulations Stephanie. I like this book very much because it resonates very strongly with what I have seen in many post-conflict environments all across the world which is that at the end of war there is often a huge and tremendous desire and hope for peace amongst the young people that have been affected by that conflict. And they strongly believe often at the end of war that peace will be a change and give them a second chance and a new opportunity. And they're very often eager to contribute to that peace and to be actively involved in it. And yet that great expectation that there often is at the end of conflict comes is often very fragile and there's a very high risk of that great expectation quickly turning to disillusionment very easily. And so there's a critical window of opportunity at the end of a conflict to capitalize on that hope and that desire for change and that belief that things will be different to capitalize on that before disillusionment sets in. And that's really our challenge as a community is to how to how to make the most of that opportunity. How to make the most of that window and allow and give young people foster their ability to be constructive agents during that time to build on that hope before possible disillusionment sets in. And how do we do that? How do we make reconstruction a credible and viable process for young people? How do we bridge the gap? The question that Stephanie has posed how do we bridge the gap between their emphasis on protection for young for children's rights to empowerment of young people as active agents in a constructive reconstruction process? Well, I identified five points and they really just summarized I think a lot of what people have already said. So I'll go through those. How do we how do we bridge the gap? How do we make reconstruction credible for young people? How do we convince young people with young people that reconstruction is going to work out for them and going to be a better deal than the war has been? First of all, reconstruction has to guarantee the safety and protection and the justice for young people. So I don't think we actually need to drop the whole and protection focus, the emergency type protection focus entirely because I think a pre reconstruction process has to also be credible in guaranteeing young people safety and allowing them justice. And I think the book is very clear in how that wasn't achieved in the DRC and that was one of the failures of that reconstruction process. It didn't guarantee safety and justice for young people. Secondly, reconstruction has to deliver for young people. It has to allow them to be socially and economically viable. It has to allow them the houses that they need or it has to allow them the opportunity to build their own houses that they need to progress with their life. So reconstruction has to deliver economically and socially for young people. Key part of that, I think, is education. Youth are often the real victims of missing out on years of education because of conflict and then it being too late for them to reintegrate into school structures because the years have gone by. And there are good examples, I think, now of creative opportunities for so-called second chance education. It allows young people to recapture that education that's been lost. So reconstruction has to provide safety and justice and it has to deliver economically and socially. Thirdly, and this is an area that the book doesn't touch on so much, but I'm beginning to realise it's increasingly important, is that reconstruction has to be politically palatable for young people. It has to be politically sincere for them. I think we still underestimate the extent to which young people are politically active before conflict, during conflict and after conflict. The case of Kosovo is used in the book and that's a very interesting one where, you know, 10 years, in the 10 years prior to the conflict, young people were actively protesting through nonviolent means through the parallel education system, through refusing, through demanding that they had their lessons in Albanian. There was 10 years of peaceful political protest by young people before it got to the point that all those avenues were blocked and people felt that they had to protest violently. And reconstruction processes have to recognise that. They can't deny young people's political involvement prior to the conflict, during the conflict and after the conflict. I've done a lot of work in eastern Uganda and one of the problems with the reconstruction process there is, while it did provide economically and socially for young people, the peace was viable in that respect. A lot of young people just felt that their grievances, their political grievances that had taken them to conflict in the first place weren't being listened to and weren't being resolved. So in the area where I work, one of the big political gripes was that young men had had their cattle stolen during the conflict without that cattle, similarly to the housing issue. You can't marry, you can't progress to manhood. So a fundamental aspect of identity had been taken away from them and young people didn't see the government touch that issue or resolve that issue whilst peace was progressing. And that means that politically it just wasn't palatable for young people and that made the potential for that reconstruction process to be stable a bit more limited. I see this very, very clearly in my current work in Azerbaijan where I'm working with young people who have grown up in displacement camps. The conflict that caused their parents to be displaced was 20 years ago and now young people have inherited that conflict even though they, some of them went even alive at the time. And there just is no political space for young people to be able to say, well, it's not necessarily my legacy, it was a legacy of my parents that they were displaced from that village. Of course I want my parents to go back home, but I'm not so sure that I want to go back home. I'm used to an urban lifestyle. I don't