Zone of Peace – reality, ideal or dreams?
Growing up in the Caribbean, one would often hear the phrase “zone of peace” floating somewhere in the background of regional speeches and summits. It sounded soothing, almost like a lullaby meant to calm the region into an arguably false sense of security, the idea that we are a region of small islands, blue waters, and neighbours who collaborate and ‘work out’ our issues collectively. For many of us in Latin America and the Caribbean, it was part slogan, part aspiration, part marketing line for tourists who wanted ‘paradise’ without ‘politics.’ But, for a generation of young people (my generation), who have come of age in the shadows of organised crime, inequality and shrinking civic space, the words have started to ring a bit hollow.
Earlier this year, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister broke this long standing regional narrative, declaring this country as one which was not a part of any zone of peace, pointing to its exposure to narco trafficking, human and sex trafficking, illicit weapons flow, and welcoming United States military support to help “crush” traffickers in the region – going as far as to call for persons engaged in these activities to be killed “violently.” It was a striking statement, not only because it marked a departure from a decades old narrative, but because it also exposed the contradiction between how the region is branded and how it feels to live here as a young person.
Just a few days earlier, The Caribbean Community reaffirmed the Caribbean as a zone of peace in its official communiqués, emphasising dialogue, international law and the peaceful settlements of disputes. At the hemispheric level, Latin American and Caribbean Leaders have endorsed declarations that frame our region as a zone of peace which rejects the use of force and commits to resolving conflicts through negotiation. On paper, it is a powerful ethical and political stance. In reality, it sits uneasily besides regional tensions and images of foreign troops on Caribbean shores, armed patrols in our communities, States of Emergencies, and a generation of young people navigating threats and exposure to organised crime and economic precarity.
If we zoom out, the story of youth, peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean is not the all too well-known tale of war and peace. It is messier and more convoluted than that. Scholarship has shown that our region does not fit squarely into traditional categories of “armed conflict” though many young people live with many forms of violence. These include structural violence such as extreme inequality, adult centrism that treats youth as second class political subjects, and patterns of disappeared and killing young people being seen as acceptable collateral by states or criminal actors.
Add to that intersectional discrimination, against women, LGBTQIA+ youth, Afro-descendants and indigenous communities, migrants, rural and poor urban youth, and you start to see why this promise of a ‘zone of peace’ can feel abstract. For many young people, violence is not a distant event. It is the police raid on the corner, the gang recruitments at the gates of schools, the intimate partner violence at home, the countless women who go missing, who are raped, sex-trafficked, the children who are kidnapped and human trafficked, and shootings which claim the lives of many of our regions promising youth.
Whilst perhaps we are a ‘zone of peace’ when it comes to global warfare, the same cannot be said for the violence at home that remains pervasive and unaddressed in our everyday realities. Latin America and the Caribbean, remains, to date the region with the highest rate of violence, the highest rate of homicides (albeit on a per capita basis) and one of the highest rates of gang violence.
I suppose the ‘zone’ depends on the lens you look through.
Realities on the Ground
The Youth Peace and Security agenda is meant to empower youth and shift the narrative away from youth being a force that needs to be ‘managed’ to youth being seen as partners in peacebuilding, governance and conflict prevention. Whilst this is the aspiration of the agenda, the reality is a bit grim. Regional governments have been slow to adopt a dedicated YPS National and Regional Action Plan. Youth policies remain relegated to entrepreneurship and “at risk” youth, rooted in the logic of containment rather than genuine co-leadership.
At the same time, regionally, civic spaces have been shrinking, falling victim to NGOisation. Across the region, young activists describe being monitored, harassed or even blacklisted for their work. Regulations intended to combat money laundering, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons have been used to make it harder for small, youth led organisations to access funding. Rural youth and those outside capital cities often hear about the YPS agenda, if at all, through second hand fragments or inaccessible policy language. Even when they are doing everyday peacebuilding, mediating neighbourhood disputes, organising cultural activities, supporting survivors of violence, they rarely see themselves reflected in official narratives about peace and security.
In the Caribbean, the dissonance is particularly sharp. Young people live at the intersection of gun trafficking routes, tourism dependent economies vulnerable to global shocks, and the frontlines of the climate crises. Crime and violence carry a huge economic cost across the wider region, estimated at an average of 3.4% of GPD. Yet, we are still sold a post-card version of our countries: serene, relaxed, safe, smiling. As one recent commentary put it, calling the Caribbean a zone of peace can be either a necessary aspiration or a romantic illusion, depending on where you stand.
What am I doing?
So where does that leave us, as young peacebuilders who still believe in dialogue and the potential of our region?
For me, the answer begins in the community rooms and youth circles rather than at high level summits. My own journey into the YPS space started not in New York or Geneva, but in classrooms, NGOs and small offices across the Caribbean. Over time, I found myself serving on UNESCO’s support group on Youth, Peace and Security for the Caribbean, joining the United Nations Alliance of Civilisations Young Peacebuilders programme for Latin America and the Caribbean, and taking on leadership roles in regional and global networks focused on the death penalty, climate justice and gender.
Those roles have been important, of course. They opened doors to the UN Human Rights Council, placed me in intergenerational dialogues with diplomats and ministers and allowed me to co-author research that tries to bridge policy and practice. Yet, the moments that have stayed with me most vividly are quieter. They are the moments, on the ground, spent with the average young person, helping them recognise how their own actions, however small they may seem, play a big role in promoting peace and security.
