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Conflicts
The Mediterranean region is in geopolitical turmoil, a battleground for longstanding conflicts and disputes that exacerbate firmly entrenched tensions. Urgent action is needed to achieve peace and security, while addressing the root causes of the region’s threats is crucial to ensure stability and cooperation.
Sarra Messaoudi
With several years of peacebuilding efforts under her belt, it would be a mistake to take Sarra Messaoudi’s youth for inexperience. Indeed, at her young age, the Tunisian activist has already spoken at the United Nations Security Council, the Geneva Peace Week, and the Africa Resilience Forum – in addition to having obtained a master’s degree in non-profit organisation management from Tunisia’s prestigious École Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales. Currently the regional lead for the MENA Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security, a platform that brings together some 200 youth-led organisations and individuals from 17 countries, she is firmly dedicated to making the region a more prosperous and peaceful place for all.
“Our understanding of peace, security and youth engagement can be quite different,” she says. “We have our own context and our own way to see peace. We promote a just peace, a positive peace based on human rights, not any peace that is suddenly imposed on us that doesn’t speak to us.”
Part of her motivation for focusing on the role of young people in this domain can be explained by the fact that they carry a significant demographic weight in the Middle East and North Africa, making up around 50% of the population, and are more than eager to be heard. The United Nations’ Youth, Peace and Security Agenda recognises their centrality to the matter, which is why the 2015 resolution calls on Member States to give young people a greater voice in decision-making processes. According to Messaoudi, promoting youth-led civic spaces is key to advancing this agenda as doing so will help create an effective bottom-up approach leading to the meaningful participation of young people in peace and security activities.
To have a space that is led, owned and designed by the youth is very important,” she argues, contrasting this form of civic debate and dialogue to externally-shaped “coalitions, programmes and networks launched by international organisations or co-chaired by governments.” These, she says, can serve as inspiration for models that can be followed, but she believes young people should be more intimately involved in shaping the peace and security discourse.
As she sees it, not only does this mean it is fundamental that these spaces be youth-led, but that they be Arabic-speaking as well if the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda is to prosper at a regional level. “We believe the national level will only be impacted if the regional level is strong,” she explains. And in a world where resources are available mainly in English, the lingua franca of the MENA Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security’s activities is Arabic, a deliberate choice aimed at engaging young people from the region, promoting a sense of trust and belonging, and levelling the playing field.
Unlike larger networks or organisations, the goal of the self-organised and volunteer-based MENA Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security is not outward-looking, with what Messaoudi calls “traditional solutions.” Rather, its main target audience are the members themselves, and most efforts are focused internally. The coalition organises capacity-building activities, hosts events that allow members to exchange ideas and determine concrete courses of action, provides young at-risk activists with resources and connections, and does advocacy work. One of its flagship projects involves the training of so-called youth, peace and security trainers in Arabic so that they can share their knowledge locally and regionally. Recently, a Palestinian member went on a tour of American universities to recount his experiences in the besieged Gaza Strip. The coalition also supports private investment in the sector and has backed research into this field.
But as ongoing conflict teetering on the edge of wider geopolitical unrest continues to threaten the stability of the MENA region, it is undeniable that the “just peace” Messaoudi and her fellow MENA Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security members so yearn for is perceived by many as an abstract, far-off concept that may very well be never achieved. Why, then, does Messaoudi continue to charge forward in the face of such adversity? The answer to this question, she says, has to do with the enduring power of hope.
“There are many people willing to listen and there are many people who change their perspective,” she says. “If we understand that peace building is a process that takes years, and if the people on the ground really start to change their mindset and feel that injustice somewhere is injustice everywhere, politics will change. If the youth keep on fighting, peace will eventually come.”