want to go back to be a tractor driver or a farmer in this village that I've never actually seen. Yet the government emphasis is so strongly on you will return home and that's the only hope that you're allowed to have. So the ideology that frames the reconstruction process is critical for allowing young people to politically engage or not engage. So reconstruction has to be politically palatable for young people. Fourthly, reconstruction has to, as many people have already said, have platforms for youth voice. And we've already heard a lot about the importance for space at the community level, whatever those communities might be, how they might be constituted, space at the community level for young people to express their opinions, their priorities, their hopes and their desires and then to take action on them. There also has to be space at the government level for young people's voices to be heard. One of the challenges I increasingly find is that I work, you know, my partners are ministers of youth in Georgia and Azerbaijan. And they're actually often saying the right things around there have to be opportunities for young people to give their opinion and to engage politically. But those ministers of youth are often very marginalised within the overall government structure. There is no way that a Ministry of Finance is going to listen to a Minister of Youth when they're making budget allocations for a country and for investing in programmes. And that is a limitation. That can be a constraint. So I think spaces for young people's voice have to be at the community level, but they also have to be pushed at the government level. And lastly, as many align, unless there's also the political space for young people to be active agents of change. Thank you so much, Joan. We're going to now open our discussion to the audience. And we have mics on both sides of the floor. I'd appreciate if you would come to the mic, introduce yourself, your organisation, and keep your remarks brief because our time is limited. But we're happy to hear from you. Hi, my name is Mayuri Saxena from the New School University. I just wanted to ask the speakers if, for their opinion, and just wanted to know if they thought it was if there was any difference in engaging orphans versus youth with some type of support system, whether it's just like maybe a parent or even relatives that were raising them by any chance in any part of the reconstruction process. And I'd take a couple of questions. And then is there any? OK, we'll keep a few going. If you wouldn't mind going to the mics because we are being webcasts, it will help move this along. Go ahead. How are you doing? My name is Chime Sonye. First, I want to thank all the panelists for the great conversation. Stephanie, I want to thank you specifically. I'm a youth and you inspired me. So I appreciate that. I have a question for I have one question for all the panelists and then I have a second question for Mark. The first question is you guys I'm not sure who brought it up about the distinction between youth and children. I'm not sure if they didn't get time to talk about that. I want to know if that could be expounded on a little bit more and how that implicates this conversation. And the second question, Mark, you brought up the idea of reintegration, not being something that youth may want because it implies going back to a status quo before the war, which I thought was really interesting. And so I want to know if you can spend on that concept also. Thank you very much. And we'll take one more question and then open it up to the panelists of comments. My name is Benjamin Gaylord. I work for the American Councils for International Education. And we work primarily with teenage scholarship programs funded by the State Department for students to come to the US for a year and study in high school, particularly working with Afghanistan and Kosovo in this context that I think are significant, particularly Afghanistan. And so I've got a couple of questions. One is we face our challenges with bringing youth from Afghanistan here for a year and then sending them back. I'm curious about how they might fit in the constellation of different types of youth and how they might be able to really contribute as agents of change, given also the challenges of transitional justice or post-conflict, which of course is a very slippery term since there's still conflict in so many of these places. And we'll see how they can get through. Yeah, no, I guess that's good. Thank you, Benjamin. We'll take this first set of questions. And Stephanie, since I would like you to start with this last question actually on the Afghanistan and then move forward on commenting on any others and then we'll move down the tape. I think I'm just going to question sort of how to work with youth who've had experience abroad and how they can go back and work for their communities. We've actually had a lot of experience with a young woman from Afghanistan named Awista Ayup, who is a diaspora herself. So she grew up in the United States and actually had little context of life in Afghanistan but started the first Afghani girl soccer team, which became a real sort of rallying force for young women to participate and have a voice be heard. They really sort of became a star team out there. And one of the things that Awista struggles with is not knowing the Afghani context. And she's had all this experience out here in the States. She's had a great education but she always comments that she never would have used soccer if she lived in Afghanistan because here it's a girl's sport and there it's not. It's completely male dominated. And so she put these female youth on the spot, really. And so one thing I would say for young people who've had who are coming over and spending some time here, gaining experience, gaining skills, gaining education, is that they should really also value their knowledge of the context of the issues and in order to marry the two because that's something that a young diaspora person was really