Image: The Outdoor Education Group
Throughout the Youth, Peace and Security agenda, frequent references are made to the importance and value of incorporating youth into political and security structures – particularly regarding peacebuilding attempts. Across reports and research, quotes are shared that support this line of argument. Take the ‘The Missing Peace’ progress study, for example, which shares excerpts from its interviews. These include testimonies on how the “Lack of space to contribute to peacebuilding makes [youth in south Sudan] more likely to approve of and engage in violence” (p.68) or how young people in Yemen “don’t have faith in the rule of law” (p.28) and are therefore pushed towards radical armed groups. Simply, there is an overarching theme that youth inclusion is a benefit for mitigating political instability. Yet, many of the reports lack explicit emphasis on the strategic benefits of the YPS Agenda. They miss out on asking the question ‘what rewards are gained from YPS’, instead of ‘what problems are solved?’. In this week’s article, I want to ask that very question.
The Utility of Force
Earlier this summer, I finished reading Gen. Rupert Smith’s seminal book The Utility of Force. The argument he makes is that previously, our societies experienced a paradigm of interstate war in which industrial economics fuelled competition between polities, leaving only the strongest to survive. States had to marshal their domestic industries alongside technological innovations and a growing population in order to find victory on the battlefield. To quote Tilly, ‘war made the state and the state made war’. A crucial aspect of this, Smith argues, is that states were able to harness a huge amount of labour, productive capacity, and troops but to achieve success, they needed to be able to harness all of it. The threat of a general strike, the bombing of factories, and other challenges were systemic vulnerabilities in the state’s ability to wage war – divided, a country could collapse.
Today, however, we face a paradigm of war between people. The three critical elements found in war have always been reason (the government’s considered decision-making), chance (the situations faced by the army on the battlefield), and passion (the people’s desire – or lack thereof – to wage war). In the prior paradigm, the government’s ‘reason’ reigned supreme. Yet in our modern times, the people have more say – and more belief in their right to have a say – than in times gone by. This means that when conflicts break out and governments eventually sign agreements, the underlying issue has not been resolved because the people still desire satisfaction.
Smith sets out several lessons worth appreciating, but relevant to the YPS agenda is that defence structures in the West have not adequately adapted to this situation. Our armies are prepared to fight other state-supplied armies, not operate amongst demographics and peoples. This has some part in explaining the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the lack of resolution in contexts such as Kosovo. Smith focuses his argument on how military force can regain utility in the modern context but his ideas are equally as relevant to resisting military force. The principal threat is that our society becomes divided, fractured, and unwilling to make a decision on its future. In this outcome, the people cannot agree to either a clear direction or a decision in the face of major issues. Nor is this problem neatly limited to the domestic sphere. Reports following the Brexit referendum and more recent revelations about Russian links to former Brexit campaigners/Reform-party members showcase Russia’s belief that a UK that leaves the EU is a weaker UK. While No.10 has largely been successful in challenging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it demonstrates the need for societal resilience against malicious activities. A key takeaway is that disinformation, division, and apathy can be as effective at magnifying the utility of one’s force as a new weapons system.
Bouncing Back
If you want to understand how to handle a big threat, speak to its smaller neighbours. Whether this is Taiwan’s comprehension of the People’s Republic of China or an Omani assessment of Gulf politics, smaller powers have a vested interest in remaining sensitive to their overbearing neighbours. Settled next to Russia is a country that regularly tops the charts for both happiness and military preparedness: Finland. Our analyst Jake Southerland set out Finland’s history with YPS and strategy but in short, Finland pursues a strategy of ‘Total Defence’ that can better be understood as resilience. At its core, it hinges on inclusion.
It is not for nothing that Finland was the first country to implement a Youth, Peace and Security National Action Plan – providing a focus as well as a form of accountability to its citizens and civil society. Young people are a gold mine for generating resilience. Besides being more physically active – and therefore the principle demographic required for a military force – young people have a more open mindset to learning and a more intuitive understanding of new technologies. Ambassador Thomas Reilly covered the relevance of this to AI in his piece on Youth and Foreign Policy, but it is worth highlighting that military technology and weapons systems are regularly developed to be used in a decade’s time. In practical terms, that means that current development is being undertaken on defence and weapons systems that will be used by our generation, or even the generation that is currently in high school. Including youth insights while creating such technology and counter-measures is of, quite literally, critical importance.
As mentioned earlier, the strategic value of inclusion is not predominantly offensive, but rather defensive. Adapting governance and legislative processes to be more inclusive of young people as not only consultants but shapers of policy is important for ensuring that 1) the demands placed on society do not have a disproportionate impact, and 2) that the demands of security are meaningfully offset so that young people’s contribution to security does not come at the cost of productivity. This point is one that I am particularly passionate about. Too often, adults of my parents’ generation and senior policymakers seem to hint that some sort of award scheme like the Duke of Edinburgh Award or National Citizen Service is an adequate outcome for community engagement. The phrase so often thrown around is that “employers love that kind of stuff” when the reality for so many of our peers is that this is a barefaced lie, and one entirely ignorant of the professional environment young people find themselves inheriting. For our societies to be truly resilient, we need the ability to come together and we need our principal security resource-providers (young people) to find some benefit in contributing.
Thought and Memory
At one point during university, a former member of Norway’s intelligence service gave a seminar. He began his lecture referencing Odin’s two ravens: Huginn and Muninn – Thought and Memory. To think creatively, we must have some appreciation of the past. Doing so shapes our comprehension of what has worked, what could work, and how we find ourselves in our current circumstance.
The United Kingdom has one of the most centralised political structures in the democratic world with our Cabinet being described as an ‘elective dictatorship’ back in 1976. Historically, however, the UK has succeeded when it found ways to include everyone in security. World War I saw an unprecedented level of manpower being deployed to the trenches, but this was only made possible by women entering the factories to uphold war materiel production. Churchill’s statue may be found outside of Parliament, but it was the trade-unionist-cum-minister Ernist Bevin who was so instrumental to ensuring that the domestic workforce maintained its contributions to the war effort despite often-harrowing circumstances. Moreover, the intelligence and military campaign against the Nazi’s would not have found the success it did without the contribution of the gay mathematician Alan Turing. It is one of the great crimes of the British state that he was so persecuted for his sexuality after such a pivotal role.
Inclusivity across gender, race, and sexuality is important for a resilient democracy, but in recent times, the UK has become stifled by a gerontocracy whose demographic weight is creating stress-fractures across Britain’s politics. If we are to achieve the resilience we need to survive and navigate this chaotic age, we must recognise the utility of youth.