Young people in Focus: War, Peace and Resistance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Abstract

While young people are increasingly exposed to and involved in armed conflict, they are systematically excluded from efforts to create peace. This disparity is exacerbated by a dearth of empirical research exploring young peoples' lived experiences of conflict and their capacities for peace. As a result, their agency is misrepresented and their impact on international relations obscured. This thesis challenges the epistemic injustice that plagues academia and devalues young people as knowers, arguing that young people are political actors who influence conflict and have distinctive capacities for peace. It critically engages with the relationship between young people and sustainable peace through an ethnographic case study in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), elevating young peoples' experiential knowledge through an innovative methodology including Photovoice, using photography and storytelling.

Cast as 'terrorists' and 'unchildren', young Palestinians are polarised in dominant global narratives and their agency problematised. However, this case study demonstrates that, in the OPT, young people are highly political and assume intersecting roles as symbols, victims and influential actors of conflict. The experience of growing up under military occupation and the perceived failure of the international peacebuilding architecture to deliver rights and justice influences the way that peace is understood and practiced. Many young Palestinians reject the framework of liberal peacebuilding in favour of a maximalist everyday peace agenda that deconstructs the dominant narratives underpinning the conflict. Young people's conviction that resistance is necessary to challenge power dynamics and create the conditions of positive peace pervaded my research and led me to an unanticipated, yet central, turn to resistance as a lens to analyse young people's agency. That resistance - everyday and overt - could be borne from a love of peace, enacted by those who fundamentally see themselves as peace actors, disrupts binary conceptions of conflict actors. These findings develop critical International Relations discourse by showing the practical and moral value in engaging with young people, and urge scholars and peacebuilders to engage with all young people as essential actors in building intergenerational, sustainable peace.