striving for. Do you want to pick that up and also anything that you could add to the distinction between children and youth? Well first, this last question. An example I think that is interesting is one that I encountered with a young man who runs a program in a refugee camp outside of Bethlehem. And I'm not sure where you are but that's the question. But and he said very clearly that for him making the choice to be to work in this nonviolent project for youth development was connected with his connections with internationals, Belgians in particular who'd come to the refugee camp and a trip that he was able to take and get further education and training to Belgium. Now that sort of works against this notion I think that's in the literature that taking young people out of their context and then sending them back is actually detrimental because it reinforces the notion that they can't that they have to go elsewhere to learn these skills. They have to go elsewhere to be a peace builder that this can't be generated from the grassroots. The one thing that I would say and I think there's a lot of truth to that. I've seen a lot of that in Northern Ireland for example where it has been detrimental to take children out of their context and then send them back again after a couple of months and expect them to be peace builders then when they're being returned to a place that they've been told is sort of inferior to this other context. But for this young person in Bethlehem his part of it I think is that he was able to be part of a very politically activist or radical movement when he got back which is connecting with what Joe was saying earlier is that it was nonviolent direct action but a lot of people would have seen it a lot of Israelis certainly would have seen it as quite threatening and that we have to allow young people to be able to express themselves the way they want to while providing mechanisms for them to be trained to do that in an all violent way. Again as I said in my presentation that hasn't happened in Northern Ireland I don't think very well. Lastly however I did groups that I have met for example in Ramallah popular achievement is a counter example to this case because there they're doing civic engagement work they're not able to travel as much but it's very grassroots oriented and is having multiple impacts and particularly girls are able to be part of those kinds of activities because girls are less likely to be allowed by their parents to travel to go overseas and so on. The youth child distinction very quickly that you asked about is an important one because it's culturally defined it's context driven young person as Marcus alluded to may be considered a youth until they're 40 if they haven't gone through certain rights of passage or haven't been able to get married and so on. The definition that Stephanie's working with I think is from 15 to 25 or 24 I think along those lines which aligns with the UN definition. So it's important to be I think to be culturally sensitive and to be aware of those differences from context to context but then again looking up with what Mark has said sometimes it doesn't help you to be culturally sensitive sometimes young people don't want to have whoever is coming in as part of an intervention utilize the models that elders want them to utilize of who is a child who is a youth in particular society and want that change, that shift and would rather work with these international definitions that give them some more power potential political role. Thank you, Siobhan. Wasam, do you want to weigh in on also the can you comment on the orphan question the first question that was discussed in conflict and I take to expand that also to displaced people as you were talking about. Working and engaging the orphan is more challenging and it's harder for work because if he's an orphan like he lost his parents when he was young or he lost his parents due to the war they are dealing with double conflicts not personal conflict and other conflict that's the social conflict that he is living in. So we worked with our friends before but to be honest we didn't find them like that effective and motivated as young people who are living with their parents now. So it's very challenging to work with them especially they are living in an orphanage and they don't have the same lifestyle that they used to live before because of what they lost after becoming orphans and it's quite different here and for distinction between youth and children it's very important not to work with young people and children at the same time or in the same group who always try to segregate like young people will be alone and children will be alone because children they have they see it differently and young people they've experienced more and they know more about what they are doing so we try to work and children more on very like in general principles and when we work with young people we work on more specified and more oriented toward what we are really addressing them. So these are two basic differences we should all the time be aware of it when we are working with people. Thank you. Mark do you want to pick up the question that was asked to you directly on reintegration? Sure. I have a couple of other questions. Briefly. Okay. On the reintegration question it's a very good one. I think the problem is in the prefix in read. I think the issue is in integration and new terms. I mean war is different and I think when you know this awareness I mean one of the things that comes out of this youth bulge demographics that Stephanie is using sort of as a platform for discussing these issues is that most youth or many youths in these countries just can't become adults in the traditional ways. It's not possible and so the issue of reintegration is ridiculous for most youth particularly in a city. Migration to a city means you're not going back to reintegrate anyway. In the reintegration generally has a very rural connotation in a lot of these post-war situations and huge numbers of youth aren't