Youth-Centered Peacebuilding Framework
Rethinking Youth Inclusion Through a Youth-Powered Approach
The Youth-Centered Peacebuilding Framework is a functional guide that proposes an actionable approach for the centering of youth in peacebuilding interventions. The guide operationalizes the concept of youth participation, starting from core principles and moving to practical guidance and specific action steps for meaningful youth engagement at different stages of a peacebuilding project.
The purpose of the guide is to explore how organizations can partner with young people to conceptualize, design, and implement peacebuilding projects. The guide operationalizes the concept of youth participation, starting from core principles and moving to practical guidance and specific action steps for meaningful engagement at different stages of a peacebuilding project. While this guide provides concrete recommendations for different stages of a peacebuilding project life cycle, it is not rigidly prescriptive: every conflict situation is different and requires unique forms of partnerships and project design. However, the guide does provide a framework for anyone who wants to partner with youth on a peacebuilding project and needs ideas on where to start. While this guide focuses specifically on providing a youth-centered focus to peacebuilding projects, the ideas presented in the guide can be tailored to peacebuilding processes generally.
The Youth-Centered Peacebuilding Framework will
- Define youth, youth inclusion, youth-powered approaches, and youth-centered peacebuilding;
- Discuss different concepts of power in youth engagement and their relationship to working with youth in peacebuilding spaces;
- Explore how meaningful youth partnerships can be embraced and enhanced in each stage of the peacebuilding project cycle; and
- Provide practical guidance and specific action steps for anyone who wants to partner with youth on a peacebuilding project and needs ideas on where to start.
