For most of the past decade, the global conversation about young people and conflict has circled a single question: why do youth turn violent? Saji Prelis, a peacebuilding practitioner whose work helped shape the United Nations' youth, peace, and security agenda, argues that the question itself is misguided. The more useful question is ultimately why most young people, even in the most fragile and violent settings, remain peaceful.
Prelis’ reframing of this question is rooted in his own upbringing in Sri Lanka, which eventually helped him move an idea from an informal, almost improvised working group to a unanimous UN Security Council resolution. The following draws on a conversation that the Centre for Youth Policy had with Prelis about how his working group initiative was shaped, how it survived contact with UN bureaucracy, and what aspects of the push for more youth participation in government are unfinished.
His Childhood in Sri Lanka
Prelis grew up in Sri Lanka during a period of ethnic conflict between the government and a nationalist majority movement. He says that his politics and ideals were heavily influenced by his proximity to violence. As a boy, news of unrest that he hoped to fight turned into something he faced everywhere, as violence plagued his community, and characterized conversations with his family and friends.
I could not understand why the person I was playing cricket with could be an enemy of the state. And I was struck by that. The girls I had a crush on – their families were being destroyed. I did not know why. As a young boy, I was frustrated and also confused.
When he realized his own family, part of the ethnic majority, was safe, he became even more confused: people he was trying to protect – those who were visibly darker-skinned and part of the targeted minority – were not like him. Furthermore, he recalls being unable to report the violence to local police because the police were often the ones committing it in the first place. The contradiction between the identity he was born into and the loyalty he held to his peers is what he now describes as the foundation of his life and career in peacebuilding.
Abstaining from Violence
We asked Saji Prelis how young people are supposed to choose the morally right path when it conflicts with what their family or community is doing. Prelis resists the idea that there is a formula to avoid it, as history has shown just how easily people can be manipulated into committing atrocities. Instead, he argued that what is important in moments of violence is what ideas, morals, and values young people can draw on to navigate them. For him, that meant remembering what his family meant to him, and recalling how they had cared for him, in moments when he might otherwise have been pulled toward violence.
What helped me in those moments was recognizing my family’s commitment to me, and if I was about to hurt somebody, recognizing my brother's face in my enemies. That is because of the belief I was brought up with: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t harm anybody. Those things are ingrained in me. It’s a value system you are taught and a value system that you are experiencing from your family network. That is a very privileged place to come from.
We then asked about how to uphold morals in times when violence has already erupted, instead of being able to stop it before it begins. Prelis responded with a metaphor: what the world sees of conflict, he says, is the eruption: the sudden, visible violence. What’s underneath the surface and not often visible – the shifting tectonic plates in this metaphor – are the decades of pressure, history, and generational trauma that built up the eventual violence.
This is where he returns to his central argument. Societies that ask why young people join armed groups rarely ask the inverse question: why do the majority of young people, even in the same environments, remain peaceful? He referenced that roughly nine in ten protests around the world are nonviolent, yet public attention gravitates towards the violent minority. While fragile states tend to have more young people prone to violence, the cause of the violence is not youth but the fragility itself. Similarly, a system that has normalized violence should not be surprised when the young people living in it become involved.
Why a Working Group?
The institutional turn in Prelis's story begins with a practical problem: none of the existing international bodies, including agencies like UNFPA, had a dedicated focus on youth and peacebuilding. Institutionalizing something new inside the UN system is a slow process, and Prelis admitted that if the effort went about institutionalizing formally, it would have been far more unproductive and may have never gotten off the ground at all.
We would have to get permission to start a working group, and we would probably not get that. It would take another six months to six years to get permission. So we thought, no, we do not need permission to start it. It’s not about the UN. It is about civil society.
Instead, the group launched what was framed to the public as a two-day workshop to have a dialogue on institutionalizing youth agendas, with no formal initiative attached to the label. By the end, though, a working group that met once a month was formed. By the time anyone might have asked whether it had authority to exist, Prelis says, it had already gone far enough that it could not easily be dismantled.
What we learned from that is that institutions that are bureaucratic in other ways needed us as much as we needed them. What we were bringing together was a network of civil society that was having conversations and creating a collective agenda to make an impact. We knew we would have a better way of getting what we wanted through a working group.