going back. I mean Kinshasa is mammoth just to give an example. Pristina tripled in size and from before to after the war. And there's very little evidence that once youth go to a capital that they ever leave. So I think the issue is the reintegration gives us sort of this idea which I think is false that we can actually go back to something before that peace can after a war can in some way be similar to what took place before the war and I just don't think that that's realistic. So with regards to this issue of youth as agents of change can they be after this program that Benjamin you're talking about which sounds really interesting. I think the problem is I don't want to be a Marxist here but this issue of class is just so wildly overlooked in looking at youth issues and it's so important. So if a young man or woman from Kosovo or Afghanistan is lucky enough my God to get to America when they get back I would imagine from my experience that most youth are going to say uh-huh. Now this one's come back it's all the advantages and now we're supposed to listen to them as a leader. They don't even know what we've been going through this well they've been enjoying themselves in the superpower you know out in Washington or something. So they have less credibility than before they left I would imagine. Particularly among you know again the marginalized majority. So it's a big challenge I mean it's something that you can discuss I think some evaluation on that might be interesting to help people prepare but I think you're really going to have your work cut out for you. Youth and children unfortunately and it's the way it is that the definition has to do with a child is anybody who's under the age of 18. You know people grow up fast in wars and I was thinking when this question was raised in Southern Sudan a lot of times in demobilization or in DDR processes for soldiers that if you're a child soldier go to UNICEF and you get education and things like that and if you're 18 you get money. So they had this program for the Southern Sudanese child soldiers outside of Rumeck and UNICEF just you know I mean they were doing their job but they didn't they had these guys you know former combatants they were 15, 16 and when they realized that they weren't going to get any money and their colleagues who were just a little bit older 18 were going to get money they there was an uproar and basically one of the kids said said he said you're calling me a child I think it was 15 you want to meet my wife? I got three children you want to meet my children? and you're calling me a child? I'm a man and you know then UNICEF's like well the regulations say you have to be sorry so that can be a challenge and the last thing on orphans most people don't know if they're orphans or not in a war they run away and they don't know where their parents are why is this important? the issue of orphanages was mentioned the thing that I found so scary and really quite terrifying is that you cannot find young women or girls who don't know where their parents are they get picked up they are a commodity and they get picked up on the streets and they're being used for domestic labor who knows? in Kosovo they're picked up and they go right to Moldova and then off to you know London and so forth as prostitutes so it's terrifying what happens to them and I think one of the things we need to wonder about is you know who's not there? who aren't you seeing? because in these sort of situations what goes on with young girls is during and after wars is absolutely frightening and just because they're not there to tell us doesn't mean it's not happening so Joe I'm hoping that you want to weigh in I had a little bit more but I think we've covered a lot and I don't see any other questions at the moment oh please come forward I can only see you if you're standing up at the mic if you have questions go ahead Joe while people are approaching the mic yes just picking up and if you could move the mic close to you thank you on the theme of the program for young people coming over and this danger that we see again and again in youth programming is that the programming itself creates its own elite of young people and you find familiar faces of the same young people going round getting the majority of the opportunities and then becoming a kind of spokesperson for young people of their country that they're actually getting further and further away from I work in Georgia at the moment and actually interesting you can't fault the Georgian government on not having political space for young people half the cabinet is they call them Misha's kindergarten half the cabinet is is under 24 years old so there's certainly you know there's certainly political influence of young people but who those young people are is quite interesting most all of them have had an American university education and that's really why they've ended up being in the cabinet in the government of Georgia because of the incredible opportunities that they have do they speak for do they understand do they represent the majority of Georgian young people absolutely not increasingly there's a great divide between rural young people who don't have those same opportunities and the Tbilisi crowd who are clearly to speak for them and I think as a community it's something that we just have to be very responsible about because we are part and parcel contributing to that phenomena excellent I think we have a very clear theme here that we can add to the storyboard on elite and class issues I'm going to take all three questions we're really at the edge of our time but I want your questions to be heard and we will do our best to answer them go ahead okay hi my name is Michael Schabler I'm from Search for Common Ground and thank you to USIP for addressing this issue of youth when people advocating to deal with the issues of youth and conflict for a long time and it's nice to see it have a platform like this here in Washington my question is sort of a comment but I wanted to put to the panel here is