Those conversations were part of the reason my friends at KeepHopeAlive, Connect and I created CONSENSUS, a dialogue-based card game designed to make difficult conversations a little less intimidating, more human, and more focused on dialogue instead of opposition. The idea was simple. Many peacebuilding tools felt like they belonged in conference centres or textbooks, not community spaces. We wanted something that could travel in a backpack, sit on a plastic table in a community hall, and invite people in rather than putting them on the spot.
The game uses a set of cards with prompts on issues like media, gender, migration, religion and education. Participants take turns drawing cards and responding, with ground rules for listening and respect. Facilitators encourage small group reflection that moves from “what do I think” to “what do we do here” and “what can we do together.” At the end, the group creates a small presentation, representing a shared vision, rooted in dialogue and consensus. It sounds modest, but I have seen it change perspectives. Young people, initially defensive, soften when they realise, they aren’t the only ones afraid. Older people, who arrive ready to lecture discover they have as much to learn as to teach. People who thought they have nothing in common find one or two points of genuine consensus, and that alone can be a starting point.
CONSENSUS is not magic. It does not dismantle cartels, reform police services or rewrite constitutions. What it does do is practise a different kind of security logic. Instead of asking “how do we control people who are dangerous”, it asks “how do we understand why people feel unsafe, and what they need to feel secure.” It moves us from talking about youth as a category to listening to young people as individuals. It treats dialogue not as a box to tick, but a habit to build.
Grappling Realities
That is why the current debate on the zone of peace matters so much. When a head of government breaks way and declares that their country stands outside a zone of peace and welcomes military deployments to deal with crime, she is responding to a very real sense of insecurity. Communities are tired of gunfire and grieving loves ones. People want action. But, if the only language of action is force, we risk deepening the very dynamics that undermine peace. Negative peace has taken us further back than positive focused peace approaches ever could. Heavy handed responses, especially when driven by external actors, can erode trust, fuel resentment, divide persons across the political spectrum, and push more young people into the margins where violence thrives.
CARICOMs own statements remind us that the zone of peace was not about denying the existence of conflict. It was about committing to resolve disputes through dialogue, international law and respect for sovereignty. It was about resisting attempts to turn our region into someone else’s military playground. Similarly, earlier regional instruments that framed Latin America and the Caribbean as a nuclear weapon free zone after the Cuban missile crises were grounded in the idea that our people deserved to live free from the threat of annihilation.
If we are serious about peace and security today, we cannot treat dialogue as a soft option that comes after the hard work of raids and crackdowns. Dialogues are the hardest task. They requires patience when everything around us screams for quick fixes. It demands that we sit with people whose perspectives we find uncomfortable, or even offensive. It forces governments to hear form young people they would rather ignore. It insists that we acknowledge structural issues – poverty, corruption, political impunity, unequal and inequitable access to education and healthcare. It forces us to recognise that we must fix ourselves, that no foreign battalion can fix these issues for us.
At the same time, dialogue does not mean pretending that everyone is equally vulnerable or responsible. One of the most powerful insights from the YPS processes in our region is the importance of intersectionality. Young people in rural communities, in favelas or inner-city neighbourhoods, young women and girls, LGBTQIA+ youth, young migrants and refugees, indigenous and Afro descendent youth all experience violence and experience it in different ways. Meaningful dialogue must recognise these differences and not simply smooth over them in the name of unity.
Where do we go now?
So, what would it look like to reclaim the “zone of peace” idea from the realm of slogans and bring it into our everyday practice?
It might look like embedding youth led dialogue processes into nationals security strategies, so that when governments plan measures against organised crime, they do so with direct input from those who live in affected communities. It might look like National Youth Parliaments and regional youth councils evolving from symbolic annual events into ongoing spaces which can influence policy in real time. It might look like regional security alliances against organised crime, such as those recently launches with international financial support, creating formal roles for youth organisations in monitoring, evaluating and community liaison, rather than closing ranks in technocratic silos.
It would definitely look like investing in hundreds of small, local initiatives across the region – games, theatre groups, sports leagues, storytelling circles, climate action projects, legal aid clinics. Each of these is a modest but concrete expression of a different security logic, one which sees peace not as the absence of headlines but as the preservation of relationships, rights and dignity.
I do not pretend that dialogue alone will solve the region’s security crises. We need police reform, justice sector investment, serious work on corruption, regional coordination that respects sovereignty and human rights, and economic models that do not leave young people choosing between migration, informal hustles and recruitment into the criminal economy. But without dialogue, all of that risks being built on sand.
When I think about the future of YPS in Latin America and the Caribbean, I think about two rooms – one is the conference halls where leaders sit behind flags, speaking about zones of peace while security details watch the doors. The other is a modest community space where young people sit in a circle and talk about what keeps them awake at night and what they can do about it. Our task as a generation is monumental but not impossible, it is to connect these two rooms. To carry the honesty of the circle into the plenary, and to bring the language of policy back to the people whose lives it affects most.
A true zone of peace is not declared once and for all in communiqué. It is negotiated, renegotiated and defended in each conversation, each neighbourhood, each policy, each act of courage that chooses listening over silence, participation over tokenism, justice over convenience. As young people from this region, we cannot wait to be invited into that process. We have to do it, and we have been going it – in research, advocacy, art, in the quiet practice of refusing to accept that violence is inevitable.
The question is whether our leaders, and the institutions that claim to speak for peace and willing to meet us there.
About the Author
Khaleem Ali is an Attorney-at-Law and Human Rights Defender. Khaleem has worked on the YPS Agenda serving on UNESCO Caribbeans YPS support group, as a member of UNAOCs Young Peacebuilders and as the Chair of the LAC Working Group for UNODC’s Generation Justice. Find more about his work here.
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