Prelis highlighted the importance of creating a “common language” to use in youth and peacebuilding. The first in its field, his working group “Youth for Common Ground” was breaking barriers set by bureaucracy hoping to keep older, tenured officials on the frontlines of peace making. The working group, then, came with the added challenge of having to define what they were working towards.
The idea was to develop a set of guiding principles, all of us, as it relates to the field of youth and peacebuilding. We knew this field did not really exist, and so we had to create the norms and language for it. The impact was actually building trust with institutional partners as we started to talk about what kind of language we could use for our guiding principles.
Guarding Against the UN's Weight
A coalition built partly inside UN space, and partly around organizations like Youth for Common Ground, faces the risk that UN's money, hierarchy, and institutional weight will dominate the youth-led side of the effort. Prelis frames the group's defense against the weight of bureaucracy as a natural product of time and trust within the group.
By working together, arguing about frame-building and terminology, what was happening was we were building connections with each other. We built almost a ‘trust-cycle’ – the more we develop together the more we develop that trust with each other.
He also adds that the speed with which the working group was formed prevented any sort of gatekeeping process. Instead, the working group learned to work with the UN instead of against it. As more organizations wanted a seat at the table, the coalition learned to treat the UN's resources as one input among several rather than the only one that mattered.
We were able to feed off of each other's strengths and weaknesses. The common issue around the UN having resources and the name brand and all that became a wall, but it also didn’t. I say that because the UN has the ties when it comes to public advocacy and the Security Council agenda, but what the UN couldn’t do, civil society did. What civil society couldn’t do, the UN did. But we were in lockstep, so we had to leverage each other's strengths and capitalize on it, rather than see it as a weakness because we did not have it.
Resolutions That Outpaced Recognition, and the Recognition to Come
The Security Council resolutions that followed, including a 2018 measure expanding youth participation and another in 2020, Prelis recalls, mattered in terms of recognition of young people’s political agency. Before 2015, he says, he watched rooms full of decision-makers where young people simply were not present. The resolutions were an attempt to correct a disproportionality: the people who would end up living with the long-term consequences of peace and security decisions were not part of making them. He connects this directly to a broader trend he sees as troubling, a shrinking of civic space globally.
More importantly, the only mechanism that only gets lost – and this was recognized by the Security Council for the first time – is that civic spaces occupied by young people are shrinking…governments have an obligation to safeguard the shrinking of civic spaces so that they don’t shrink even further.
Prelis is candid that political commitment has, in some respects, outrun actual outcomes, with fewer explicit references to youth showing up in newer resolutions even as more youth are supposedly involved. Part of the ongoing challenge, he suggests, is proving that these agendas produce measurable change rather than symbolic recognition. He also flags an unresolved tension in how youth representation is understood: regional bodies represent regional populations, but no understanding exists for who a young person at the table represents. Prelis highlights, though, that every voice carries its own weight. In practice, then, young people inside these coalitions tend to represent the coalition itself. That should be enough to justify the representation of youth in coalitions.
Why This Still Matters
Prelis' account is a case study in how fragile, deliberately slow-moving institutional change actually is a unanimous Security Council resolution. The youth peace and security agenda was not achieved by a UN body deciding that young people deserved a seat at the table. Instead, it arrived because a small group of determined young people built trust and worked faster than bureaucracy could. The work is not over – the group then spent years afterward discovering that formal recognition does not, by itself, guarantee sustained outcomes. Now, the fight for youth recognition is ongoing.
Prelis' personal account of Sri Lanka is a reminder of what is lost when young people cannot act on their own values, and default to their hereditary identities. If the shrinking of civic space he describes continues unchecked, the choice he faced at twelve, between the safety of his own community and the conscience telling him to protect people outside it, becomes a choice fewer young people will have the institutional support to make well. The unfinished work of the youth, peace, and security agenda, is about preserving the conditions under which the quieter, less visible majority of young people who choose peace can keep doing so. With this, the work done will give the public exposure to the majority of young people who avoid violence for the sake of peace, too.
The Centre for Youth Policy is an independent, nonpartisan organization and does not take institutional positions. The views and opinions expressed in this leader profiles are solely those of the author.
About the Author
Olivia Anikst
Global Strategy Analyst and Writer
Olivia Anikst is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying Global Studies and Political Science. She works as an Analyst and Writer for CYP, researching and reporting on upcoming elections and how young people are affected by the current political climate. Originally from New York City, Olivia spent a semester of 11th grade in Johannesburg, and she hopes to work in International Crisis Management with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.