about the objective the purpose of interventions for youth and conflict and this notion of youth as agents of change and the objectives of it why do we actually do it what are we trying to achieve and the conversation is often very confused because we mix purposes we mix the purpose of protection of poverty alleviation and of you know bringing about peace in the society and the the follow-on is then at what level do we work because most of the interventions are sort of petri dish level as mark was pointing out you know even the the multi-million dollar education initiatives that we'll see from USAID reach twenty thousand youth in Pakistan a country of a hundred and eighty million people what are we actually achieving there really how do we begin to affect change at a generational level and that's i think the next step for all of us who want to work on who are working on this issue try to find a way of of taking that leap and the mechanism that I fear absent from the conversation for the most part with the exception of our friend with some uh... is about how youth respond themselves to the dynamics of of conflict and we know that you thought that there's organizations of all sorts at which you third playing leadership roles from student unions to use wings of political parties trade unions are mostly youth dominated in almost every country in the world etc etc you know truck drivers unions are one of the most powerful thing so anyway those are those are uh... sort of a broader caught question about how we affect that broader change thank you michael that's great and we're going to go to you so my name is uh... namanya shukla from the u.s. Baltic Foundation uh... i have a small comment to miss the various speech actually being observed in origin i can state that the protest have not been quiet throughout the nineties and one of the main reasons for the intervention was the constant pression of the syrian population as well in the north however i think the case with cost was slightly different i i i i believe that the youth there is in a way was actually more harmed by the cost of all institutions and cost of politicians rather than the belgrade government because if you look back in nineteen seventy four they were granted the reason of course with their at their autonomous status they have basically their freedom in a way but i think that the politicians had a completely different way different vision in front of them we know what happened later on and with the unilateral declaration of independence but if we look at the current development there that we also tend to forget what happens to the syrian youth in kosovo because we don't mention that and for me as a syrup i i do feel offended that my people like was uh... with some those that a lot of them have fled some to the north some to belgrade and i think that for that and today there is you mentioned the youth called the cost was used but what percentage of those are serves what percentage of roma like stated that the new cost of life has six stars and one politician said well they can remove two because where the catholics and the jews from costal completely disappeared so i i just felt slightly offended that this was presented from a purely one-sided story thank you very much hi my name is andrea carnaldo from redgar's university uh... mark pointed out that the experience for young women is completely different from the experience uh... of young men what steps can be taken to ensure that young girls are being protected in these conflict environment and that they can participate uh... actively in the peace process please and our final question and then a very rapid responses from our panelists thank you i'll try my best to make it very brief uh... i'm reeling that if you have a research in turn at the center for strategic and international studies it's actually quite a quick incident of my question is related to uh... with uh... gentleman for me asked i i'm from coastal and i grew up there and uh... i was there during the war i my family and i'd like so almost a million others had to flee the country and i was a refugee in missus only a later on in pennant i i would like to hear the opinion of professor summers and especially mrs berry during the war i think we uh... i i just wanted to comment on her on the students protest it is very true that the student the students who protest were not violent and uh... since the forceful revocation of the autonomy of coastal by milosevic in nineteen eighty nine there was pretty much uh... educational and apartheid institute in coastal i i went to school in coastal and me as an opinion student i didn't have access to chemistry lab to computer lab and my serve in the fellow students they did and that was basically uh... discrimination based on a nationality from a state agent from top bottom so my question is how do you how do you avoid uh... violence one for so long you have pursued nonviolent means to add address issue and get world's attention but when a body's listing you then unfortunately that might actually that energy might get channeled throughout otherwise and uh... just to make a comment that this was uh... an assort but gentle before me i said that there are no uh... serving students in the university now i mean i have i have friends there uh... i don't know if he's been there but you can go and let's see and there are uh... students uh... by a Bosnian Bosnian origin of a Goranian energy and Turkish origin and the most important thing is that uh... a lot of serving students kit are discouraged to side of the university of pristina because so it would serve that does not recognize those diplomas all right well thank you and for some i think that we could be again with you perhaps and then i'm going to ask uh... then joe mark shabon and stephanie you have the last word and we're going to wrap it up within five minutes so it's really brief okay really excuse me we're going to finish with our panelist thank you very much and we can take that offline uh... with some would you begin and