Over the last week, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy and witness some great conversations with some very interesting people. All of them have, in some way, related security back to young people and made defence relevant to a generation that has largely been the witness to a failing politics. Despite the worrying cause for pessimism, there remained a space for dreamers.
The Scars of Stolen Childhood
My first conversation took place with Karolina Hird, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It is the final episode of the Defence Season and will be released in a few weeks but towards the end of the episode, our conversation turned towards her research and what this means for peace processes.
Karolina has recently published a piece with ISW on the systematic undertaking by the Russian state to extract children out of Ukraine. The conservative estimate is the around 20,000 children have been robbed from their homes and moved to Russia with the intentional focus on disabled children.
It is an act that is staggering in its horror, particularly because it reflects the conscious malice of the Russian state and its attempts to thoroughly dismantle the very essence of Ukraine. It is also deeply corrupting to the rules-based order because, if accepted as bargaining chip in negotiations, it turns the trauma of children into a quantifiable transaction. How many children is an acre of Ukrainian land worth?
Despite the morbidity of such a conversation, the discussion turned to a fresh perspective on defence and diplomacy. Traditionally, policymakers have focused on ensuring the guns stop firing as a means to end conflict. Last week President Macron himself said that were President Putin to commit to the right terms, ‘the weapons fall silent’ tomorrow. Yet, the violence that stimulates conflict and prevents the neighbourly companionship required for peace and stability operates on levels beside intra-state conflict. That is to say war is more than battles on a field but also the violence and trauma inflicted onto populations outside of these artillery barrages. As such, peacebuilding efforts between countries must contend with more problems than just the firing of rifles.
Sea Monsters in the Desert: Helping the Survivors of a Wreckage
Later that same week, I had the pleasure of giving a talk with the Migration Youth and Children Platform – a youth platform dedicated to impacting international migration policy. My aim was to share my background in security, armed non-state actors, and the Middle East with people whose lived experiences offered a much more thoughtful perspective on the reality facing the Middle East.
The talk shared Western and Middle Easter understandings of ‘non-state actors’ with the conclusion that the key differentiation is between actors that localise agency and those that disperse it. States, the Leviathans of the political world, disperse agency and are built on both trust that others will follow the rules and the violence required to ensure rules are credible. Non-state actors, by contrast, control more aspects of their political will at the expense of being able to achieve more limited outcomes.
At the end of my talk, the topic was opened up to the wider audience. Here, I was met in conversation with a refugee from Palestine who shared her thoughts on the history and structures in place that prevent integration between different groups and demographics. The trust required to disperse agency and create a functioning state is impossible to build when those states maintain processes and procedures inherited from a colonial history. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for example, is unlikely to ever want to empower or encourage agency in its migrant Palestinian populations because to do so would be to dilute the base of support for the Hashemites themselves. Building trust between different demographics, populations, and centres of agency is an improbability when existing institutions actively ignore historical suppression.
Overall, this conversation was a pertinent reminder that the domestic processes of building stability and robust orders will always find themselves influenced by external interests. To find new solutions to old problems requires us to consider new perspectives, however uncomfortable.
Black Mountain: NATO’s Youth Summit in Montenegro
Finally, the British Institute of Global Affairs was delighted to be invited to the virtual attendance of NATO’s Youth Summit. Hosted in Montenegro, the summit covered a range of issues from the Western Balkans to cyber-security to, of course, youth perspectives on defence.
One particular panel focused on how defence spending relates to young people across the Alliance. The most important question raised was simply how does defence affect young people? The obvious answer is that it is our security too but crucially, young people are likely to carry a disproportionate share of this burden. If the Alliance fails to Deter (half of its core mission), it must be prepared to Defend (the other half of its mission). It will be our old friends from high school now being marched in uniforms and potentially brought back in caskets. Even when it comes to the high-end technology the West relies on to deter, it is young people whose income is increasingly taxed in the economy of an ageing population.
With such a high potential and realised burden on young people, how can defence incorporate youth? The panellists argued that innovation in defence can from anywhere. With modern technology changing rapidly, existing military doctrine may not be able to keep pace so opening spaces for cooperative dialogue can offer young people a chance to shape defence. More fundamentally, I think, defence policy that you have no ability to shape comes awfully close to security racketeering. Defence policy is meant to secure not just our wellbeing but, as young people, our future – it is only right we have a say in the demands, obligations, and outcomes required in that equation.
One of the five panellists was specifically from NATO’s new Youth Advisory Council initiative. He raised the issue that NATO has a talent for connecting with young people interested in defence, the packed Summit providing its own evidence for that fact, but how can it connect with the PR intern or the trainee car mechanic? What does NATO mean to the blue-collar youth? In all likelihood, these will be the people operating missiles, carrying rifles, and marching over terrain if Deterrence becomes Defence.
With all of the conversations I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of this week, the answer to that question seems deceptively simply. To have young people earnestly involved in defence means having a system or idea worth defending. To a generation that has a far greater ability to perceive, observe, and perhaps articulate violence and trauma in the modern world, this means defending a politics that earnestly empowers self-determination.