uh... then i'm going to go to jail and please put the microphone by you so that our webcast well i'd like to uh... to answer the question what could have been taken to ensure young women to be protected actually during the war we're integrating the young girls we're asking the young girls not to stay in the street and the parks living and they were like some men are threatening us some men are looking at us some men are like harassing us so we're like we're integrated them in our work we told them we have to take the lead to be with us and when they were like in a more organized structure they become stronger and powerful and they can protect themselves it's not like telling her how to protect herself and uh... giving her information give her some real concrete actions to do in her life so she might find herself and in safe space again thank you joe last yeah just to say apologies for any offense course of course and we at the world bank are currently funding uh... youth development and inclusion project in cost of and i'd absolutely love to talk to both of you and to give you more information about that project and uh... and hear from you whether you think it's hitting the mark and and going in the right direction i think i was using the example just uh... uh... not as a kind of summary of the overall context but just to say that i know for myself that the first time often that uh... i'm drawn to the uh... uh... to look at youth issues is when violence is actually broken out but there is so much going on underneath the surface so much political activism so much protest so much and demonstration as the example of the truck drivers was given that we we failed to understand because it's peaceful and actually if we understood that a bit more and understood uh... what the grievances are and what people are trying to say and and to listen to those protests we might do better at getting to the point that people think that the only recourse is to violence and that's the only way that they can get the message across thank you for that clarification mark okay uh... uh... the uh... the issue that andrea raised about uh... young girls in protection uh... i i think the uh... i think one of the things that happens in just about every post war situation is that uh... sexual violence just goes through the roof and becomes i'd really and domestic violence i'd point out uh... and becomes really an epidemic and i think this severely constraints the options in terms of protection and and where a young woman can go so one of the things that i think that uh... people need to think much more carefully about is as opposed to saying here's a school if girls want to go with the day should go is to take into account how dangerous is it how dangerous it is to get to school and to get back safely uh... and to make education portable as opposed to uh... saying we built a school so go there because it's not going to that means that a lot of girls can't go the other issue for education and for jobs training and other things is childcare a lot of young women at during and after wars have kids something's got to you know if you want women uh... girls to be involved in these programs you got to work that out uh... i'm going to wait very carefully into coast of ohio i don't think you know i don't have time i'm going to save you from that journey shabang okay quickly uh... i think that something that that this the questions have sparked me is to point out that we we haven't really had a third discussion of ideological uh... and cultural and identity issues as well as the class and the lead exclusion things and i think that those are very important as well as the multiple identities of young people uh... in answer to the question about what what's the purpose of intervention i think it does it goes on a case-by-case basis but one sort of broad framework uh... seems to me perhaps is the need to better document coordinate what's already going on i know that in northern island for example uh... youth workers will say that a lot of really good projects of being lost they've just been lost because they weren't documented they didn't have the time to document them and now they don't have funding for them anymore uh... and so an important thing that we can do is help to to create that and and and in doing that educate the the policy and the political people about the importance of having a youth policy and a youth vision which i know you're not exactly sure you think that's the case uh... should be the case and we'll have to debate that later and finally stephanie you have the last word and uh... before you have the last word i want to thank the audience and all the questions asked and uh... stephanie i'm going to turn it to you to wrap up in your own words i think this question about what our what's our purpose what is the purpose of really of intervention is really summarizes everything and for me as you said it's really on a case-by-case basis and there should be a lot of different purposes for different interventions from policy to programs uh... but for me and i know we've said this over and over but it's really about finding a way to include youth voices to give them a platform for their voice from this voice as mark says we should hope to gather what youth priorities are what their needs are uh... in this context and i think the missing link that's off we often get to finding a platform for youth voices and we often get there creatively uh... through theater that's what some said through music through poetry through journalism we've gotten there and i think the missing link for me is finding once we've voiced our priorities someone who listens and not only someone who listens but someone who takes that into account as just joe said in a government or political context and makes changes accordingly and i think that as we look to the future uh... for me bridging that gap is also important and i would just uh... echo thanks to everyone for coming and uh... i hope you have a chance to enjoy the book thank you very much